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Tenoke comments on LW Women- Female privilege - Less Wrong
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This is the first of the LW women posts which seemed promising to me after the first paragraph. However why use the myers-briggs? Sure, it is not total bollocks but come on, this is LessWrong.
Furthermore, I hope that the women of LessWrong do not perceive any downvotes or negative comments as a general dislike for them. I feel that most downvotes and comments are aimed at the content and the execution of the idea not at women as a whole or even the women behind the posts.
I find Myers Briggs usefully predictive. Similar to what Haidt is doing with emotion. Is it something to snicker at around here?
I don't know about snickering, but here's something that has me knocking my head against the wall:
Indeed, that is interesting, especially given that the first published MBTI preceded the first modern publication of Big Five by something like 20 years. (On the other hand, psychologists are known to be able to see into the future as their invariably-successful-in-disproving-the-null experiments demonstrate.)
Unfortunately, once we're talking about snickering, I'm not confident I can infer why you're banging your head against the wall.
I only read one of five pages, but your quote was what stuck out to me. I'm disappointed at the academics turning away from doing research on a huge already measured base. If they found out anything useful, they would be creating value for a huge number of people.
Reading more, I'm probably more annoyed at the intellectual property racket that has grown up around it. I think I recall early internet years where the place I originally took the test was shut down under legal threat.
The extended self-reinforcing lack of research is what got to me. The intellectual property angle doesn't bother me as much.
Ok. I share the first, and see the second.
This is a good starting point for finding out what is wrong with myers-briggs (the most important paragraph is the third if I am not mistaken). Sure it usually seems predictive to you but this is at least partially due to the Forer effect.
The in thing right now (and for the last two decades) is the Big Five/OCEAN.
I/E is obviously a thing. S/N has big correlations with g so it's obviously tracking something. F/T is perhaps less obvious statistically(?) but introspectively and anecdotally-observationally still pretty clear, and P/J is the most questionable and confusing part of MBTI so I won't defend it. Hypotheses and conceptual frameworks shouldn't be pet causes.
Data: Wikipedia claims E/I is very correlated with E, S/N is very correlated with O, F/T fairly correlated with A, J/P fairly correlated with C and somewhat correlated with O, and Neuroticism isn't measured in MBTI. So this backs up your claim that P/J doesn't measure any concrete "thing".
Clicking through the citation gives that N is not well-correlated with anything in men (a tiny bit with E/I), and somewhat correlated with the F/T in women. Also F/T has a small effect on extraversion in men, but it's S/N and J/P which has the effect on women.
This abstract follows the Wikipedia excerpt:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886996000335
As far as I know S/N as measured by MBTI does not have big correlations with anything and it doesn't even correlate with other scales designed to measure the same type of thing(intuitions etc.). Same for F/T.
"High correlations with comparable scales of other instruments" seems to be an odd metric to demand - is there some reason this would imply a flaw in Myers-Briggs rather than a flaw in the other instruments or simply that they're measuring different things?
The second paragraph's criticism that Myers-Briggs scores aren't bimodal is something I find even more baffling. I wouldn't have expected any accurate test of non-sexual human behavior to show bimodal results, but I would expect the results of any test to be oversimplified into "you're more/less X than average" categories.
The Forer effect probably is a significant factor in people's appreciation of Myers-Briggs, though. And the criticism of its dependence on honest self-reporting hits close to home: when I took a few versions of the test long ago, I found that where I fell on the J/P scale seemed to be heavily determined by what fraction of the questions were phrased as "do you try to X" versus "do you typically X".
This is the usual modus tollens/ponens question: just pointing out inconsistency (low correlation) doesn't tell you who to favor. In this case, the argument for rejecting MBTI rather than the others would go something like 'it has a highly questionable origin and does not seem to measure anything interesting; the other scales have good theoretical justifications in their areas or were derived directly from the data, have demonstrated various forms of usefulness like predicting relevant behavior, and are less likely to be collectively wrong than MBTI uniquely correct'
As for measuring different things, well, then you get into other things like the lower psychometric reliability of MBTI compared to Big Five - if a instrument is not reliable, then it may be measuring nothing of interest.
This is how you typically meassure test validity.
Sometimes, but not justifiably so. (I would snicker at the claim that MBTI is the optimal way to categorize personality traits, or even a claim that it is close to optimal. But I certainly wouldn't snicker at people finding it useful given that it is what they have.)
I wouldn't think it's optimal either. Certainly better to do measurements and verify predictions in a controlled manner, but not all evidence comes in plecebo controlled double blind trials.
I like the move of at least some interpretations of breaking open the black box of personality in terms of finite function and attention that imply limitations and tradeoffs.
Well, there's the Big Five...
I approve of the methodology used to construct Big Five. Specifically the part where there actually was one. I'd be a little surprised if the submitter happened to have access to big 5 test results for a sufficient number of peers for it to have been significantly useful for her. Most people don't. In such cases I don't sneer at use of MBTI nomenclature because it is being used as a partial replacement to implicit 'common sense' cultural psychological nomenclature that is inevitable in any human language and which is even less rigorous.
I guess most people don't have access to MBTI test results for their peers, either, so that's not a good reason to prefer MBTI to Big Five.
Well, in my experience they're frequently self-reported on forums, social networks, etc. And - again, in my experience - knowing people's MBTI (with some confidence that they're honestly reporting actual results from a real test) is certainly better for very broadly predicting someone's personality (and constraining expectations about at least their social actions, so not just Forer effect) than their star sign or political affiliation (barring the more extreme options... although I have seen a few fascists who were just generally confused and alienated and liked cute things) or religious self-identification or whatever!
coughharrypotterhousescough
Eh. I've been known to use the Harry Potter house metaphor occasionally (though not, as best I can recall, here), and I find it attractive mainly because it's a casual and vaguely silly typology on its face: it gives a useful shorthand for stuff like "conviction-driven personality; values justice and courage" or "ambition-driven personality; values winning" without pretending to be anything more than that.
The MBTI's dressed up in more scientific clothes, and if I used it in the same contexts I'd be giving the impression of more rigor than I've actually got -- but it's got too many internal problems for me to use it when I actually need rigor.
(This is sorta tangential to your comment, Nornagest, but to express the emotivation behind my original comment: sure, MBTI is a scratched up magnifying glass, not a microscope, but magnifying glasses can be pretty handy and there's no reason to scoff at them. Not that you (Nornagest) were sneering at MBTI, but a lot of folks do and it strikes me as masturbatory.)
One problem with HP/HPMOR house is that even in HPMOR some of the houses sound awesomer than others. (Subjectively).
Which ones precisely? (I am reminded how Gryffindor is glorified in HP to the extent that even Hermione is put in there whereas HPMoR tends to present it as the least of the four.)
Broader than 'awesomeness': Hufflepuff doesn't seem very awesome, people might not feel they deserve Gryffindor or Slytherin, to a certain naive sort of person Slytherin sounds about the way it does in canon!HP and to a certain sort of cynic Gryffindor sounds even worse than it does in HPMOR.
They're also poorly defined.
I'm not sure if they are "conscientious", "Kind", difficult to classify, or lacking traits of the other houses. If it's conscientious, Hermione belongs there and Neville does not.
I prefer "Kind", because that is the trait that complements the other houses nicely - in real life, human motivations do seem to classify nicely into [ambition, altruism, knowledge-seeking, justice-seeking] ...but both the cannon and hpmor seem confused on whether Hufflepuff is "altruistic" or simply "rule abiding"...
I don't know, Hufflepuff seems pretty awesome to me; they're the people most likely to Get Shit Done.