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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3588 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Does anyone here know their Myers-Briggs type or ever tried to figure it out?

Ok yes I know it's pseudoscience, I know it's not much better than a horoscope, but it's the fun thread gimme a break. If we can talk about tarot we can talk about MBTI. (MBTI at least is willing to talk about the weaknesses and negative aspects of different personality types, which makes it a little better than a horoscope.)

I think I'm an INFx (never quite sure on the last letter). Or at least an INxx. Probably most people who enjoy long internet arguments are an INxx of some kind.

Most people think you're supposed to just mix and match the four letters (decide if you're an introvert or extrovert for I or E, thinker or feeler for T or F, etc) but actually what it's really "about" is the "cognitive function stack", the cognitive tools that you use to process information and make decisions. The four letter personality type is just a code for a specific function stack. So for the INTP for example, their functions (from most dominant to least dominant) are Ti Ne Si Fe - introverted thinking, extroverted intuition, introverted sensing, and extroverted feeling. The "introverted" functions are more private, more about determining the texture of your inner experience, more about how you generate thoughts and ideas internally, and the "extroverted" functions are how you interface with the outside world, those are the aspects of your experience that you want to share around and make public, you're more likely to want to know how other people are experiencing that same function, etc.

If nothing else, I think the idea of different individual aspects of your cognition being introverted or extroverted, rather than introversion/extroversion being a single trait, is interesting and may have some use.

I score INTJ half the time and INTP half the time, so I'm like right on the threshold of J/P, but the INT are pretty strong.

It is obvious that it's NOT just pseudoscience (in the way that astrology is), otherwise we wouldn't see so many real correlations. Also every woman I've ever been seriously interested in beyond surface level attraction, including my wife, has been INTx.

What it isn't is some sort of scientific causal phenomenon where your brain is somehow biologically born as one of these types and they then cause you to exhibit external behaviors. It's a classification scheme. A compression algorithm. It asks you how introverted, extroverted, emotional etc etc you are in a bunch of ways and then condenses that into four letters so you can communicate more concisely without sharing your entire 50 question response with everybody you meet. I can just say "INTJ" and someone else says "INTJ" or "INTP" and I'm like "oh, we probably have a lot in common" and then we do.

I actually was required to take Gallup's Clifton Strengths test for my business communications college class (at a discounted cost) which I actually found pretty good and a step above the other tests I've taken.

For example, one of my top traits was "Context". Basically, that I enjoy thinking about the past, like to think about cause and effect, etc. This is helpful for I think some obvious reasons, but also a weakness, because change can be tough, and it can sometimes slow me from looking for current opportunities. I think that's actually pretty spot-on for me, and at the same time it's not true of all people (a lot of people find the past boring) so it suffers a little less than some of the other tests from the generic-advice trap common to astrology and horoscopes. Most of the traits highlighted has some kind of pros and cons list, with the idea being to better understand yourself and to double down on what you're good at (and be aware of the blind spots for what you aren't good at).

Or, "Harmony" was another top trait. It can be helpful for sensing conflict beforehand, finding common ground, staying practical, etc. but also means that I might sometimes avoid conflict, seek too-easy band-aid fixes, or get stressed when people don't agree.

Now, I will say that it's oriented towards corporate-like utility, rather than some kind of 'accuracy', and any system of personality with cleanly separated domains with suspiciously similar numbers of sub-categories is a little suspect, but I also kind of like that aspect of it. Also it's identifying the top "strengths", but really it's just saying these traits are your strongest traits, somewhat divorced from if they are good/bad or on some kind of sliding scale. In that sense it's a bit more honest because it's not so much about "you are X category" but more "this blend of traits represents you best".

INTJ, every time. The amusing thing is, while I peg the I and T scales quite hard and am always comfortably N, I'm always around 51% J to 49%P. You'd think at least once I'd take the test on a day when P was up but, nope, never happens.

INTP this is the first Internet forum I've ever been on where a solid majority of the commenters aren't INTx, that's quite interesting.

