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In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

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Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#251

Post by nicoburns »

fsloth wrote: post #234
nicoburns wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked into the "Cognitive Functions" that MBTI theory uses? If not, I'd recommend reading through the 101, 201, and 301 articles here https://personalityjunkie.com/typology-101/ To me I see "INTx" and think that makes no sense because INTJ and INTP have completely different functional stacks. INTJ's are dominant "Introverted Intuition" (Ni) followed by "Extraverted Feeling" (Fe), whereas INTP's are dominant…

I think those Cognitive Functions are just Jungian pseudoscience. They are based on work that is closer to fiction than science. Not any better or worse than any psychologically motivated work of fiction - but fiction never the less.

I like to see it as an as-yet poorly evidenced scientific hypothesis rather than an pseudo-scientific "fact". Which indeed may need to go through further revisions before the correct version is found. But I see lots of circumstantial evidence which makes me think it is worthy of further investigation.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#252

Post by dahart »

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…

> Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case.

Why would measuring self-selection be a good thing, why would that be a reason to use MBTI in your book, rather than a reason to avoid it? If it does measure self-selection, then what is the function or purpose of the test?

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#253

Post by Bakary »

0x737368 wrote: post #210
tsimionescu wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nursin…

But surely the social consensus that engineers are more prestigious than nurses is on the society and not on Peterson. It might be difficult to predict the success of somebody via IQ if you compare two individuals from radically different socio-economic backgrounds, but you can compare two individuals with different IQs from similar socio-economic backgrounds and statistically IQ is a very good predictor of success.…

Essentially, the problem with Peterson is that it's a boring rehash. It's a bit frustrating to see the guy defended along the lines of him being a victim of censorship and close-mindedness, when in fact the issue is the lack of content. This is a widespread problem in the YouTube era, where debate confrontations are inherently more popular and financially rewarding for their participants.

His ideas on Christianity and Jungian psychology are not novel. His self-help material is exactly the same fare dressed up differently. The combination of psychology, biology, and myth to redefine masculinity is not novel; Campbell and Evola and probably a wide range of previous writers treaded that ground. He doesn't bring anything insightful to the interpretation of Solzhenitsyn. His interpretation of postmodernism is an incoherent mishmash designed for Patreon support. It goes way beyond a person just making mistakes in the search for answers. His approach is conversational in the same way a Reddit thread is conversational.

If you are interested in those topics, you are better off reading Oakeshott, Nozick, Sowell, Scruton, actual Jungian books, actual theologians, actually delve into the precise ideas of postmodernism and Marxism and what the actual arguments are. After this, Peterson will seem incredibly boring.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#254

Post by specialist »

hrktb wrote: post #248
specialist wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem [is] that people think they measure a permanent aspect of themselves. In truth, people's personalities are malleable... The one and only time I did the Myers-Briggs stuff, the speaker made it absolutely abundantly clear: 1) Traits were contextual. We're different around family, friends, coworkers, commuting into work... (Duh, right?) 2) Though people can fake traits, like an introvert acting extroverted…

I’m a bit lost. Combining 1) and 2), it means the test is against contextual and “fakeable” traits ? Setting apart 3), as I would imagine a rotated iceberg might not come back to a resting state identical to before the rotation. If the goal is to predict anything, we could also assume that context will change with time (even working at the same company, people change, assignments change, incentives change). All in al…

You're the exact same person at church, work, hanging out with your buddies watching sports (or playing board games), doorbelling for a political campaign, baby sitting your nieces, etc?

Per the article, your traits are on a spectrum. Not binary. You may be more extroverted at church and less at work.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#255

Post by Retric »

zippy5 wrote: post #187
Retric wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raw IQ scores aren’t very stable over time. At 90+ peoples raw scores have dropped significantly vs age 30. Trauma, Alcoholism, and other diseases can also lower scores dramatically. You can correlate adult IQ’s with tests taken by 2 year olds, but the individual raw scores again vary significantly. It seems stable because of how age is adjusting for and the huge sweet spot where 64.2% of the population is grouped be…

At quantum scale or near the speed of light newtonian mechanics breaks down, so we know it a local approximation. However, for set circumstances it approximates it does it well. For many decades physists searched universally true theory to no avail. My point is this, IQ seems to have signal. It probably doesn't hold up in extreme circumstances. Psychology in particular seems to have a difficult time holding large eno…

That doesn’t support your original point. Color blindness is very persistent over time IQ isn’t. Sure +/- 7 IQ points sounds very accurate, but that can be more than a 30 percentile change from two different tests 1 month apart meaning the actual signal is very weak.

