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In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

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Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#161

Post by feanaro »

mudita wrote: post #121
feanaro wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ. If you aren't going to accept IQ, then you've entirely tossed out the field of psychology. There is nothing left. Huh. That's quite a bold and incorrect claim. Are you a psychologist?

Let's hear it from a psychologist: "If you don’t buy IQ research, you might as well throw out all the rest of psychology." (Jordan Peterson) https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=2938 For anybody interested in personality research, I warmly recommend this lecture series, by the way. These are the basics, which psychology students learn at university.

I do not understand this statement as claiming that IQ is the entire content of the field of psychology. Do you?

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#162

Post by feanaro »

exfalso wrote: post #114
feanaro wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ. If you aren't going to accept IQ, then you've entirely tossed out the field of psychology. There is nothing left. Huh. That's quite a bold and incorrect claim. Are you a psychologist?

Perhaps the word "psychometry" would have been better. There isn't any psychometric test more stable than IQ.

That's a bit better, but confusing the statements "IQ is the most temporally stable psychometric construct" and "IQ is the only valid psychometric construct" is still egregious.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#163

Post by singingfish »

enkid wrote: post #151
singingfish wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have good points there. From reading the article, the inaccuracy is by inappropriately classifying people into groups, and the groupings lack sensitivity. As you also point out the underlying theoretical framework is also wrong. The article does point out that the Myers Briggs does correlate reasonably well with four of the big 5 though. Having said that I would definitely discourage use of the Myers-Briggs. The…

So IQ measures something, but we don't know what and we don't know how it impacts the real world. How can we meaningfully say it measures something then?

Well, for example, you can definitely see variations in people's short term memory capacity, basic facilities with dealing with language, and logical problem solving skills. And importantly from a clinical perspective you can see when these are mismatched. However these are very reductive variables, and in the real world there are many more things in interacting with each other than these isolated components.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#164

Post by bjoli »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #159
souprock wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article covers reproducibility. The test does reliably reproduce results, at least if you don't quantize to boolean. Jung doesn't matter. Being a cash cow doesn't matter. There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ. If you aren't going to accept IQ, then you've entirely tossed out the field of psychology. There is nothing left.

> There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ. This is not true. See Wikipedia[0][1][2]. IQ actually holds little support, compared with (e.g.) bilateral sound recognition, or somatotopic arrangement on the postcentral gyrus. (Among psychologists, that is; IQ probably has more support amongst the general population, because it's pop-pseudoscience.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor…

What we can say about iq tests is that they test something, and those results remain consistent through life. The results are positively correlated to many things (such as academic success. The people scoring a 9, the maximum result, on the tests used in the Swedish conscription live longer, etc...).

Had it been completely pop-pseudoscience it would not be used by, say, the Swedish school system as a tool to gauge whether someone has special needs that warrant another form of school with extra support. The tests used are however not the same as most people have done online, like WAIS (but for kids. Can't remember the name of it).

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#165

Post by silvestrov »

enkid wrote: post #151
singingfish wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have good points there. From reading the article, the inaccuracy is by inappropriately classifying people into groups, and the groupings lack sensitivity. As you also point out the underlying theoretical framework is also wrong. The article does point out that the Myers Briggs does correlate reasonably well with four of the big 5 though. Having said that I would definitely discourage use of the Myers-Briggs. The…

So IQ measures something, but we don't know what and we don't know how it impacts the real world. How can we meaningfully say it measures something then?

For many, many years we could not explain why gravity exists and how it works. We could only experience it.

We knew of gravity much before we knew of electricity. Try explain electricity to somebody in year 1300 and you'd be burned as a witch.

And yet we understood electricity much earlier than gravity. How electricity works is much simpler to explain than gravity.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#166

Post by 0x737368 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #155
0x737368 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Thanks for the response.

I think discussing whether he's liberal or conservative is a wishy-washy subject and I'm on shaky ground when discussing whether he's right about the left, but in the interest of having a dialogue I do have some retorts about some of the other things you've mentioned.

