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Comment by araneae | Hacker News Reader

  "Women feel, while men think" is essentially
  a solved debate as far as gender issues go.

Really? Because this is, on average, true. Whether or not it's biological or cultural is another argument, but I think that is also up for debate. The fact is that Meyer-Briggs test show that women are much more likely to be "Feeling" over "Thinking" on that axis of the test.

Now, you can debate all you want over the validity of these personality tests, but when women are asked how they react to situations, they tend choose to select the "feeling" axis. Perhaps that's not actually what they think, and they're just trying to conform to female stereotypes, but I really don't think it's resolved at all.

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Myers-Briggs scores people on several dimensions. They chose to label one of those dimensions "thinking-feeling". But that doesn't mean that the test is actually discriminating between "thinking" and "feeling" as we commonly understand those words. You could just as easily label the "thinking-feeling" axis as "detached-involved" -- but then it would obviously be irrelevant to the claim that "women feel, while men think".

This is one of those cases where details matter: psychometrics are not simple.

To further illustrate how you can't just throw these labels around, Myers-Briggs has "iNtuiting" on another axis. PZ Meyers makes references that place "Intuition" in opposition to science (thinking.) If the words mean the same in both contexts, then the Myers-Briggs temperament of the NT/Rational who is both iNtuitive and Thinking becomes, well, awkward at best.

Obviously the set of questions they ask relating to "thinking" versus "feeling" do not have a 1-to-1 relationship with those characteristics. But it's not bad: http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-bas...

To address intuition, INTPs- where N stands for intuition- are actually the "scientist" types. However, like you note, the combination is comparatively rare. "Intuition" for MBTI talks about how you perceive incoming information. http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-bas... But you're right, the definition of "intuition" in MBTI is... unintuitive.

Would have been an edit, but I had forgot where I had placed this:

http://www.sengifted.org/articles_social/Sak_SynthesisOfRese...

Proof! Kind of.

The question then becomes if it's trained, or if it's genetic.

If it's trained, which most people I've encountered will vocally agree with, and a glance at many cultures will show extreme training in this area, parroting it will only make things worse.

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