5 ms·

I'll go with an option not on the list: "useless", as are the results of all these personality tests. The whole notion that you can absolutely quantify somethin

I'll go with an option not on the list: "useless", as are the results of all these personality tests. The whole notion that you can absolutely quantify something as nebulous and volatile as personality is absurd; the idea of doing so within the constraint of four axes is down right laughable. Seriously, these things are the real-life equivalent of a silly Facebook quiz. edit: Having looked over the questions in the linked quiz, my answer to most all of them was "it depends". I guess this means I have no personality. :)

aikiai 17y ago
M-B is actually quite interesting to me. It is a very well defined personality type system, and I've found the results of tests to often be insightful. The test does not claim ANY kind of "absolute quantifification". That would be claiming that there are only 16 personalities in the world, which, as you note, is absurd. It is merely an attempt to define a few of the dimensions that make up a human personality, and provide a framework for talking about how those different dimensions interact. If you aren't interested in this, it's your business. But you should really reflect on where the attitude of "this is too nebulous and volatile" a subject to study and try to quantify, and decide if that's really how you want to react to things that are too big and complex to be immediately understood. If you really think the test is bullshit, then why am I, and the vast majority of the respondents on the previous poll (linked above/below) NTs, also know as Rationals? Seems odd, considering the figure I've heard quotes Rationals as 10% of the US population. Unless, of course, these results are revealing something specific about this population in particular?? Hmm.
branden 17y ago
MBTI is more complicated than that. Those four preferences interact to form a fuller picture of the personality type. Regardless of whether you choose to view it as informative, it certainly has more depth than a Facebook quiz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Type_dynamics_and_development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Typ... Personality is indeed a complicated thing, and MBTI respects that. It's understood that only the person in question can decide what their type is, since so much about it is below the surface of what another person can observe. It's only a tool for analyzing and understanding certain parts of your own personality that most people share, that can vary widely, and that tend to face one of two directions. Knowing my type (INTP) has been pretty valuable to me. It's given me a clearer understanding of the preferential basis for some of my attitudes and behaviors, and it helped me accept my introversion as a natural part of who I am. Looking at the previous HN poll (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240), there's a strong presence here of types that are uncommon in the general population. At the very least, that correlation is pretty interesting.
- jpeterson 17y ago
  Those four preferences interact to form a fuller picture of the personality type I don't know what this means, and to be frank, it sounds like a lot of gobbledy-gook. The whole point of categorizing is that the categories should convey some information about the thing categorized. The point I'm making here is that these personality categories don't even come close to this. The problem is that personality is an extremely complicated concept, and one that is prone to constant change. I seriously doubt that you could say something meaningful about a subject's personality with 10 axes, let alone four. To illustrate this, ask yourself two basic questions of these test results: 1) Are the conditions and results repeatable? 2) Can you use them to make any meaningful prediction of behavior? My contention is that the answer to each is a resounding "No", and hence the results are essentially useless.
  - branden 17y ago
    The Wikipedia link I provided describes preference interaction in depth. It seems you're saying that a categorization system that doesn't describe its subjects in complete, full, everlasting detail is worthless. I'd have to disagree. Look at the poll right now, or its predecessor. INTP has a higher tally than all the other types, which is particularly interesting considering its relative rarity in the general population. You could therefore conclude that an INTP is more likely to vote in a poll on HN than, say, an ISFJ. That's information. Useless information perhaps, but information nonetheless. If MBTI didn't actually indicate anything, then the tallies would more closely fit the type distribution in the general population. Your concerns about the test's reliability are valid, but any attempt to categorize something that we don't completely understand is going to have its inconsistencies. It's a far leap from there to useless.
    - jpeterson 17y ago
      It seems you're saying that a categorization system that doesn't describe its subjects in complete, full, everlasting detail is worthless. No, what I'm saying is that a categorization system that doesn't say much of anything about its subjects is useless. INTP has a higher tally than all the other types, which is particularly interesting considering its relative rarity in the general population. You could therefore conclude that an INTP is more likely to vote in a poll on HN than, say, an ISFJ. That's information. You're using INTP in conjunction with a hacker news poll to draw a conclusion here; not INTP itself. The reason for this is that it's not possible to draw any meaningful conclusion from the INTP result itself. And even this conclusion is very vague: what does it tell you exactly that the incidence of scoring INTP is higher on HN than the general population? What prediction can you make from this fact?
