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The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

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

#311

Post by CoryG89 »

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.

Being linked to your birthday has absolutely nothing to do with being prescriptive. Perhaps horoscopes are only prescriptive, but astrology as a whole is much broader than that.

I don't put faith in or know much about astrology, but I do know there are many different types and areas of astrology and not all of them have to do with telling you how to pick your lotto numbers tomorrow.

A lot of people talk about signs and astrology in terms of being able to read people and determine personality traits of others.

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

#312

Post by CoryG89 »

pcmaffey wrote: post #94
Analemma_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't get why some people can't seem to tell the difference between things like MBTIs and astrological signs/zodiacs/horoscopes Then let me try to help clarify. MBTI has no predictive power ("I'm an INTP, so... ?") and is not falsifiable. Those are the delineators between science and pseudoscience, so that's why I bucket it with astrology.

You're doing a disservice to astrology. MBTI is a subjective categorization. Astrology is more like your DNA. You're born with a specific set pattern. Just like we don't understand what most of our genetic patterns mean, we don't understand what most of our astrological patterns mean.

Much of our DNA may not mean very much at all, just like our astrological patterns.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/magazine/is-most-of-our-dn...

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

#314

Post by Mz »

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…

I don't know much about astrology,

Then please kindly don't defend it.

but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right?

I have actually studied astrology. Serious astrologers loathe sun sign astrology.

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

#315

Post by emodendroket »

cylinder wrote: post #42

And it can be harmful. People use their categorization as an excuse (I know I have). "I'm an INTP, I can't have a normal career, I always lose interest and move on to the next thing!" Yeah... this is called being undisciplined. Experts and Masters aren't born with the discipline to master their craft. They struggle like anyone else, but they break through those barriers and continue their mastery. Don't use your pers…

I believe it, but I don't find it hard to believe that, to some extent, differences in diligence are ingrained.

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

#316

Post by sn9 »

pmarreck wrote: post #271
erispoe wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invisibilia ran a great episode on "the personality myth"[1] and I think it shows the difference between BMI and "personality tests". BMI might be worthless but it measures something that objectively exists. Is it useful? Maybe not. Personality tests measure something that we don't even know exists, personality . The episode talks about research showing how we can understand ourselves better as sets of behavior that…

> Personality tests measure something that we don't even know exists, personality. This sentence strikes me as odd, because subjectively, the one thing that shines through the most with people, even people I haven't seen in 20+ years, is a distinct (and possibly largely immutable) personality. In fact, a large part of why I was so shy growing up is because people's personalities were so "bright" that I felt intimidat…

They never claimed evidence of nonexistence.

They claimed there's simply an absence of unambiguous evidence that it exists.

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

#317

Post by sn9 »

gnaritas wrote: post #278
1457389 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meyers Briggs is meant to be descriptive, but the preponderance of evidence shows that it is not, at all. In the corporate world discussion of MBTI very quickly becomes idiotically prescriptive. In my line if I see someone discuss MBTI with any level of passion or enthusiasm I have learned to distrust their evaluations of personalities and strengths/weaknesses, whether they refer to themselves or others.

> In the corporate world discussion of MBTI very quickly becomes idiotically prescriptive. Misuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool.

Yes the uselessness of the tool invalidates the tool.

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

#318

Post by ScottBurson »

aaimnr wrote: post #284
ScottBurson wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have studied the Enneagram deeply. It is a far more profound system than the MBTI, and far more useful for understanding oneself and others. The MBTI has some correlation to the Enneagram, and it is from that correlation that it takes most or all of its validity. But the correlation is only partial. If you look in Jung's Psychological Types , you will see that he correctly characterized eight of the nine Enneagram…

What you mention about Jung/enneagram correlation is interesting. You'd think that since he's based on different partitioning scheme (2 * 2 * 2) he should end up without any types matching exactly, but you seem to suggest that it's the case and he's just missing one. I guess it could make sense provided he based his type descriptions on empirical evidence (clustering his patients) that he later artificially pushed in…

Here are my pairings. (I'm at work and don't have my copy of Psychological Types handy, so this is going off someone else's interpretations [0]. But I think this is probably right.)

  ES - 7
  IS - 9
  EI - 8
  II - 4
  ET - 1
  IT - 5
  EF - 2 (but see below)
  IF - 6
The EF description does have some Three-sounding qualities to it; it's a fair guess that Jung lumped many Threes in with the Twos, since, after all, a lot of Threes (a majority, in my experience) lean toward Two, and after all he had to put them somewhere. (Some of them probably wound up in EI and ES as well.) Still, based on the descriptions in his book, I concluded that he overlooked the Three.

[0] http://www.watchwordtest.com/types.aspx

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

#319

Post by arde »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #170
raverbashing wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Because those mentioned deal with random events, where X and Y are uncorrelated (being X a date of birth or card drawn from Tarot and Y is some personality characteristic) MB do ask you questions from which you can predict - to some degree - some outcomes (how do you think a strong Extrovert changes from a strong Introvert)? Just don't do something stupid like "this job requires a INTJ only" or think that the dist…

Astrology is correlated to seasonal climate change etc. which can plausibly affect life outcomes, though

Considering the planet has two hemispheres, no, it's not correlated.

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

#320

Post by arde »

dragonwriter wrote: post #191
Simon321 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much more than 'astrology or tarot cards'. MBTI correlates with the big five personality traits. Which are backed up scientifically.

It correlates poorly with any of the competing empirically-supportable models; e.g., as I recall, the I-E axis seems to be a blend of the extraversion and neuroticism axes shared by the EPQ (3 factor) and Big Five (5 factor) models. Better to use one of the scientific models directly than MBTI.

Indeed. But that doesn't mean MBTI is really meaningless, only that there are better models.
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