My vague recollection of the online MTBI test I took was that every question boiled down to "are you stupid, Y/N?" and if you answer no you get INTP or INTJ, and if you answer yes you get something else.

I was INTP of course.

Oh, you don't feel like saying "Strongly Disagree" to:

Complex and novel ideas excite you more than simple and straightforward ones.

You are not too interested in discussions about various interpretations of creative works.

You prioritize facts over people’s feelings when determining a course of action.

You actively seek out new experiences and knowledge areas to explore.

Or "Strongly Agree" to:

You usually feel more persuaded by what resonates emotionally with you than by factual arguments.

People’s stories and emotions speak louder to you than numbers or data.

You favor efficiency in decisions, even if it means disregarding some emotional aspects.

You are not easily swayed by emotional arguments.

Congratulations, your personality type has been determined to be mottezan!

It sounds obvious to us, but to other people it sounds like "are you a heartless robot". T vs F is only like a 55/45 split.

INTx might be 75% or whatever of Mottezans but it's only around 7.5% of the population.

I can see that, actually. And the reality is that my own worldview can sound very "F", depending on the context. That said, my general view of the world is that we should be making reasonable decisions based on logic -- and accounting for people's emotions and the real fallout of a decision on people is a part of that. I read "You prioritize facts over people’s feelings when determining a course of action." as referring to, not taking people's actual feelings as a result of the action into account, but "making a gut decision based on people feel at the current moment rather than actually evaluating whether those feelings will reflect how they experience the fallout of the decision." Other people might read it differently, and that's a big ambiguity!

That's my problem with the T vs F dichotomy -- it's not real. People who are so far in the extreme that an emotional argument from their partner or their child would not persuade them barely exist. And people who are so extreme that they'd rather make a feelings-based argument over what kind of mortgage to get also barely exist. People are both feelers and thinkers. I agree with @Primaprimaprima on this.

I'm not a utilitarian, but I guess I sound like one in this context. But my values on these kinds of questions are shaped by the fact that my feelings and emotions are very flighty and unhelpful a lot of the time: if I made decisions based on how I feel right now I would make horrible, impulsive, and often extremely avoidant decisions! I couldn't function. My life has been a long struggle of using the "heartless robot" to override the useless emotions that can't help me in the moment, to try and develop a path forward that will lead to the best emotional state I can possibly expect and to proper functioning. I have to think in terms of telos, because I need some kind of a star in the East to walk towards in the desert.

What? The majority of people here are either INTJ or INTP…

(Ok among the self reports here it’s only slightly tilted to INTx rather than super strongly tilted but I still think INTx is a solid majority)

I’m an INFP idealist. I want to see everyone saved, rescued, loved, and a part of me hurts when they aren’t. I want everyone to comprehend and never to argue.

It was 4chan that taught me to have a thick skin and give as good as I get, here on the Internet.

Usually it feels like 90/10 among people who comment with the 10 being NTs of another flavor.

I was first introduced to myers-briggs in a religious ed class. I've noted before that Catholic school religious education is essentially useless- not from an it's all fake perspective(I am not an atheist) but from a 'there is no curriculum and so we learn nothing but the teacher's personality' perspective. We had guest lectures on the ancient aliens theory. We watched movies. We learned interesting, but not particularly relevant, facts about church history. Once a year, we picked a saint and wrote a biography. I submitted the exact same thing every year; so did half the rest of the class. Nobody ever noticed. If there was something on campus, we got out of religion class to go to it. If there was a project to do, we had study hall. If the teacher had some sort of personal idiosyncracy, 'the intersection of a vegan diet and the Catholic faith' could eat up several class periods. I liked the older teachers better than the theoretically better qualified ones.

Anyways, one of the projects given to absorb classtime was to research myers-briggs and write about your temperament in connection with faith. This was incredibly vague and, as I recall, like one half of one paragraph. It's interesting that every myers-briggs temperament corresponds to aristotelian temperament combinations, but there's not much of a pattern as to which to which. That tells me there's a there. It may not mean much but it surely exists.