Ixiaus 17y ago
I up voted for your anti-herd thought. Even if it is a bit invidious for those that find value in it. The Myers-Briggs typology based on Carl Gustav Jung's work, is in my opinion, an accurate and useful tool for generalizing intelligence types. You are correct, in contending, that quantifying the psychic whole of a person to an absolute degree is absurd because the psyche of a person is constantly evolving. The MBTI type only seems to shift in a minor way, though, despite gnostic shifts in the psyche. I can account for this. I was typed as an INTJ early in life when I mostly just built stuff, didn't socialize much, and sandboxed in my own mind; throughout life I've experienced many things and people that would be considered "outside" the profile of an INTJ. Those experiences didn't change my typing, they only made it more potent. Instead of a socially inept introvert, I became a socially adept introvert. Instead of being intellectually rigid and intransigent, I became intellectually focused and discerning. My type hasn't changed at all, despite traveling through India, experimenting with psycho-active drugs, and working for soul crushing corporations. I'm supporting your statement that it isn't necessary, because it isn't. At all. However, is it useful? Fun even? Yeah. It is. I view Astrology in a similar light. Your "sun sign" is just a "blueprint" upon which your living of life molds and evolves (another discussion though).
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- wisty 17y ago
  It does describe a few of axes of your personality, but it's not that great. It's not like they are really poles - you don't get many total introverts or extroverts, people sit on a continuum. A normally distributed attribute is a lousy way to categorize people. Introverts are people who tend to think before acting (which makes them more shy), and extroverts act before thinking (which makes them less shy), but those aren't the only factors in social adeptness. A polite introvert who can make good jokes will have more friends than the extroverted class bully. The main value of MB is that it's value free. It's easy to talk about introversion-extroversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling or judging-perceiving; it's hard to say people are lazy-hardworking, boring-interesting, smart-dumb, or brave-cowardly.
richardw 17y ago
That was exactly my response when a psychologist friend of mine told me about the M-B tests. Then we did a test at work and the result was surprisingly accurate. I know you think it's a waste of time but maybe try it out anyway. Also, as with many of these things: "the map is not the territory". Use any insight it gives, ignore what it doesn't.
araneae 17y ago
I generally think so, but I was sitting at a table with my friends in a bar once, and we discovered that all of us were INTPs. The more different people are from my personality type, the more difficulty I have communicating with them. Sometimes I feel like we're not even the same species, as they offer me homeopathy for a burnt finger, or tell me they're psychic with a straight face.
- gcheong 17y ago
  What are the M-B personality types of the people you have most trouble communicating with?
keltecp11 17y ago
I 100% disagree... I found it to be extremely accurate. Like Scary Accurate.
- m_eiman 17y ago
  You mean scary accurate like a horoscope? A basic problem with this kinds of tests is that it's too easy to interpret the results to fit a very wide range of personalities - just like a horoscope will fit just about everyone who believes in them. But they're still fun, and might give a hint about some general tendencies.
  - etherael 17y ago
    Compare and contrast distrubitions; above vs http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943884 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943884 So no, not scary accurate like a horoscope. :)
    - m_eiman 17y ago
      That's not really comparable, though. That question is "what's your birthday", not "answer a bunch of ambiguous questions and see if the made up blurb that results is applicable to you". There's also the aspect of giving the "right" answers to achieve a desired result. It's not very difficult to e.g. get an inrovert or extrovert type, and everyone knows that "real" hackers are introvert, so... Basically it's not science, definitely not in this form. [edit: I would have expected more extroverts in the results here, since the target audience is entrepreneurial hackers. Maybe it's the proggit exodus that's showing?]
      - etherael 17y ago
        I doubt that people actually bother to lie on the test to get a specific result, especially here. Noone knows anyone else's type, and even if they did, they could always just lie. My point was that the constant claims that these categorisations were qualitatively indistinguishable from the zodiac are patently false, and there's the evidence.
david927 17y ago
You're confusing this with a lot of the garbage out there. This is based on Carl Jung's work and is absolutely valid. It's not "quantifying" personality; it's helping -you- understand yourself better. That's it. Everyone is a combination of these things. The most introverted person in the world is sometimes extroverted, and the opposite as well. My wife is introverted around friends but extroverted at home; I'm extroverted with friends but introverted at home. You're answer "it depends" is absolutely valid and yet doesn't invalidate any part of Meyers-Briggs. You don't like to be pinned down and that's fine, but you have preferences, and that's all it's asking. You may be able to write with both left and right hands, but which one do you sometimes prefer? And if you prefer that, you might also prefer 'x'. If you give it a chance, you might be surprised to learn something new about yourself.

