The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

Post by lucisferre » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 9:48 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #335

lucisferre wrote: post #334

Is any personality test really meaningful? I mean the entire field of psychology apparently doesn't care much about correctness or falsifiability? Why bother to hold MBTI to a higher standard? [1] [1]: http://www.nature.com/news/smart-software-spots-statistical-...

Yes, there are models of personality that, unlike MBTI, have a scientific basis for the selection of their dimensions. That there are widespread problems with psychological research does not mean that there is no reason to apply standards when evaluating proposed models in the field (in fact, it's a good reason to be particularly careful in doing so.)

Post by sn9 » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 1:00 AM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #324

sn9 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

Post by nonbel » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 4:17 AM UTC

btilly wrote: post #339

nonbel wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 educati…

Yeah, everything is correlated with everything, and a principal component analysis will quickly sort out the source. For example what songs you like is tied to what media you watch which is tied to what politics you have. And most of that is tied to how liberal vs conservative you are. It doesn't take many principal components to make most of the remaining correlations very small. But correlations between astrologica…

Post by gnaritas » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:43 PM UTC

nonbel wrote: post #346

gnaritas wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though. I can correlations the drop in pirates with a rise in global temperature, so what... correlations don't mean a damn thing by themselves, that's just data-mining bias.

No, it is not data-mining bias. There really is a correlation. It is real, but realizing that has no usefulness at all.

Post by sn9 » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 10:11 PM UTC

gnaritas wrote: post #348

sn9 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also true of astrology and MBTI has as much scientific validity and predictive value. No one's disputing that a useless tool can be misused. They're questioning the use of useless tools at all. They give the illusion of understanding to those not interested in evidence.

> This is also true of astrology False. > and MBTI has as much scientific validity and predictive value. As it can be mapped directly to the big 5, this is also false.