The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by AstralStorm » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 7:26 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #301

AstralStorm wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Provided by another person in this thread already.

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

#322

Post by AstralStorm » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 7:31 AM UTC

Xcelerate wrote: post #240

ivraatiems wrote: post #12

This is not a new finding. MBTI has never really been a serious psychological tool. In fact, a lot of the personality assessments used in business are really just woo - MBTI isn't even the worst. It at least is internally consistent. For a real personality exam with actual use in psych research, check out the Five Factor metric.

Five Factor is not much better than MBTI. See http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/ajp.161.10.1... for better (and more recent) research on the subject.

Dead salmon study is nowhere near comparable to a psych survey with a lot of data behind it like Big Five.

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

#323

Post by AstralStorm » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 7:34 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #300

Here's the correlations between MBTI dimensions and the "big five" personality traits that are commonly used in social-sciences research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi... When I look at those, I think "Not everything, but not nothing either". A correlation of 0.7+ is pretty high for anything in the social sciences - by comparison, the correlation between intelligence and genetics is abo…

Correlation of 0.4 means generally "it could be" in proper statistics. As in "it is also probable for a normal variate that you're seeing a spurious one". You probably wanted effect size instead and a good statistical test.

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

#324

Post by pmarreck » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 10:04 AM UTC

sn9 wrote: post #316

pmarreck wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Thank you for the clarification.

My argument is then that we will never have evidence that it exists because evidence is rational and objective and its very reality and/or value is trapped in the irrational subjective eye of the beholder.

Trying to boil it down into, say, patterns of neuron activations would be like trying to boil down or derive the "value reality" of the Mona Lisa by analyzing and cataloguing the light wavelengths reflecting off of it.

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

#325

Post by nonbel » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 1:31 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #285

nonbel wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"astrology is a starting point with zero correlation with who you are" I would really doubt that it is zero, the relative position of the celestial bodies correlates with season. All sorts of human activities follow a yearly cycle, including birth rates and mortality rates. I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality. I would take it further and say a good principle is that "e…

There are indeed measured weak correlations between seasons and personality. Things like your odds of being bipolar are higher if you were born in late winter, and lower for summer/early fall. (The same correlations exist in the Southern hemisphere, but with the obvious 6 month shift.) However there aren't correlations between those known correlations and the traits that astrology says that you should have. Therefore…

It all depends on the sample size. If sufficient money is put towards it you will find the correlation. People have also done studies on this for around 50 years, everything is correlated with everything else:

'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.' https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf

"One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square" http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38...

"...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...

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

#326

Post by amirmc » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 1:40 PM UTC

mi100hael wrote: post #129

amirmc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I did this test, the trainer was pretty clear that it's not meant to be a 'spectrum'. You're either an E or an I and that was that. The only one they claimed might be a spectrum was P to J.

Sounds like your trainer was a doofus. Each pair is a continuum and most people exhibit at least a mild preference in one direction or the other.

My trainer was certified by the people who make and sell the course/questionnaire. She made it clear that this was the official position.

So, no, she was not a doofus.

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

#327

Post by gnaritas » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

sn9 wrote: post #317

gnaritas wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And yet, misuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool; MBTI can do something the big 5 can't, assign a category which aids in thinking about and understanding another person which as someone else in this discussion points out can be statistically mapped directly to the big 5 making it not at all a useless tool.

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

#328

Post by gnaritas » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 2:54 PM UTC

winston_smith wrote: post #309

gnaritas wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Oh dear, I don't care what you like to harp on, take your sarcasm and shove it.

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

#329

Post by gnaritas » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 2:57 PM UTC

CoryG89 wrote: post #311

gnaritas wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

It has everything to do with it, and it doesn't matter how or what a lot of people talk about astrology in terms of, it's absolute horseshit regardless of how they try and justify it. The stars, planets, etc have no relationship to your personality in any way.

> don't put faith in or know much about astrology

You're right, you don't, so perhaps don't sit here and defend this pseudo-scientific nonsense that you know nothing about.

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

#330

Post by gnaritas » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #302

gnaritas wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

False. It's exactly the opposite, the label doesn't assign the traits, rather the traits create the label; if your traits change so does the label, it's nothing more than a description of who you are now according to your own answers to those traits questions. And it aids greatly in think about yourself and others and how people differ and exactly in what ways they can differ.

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

Then learn more.