aikiai 17y ago

M-B is actually quite interesting to me. It is a very well defined personality type system, and I've found the results of tests to often be insightful. The test does not claim ANY kind of "absolute quantifification". That would be claiming that there are only 16 personalities in the world, which, as you note, is absurd. It is merely an attempt to define a few of the dimensions that make up a human personality, and provide a framework for talking about how those different dimensions interact. If you aren't interested in this, it's your business. But you should really reflect on where the attitude of "this is too nebulous and volatile" a subject to study and try to quantify, and decide if that's really how you want to react to things that are too big and complex to be immediately understood. If you really think the test is bullshit, then why am I, and the vast majority of the respondents on the previous poll (linked above/below) NTs, also know as Rationals? Seems odd, considering the figure I've heard quotes Rationals as 10% of the US population. Unless, of course, these results are revealing something specific about this population in particular?? Hmm.

branden 17y ago

MBTI is more complicated than that. Those four preferences interact to form a fuller picture of the personality type. Regardless of whether you choose to view it as informative, it certainly has more depth than a Facebook quiz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Type_dynamics_and_development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Typ... Personality is indeed a complicated thing, and MBTI respects that. It's understood that only the person in question can decide what their type is, since so much about it is below the surface of what another person can observe. It's only a tool for analyzing and understanding certain parts of your own personality that most people share, that can vary widely, and that tend to face one of two directions. Knowing my type (INTP) has been pretty valuable to me. It's given me a clearer understanding of the preferential basis for some of my attitudes and behaviors, and it helped me accept my introversion as a natural part of who I am. Looking at the previous HN poll (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240), there's a strong presence here of types that are uncommon in the general population. At the very least, that correlation is pretty interesting.

jpeterson 17y ago
Those four preferences interact to form a fuller picture of the personality type I don't know what this means, and to be frank, it sounds like a lot of gobbledy-gook. The whole point of categorizing is that the categories should convey some information about the thing categorized. The point I'm making here is that these personality categories don't even come close to this. The problem is that personality is an extremely complicated concept, and one that is prone to constant change. I seriously doubt that you could say something meaningful about a subject's personality with 10 axes, let alone four. To illustrate this, ask yourself two basic questions of these test results: 1) Are the conditions and results repeatable? 2) Can you use them to make any meaningful prediction of behavior? My contention is that the answer to each is a resounding "No", and hence the results are essentially useless.
- branden 17y ago
  The Wikipedia link I provided describes preference interaction in depth. It seems you're saying that a categorization system that doesn't describe its subjects in complete, full, everlasting detail is worthless. I'd have to disagree. Look at the poll right now, or its predecessor. INTP has a higher tally than all the other types, which is particularly interesting considering its relative rarity in the general population. You could therefore conclude that an INTP is more likely to vote in a poll on HN than, say, an ISFJ. That's information. Useless information perhaps, but information nonetheless. If MBTI didn't actually indicate anything, then the tallies would more closely fit the type distribution in the general population. Your concerns about the test's reliability are valid, but any attempt to categorize something that we don't completely understand is going to have its inconsistencies. It's a far leap from there to useless.
  - jpeterson 17y ago
    It seems you're saying that a categorization system that doesn't describe its subjects in complete, full, everlasting detail is worthless. No, what I'm saying is that a categorization system that doesn't say much of anything about its subjects is useless. INTP has a higher tally than all the other types, which is particularly interesting considering its relative rarity in the general population. You could therefore conclude that an INTP is more likely to vote in a poll on HN than, say, an ISFJ. That's information. You're using INTP in conjunction with a hacker news poll to draw a conclusion here; not INTP itself. The reason for this is that it's not possible to draw any meaningful conclusion from the INTP result itself. And even this conclusion is very vague: what does it tell you exactly that the incidence of scoring INTP is higher on HN than the general population? What prediction can you make from this fact?

