There are tons of correlations, for example INTP/INTJ subreddits on Reddit being most popular while these types generally are one of the rarest. There's tons of things you can predict with this. INTPs are often going to face similar challenges and obstacles in life, there's similar things that will help them grow as a person that would not help other types.
Sure. Now can we do the same with the other fourteen types, or is the primary value here that there are two kinds of people: INTx and non-INTx?
There's probably some bias here, but I've only ever heard INTx specifically singled out when talking about MBTI. That suggests that MBTI may make too many clear distinctions where reality draws a much softer line. A coarser-grained theory is likely to have more predictive power and be more applicable. Alternatively, a fine-grained theory with the boundaries drawn differently, such as the Big Five, may better account for these softer distinctions.
I'm not saying this is definitively the case. I'm saying that a complex theory that makes a small set of predictions doesn't justify its weight. If MBTI does fall into that category, we should feel no qualms about finding something that works better for us.
(Personally, I get a lot more out of the Bartle taxonomy. Only four broad classifications, and more focused on what value one seeks from certain kinds of games. Not without its flaws, either.)
> INTPs are often going to face similar challenges and obstacles in life, there's similar things that will help them grow as a person that would not help other types.
I really am going to need a citation for this. Here's my new horse: there cannot be 16 broad (even with overlap) classes of obstacles and growth opportunities in life that are specific to each personality type. Humans are simultaneously too subtle for a personality test to provide this level of insight, and too similar for tactics to be inapplicable to all but one type of person. It smells like horoscopes, and there are only twelve of those.
We all have issues. Let's categorize those, not the personality types that we think correlate with them. It borders on claiming that the problems I have in life are because of something wrong with me, and not just the circumstances of life in general.
Talking about personality models seems to appeal to INTJs and INTPs more than anyone else. Never hearing about other types probably says something about your social circles too.
Are all psychometricians INTx's, then? This sounds like exactly the kind of over-conclusion that bothers people about personality testing and its applications. ;-)
Of course not. It's all probabilistic. I feel like the people who think MBTI and personality tests don't make sense are themselves the ones making those over conclusions and they can only think in binary, black and white way, when it really could be something like INTx is likely to be overrepresented in psychometricians fields by 4x, ESFJ might be underrepresented by 5x, etc.
So for instance maybe there's 6% INTXs in the world, but in psychometry field there happens to be 30% INTX representation. Nobody is making the claim that ALL psy
Or it could be these tests literally do not even discriminate 99% of the population if the measurement error is near the size of the mode width. See my other comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26292915
A simpler way to think about it might be "How would I assign a p-value to the personality type?" Once you have that answer, all your "over-representation" stats should, naturally, trim out (or otherwise down-weight) the poor p-value personality assignments (any such over-representation stats that you have heard very likely do no such filtering).
Have you looked into the "Cognitive Functions" that MBTI theory uses? If not, I'd recommend reading through the 101, 201, and 301 articles here https://personalityjunkie.com/typology-101/
To me I see "INTx" and think that makes no sense because INTJ and INTP have completely different functional stacks. INTJ's are dominant "Introverted Intuition" (Ni) followed by "Extraverted Feeling" (Fe), whereas INTP's are dominant "Introverted Thinking" (Ti) followed by "Extravert Inuition" (Ne). So they're basically completely different.
Once you have a functional stack, then the MBTI theory becomes a lot more subtle: not only does everyone have 4 our of the 8 functions in their stack covering both sides of each of the distinctions, but the relative strength of each of these functions can vary continuously.
And that's before you even get to variations based on experience, which the MBTI doesn't even attempt to describe (you'd typically use someone's MBTI type in conjunction with their life experience to explain their personality as a whole).
What 'pseudalopex mentioned -- and also note that I was responding to someboody who grouped INTJ/INTP together. I don't have much of a vested interest in MBTI; I was just trying to work from the ancestor post's foundation to think critically about what we're getting from that interpretation.
I know even less about "congnitive functions", but it definitely sounds more subtle than the axes most people interpret MBTI as. My specific criticisms don't immediately transfer.
> The functions are part of the controversial Jungian ideas the article mentioned. Most people ignore them entirely and treat the preferences as axes.
They do. And IMO this is exactly why the results never reproduce. The functions actually make sense and anecdotally seem to correspond to something in the real world (they've rarely if ever been subject to scientific testing as far as I'm aware). The preferences by themselves are just a somewhat less reproducible variant of the Big 5 as criticisms claim.
> I think they just meant INTJ or INTP.
I'm sure they did. My point being that if you look at the functions (which most anyone who takes Myers-Briggs seriously does) then INTJ and INTP aren't similar at all. So talking about them together makes little sense. Although reading up the thread, it looks like they were just suggesting that they both have subreddits. Which I guess isn't really talking about their personalities at all.
They are similar since they correlate similarly with lots of real world aspects. E.G. most simple is they are both very actively represented on Reddit and second one being top 2 highest average IQs. They also share very many similar interests.
I think those Cognitive Functions are just Jungian pseudoscience. They are based on work that is closer to fiction than science. Not any better or worse than any psychologically motivated work of fiction - but fiction never the less.
