In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

These are answers to a standardized test. So, they are (probably) teasing out some tiny kernel of truth in the distribution of (probably context sensitive) human traits (insofar as these traits are related to the questions, but probably more dubiously insofar as people use English words like "intuitive" for axes or name one axis two different English ideas like Judging and Perceiving).

Honestly, the more "words" you add to try to summarize a pile of question answers, the further away you are getting from "science" and the closer you get to astrology. If there is only one lesson I can convey here, it should be that. The science is the 50 or however many questions dimensional questionnaire and the 4 or 5 dimensional distributional summary of the full high dimensional distribution. You project "down from the questions" to the summary and then people using English "back project" but are mostly just filling in poetic detail from anecdotal experience. The bigger that back projection to paragraphs and chapters the more like astrology or psychology by and for poets things have become.

However, as mentioned a couple of times, these summaries may be telling you very little (not "probably says" as you say a few times, but "probably says nothing") about the 99% neurotypical people (yes, my estimate is hand-wavy based on the distribution along just one axis from the article which says the other are "similar"). The tests may be only useful to identify outlying personality extremes which is very much not how amateurs apply them. Amateurs overconclude..reading profiles and basically acting out the epistemological play of astrology over again (but backed by "science" so they feel less guilty; EDIT - and yes I have known several such people in real life).

Incidentally, this also explains "correlations" with other things (like IQ or engineers or etc.) because linear statistics like correlation are notoriously dragged around by outliers. To whatever extent these things are true, the correlations (unadjusted for individual noise as already mentioned) will have much weaker statistical power than you would naively expect. In effect, your sample size may be only 0.2% to a few % what you thought it was. So, instead of 1000s of people you have 10s with thin population of each of the 16 categories. This would show up in the reproducibility of the correlation studies, but honestly require a more careful meta-analysis than I am prepared to offer for free. So, these studies, too, may have a grain of truth, but perhaps only a grain and this grain is probably much smaller than what personality test advocates in this comment thread seem to understand.

At least one real world problem with taking these measurements too seriously is, as others in this thread have mentioned, that these thinly evidenced divisions - even if real - can be as ripe for abuse as race/whatever designator is. In-group preference [1] is a strongly replicated result in psychology. This is another reason why axes-only "a% I, b% N, c% T, d% P" are better than classification, and why the big 5 (which at least resists categories) is less harmful. a +- A, b +- B, etc. would be even better.

Have you or anyone on this whole thread ever heard of a p-value for your personality assignment or error bars on your personality axes before I mentioned them? (Yes, I know the problems with p-values. Those problems are not the point here.) No? Yet everyone has heard of same-person reproducibility problems. These are obviously deeply related issues.

So, the problem is not that "MB is totally not science". It's that personality measurement in general is weak enough science to be far more likely to be misapplied than to be correctly understood, especially by lay practitioners like HR depts/mgmt/people on first dates/people in emotionally heated scenarios. It may have a real and even positive role in diagnosing true outlier children in need of interventions, though "profiles" of all the super extreme 16 cases will probably sound bad and may be obvious sans any testing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism

Only if you're doing science. It's possible to find things out without science slowing you down, but I wouldn't ordinarily recommend it; science is a great way to avoid the common traps that humans invariably fall into when they try to bypass the scientific method.

>Well, there are two options: either this is right and there is a vast gulf between the workings of the male and female mind, or these countries are not as free of social expectations as they like to think they are. Not sure how the UK and Northern Europe compare, but a (female) friend who left Romania for Germany was shocked at how large the social pressure on women to give up working after having a child are. She has had multiple colleagues directly and indirectly pushing her into feeling like a bad mother for holding a full-time job while having a child at home.

Yes, it seems even the most progressive countries haven't eliminated all pressure yet. And that might be for the best, but that's besides the point.

>In my own university days in the CS department, there was a marked difference between the number of men and women, but nowhere near what you're saying: it was more like 10 women for every 20 men, maybe a little less. I've had several female professors, including the head of the Polytechnic institute and the head of the CS department. In my job today, I am on a team of 4 men and 3 women (all programmers), working on a project with a female project lead, and probably overall 30 men and 6 women in Dev, and 50 men and 14 women if you include QA (who also do Python-based automated testing). This is on a project deep in the world of computer networking, not some soft field. And the team is about half in Romania, half in India - not exactly countries known for their courageous tearing down of social norms.

Peterson and the study that he referenced specifically did point out that the less pressured men and women are to follow a path the more pronounced the differences become. So far your anecdote, as well as my own from previously living in an ex-USSR country, confirm this. Why this is so - I have no idea but I find it fascinating.

>Well, if he's saying that women are more fit to be nurses and men are more fit to be engineers, than I feel justified in saying that he's implying women are less suited than men for intellectual labor (not necessarily dumber, but at least less likely to enjoy it). That may not be his intention (though I believe it may well be), but he also doesn't go out of his way to disclaim it.

Whilst Peterson never specifically said that men are more fit to be engineers than women, I do agree that what he HAS said is analogous to that. However, I believe his views on that came from evidence and not from a sexist point-of-view that women are inferior. The inverse of that is that women are better at child-rearing and people-facing roles, a statement which I think is on average just as true as the one about men and engineers. Is it then misandrist to say that men are, on average, not as good at raising children? I wouldn't say so personally.

>My strong belief is that it's a problem of education and social pressures. Even in Romania (to be clear, I keep bringing it up because it's the country where I have the most experience), where women do choose these fields in much bigger numbers for whatever reasons, there are deep biases against women's ability in this field. Female colleagues were more likely to be a professor's target for ridicule, or simply receive lower grades on exams for the same mistakes. They would be less likely to be given as positive examples, and less likely to be encouraged towards this field.

I do trust what you say about this 100% when it pertains to Romania, but let me assure you that in the UK even a minor complaint of sexist harassment of any kind will very likely result in a rapid and unexpected vacancy in the company. Sometimes it can be even unfair, but that's besides the point again. In fact, in my experience whenever I see women in engineering fields, I'd see guys pretty much bend over backwards to be nice and supportive of them. So much so that it'd seem saccharine and the women would be either put off by this treatment(perhaps another pressure that dissuades women from the field? I doubt it but it could play a role I suppose, especially if the guys are doing it in the hopes of "surreptitiously" getting in their pants) or have everything so baby-proofed for them that they'd have no challenge because everything would be done for them.

>Even if comparing between two similar-income American (non-recent immigrants) families in the same city in America, one with black skin and the other with white skin, there is some SMALL chance that there are inherent biases, either internal or in the test, that may affect the validity of results. And from what I've read, many such comparisons are far, far from this close. Some famous books on the topic, such as "The Bell Curve", include horribly, obviously biased studies, such as comparing the IQs of white and black kids as measured by apartheid South Africa!

I agree that it can be an apples to oranges comparison. This conversation did make aware of how ignorant I was of the actual methodology of that IQ between races study, so that's something I'll have to look up. That "Bell Curve" thing is shocking! A good reminder how "science" can be manipulated by using a bad methodology to push results to confirm a bias and then touting it as the empirical truth. What I like to call the "I F**ING LOVE SCIENCE" brand of science.

This article [1] about what determines a persons handedness starts out:

> Like most aspects of human behavior, handedness is a complex trait that appears to be influenced by multiple factors, including genetics, environment, and chance.

It goes on to say that there are up to 40 genes that contribute. It seems like it's complex enough that the central limit theorem should apply yet handedness is definitely a bimodal distribution.

[1]: https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/handed...

I get the same Hogwarts house every time I take that test too.