It's interesting that every myers-briggs temperament corresponds to aristotelian temperament combinations, but there's not much of a pattern as to which to which. That tells me there's a there. It may not mean much but it surely exists

Myers and Briggs were reading Jung, who was almost certainly reading Aristotle (along with all the myths he could find), so it makes sense.

ENTJ

I just did the Meyers-Briggs a few months ago at the suggestion of some people I work with. Unknown to me at the time, the office consensus had settled on ENT already and was only undecided on J or P.

Once I got my results, J seemed pretty obvious to me, but I guess I hide it well or come off differently to people in real life.

We were made to go through a test and an interview with a psychologist when I started out as a management consultant as part of the onboarding process. They said I was ENTJ which fits well enough but the E wasn't very definitive.

Pretty much everyone they hired were NT, most E but with a pretty even split on P/J. Being NT seemed like a hiring requirement.

If you want personality pseudoscience I recommend the Enneagram over Myers-Briggs. It has a lot more depth. Myers-Briggs is focused on being descriptive, while Enneagram is more focused on being prescriptive. As in, "If I have this kind of personality type, what should I do to be a healthier and happier person?" And the advice is very good in my experience! At least for type Fives, I have not tried the advice for other types and can't testify to their accuracy and effectiveness. But if you're the kind of nut who finds categorizing by personality really fun, then you're probably a type Five anyway.

Based on the descriptions, I'm more of a Four. (...and that's exactly what the test gave me, 4w3. That probably should really be 4w5 though, because I have rather idiosyncratic conceptions of "status" and "success" that probably don't line up with what the test authors had in mind.)

I think there's a difference between, do you like to categorize people because it's another interesting data point about how they work, or do you like to categorize people because you want to know the color of their soul.

do you like to categorize people because it's another interesting data point about how they work

This is basically the thing that got me interested in psychometrics. My problem is I have a bad tendency to categorize people in my head as lab rats with identifiable characteristics and try to predict what they’re going to do. It can make it a little hard to actually connect, because I’ve already formed an impression of what box someone fits it, and my box is oddly specific.

That said, what you said earlier about the most interesting part of Meyers-Briggs being the type functions is also my view. I think the categorizations are bogus, but I’m definitely the sort of person whose most conscious experience is thinking through things like I’m making a logical argument, pulling in information from the environment to try and enhance that logic, and then dragging my feelings along.

Except when anxiety hits and the processor gets interrupted by the amygdala. That’s when things go off the rails.

I’m definitely the sort of person whose most conscious experience is thinking through things like I’m making a logical argument, pulling in information from the environment to try and enhance that logic, and then dragging my feelings along.

That's really interesting! I didn't have you pegged that way based on some of your other posts, but I suppose it does fit.

The idea that someone could experience "logical argumentation" as their default mode of conscious experience is definitely very interesting to me. I mean I understand intellectually that there's no reason why that couldn't be the case, and I know that there are many people who would report that they think this way. But it's rather foreign to me, because logic to me is a tool, it's not where I live. The urge to typical-mind is so strong, so when people report to me that this is how they are by default, I always have a little urge to ask... really? Do you actually not experience your mind as a buzz of images and sounds by default? It's quiet and "logical" up there? Really?

I didn't have you pegged that way based on some of your other posts, but I suppose it does fit.

That's actually my big issue with the MBTI: Thinking and Feeling aren't so alien to each other. I could probably be equally described by the INFP functions, making decisions based on values, following what's right, working on refining values, trying to take others' perspectives into consideration. I do both. But I'm distrustful of my 'gut,' and I want to expose it to logical argumentation to see if what I'm doing is actually in accordance with the logical way to pursue my values and preferences. I'm a big believer in cooperation, but because I believe it is logical.

