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Comment by NalNezumi | Hacker News Reader

It's horrifying that some comments are seriously arguing for the benefit of Myers Briggs here. It's a cold reminder that HN is not a rational place as a lot of us like to think; there's believers here that believe in psychology equivalent of flat earth, and can read about "confirmation bias" but not see it in themselves even after clearly writing it down for us!

A friendly reminder of the beating this dead horse that is Myers Briggs have had almost a decade ago by Adam Grant

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog...

Edit: non amp link (thanks smingo) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309...

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Note the correlations between MBTI types and Big Five personality dimensions:

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

These are not insignificant, particularly in the social sciences. 0.45 would be a large effect size in most psychology papers; 0.72 is huge.

I think a large part of whether people think MBTI is bunk or a useful tool depends on their willingness to overlook small details to get a general gist that's helpful but perhaps not totally accurate. Which is perhaps why another comment down-thread remarks that N's are much more likely to view MBTI as valid than S's (and sure enough, the indicator was developed by an INFJ and INFP, based on the ideas of an INTJ). "Personality" itself is an abstraction, and personality types are an abstraction on top of an abstraction. All generalizations are wrong, but some of them are useful.

One bit of psuedoscience correlates to another. Okay.

One test measuring extroversion only manages 0.74 correlation with another. I'm not impressed.

Big Five is based on factor analysis, it's hard to call it pseudoscience.

They didn't invent traits and then came up with fake data to prove their model. It's the opposite: they used statistical methods to discover those traits.

It might be an imperfect model, but it's still scientific.

Does MBTI have scores for dimensions? For instance, does it report that one is 45% introvert and 55% extrovert? I've never heard of MBTI scores. To my understanding, it just reports one is more extrovert than introvert. In such a case, I don't think it would be meaningful to measure correlation to Big Five, which reports its results on a continuous scale.

Some tests will return the scaled dimension, yes. But the biggest reason it's so popular is it's so easy to communicate with binary letters, because if you're at the 45% mark on the introvert/extrovert scale your type will be I type. This is also the reason a lot of people get different retest results. If you're near the middle of the scale it's easy to lean on either side.

> there's believers here that believe in psychology equivalent of flat earth

That is clearly hyperbole, as is the equivocation with horoscopes mentioned in the article you linked. In both instances, the argument is hurting your case.

Look, I agree that the big 5 is superior. But the MBTI traits are clearly rough first approximations of traits discovered by more rigorous science - not just pure superstition.

There's a great amount of benefit to companies led by superstition to self-label so employees can give them a wide berth.

Link without Google amp: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309...

Just for this argument: "Research shows that as many as 75 percent of personality test-takers receive a different result when tested again."

There is an easy counter: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18248

The other two still holds for me though. But Big Five is not any better IMHO, it can be a trait for psychological health, but definitely not for personality.

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