wedrifid comments on On the Openness personality trait & 'rationality' - Less Wrong
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Your understanding is consistent with mine. Myers-Briggs is really frustrating, because some of its ideas are anecdotally compelling (Introversion vs. Extraversion, Thinking vs. Feeling), while others are esoteric (Judging vs. Perceiving and Sensing vs. Intuition). At least on the types, INTP probably refers to a real phenotype (which is common on LW), but I don't know if any of the other type combinations are real.
Interestingly, the MBTI seems to almost reduce down to the Big Five according to this study.
The way I've heard it explained goes something like this: "you don't like art because you are high in Openness. You are high in Openness because you like art."
Of course, since the Openness scale has reliability, you can make predictions about how someone would respond to one question from the scale if you know what they would respond to another item. Whether that's because of one underlying trait, or because of a bunch of converging traits, is an empirical question.
And this is the central point of the whole thing. They aren't meant to represent a deep meaningful biological reality. Just clear correlations that are useful.