I also have a strong romantic identity, which does somehow slot in to that frame. But by far the most important thing in a relationship to me is that I can explore ideas with my partner -- my girlfriend met me because I gave a lecture about history and she felt, according to her recollection, that "this is the kind of man I need in my life!" 100% of my partners have either identified with the Tumblr phrase "sapiosexual" or could fairly be described with it. That's not to say I'm not affectionate in a traditional sense, because I have also been described as romantic, but for me a relationship needs both aspects. For me, my idea of an amazing date is a discussion about the concept of justice over dinner and a reflection on the future of commerce as pillow talk.

That's also a problem with the MBTI -- it doesn't have anywhere to put the logician who's also a hopeless romantic!

But it's rather foreign to me, because logic to me is a tool, it's not where I live.

I think in words. Have you ever used Spreeder? I hardly know her! That's what my mental imagery often looks like; words scrolling through my head against a black background. I often feel punctuation, when I wrote "feel" just then I felt kind of like I needed to lean, and when I write a full-stop period, I feel like I need to jolt forward like a typewriter. (*jolt*)

Basically 85-90% of my internal experience is me thinking about what I would write in an essay or say in a lecture about my experiences or whatever I'm thinking about; for instance, today, I was thinking about how the prisoner's dillema applies to dating and the kind of argument I would make for cooperation in a world where so many people feel like defecting. I don't necessarily think in syllogisms, but I do think in logical, well-flowing arguments. So what people read on the motte is extremely close to just what I'm doing in my head most of the time. That's why my motte posts are often so long. This, right now, is literally my stream-of-consciousness.

I have "absent-minded professor" vibes, and I frequently make wrong turns when driving because I was thinking about personality theory instead of navigating. Fortunately my cerabellum is pretty good at keeping my foot on the brake when it needs to be.

I also like listening music to crowd out distractions so I can get into my flow of words, and sometimes I pace while thinking to also occupy my body and 'get it out of the way.'

Do you actually not experience your mind as a buzz of images and sounds by default?

Well, maybe not unless you count the sound of my own voice, or music. I don't experience many mental images, and I find fiction hard to read if it has a lot of description, because my imagination can't keep up with the imagery they're trying to get me to experience. I prefer dialogue.

My internal conscious experience is highly verbal, and I've occasionally found myself thinking about a phrase so intensely that I say it out loud accidentially. My chief mode of internal experience is to imagine that either I'm doing what I am now -- and writing something -- or to imagine myself with my partner, or in front of a crowd of people, explaining to them what I'm thinking. When I was in school I often imagined giving a class presentation on whatever was interesting me at the moment.

I hate smalltalk, but I love public speaking, because to me it's like writing an essay out loud, and with more opportunity for humor.

It's quiet and "logical" up there?

It's logical, but not necessarily quiet. Like I intimated, the logical processing I go through has to compete with the anxiety feelings that often try to crowd it out -- tightness in the chest, lightheadedness, shaking, impending sense of doom. I guess you could maybe think of the logical thinking as a way to compensate for the fact that my emotional experience is so intense and unreliable.

I resonate with so much of this, except for finding fiction hard to read - while I also vastly prefer dialogue, my imagination has no trouble generating imagery to match the narrative. But I've always also thought that was the part of reading that was like exercise and years as a slop vacuum have made me farm strong at it. That's why visual novels and comics can be wordy as hell but nobody is impressed when you tell them you read them.

Anyway, do you ever worry when you find yourself saying "Ha ha now you're Tolkien!" (when you just read a cleverly written passage) or "Just fucking shoot me already" (infinite applicable situations) out loud that that's how hobos get started? Because I do, all the time.

Thinking and Feeling aren't so alien to each other.

Right, I'm always trying to explain this to people. The "logic vs emotion" dichotomy is clearly overly simplistic and not really tenable. But at the same time, I think it's pretty clear that different people do think and experience in fundamentally different ways, and we need some kind of language for talking about it, even if we end up not using those terms specifically.

If you're the kind of person who writes things like "the color of their soul" then yes, I would agree you are a Four. :-)

Enneagram "tests" are pretty hit and miss, I find the best way to type someone is to teach the types to them and let them type themselves. But based on your comments 4w5 sounds pretty likely for you.

