FUNCTION OF PROFILES IS TO TEACH YOU ABOUT OTHERS, MORE SO THAN YOURSELF. Strang

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless?utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=article%3Afixed&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebookTHE FUNCTION OF PROFILES IS TO TEACH YOU ABOUT OTHERS, MORE SO THAN YOURSELF.

Strangely enough, the article is an exercise in criticism using pseudoscience which is kind of humorous.

The fact is this:

(a) MBT Is not a diagnostic tool, it is an tool for categorizing methods of interpersonal communication and collaboration. It is a tool of interpersonal understanding. It assists you in communicating with others in a common language. And it is entirely POSITIVE in construction (not clinical and critical.) People with similar behavior definitely fall into these categories and we have a LOT OF DATA showing so. We can map this data to career paths and show distributions. The problem with this test is that it is not 600 questions with lie detectors. So variations in marginal scores are large. The 16 types (boxes) are ideal types. but many people sit near the lines, rather than the center of the boxes. this is fine. People come to understand it.

(b) Yes, big 5 is better – for a totalitarian system of thought – much like freudianism it’s for diagnosing deviations from a mean – this is a tyrannical tool of socialists and feminists for applying critique to western values. The big 5 is a DIAGNOSTIC tool used by psychologists and it’s a frame of reference for them. But then, we also understand that Rorschach tests are pseudoscientific and have no empirical basis but something like 80% of psychologists have been taught to use them.

(c) Yes, Propertarianism is probably much better than the big 5, as a division of perception, cognition, judgement, knowledge labor and advocacy.

(d) if you take it a number of times, you will slowly determine how to categorize your behavior according to the categories.

(e) sixteen categories is about the limit at which it is useful to group people for the average person to use in comparisons.

(f) It is terribly useful in training people to understand the incentives of others.

(g) the goal is to train people to think of others as having different incentives than you do. This is the problem. And that is the purpose of these ‘tests’.

For example, before I came up with propertarianism, I used this series instead:

(a) dominance / submission

(b) extroversion / introversion

(c) patience / impulsivity

(d) blame acceptance / blame avoidance (Which I still find very useful)

After propertarianism I just explain things as reproductive strategies in an attempt to acquire resources of which status and cooperative alliances are as important as material goods.

WHY IT MATTERS

All that matters is that we train people to be other-focused. It actually doesn’t matter which framework you use.

The reason I defend MBT is because it is easy enough for non-specialists to use, and sufficiently EXPLANATORY that

WHAT I PREFER

1) IQ Test

2) Haidt’s Moral Foundations Test

3) Your parent’s social and economic class

4) Your ethnic, religious, cultural, origins.

5) Propertarian explanation of your incentives.

But those things require a lot of understanding to make use of.

Curt Doolittle