Poll HN: What is your personality type? • Hacker News Board

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#91

Post by tbastos » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:41 PM UTC

xixi77 wrote: post #76

tokenadult wrote: post #53

Obligatory references on the subject of the unvalidated Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/myers-b... "Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either. . . . . "Yet despite its widespread use and vas…

Lots of critical responses here. What is happening is that you can think of a personality profile as a vector in very high-dimensional space. MBTI presents a basis in a 4-dimensional subspace of that. How well it works for a particular person depends on how her personality aligns with that basis. A lot people will test near the middle on the MBTI characteristics, and say that the test does not work for them. If most…

Exactly... there are hundreds of systems to evaluate people. All of them are abstractions which are unable to capture the full depth of reality, and so will work well under some conditions and bad under others. It's a matter of design choices and tradeoffs. Choose the system that better fits your needs and be aware of its limitations.

That said, I like MBTI's (or Keirsey's) simplicity. It gives you a lot of data for such a simple system, and is easy to apply. You have to be aware of its limitations, of course. But I've been playing with it for almost 10 years (in my personal life, not so much for work) and it rarely fails me.

I think it's the same principle as the Fibonacci scale for planning poker... you will always have some error in your system, don't fool yourself. So the ROI of a simple system might pay off...

PS: I agree, MBTI seems VERY accurate for people that are not in the middle of the scales, and not-so-accurate otherwise.

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#92

Post by aaronsnoswell » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:42 PM UTC

Interesting, the website links states that INTJ's are less than 2% of general population, yet they consist of about 30$ of responses to this poll, confirming HN is not a standard subset of the general populace.

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#93

Post by schpet » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:42 PM UTC

"the INTJ may become obsessed with mindless repetitive, Sensate activities" http://www.personalitypage.com/INTJ.html

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#94

Post by etfb » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:44 PM UTC

I'm a QWBX - that's the personality type for people who think pseudoscientific bullshit like the MBTI doesn't belong in the boardrooms, factory floors and minds of the human race.

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#95

Post by crorella » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:46 PM UTC

So many INTJ I guess it makes sense given the kind of website we use :D

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#96

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:49 PM UTC

mhurron wrote: post #35

seiji wrote: post #27

Which one is "caustic bastard?"

I was wondering something similar, but for 'asshole.'

And my first instinct was "misanthrope" which I guess is just an asshole with motivation.

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#97

Post by bgilroy26 » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:51 PM UTC

agoandanon wrote: post #26

reinhardt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it apparently was (is?) being used as an HR screening tool, I'm afraid it's not always harmless conversation fodder.

Eh, just learn the test well enough that you can figure out what they want, and then give them the result which gets you hired.

In general, investing energy in deceiving people would have a greater cost than landing one job vs another would have a benefit.

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#98

Post by concone » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:51 PM UTC

INFJ

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#99

Post by sliverstorm » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:51 PM UTC

xixi77 wrote: post #76

tokenadult wrote: post #53

Obligatory references on the subject of the unvalidated Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/myers-b... "Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either. . . . . "Yet despite its widespread use and vas…

Lots of critical responses here. What is happening is that you can think of a personality profile as a vector in very high-dimensional space. MBTI presents a basis in a 4-dimensional subspace of that. How well it works for a particular person depends on how her personality aligns with that basis. A lot people will test near the middle on the MBTI characteristics, and say that the test does not work for them. If most…

The classification would be more meaningful, I think, if there was a good way to characterize certainty/degree.

In my case, I and T are both generally very strong, while N has been weaker.

The most interesting part is the J/P has gradually shifted. I used to test as a very strong J, but that has been changing and today I finally flipped and tested P.

Re: Poll HN: What is your personality type?

#100

Post by deanly » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:53 PM UTC

adnam wrote: post #68

octo_t wrote: post #2

I was under the impression the Meyer-Briggs was essentially pseudo-science?

Yet the poll-results show that HN is predominantly INTP/INTJ, which Myers-Brigg would predict for this audience!

Even more interesting given that those two are among the rarest archetypes in the general population by some estimates: http://www.capt.org/mbti-assessment/estimated-frequencies.ht...

Also, no wonder we're all "judgmental".