I tried looking into Enneagram for a while (recommended by a Five, I think), but just couldn't. It seemed like everything that might have been interesting was not just paywalled, but sold as "retreats" and "experiences." I came out type nine, and I think it had super generic advice one would get from a generic check-up, like getting more exercise, which seemed actually worse than a horoscope.

Call me crazy, but I think bring advised to get more exercise is quasi-universally applicable, and beats the advice given by the average horoscope. Just because something is universally applicable doesn't mean it's worse!

Sure, it's good advice. It's just good advice in almost all contexts, hardly anyone gets enough exercise nowadays. It's worse for the purposes of differentiating various personalities.

It's true that most of the stuff online is either fluff or paywalled, and there are a lot of expensive workshops out there. You can skip those. If you want to get into it, you really just need to read one book: Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self Discovery, by Don Riso. It has 90% of everything you would ever need to know about the Enneagram, packaged up in a very readable format. You can probably get it at a used bookstore for $10, and it will likely be at your local library.

(Or you can read it online here, if you don't mind being a pirate)

Here's an excerpt from the book on Type Five:

Like the other two members of the Doing Triad, average Fives tend to have problems with security because they fear that the environment is unpredictable and potentially threatening. Fives protect themselves by being extraordinarily observant so that they can anticipate problems in the environment, particularly problems with other people. Their curiosity, their insight, their need to make sense of their perceptions — and eventually, their paranoid tendencies — are all attempts to defend themselves from real or imagined dangers.

When Fives are healthy, they observe reality as it is and are able to comprehend complex phenomena at a glance. In their search for security, however, the perceptions of even average Fives tend to become skewed. They come to premature conclusions about the environment by projecting their faulty interpretations on it. They begin to reduce the complexity of reality to a single, all-embracing idea so that they can defend themselves by having everything figured out. And if they become unhealthy, Fives are the type of persons who take their eccentric ideas to such absurd extremes that they become obsessed with completely distorted notions about reality. Ultimately, unhealthy Fives become paranoid, utterly terrified by the threatening visions which they have created in their minds.

Their problem with anxiety, one of the issues common to the personality types of the Doing Triad, is related to their difficulty with perceiving reality objectively. They are afraid of allowing anyone or anything to influence them or their thoughts. They fear being controlled or possessed by someone else. Ironically, however, even average Fives are not unwilling to be possessed by an idea, as long as the idea has originated with them. Nothing must be allowed to influence their thinking lest their sense of self be diminished, although by relying solely on their own ideas, without testing them in the real world, Fives eventually become out of touch with reality.

The upshot of this is that average to unhealthy Fives are uncertain whether or not their perceptions of the environment are valid. They do not know what is real and what is the product of their minds. They project their anxiety-ridden thoughts and their aggressive impulses into the environment, becoming fearful of the antagonistic forces which seem to be arrayed against them. They gradually become convinced that their peculiar, and increasingly paranoid, interpretation of reality is the way things really are. In the end, they become so terrorized that they cannot act even though they are consumed by anxiety.

I may have underrepresented how much I tried getting into it, though it's been most of a decade. I bought and read a book (not sure which), had coffee with a neighbor who was a certified counselor and used it in her work, who also lent me a book, and put probably about 20 hours into it, with no results, just confusion. Meanwhile, MBTI people say things like "use your second function more," which is much more actionable.

ISTP

I was really into it for a while, due to having a less common personality for a woman, and hearing a lot of "women ___" statements that don't really apply to me, and trying to express why.

My main objection, in comparison to OCEAN, is the Sensing/iNtuition dichotomy. I'm both high openness and a concrete (rather than more abstract/symbolic) thinker. For instance, when I paint, I prefer plein air or studio painting rather than stories -- I want to capture the thing in front of me. But I also spend a lot of time reading people theorizing and predicting, so shrug, I think high Openness/concrete captures this better than S/N

Yeah, I think part of the reason why I'm so drawn to this stuff is that I'm always looking for language to describe why I feel so different. I'm both highly abstract and also feelings-based, which is... just unusual in general I think, but especially so for men. When I read the description of Ni-dominant thinking I was just like, yeah, that is what it feels like (subjectively speaking anyway).