I like to see it as an as-yet poorly evidenced scientific hypothesis rather than an pseudo-scientific "fact". Which indeed may need to go through further revisions before the correct version is found. But I see lots of circumstantial evidence which makes me think it is worthy of further investigation.
Sure, but neither does a lack of evidence mean that something isn't true. It's not science currently. But that doesn't mean it won't be (nor does it mean it will be).
I think you'd be surprised at how many scientific breakthroughs have come from individuals being bloody minded about things that everyone else thought were ridiculous. Science isn't just about testing hypothesis. The other part of it is about generating hypothesis to test. That part tends to be a lot more fluffy and subjective, but it's just as critical to the scientific process.
The main issue I have with Jungian analysis is that it takes Jungs ideas as given and then implements no work to test or validate them. Any authoritarian system that does not evolve is more like religious or political dogma than science.
The difference between Jung and for example Alfred Wegener who was one of the early proponents of plate tectonics is that Wegener's ideas were validated.
"Lots of strange ideas have been true" is not incorrect, but I think there are a lot more strange incorrect ideas out there than correct ones.
> Sure. Now can we do the same with the other fourteen types, or is the primary value here that there are two kinds of people: INTx and non-INTx?
I started with INTx to have at least one detailed, specific argument that there is correlation and MBTI is at least not completely meaningless. There's also a correlation between INTx and IQ, to go as scientific as we can here. Just search for IQ by personality type. Now you could say we are putting two completely meaningless metrics together. If they truly were, how could they have correlation?
Big Five is not the topic here. The argument is whether MBTI can have meaning and whether it can be useful. Let's say Big Five was better, it doesn't mean that MBTI is completely useless. And I'm not going to argue about Big Five vs MBTI.
> there cannot be 16 broad (even with overlap) classes of obstacles and growth opportunities in life that are specific to each personality type.
No one has made this claim. There are various obstacles and challenges in life, and the only claim is that some personality types are more LIKELY to face some obstacles and challenges than other personality types. E.g. INTX will LIKELY have to put in more conscious effort to improve social skills in order to better communicate with people. This already is useful information. It also gives insights into how a person thinks and perceives the world, if you go into how functions work and which personality types are more likely to use which functions to understand what is going on. If there are 16 categories you can get a quick understanding of what a person might be like if you know the MBTI type, which otherwise you would have to read tons of paper on that person to understand what he/she LIKELY is.
It's all a game of probabilities and spectrum. You could do statements like, this person is 65% I, 70% N, 75% T, 66% P, therefore there's likelihood of this person facing challenges with social situations being 80-90%. The way this person is likely to make decisions is to use internal thinking to make conclusions based on logical analysis. All of this can say a lot about the person just with 4 letters.
> E.g. INTX will LIKELY have to put in more conscious effort to improve social skills in order to better communicate with people
I knew I needed to work on my social skills long before I tested as an INTP. My criticism is not that the correlations don't exist. My criticism is that they don't seem helpful.
> It also gives insights into how a person thinks and perceives the world [...] which otherwise you would have to read tons of paper on that person
Can't you just talk with them? Somebody once asked me for my MBTI class as a shortcut to trying to understand how to interact with me. It didn't work very well for them, and I didn't much appreciate being binned that way.
I've always been binned as a logical person in particular, but my internal landscape has been, subjectively, dominated by creative thought and expression. Logic is just a tool I use to impose some structure on that experience. People who stop at the surface -- and worse, who label me under MBTI -- manifestly do not understand me, my motivations, my goals, or my challenges. (If you go point to some MBTI page on Logicians and say "it mentions creativity right here!" I will be very cross with you.)
To say this is a sore spot may be an understatement.
> Do you take the time to understand everyone you meet, their motivations, their goals, and their challenges? Even the ones who don't want you to?
To the degree our relationship warrants. Don't you? We all form mental models of the people we interact with over time. I don't see how the MBTI helps that process. As mentioned, for some people who have interacted with me, it has hindered that process by establishing a totem to which I am compared.
Is the argument that MBTI is useful when interacting with people you don't spend time with, who have a brief and transient presence in your life? Or is it more akin to birdwatching? I don't see either of those options as especially useful, but I won't fault anybody for it.
The more straightforward explanation is that the INTP/INTJ descriptions are much more exciting to someone with introverted traits than any other MBTI result. They are much more likely to be discussed for that reason alone. The glamor of the result affects its distribution, when in reality people who meet the description in a plausible way are quite rare and exceptional.
The population of people who get an INTP result might have quite many asperger spectrum non-neurotypicals among them. If MB contains an accidental asperger scoring system within itself it does not make it relevant in the _general case_ for other personality types.
That said if INTP can be used as a lodestar for creating asperger communities and peer-support groups it's not a bad thing. But it does not really validate MB in any way as a general purpose psychometric tool.
I personally filled an online MB questionnaire or two in adolescence and certainly found the INTP score as something that helped me acknowledge a few things about myself. But it was not really something I would call fundamentally important.
