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MBTI rule (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'll just leave my comment from further down in the thread here for you two:

I don't like MBTI either, they've had a hundred years of opportunity to do science but never used it. They're a business selling coaching re-investing into marketing, not science. I'm merely using their abbreviations because they became a lingua franca.

MBTI being bunk doesn't mean that Jung didn't spot something real, though, even if he proved nothing and could only describe it fuzzily (he didn't even describe 16 types, but eight, based on primary cognitive function. In that rough model ISTPs and INTPs are one and the same which we definitely aren't). The whole of Psychological types is basically saying "hey guys there's something here we should have a look at it". Chapter 10 is the interesting one, the rest is... philology? It's the best proof he could muster back then give the man a break that was 100 years ago.

On the scientific front the best the typology community has right now is Juan E Sandoval's stuff, the pilot studies are quite promising but there's more theorycrafting to be done before applying for grants for properly-sized studies to then throw at the scientific establishment saying "prove us wrong".

In case of tl;dw: Consider embodied cognition, and following from that that cognitive operations are expressed outwardly by various gestures, suchlike, CT calls the lot of it vultology. Then make a taxonomy of markers, analyse a lot of video marking those things and throw statistics at the data, what you get out of that is bimodal distributions, showing that there's actual differences between people (that is, unlike Big5 axis which don't have bimodal distributions). Make a twin study, observe that twins share vultological clusters, strongly suggesting that those clusters are innate. Flank by psychological questionaries establishing correlations between the vultological clusters and self-reported cognition.

You can say that you're sceptical but if you say that that's not doing science then I don't know what to tell you, either.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

You can say that you're sceptical but if you say that that's not doing science then I don't know what to tell you, either.

Isn't skepticism the bedrock of science? The scientific method (heavily simplified) requires a hypothesis, predictions based on that hypothesis, and then testing of those predictions. I don't see any predictive power in the MBTI matrix, which means it's unfalsifiable. This is different than your twins example, where you can predict certain characteristics of the results.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Psychology and predictive power are two things you should never use in the same sentence if you don't want to give psychologists an existential crisis. The mind is a chaotic system (as in chaos theory), to draw a parallel to physics the best psychology can do is say "this double pendulum will only swing within a certain radius": True, no doubt, but also somewhat unsatisfactory.

None of this will ever be "You're an ESTP therefore I predict you will be a base jumper". I mean if you look at base jumpers there's a fuckton of ESTPs there but even more of them are bus drivers or something completely random. Predicting, in this context, is more of the statistical kind. More like predicting someone's sex by their height, with the additional twist that we have to prove the existence of different sexes by there being a bimodal distribution in height.

Both CT and MBTI share the same root in Jungian function theory but they use different definitions, the CT ones are very precise, example: Sensing. MBTI as well as other systems have a very, very hard time actually agreeing on what type someone is, to a large degree I'd say those imprecise definitions are the cause. Even "vibe-typing" based on CT definitions and vultology will have more cross-examiner agreement than going with the formal MBTI tests.

But that doesn't mean that those definitions are miles apart -- as you see in the Sensing example, they do have some correspondence. Which means that while the type matrix between the two isn't identical, it's also not completely different. As such CT holding up to scrutiny would also mean MBTI holding up to scrutiny to the degree that it doesn't stray from CT too much.

Which is pretty much all just to say that comparing MBTI to astrology is kinda off-base. MBTI might be problematic in a hell a lot of ways but it's also not claiming that Mercury being in retrograde at the moment of your birth has any impact on you, that's just plain aphysical, MBTI makes no such claims. MBTI might be, as formulated, unfalsifiable, whereas astrology is right-out disproven.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Depends on the individual definition of skepticism.

Some people say, "hmm, I'm skeptical", and then do nothing after. That's not science. That's denial.

Some people say, "hmm, I'm skeptical", and then go look into stuff about that thing to make sure that the data they find confirmation or denies the thing they're skeptical about. That's science (the very very very beginning).