In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

The profiles seem more propagated by Keirsey Temperament type material (e.g. Please Understand Me). Their existence could be viewed as more of a downside of MB relative to Big 5 because they exaggerate the meaning of the measurement and/or category. { These profiles "read a lot into" the various categories - as do all the English names for axes/groups. }

EDIT1: Also B5 just names 5 axes instead of MB naming (4*2) groups which always bugged me. Beyond that, because B5 does not discretize, it puts the measurement error center stage. Emphasizing measurement error is a major positive for something already so vague.

EDIT2: Also, while situation, context, how well you slept, or whatever absolutely matter, I believe this vagueness underwrites much of the "MB is pseudoscience" hostility. To some, it's so vague as to be meaningless jibber-jabber. To others, it's specific enough to be just on this side of the "science" line. Even if you think it is science, science can clearly be misapplied by those who don't understand it, and this "science" probably is..a lot (as bemoaned by the article).

As the author @dyno-might points out in fledgling steps to harden the ideas, there could be an intermediate 'x' value for each of the 4 axes. He does not say how far out from the mean one has to be "to not be in 'x'". Far enough out for each of the 4 and, boom, 99% of people are XXXX. At that point, the tests become only outlier detectors (again modulated by other, unmeasured variables) discriminating only 1% of people. Note 0.317 is also about outside 1 standard deviation for a normal curve and assuming independence, for simplicity of the example, 0.317*4 = .01. At 1.25 SDs that goes to 0.002. (Not random values - @dyno-might's distributions looked a little platykurtic.) So, it might easily be the test is only very informative (i.e. maybe predictive) for a tiny fraction of people - so not exactly unscientific, but also not exactly very useful if "over-concluding" is likely for 99% to 99.9% of the "modal" test takers. Textual profiles (or book chapters!) can take that over-concluding from just binning up a few notches.

> predictive qualities do not extend beyond the binning process

I agree that these tests should not be used for the purpose of evaluating/predicting the "fit" of any individual in an organization from an HR or leadership perspective. They are helpful, imho, for understanding some characteristics of one's own personality and how it relates to others.

Personality is a real thing. It's also very complex so having some "bins" to structure how you (as an individual) think about it can be super useful. But yeah, in the hands of HR and other amateur psychologists it's not a useful tool.

I never thought about the lack of a neutral trait, but you are right.

However I don't think there's any reason to expect these traits to have a normal distribution. Humans have plenty of bimodal-ish traits.

Yes, if interpreted like that, I agree with it. What threw me off was "There's nothing left" part. I see now that I might've misinterpreted the meaning.

Re: men vs women - he has often claimed for example that women get payed less because they are unwilling to do the better paying jobs (most famously in the Cathy Newman interview [0]). He also claims often that women are more interested in empathy and men in systems, so that men are vastly much more likely to be in fields like engineering, while women are more vastly more likely to be interested in fields like nursing [1], with natural differences as large as 20:1. He himself may not make this value judgement, but given the general social consensus that views engineering as a more prestigious, intellectual job than medical nurses, I think it's mostly fair to characterize this claim as I did.

I disagree with this conclusion any way - I believe that IQ testing quickly loses any kind of predictive power when applied to different backgrounds, and many implicit and even explicit biases quickly show up. I also find it hard to believe that a society where women:men ratios in any profession are 20:1 or 1:20 can be characterized as the free-est in the world on this issue. More likely, there are great social and historical pressures trending in this direction, and the state is simply doing nothing to try to reverse this injustice. Looking at former communist countries, that are generally not even close to having any kind of women in STEM programs that could be considered to bias results, the women:men ratio in STEM fields is something like 30:70.

Re: IQ and "race" - I don't think so. You may accept that IQ has some correlation with what we understand by intelligence in regular usage, but that doesn't mean in any way that you can meaningfully compare people for IQ across arbitrary divides such as "race", especially when "race" is highly correlated with things such as poverty, teacher attitudes, social attitudes etc. And I keep saying "race" and not race because there is no scientific basis for our notions of race - they are arbitrary social constructs based on skin color and culture (for some examples: are Italians and Irish people white? 50 years ago, they were considered a different race; or, what is the race of the child of a mixed black-skin & white-skin couple? Is Kamala Harris black or white? What about her children? Are they white? black? semitic? south-asian? How many studies of IQ vs race on similar populations actually look at any kind of genetic evidence, vs just skin color?)

I will admit that "conman" was a bit rough and an exaggeration. Still, he is definitely using some conman-style tactics to sell his opinions outside his area of expertise. I am not talking about the area of psychology, which includes his self-help work, but about his political discourse.

[0] The Cathy Newman Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54

[1] Jordan B Peterson: Why so many Male Engineers and Female Nurses? (3 minute video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7uZOAzVRgU