What do people think of the Myer-briggs personality system? I've seen it referenced a few times here and have occasionally had interesting insights from it, but I'm unsure about the empirical basis of it. I'm particularly worried by the self reporting of peoples features (e.g. if I'm asked if I'm extroverted what baseline am I comparing myself to?) and the possible reporting of what people want to believe about themselves not an objective assessment (e.g. I would want to say rationality is more important than emotion, even if in reality most of my decisions are emotional and I just rationalise them).
e.g. if I'm asked if I'm extroverted what baseline am I comparing myself to?
I took an online Big Five personality test, and it explicitly said I was to compare myself to typical people of the same gender and age as me (which, since there are huge selection effects in the kinds of male twentysomethings I hang around with, meant that in lots of questions I wanted to answer “how the hell should I know?”).
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.