I agree that MBTI can be overly restrictive and has a hard time describing people who are blends of different traits. It's a bit silly that according to MBTI you can't have both introverted thinking and introverted feeling for example, I think it's pretty clear that there are people who fit the descriptions of both. But I still think there's something illuminating about it regardless.

I just took one of these online tests and got INTP. Not the first time I've taken it; I tend to oscillate between INTP (Ti-Ne-Si-Fe) and ISTP (Ti-Se-Ni-Fe), though a far larger amount of the time I score as the former. Even as a participant it's pretty apparent just how low the test-retest reliability of Myers-Briggs is. Introverted thinking as my dominant function and extraverted feeling as my inferior function seems to be a consistent characteristic though.

I think it is better than a horoscope or tarot, because it's based on the actual individual patterns of behavior, instead of something that has no relationship to the actual person. But of course attempting to reduce the infinite human diversity to a handful of broad classes would be very imprecise and frequently misleading. That said, there are people that can be described as "phlegmatic" or "sanguine", and that's not entirely wrong, even though nobody believes in the humoral theory anymore. It's clear that there are some patterns in people's behavior, and those can be to some measure classified. My type on MBTI comes out as INTJ and it's roughly matching my behavior and is probably useful to a certain measure - you wouldn't know everything about me, you won't probably know any of the important things about me as a person, but you would understand roughly how my thinking and approach to things works. I think that is useful, though one must always understand that this is very imprecise and not to put too much into it like "I know how you think now, you're totally transparent to me". No classification system is ever going to do that.

MBTI is binary big5 (ocean) without neuroticism and with German pseudo-science for spice.

Yeah, whenever people come out of the woodwork to say things like "Meyers-Briggs is complete nonsense" I roll my eyes, because it's not. Like you, I am certainly willing to believe that the framework is not perfect. Not only is any framework going be imperfect for the reasons you said, but with MBTI specifically some of the categories seem poorly defined. The introvert/extrovert and think/feel axes are really strong in their ability to gauge what a person is like, but the others not so much. So yeah, the system is flawed. But on the other hand, most people I've known tend to get consistent results on tests, and people with similar results truly do behave similarly. So despite the flaws, there is truth to be found there, and the "Meyers-Briggs is complete nonsense" claim simply does not withstand scrutiny under the available evidence.

I think "nonsense" applies a little to the pop-culture version of MBTI, where you're either e.g. "a T" or "an F". That's like having a tape measure with only one marking that tells you if you're "tall" or "short". That's not how to measure samples from a unimodal distribution! But it's still not complete nonsense, any more than our hypothetical tape measure would be; height and personality traits are still real things.

The more sophisticated tests that return results like "60%T 40%F" probably aren't as useful as OCEAN, because if you want to find the principal components of a low-dimensional manifold then Factor Analysis outperforms Jung Plus Guessin', but they're vastly better than horoscopes.

I think Judging Perceiving is just as strong in gauging what a person is like, but not named very well!

INTP. You are aware that MB is a load of shit, so if you want horoscopes but actually rigorous (standing up to a factor analysis), then OCEAN is the one for you.

One use I have for MBTI (InTx btw) is safely demonstrating diversity. Not on a forum like ours, where INTJ/P are dominant, but in a more normie company it can be eye-opening how different people are. Like, a guy you are buddies with tells you he's an ESFJ and you're like "woah, he should be the complete opposite of me, he has answered every question on this quiz wrong and yet he's still a human being I enjoy working/studying/hanging out with".

I think this is too harsh, MBTI has value if you understand its limitations. For example managers can use it as a shortcut to understand management styles until you get to know your staff on an individual level.

In a healthcare context you can use it to understand a little bit about what interventions, therapy, explanations and so on will work for a patient until you get to know them better.

