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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3433 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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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!

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