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The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#301

Post by amelius »

AstralStorm wrote: post #290
amelius wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is very hard for a test not to have predictive power. For example, companies fruitfully extract predictive power from whether a user clicked a link or not. Facebook extracts predictive power from whether users like videos, et cetera. So why shouldn't an elaborate test that was developed to have meaning, not have any predictive power?

Not having predictive power means it is not better than chance at predicting any X. There are results that show MBTI has no predictive power against job performance. It has not been tested against any other measure. That said, MBTI shows bad orthogonality in the factors in its response. This suggests the factors are ill defined.

> There are results that show MBTI has no predictive power against job performance.

Could you provide a reference?

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#302

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

gnaritas wrote: post #280
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astrology is prescriptive If you disregard the people who claim astrology is prescriptive, and pay attention to only those aspects of it that describe tendencies - all the most convincing astrology nuts I've met do this - it can be quite... warming.

Those tendencies are still linked to a birthdate which makes them prescriptive, you cannot ignore the prescriptive element of astrology without ignoring astrology entirely.

Myers-Briggs has a type label then assigns traits based on that label.

It's not clear to me how that's different.

Sure, you can choose your type by responding differently to the questions, or finding a "practitioner" who assigns a type you prefer, but the same applies to astrology: shop around until you hear what you want to here.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#303

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

It's funny but I have a relative who was into the works of Carlos Castaneda and I've read quite a few of them (they're a bit magical realism, remind me a bit of J. L. Borges). In one of the books, Don Juan (his guru) describes a personality system based on the cardinal directions which ends up classifying every member of the human species in one of sixteen distinct personality types. As is typical for Castaneda's stories, Carlos immediately challenges the idea that there are only sixteen types of people in the whole world - which is really just a plot device to keep Don Juan talking and move the description of the whole system along.

Anyway, this personality system is what I thought when I first heard of the Myers-Briggs test and I thought it has exactly the same merit as any other system that arbitrarily groups people into 16 types based on whatever perceived characteristic of theirs, which is to say: none at all. In Castaneda's case you need to have special seer powers to see peoples' type. In Myers Briggs all you need is an MBTI test.

There is progress even in magic, it seems.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#304

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #28

This is so poorly thought out. I really don't get why some people can't seem to tell the difference between things like MBTIs and astrological signs/zodiacs/horoscopes in terms of their potential to classify people in a meaningful way... One is an arbitrary mapping of a person's date of birth to an set of traits and prophesies. The other is a brief summary of a person's personality/behavioral inclinations based on a…

>> a brief summary of a person's personality/behavioral inclinations based on a survey of that person's stated behavior and inclinations.

I'm really a very nice person. I'm magnanimous, full of goodwill and compassion and everyone I meet immediately likes me. I am intelligent and brave and very gregarious. I am the best person to be around when you need a shoulder to cry on because I have a deep understanding of human nature, thanks to my very high emotional intelligence.

That is the problem with taking into account people's stated behaviour and inclinations.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#305

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

wutf wrote: post #6

The covariance of the Big 5 and MBTI is high. This means that if you give both inventories to the same population you can do a factor rotation of one onto the other with much of the variance being preserved. This has been demonstrated multiple times in the academic literature. I have never read an article against the MBTI that mentioned this, and that's because the people who write these articles do not understand st…

That's probably a very good argument against the Big 5.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#306

Post by AstralStorm »

wutf wrote: post #200
bradleyjg wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Looks like extroversion is the best correlated (.74) which I suppose makes sense. But nearly as strong (.72) is intuition/sensing to openness to experience, which I would not have predicted. Conscientiousness to judging/perceiving is only .49 and agreeableness to thinking/feeling is only .44. MBTI has no good correlate for neuroticism. I'm no statistician, but "is approximately as valid" looks to be over…

You're no statistician or psychologist. Those loadings are huge.

0.5 correlation means it is maybe perhaps correlated given Emax view of the statistics. For normal variates you should aim for R=0.95 at least. Both MBTI and Big Five are approximately normal variates.

Also correlation is a linear operator which is not particularly sensitive to anything nonlinear. Use a good statistical test instead.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#307

Post by amelius »

nonbel wrote: post #283
gnaritas wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality. There's no evidence of this, so you should have doubts.

Sure there is, I found thousands of papers on it with one simple search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=season+of+birth EG: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151 I don't know much about astrology, but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? From my understanding, it is basically a wa…

http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-birth-month-influences-perso...

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#308

Post by 3minus1 »

grandalf wrote: post #255
3minus1 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fair enough. my comment was definitely overly grumpy

no worries.

btw I'm not one of those people that disagrees with their MBTI type. I always felt like mine was pretty accurate.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#309

Post by winston_smith »

gnaritas wrote: post #227
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment works surprisingly well like this: As an individual (Taurus) thoroughly interested in astrology, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout astrology as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what astrology attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article…

They are not remotely comparable, Meyers Briggs is descriptive, Astrology is prescriptive and it's the prescriptive part that is nonsense. There is no connection to your personality and your birth date. Meyers Briggs is a classification system that groups similar personalities, it does not prescribe what your personality is or should be.

| They are not remotely comparable

Oh dear, there seems to be an epidemic of people's comparators not working. You might want to start small: try comparing two oranges, then an orange and an apple. Before long you'll be comparing supernovas to salamanders!

(Or perhaps you meant the rather less categorical "I think they're very different". I harp on this because I find "not remotely comparable" excessively dismissive. It's fine to disagree, just don't act like there's no possible way the other person might have a valid point)

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#310

Post by wutf »

liquidise wrote: post #19

> the most obvious flaw is that the MBTI seems to rely exclusively on binary choices….For example, in the category of extrovert v introvert, you’re either one or the other; there is no middle ground This is categorically false. Myers Briggs results are quite literally reported on a spectrum of 100 I - 0 - E 100, with your position on the spectrum shown. The 4 letter rollup is exactly that: a summary rollup of your te…

This isn't actually true. During construction of the test they throw out questions that don't categorize you. It has discriminative validity even when it looks close.
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