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You bring up an interesting case I think even you failed to consider: Since mbti essentially neuters it's own usefulness in the "round those percentages down t

by cazum 10y ago

You bring up an interesting case I think even you failed to consider: Since mbti essentially neuters it's own usefulness in the "round those percentages down to binary" stage, you could end up with a situation where an INTP and an ESFJ have only an 8% total difference in mbti-measured personality between them.

0xfffafaCrash 10y ago
Oh absolutely. In fact I think there are those situations. My argument isn't that MBTI is effective in all individual cases to gauge much about them. My argument is that the ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established. It's not been well researched in the first place and the research I've seen has been quite awful in their setup and analysis. The question isn't whether people who are in the middle of each criteria exist and could easily swap classifications to their polar opposite. The question is what percentage of people would do that and whether it's high enough that there's too little signal to noise to extract any meaningful information out of the classification system.
- cazum 10y ago
  Well, since we know that 50% of people score different types upon retaking the test, that should be enough to identify the prevalence of these problem. As for signal-to-noise, mbti is a useful tool for measuring the traits it measures, it just, for some reason, cuts the signal in half by removing the percentage from the label. Without the percentages, you can never assume a persons traits don't hover at that middle ground. And thus, can never assume any part of their label is accurate. If the occurrence of these hover cases were more like <4%, I'd be more inclined to agree with its usefulness, but as it is right now, the 4bit label, on its own, is just noise.
  - 0xfffafaCrash 10y ago
    If 50% of people score the exact same type upon retaking the test, I consider that great evidence that there is relatively stable information in the indicator. As a baseline, remember that if the distribution of results was uniform, a null model would expect something on the order of 6.25% if the noise really drowned out all the signal.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  >ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established Don't invert the burden of proof. It's up to the proponents of MBTI to demonstrate its effectiveness.

by cazum 10y ago

0xfffafaCrash 10y ago

Oh absolutely. In fact I think there are those situations. My argument isn't that MBTI is effective in all individual cases to gauge much about them. My argument is that the ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established. It's not been well researched in the first place and the research I've seen has been quite awful in their setup and analysis. The question isn't whether people who are in the middle of each criteria exist and could easily swap classifications to their polar opposite. The question is what percentage of people would do that and whether it's high enough that there's too little signal to noise to extract any meaningful information out of the classification system.

cazum 10y ago
Well, since we know that 50% of people score different types upon retaking the test, that should be enough to identify the prevalence of these problem. As for signal-to-noise, mbti is a useful tool for measuring the traits it measures, it just, for some reason, cuts the signal in half by removing the percentage from the label. Without the percentages, you can never assume a persons traits don't hover at that middle ground. And thus, can never assume any part of their label is accurate. If the occurrence of these hover cases were more like <4%, I'd be more inclined to agree with its usefulness, but as it is right now, the 4bit label, on its own, is just noise.
- 0xfffafaCrash 10y ago
  If 50% of people score the exact same type upon retaking the test, I consider that great evidence that there is relatively stable information in the indicator. As a baseline, remember that if the distribution of results was uniform, a null model would expect something on the order of 6.25% if the noise really drowned out all the signal.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
>ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established Don't invert the burden of proof. It's up to the proponents of MBTI to demonstrate its effectiveness.