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In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

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Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#271

Post by 0x737368 »

Bakary wrote: post #253
0x737368 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Whilst I am willing to concede that his approach and ideas might not be novel, it is his fantastic delivery of lectures and connecting different phenomena in a network to explain/support a concept is what draws me to his stuff. As a counterpoint, I really like Campbell's a Hero with a Thousand Faces, but darn if his book isn't hard to read.

I think it's a fair argument against him, but it is not Campbell or Evola who managed to get into the spotlight and spread those ideas to millions, but Peterson. Perhaps it could be argued that it's his captivating presentational style or ability to package things well are his USP?

Thank you for the reading list, I do want to delve deeper into this stuff.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#272

Post by runarberg »

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.

The best evidence for the existence of the g factor are IQ tests, and IQ tests are optimized to measure the g factor.

Do you see a problem there?

The g factor—or more descriptively—the theory of general intelligence has little support outside of the field of psychometrics. And the field of psychometrics is not known for it’s scientific rigor. Needless to say, there is little reason to believe that the theory of general intelligence has any grounds in reality, nor that the g factor exists outside of an operationally defined concept that might not hold any descriptive power for human behavior outside of a narrow setting of pen and paper tests.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#274

Post by bjoli »

Retric wrote: post #183
bjoli wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

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…

First of all, scores are normalized to age (you never compare 90 to 30 years olds. Only 90 to 90-ish year olds).

No serious IQ test claim to measure much more than 2 standard deviations up and down (meaning they all break down somewhere above 130-135 or below 70). I have done WISC/WAIS three times (as a part of a psychological assessment) and the conversion to IQ scores were within 3 points (the WAIS/WISC scale measures many different abilities, and can be converted to an "aggregate" IQ score). I asked about this and when people are healthy the tester said people tend to score very similarly on tests, even many years apart.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#275

Post by mcguire »

bjoli wrote: post #164
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wh…

"as a tool to gauge whether someone has special needs that warrant another form of school with extra support"

Someone is using IQ tests for their intended purpose?!

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#276

Post by mcguire »

tsimionescu wrote: post #259
valvar wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fil…

Don't you first have to define what you want to measure and demonstrate that it exists?

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#277

Post by mcguire »

Retric wrote: post #183
bjoli wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

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…

My high school transcripts show the results of IQ tests taken in the 4th and 6th grade. Between those two tests, my IQ had dropped by 10%.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#278

Post by runarberg »

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…

> It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either.

This is an often cited myth. Examples of psychological effects with high predictive powers include:

* The law of stimulus and response

* Priming

* Classical conditioning

* Reinforcement learning, which further includes positive reinforcement, punishment, etc.

* Plenty of neural models that predict behavioral anomalies after brain trauma.

* Plenty of social psychology models that predict how people behave inside groups.

* Heck even the linguist Noam Chomsky made an accurate psychological prediction based on cognitive psychology in how people acquire grammar.

I think you might be confusing psychology with psychometrics which is a sub-field of psychology which holds that any psychological effect is measurable and that operational definition is a good way to establish these effects. The whole field of psychometrics has a serious problem with predictive powers of their theories. Other modern fields of psychology on the other hand has a good track record of making theories that hold good predictive powers.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#279

Post by fsloth »

nicoburns wrote: post #251
fsloth wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lots of good fiction feels profound. Good fiction feels right and true. But feeling right does not turn the fiction into science.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#280

Post by todd8 »

criddell wrote: post #250
todd8 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Central Limit Theorem is one big reason to expect that traits have a normal distribution. Wikipedia has a good explanation. [1] and [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Moivre–Laplace_theorem

How would the central limit theorem apply to seemingly bimodal distributions like left vs right handedness?

With respect to personality, I believe that there are likely a number of independent factors, perhaps hundreds, that affect in some way where one’s position lies on each of the axes of personality. These factors could be particular childhood traumas, birth order, parent’s behavior/addiction, childhood friends, and genetic factors. Even if each of these numerous random variable is binomial the central limit theorem applies.
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