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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

How Myers Briggs is still a thing boggles me. People would get mocked for taking horoscopes seriously, but Myers Briggs’ unsubstantiated BS is paid for out of company funds.

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I agree that Myers Briggs is pretty wishy washy, but "You answered these questions in these particular ways, so we can conclude these facts about your personality" is a completely different galaxy from "You were born in this month, so we can conclude these facts about your future."

Although, Chinese astrology may not be as incorrect as Western is. Consider how many people have said that "Gen Z behaves such a way", or "millennials are all xyz". After all, we are talking about a test that isn't really more precise.

Main reason I disagree is that astrology takes many more turns than a random person writing a random daily horoscope for your [sun] sign that can be attributed to anyone.

There are way more similarities between Myers Briggs and astrology.

At this point I would choose people leading with astrology over Myers Briggs because of the broader appeal and expectation to be criticized. Whereas people leading with Myers Briggs take themselves way too seriously.

It is in the same galaxy of being wrong, neither can conclude the things they claim to conclude.

If anything, Myers Briggs is worse because it fools people into thinking it is supported by data and is “scientific”.

MBTI lumps all people into 16 groups and makes conclusions about them on that basis. Western astrology groups people into 12 groups and makes conclusions based on that. They're both about equally BS.

Lumping people into groups doesn’t BS make. You can lump people into groups based on whether they have schizophrenia, and the diffidence between the average person in the two groups will be pretty clear.

Way to miss the point. Even with your grouping, you can't make any predictions about what the individuals in those groups would do. That's what both MBTI and astrology are fundamentally about.

It doesn't seem to be a valid or useful test.

It’s better than anything else available to layman, hence why they find it useful.

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