You can read papers saying IQ texts on 2 year olds are strongly correlated with adult IQ, but read the details and individual people’s scores varied wildly.

So sure in aggregate it seems consistent, but that’s largely an artifact of test design. Someone with mental handicaps so profound as to be non communicative will consistently score very low, it doesn’t mean much for the general population.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#256

Post by mancerayder »

smokey_circles wrote: post #75

I don't know how/why people defend this test. 1. It's inaccurate. And that's not just "technically true", it's very rare that the test reproduces results. 2. Jung's theories (the ones used in the test) aren't just "controversial". They're wrong. He says it himself, in the same document they used to create the test. It is just a cash cow now. The _biggest_ problem with the test is it is harmful, not helpful. People be…

>2. Jung's theories (the ones used in the test) aren't just "controversial". They're wrong. He says it himself, in the same document they used to create the test.

Not a Jungian, but the "wrong" claim is a bold one, in reference to Jung's theories. Are they even falsifiable ? Psychology isn't a hard science. For example, how could you falsify something like the idea of archetypes?

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#257

Post by bumby »

efficax wrote: post #214
mudita wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Peterson is a jungian hack

Can you elaborate? I’m aware of his controversies in pop culture but I’d be interested in any disagreements within his academic field. I’ve heard him disagree with Angela Duckworth regarding her “grit” attribute but that’s the extent to which I’ve heard

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#258

Post by andrewingram »

Smaug123 wrote: post #239
Isinlor wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of this effect and I never cared for horoscopes, Harry Potter houses and what not. But INTP description is very specific. > Chief among Logicians’ interests is exploring and building models for underlying principles and ideas, even going so far as to find these concepts, in their own way, beautiful – this makes them natural mathematicians, systems analysts, and career scientists, especially in more abstract…

Can you distinguish yourself from the INTJ description? This was my main problem with the personality types: I agreed wholeheartedly with the (rather long!) descriptions of maybe five of the sixteen.

Anecdotally, whenever I’ve read all 16 descriptions on a site, only one has ever “felt” like me. I’ve never done it blind (reading the descriptions without knowing the types), but each one does come across as distinctive enough that they can’t just be accused of being Barnum phrases.

Another quirk is that the only people who are going to advocate for these tests are those for who felt their own results were highly descriptive and meaningful to them. So they’re useful in that personal sense, one can point to a few paragraphs of text and say “look, this describes how I think and see the world, read this if you want to understand me better”. To me that undeniably has utility, even if it’s only for a minority of the population (assuming most people sit somewhere in the middle of the bell curves and therefore don’t identify that strong with any of that types).

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#259

Post by tsimionescu »

valvar wrote: post #191
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The results are positively correlated to many things (such as academic success. They would be so correlated even if they were a bad metric. Imagine a score that multiplies academic success and the highest Tetris score obtained within 100 miles of your birthplace, then subtracts 50 points if you're a girl. That would also be positively correlated with academic success. IQ tests measure something , yes, but they're n…

IQ tests measure the g factor and also happen to be the best way to measure it. So those opposed to IQ should either come up with a better way to measure g or be open about their rejection of the existence of differences in cognitive abilities.

If the best way we have to measure something is very bad, perhaps it's best to say we just can't measure it and keep looking, rather than using a very bad measure. It's like instead of trying to invent scales, we kept trying to measure objects' mass by their volume, which happens to work decently for many common objects, bud fails spectacularly for others. And instead of admitting we just can't measure mass, we'd fill our bags based on volume, and be consistently annoyed when we found we can pick up the "heavier" bag of balloons, but can't pick up the "lighter" bag of bowling balls.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#260

Post by kayodelycaon »

esperent wrote: post #141
mudita wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nice, very readable article by a psychologist specialising in lifespan personality development: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/30/4840534... "while personality traits are relatively stable over time, they can and often do gradually change across the life span. What's more, those changes are usually for the better. Many studies, including some of my own, show that most adults become more a…

The important word there is "tend". For most people their personality slowly shifts over decades. However, that doesn't mean faster change is impossible. People's personalities can change quickly, either due to life changing events or to intentional effort to change - for example, nearly anyone who is neurotic, depressed, anxious, easily angered, or similar who practices mindfulness daily for 6 months will experience…

Mindfulness isn’t necessary helpful by itself, nor is CBT. You also need to have the capacity to change, which is not a given.

In my case, unmedicated, my executive function is compromised. This means I lack the self-control necessary to regulate emotions and control what I’m paying attention to.

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