Most patients won't know that they prefer a logical style of consenting over an emotional one, but if they tell you they are an INTJ you can be pretty sure, etc.

I don't think I've ever seen it applied, certainly not in a healthcare setup. If someone's getting utility out of it, it's not happening where I could see them. Which isn't the same as saying it has no utility, it just doesn't seem to come up.

I think that's mostly a skill issue lol. Most managers are bad, most conversations with patients are low skill and meant to check a box before moving to the next thing. If it's not a tool in your toolbox it isn't necessarily worth making it one, but I have seen MBTI used to great effect in a way that you can't with say the Big 5.

I've heard of the Big 5 being used in management, but mostly as a hiring screen, to try not to hire people who are too low in conscientiousness. Which is of course a zero sum game, so not useful for society at large.

Sorting the people best at some trait into the jobs that most benefit from that trait is useful for society at large, even if every job would show some benefit.

Just because good engineers must communicate well and good journalists must understand math doesn't mean we could swap them around with no problems; the priority order differs from job to job.

And conscientious isn't quite a trait with no downsides like communication and math skills are. I've seen many a conscientious person buckle down to spend hundreds of hours brute forcing the implementation of a poorly conceived idea that a less diligent person would have pushed back on.

INTP, reliably. I think the "horoscope" comparisons are nonsense propagated by an unholy alliance of IFLSciencers ("Don't you know THE SCIENCE says you are not supposed to use it?") and people who are vaguely aesthetically annoyed that its fans have some intersection with the horoscope crowd (people who just like labels). The questions the classification is based on ask about real and reasonably stable personality traits - why would the classification that results not capture personality? Is "people who said in a questionnaire in ten different ways that they are not perceptive of others' feelings will be seen as insensitive" comparable to "people born in October will be seen as insensitive"?

The only potentially valid objections are that it doesn't categorise along principal components or "cleave reality at its joints".

I'd bet that INTP and INTJ is 5-10x overrepresented on this forum compared to the general population. I'm INTJ personally.

Oh yeah for sure, anyone who identifies as a Rationalist in the LW sense or has an affinity for that style of thinking is basically an INTJ or INTP by definition.

More than zero rationalists are extroverted. Not gonna dispute the NT part of that though.

IMHO the best rationalists (unlike myself) are extroverted. But if you interpret "in the LW sense" as "prone to endless navel-gazing akrasia on online forums", which IMHO is only a little unfair, then that selects for introversion too.

Does anyone here know their Myers-Briggs type or ever tried to figure it out?

Ok yes I know it's pseudoscience, I know it's not much better than a horoscope

Is it actually any worse than mainstream psychology?

Academic and high-class psychologists use Big Five, your average crunchy psychotherapist on the street is more likely to use the Enneagram.

Yes. Because mainstream psychology abandoned it ages ago in favor of the Big Five/OCEAN.

I was under the impression that it was never part of psychology, but was developed by two housewives for some popular magazine or something. Like 4bpp the claims of it being like a horoscope feel like cope. If psychology has a better test, fair enough, but I'm gonna need an RCT betwwen M&B and Big Five or whatever, before I actually believe it.

Well, I'm not a psychologist, so I might have misremembered that factoid. Never heard MB being used in a healthcare setting, last I heard, it had been a mild fad in HR.

Even OCEAN is of limited utility.

This is a really big area that I’m largely ignorant of. Here’s an overview of the historical development of the Big Five model with copious citations, particularly with reference to studies on cross-cultural validation of the Big Five categories.

I note that the paper notes that, methodologically, research into the Big Five “originated in studies of natural language trait terms […] For the layperson, personality is defined by such terms as friendly, high-strung, and punctual. These are the basic ways in which individuals understand themselves and others”. I sense an effortpost in the future on the relationship between ordinary language philosophy and this approach to psychology.

INTJ, every damn time. I found the whole bit about extroverted sensing being my inferior function quite interesting, as it explained a few of my RW peccadilloes like driving fun cars.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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