Ixiaus 17y ago

I up voted for your anti-herd thought. Even if it is a bit invidious for those that find value in it. The Myers-Briggs typology based on Carl Gustav Jung's work, is in my opinion, an accurate and useful tool for generalizing intelligence types. You are correct, in contending, that quantifying the psychic whole of a person to an absolute degree is absurd because the psyche of a person is constantly evolving. The MBTI type only seems to shift in a minor way, though, despite gnostic shifts in the psyche. I can account for this. I was typed as an INTJ early in life when I mostly just built stuff, didn't socialize much, and sandboxed in my own mind; throughout life I've experienced many things and people that would be considered "outside" the profile of an INTJ. Those experiences didn't change my typing, they only made it more potent. Instead of a socially inept introvert, I became a socially adept introvert. Instead of being intellectually rigid and intransigent, I became intellectually focused and discerning. My type hasn't changed at all, despite traveling through India, experimenting with psycho-active drugs, and working for soul crushing corporations. I'm supporting your statement that it isn't necessary, because it isn't. At all. However, is it useful? Fun even? Yeah. It is. I view Astrology in a similar light. Your "sun sign" is just a "blueprint" upon which your living of life molds and evolves (another discussion though).

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
wisty 17y ago
It does describe a few of axes of your personality, but it's not that great. It's not like they are really poles - you don't get many total introverts or extroverts, people sit on a continuum. A normally distributed attribute is a lousy way to categorize people. Introverts are people who tend to think before acting (which makes them more shy), and extroverts act before thinking (which makes them less shy), but those aren't the only factors in social adeptness. A polite introvert who can make good jokes will have more friends than the extroverted class bully. The main value of MB is that it's value free. It's easy to talk about introversion-extroversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling or judging-perceiving; it's hard to say people are lazy-hardworking, boring-interesting, smart-dumb, or brave-cowardly.

richardw 17y ago

That was exactly my response when a psychologist friend of mine told me about the M-B tests. Then we did a test at work and the result was surprisingly accurate. I know you think it's a waste of time but maybe try it out anyway. Also, as with many of these things: "the map is not the territory". Use any insight it gives, ignore what it doesn't.

araneae 17y ago

I generally think so, but I was sitting at a table with my friends in a bar once, and we discovered that all of us were INTPs. The more different people are from my personality type, the more difficulty I have communicating with them. Sometimes I feel like we're not even the same species, as they offer me homeopathy for a burnt finger, or tell me they're psychic with a straight face.

gcheong 17y ago
What are the M-B personality types of the people you have most trouble communicating with?

keltecp11 17y ago

I 100% disagree... I found it to be extremely accurate. Like Scary Accurate.

m_eiman 17y ago
You mean scary accurate like a horoscope? A basic problem with this kinds of tests is that it's too easy to interpret the results to fit a very wide range of personalities - just like a horoscope will fit just about everyone who believes in them. But they're still fun, and might give a hint about some general tendencies.
- etherael 17y ago
  Compare and contrast distrubitions; above vs http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943884 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943884 So no, not scary accurate like a horoscope. :)
  - m_eiman 17y ago
    That's not really comparable, though. That question is "what's your birthday", not "answer a bunch of ambiguous questions and see if the made up blurb that results is applicable to you". There's also the aspect of giving the "right" answers to achieve a desired result. It's not very difficult to e.g. get an inrovert or extrovert type, and everyone knows that "real" hackers are introvert, so... Basically it's not science, definitely not in this form. [edit: I would have expected more extroverts in the results here, since the target audience is entrepreneurial hackers. Maybe it's the proggit exodus that's showing?]
    - etherael 17y ago
      I doubt that people actually bother to lie on the test to get a specific result, especially here. Noone knows anyone else's type, and even if they did, they could always just lie. My point was that the constant claims that these categorisations were qualitatively indistinguishable from the zodiac are patently false, and there's the evidence.

david927 17y ago

You're confusing this with a lot of the garbage out there. This is based on Carl Jung's work and is absolutely valid. It's not "quantifying" personality; it's helping -you- understand yourself better. That's it. Everyone is a combination of these things. The most introverted person in the world is sometimes extroverted, and the opposite as well. My wife is introverted around friends but extroverted at home; I'm extroverted with friends but introverted at home. You're answer "it depends" is absolutely valid and yet doesn't invalidate any part of Meyers-Briggs. You don't like to be pinned down and that's fine, but you have preferences, and that's all it's asking. You may be able to write with both left and right hands, but which one do you sometimes prefer? And if you prefer that, you might also prefer 'x'. If you give it a chance, you might be surprised to learn something new about yourself.