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Comment by ryaniscool | Hacker News Reader

This always seemed like common sense to me for various reasons. One good reason is that the people that typically give this type of advice (counselors and career advisors) are in such banal careers themselves. I doubt they are living "their dream". Their original dream was probably to be an international spy like James Bond or a professional athlete.

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>One good reason is that the people that typically give this type of advice (counselors and career advisors) are in such banal careers themselves

It might be poorly compensated but it's not a banal career. A good career advisor has the potential to make a huge difference in people's lives, more even than a teacher. As someone who grew up in a rural lower-class family (where good career advice was scarce), I'd have saved a couple mostly wasted years of my life if I'd met a good career advisor in high school.

That seems unnecessarily pessimistic. There is literally an mbti personality type called counselor “INFJ”. An INFJ is a born counselor. https://keirsey.com/temperament/idealist-counselor/ Example: Gandhi. I doubt he cared about being Bond. His ideal of non violence would interfere with a license to kill.

That personality categorization stuff is unsubstantiated nonsense.

Plenty of sources in criticism section:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

Although, one can easily see that we do not have the ability to perform good experiments with concepts as nebulous and ill defined as “personality types”.

Here are the definitions by Carl Jung:

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jung/types.htm

https://www.reddit.com/r/Jung/

How does that address the problem that it is not possible to perform the experiments necessary to make the strong claims?

This is not an issue specific to this idea in popular psychology, but in general to almost any field with difficult to define parameters.

Even in math it’s possible to have conjectures that are likely true but may never be proved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbach%27s_conjecture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

Even in physics, you have statistical truths like second law of thermodynamics. they allow you to generalize where precise computation is impossible.

So Jung’s insights into personality attitudes, dichotomies of perception and judgment seem like interesting conjectures worth knowing about, possibly difficult to prove.

The difference is the 2nd law of thermodynamics has tons of data showing its utility in modeling our world. Obviously, humans might be living in a simulation and everything is possibly wrong, but the personality test thing has many weaknesses and data contrary to its claims as summarized in the wiki article. I do not see what makes it worth knowing about compared to the litany of other pop psychology conjectures.

It wasn’t pop psychology when Jung came up with it. it stands on its own, just read it. The tests just simplify the process for people who don’t know the theory. by the way since you (and I) are so curious to know your type, here is a free test

https://sakinorva.net/functions

Now there’s a chap who was keen on dreams! :)

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