Re: men superior to women in intellect and rationality - only thing I've seen him state to this effect was describe the distribution of IQs and commenting that the average is the same, however the lowest and highest IQ individuals tend to be male, however women are more packed around the average. I wouldn't describe this as sexist or male-chauvinistic, he's discussing results of studies. From the same observations you'll find that there's more 75-th percentile women than men. When I formulate my conclusion this way, am I now being sexist towards men?

Re: white people being more intelligent than black - if you agree that IQ measures intelligence at least in some capacity, then the results of whites on avg. having a higher IQ than blacks, and Asians and Jews higher than whites, speak for themselves. It might be an inconvenient and unfortunate reality, but you can't fix or mitigate this problem if you just sweep it under the rug. On the other hand, whenever I watch highlights of the NBA, the CRUSHING majority(like 99%) of the athletes there are black/mixed race. So is NBA racist for presenting all of the most athletic players as black? Should we also not talk about how white basketball players are underperforming in physical aspects in the NBA as it's racist?

I haven't kept that much track about the cultural stuff he said nor am I educated enough in the subject so I can't agree or disagree with you there, however I wouldn't call him a conman. His lessons of personal responsibility and guidelines on how to improve and add structure to your life seem sound. I suspect that his advice resonates more with people of a certain temperament than others, which is why I often hear that his advice is useless, despite there being thousands(maybe millions?) of people that have said that his advice has helped them out of a very tough spot.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#167

Post by rcxdude »

feanaro wrote: post #162
exfalso wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the word "psychometry" would have been better. There isn't any psychometric test more stable than IQ.

That's a bit better, but confusing the statements "IQ is the most temporally stable psychometric construct" and "IQ is the only valid psychometric construct" is still egregious.

I don't read it that way, I think it's meant as 'if you reject IQ, you have raised your standards of evidence so high you must logically reject everything else in psychology/psychometry as well'. It's meant to highlight a contradiction.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#168

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Twisol wrote: post #158
concordDance wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really saying that testing as intj (for example) doesn't correlate with anything? Because that seems incredibly unlikely. E.g. three years ago Slate Star Codex readers were surveyed and found to be 10 times more likely to be INTJ/INTP than the general population.

Not particularly having a horse in this race, if a theory can't reliably make useful predictions, it's not a very useful theory. There's certainly something to be said about identifying correlations, but it isn't yet clear to me whether we can draw inferences based on those correlations to make useful predictions. In the SSC example, I wouldn't be especially shocked if there are no useful inferences in either directi…

There are tons of correlations, for example INTP/INTJ subreddits on Reddit being most popular while these types generally are one of the rarest. There's tons of things you can predict with this. INTPs are often going to face similar challenges and obstacles in life, there's similar things that will help them grow as a person that would not help other types.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#169

Post by Smaug123 »

wisty wrote: post #134
Xcelerate wrote: post #19

I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either; the whole field is just not anywhere near the level of physics or chemistry (not to blame the researchers; predicting humans is very hard). The big 5 and I think more recently an 18 dimensional breakdown (using PCA or ICA?) just aren't that much better than MBTI, despite ma…

There's two main personality tests. Big 5 is preferred by scientists. MBTI is preferred by people who are taking it to see which famous person (or fictional character) allegedly has the same personality. The problem isn't just the test, it's the whole culture around MBTI. Yes, the test measures something, but you're not just getting a test, you're also getting a bunch of information on how to interpret the test. You…

Really? I certainly don't take MBTI seriously, but I use that as a rough definition of introversion.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#170

Post by mewpmewp2 »

enkid wrote: post #151
singingfish wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have good points there. From reading the article, the inaccuracy is by inappropriately classifying people into groups, and the groupings lack sensitivity. As you also point out the underlying theoretical framework is also wrong. The article does point out that the Myers Briggs does correlate reasonably well with four of the big 5 though. Having said that I would definitely discourage use of the Myers-Briggs. The…

So IQ measures something, but we don't know what and we don't know how it impacts the real world. How can we meaningfully say it measures something then?

We do know what it measures and we do know what impact it has on real life scenarios.
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