Interesting that it scored me as:
ESTP 0.993968
ISFP 0.003365
ENFJ 0.000944
ISTJ 0.000374
INTJ 0.000271
Which is actually rather accurate to how I test. My work profile is ESTP, my private life profile is ISFP. The weights are obviously off, and my Reddit account is completely tied to my personal interests around blood bowl.
Either way, I’m surprised to see astrology for people who don’t believe in astrology on HN. I never fully understood HRs reliance on these tools, once you’ve taken a few, you can score exactly as you want to, but I’m truly surprised to see them on HN.
> I never fully understood HRs reliance on these tools, once you’ve taken a few, you can score exactly as you want to, but I’m truly surprised to see them on HN.
Not MBTI directly but stuff they’ve build upon the meyers brings and DISC profiling lines of thought. They’re pretty common in any enterprise organisation here, typically in some form that any given HR department has developed themselves in partnership with some consultant agency for lots and lots of money.
It’s given to anyone heading for a management related position. As I advice top management on tech decision I always end up taking them when getting hired or reorganised. I do tell the truth on them of course, but it’s a bunch of black magic as far as I’m concerned. I don’t even think it’s a nice tool for talking because it’s often either/or results when everyone is really a tad of everything.
Question, are you permitted to view your own results? My company conducts a similar series of assessments for all roles; and as a hiring manager I am able to see how applicants score across a battery of indicators from agreeableness, deferential nature, leadership ability, along with how individuals do in raw aptitude testing.
Became curious one day and asked HR if I could view my scores and was told no. Furrowed my brow a bit at that one.
I furrow it even more knowing the company doesn't expect hiring managers to actually use these scores with any meaningful weight, nor does recruiting actually rely on them during the screening process-or so I was told when asked-they merely ship them direct to the decision maker, forcing me to wonder why we put candidates through them to begin with.
Certainly the common refrain is that giving candidates their results could open companies up to liability if they pass on a candidate, which causes a further reaction on my part "all the more reason to do away with them and find another means of assessing talent. Maybe this is a process that doesn't require the reduction of humans to a few data points and indicators n a scoreboard for the privilege of a friendly career conversation".
Well yes, part of it is that you talk through the results with the HR consultant and hiring manager, so you can talk about whether you agree with the results or how they see them and such.
I’m on an ethics committee with my employer, while it tends to focus on how our product behaves ethically I’m going to be making a push to focus a few things inward, and I plan to start with this.
Frankly it’s of my opinion if you’re going to assess someone using this type of technology and use it in any means to make a determination of hiring, that candidate is owed their results.
Anecdotally, McKinsey and other consulting people are/were pretty obsessed with it. At least those are the only ones I ever heard using it in a normal human conversation. At first I was terribly confused talking to people referring to themselves and others with what sounded like bad passwords. But it fits the general cult like behavior.
It sounds just enough like science for people to pay a lot of money for it, but not enough like science that it scares anyone. Of course, it's pretty much bullshit for many reasons.
Scientifically valid personality tests are illegal for HR to use outside of exceptional roles in specific industries. These Meyers-Briggs-like tests are pseudoscientific silliness.
Many moons ago I was in a graduate program at a large multinational industry company. Closer to the end of the graduate program they had all the graduates do the Myers-Briggs Test at a multi-day company retreat event.
It was painted as a 'self-discovery' exercise but the exercise was organized by HR and it clearly felt like they were pre-screening for which graduates to put on a 'upper management' track.
We have something similar. They use these for some of the leadership 'culture' sessions - but the emphasis is more around the differences in people and how one style of communication is more effective with one group and backfire with others. I was super skeptical initially, but there were some interesting insights that came out of it.
Interesting. I have two reddit accounts that I use for different subreddits, and they got totally different results.
One is my main that I use for most boring stuff, some niche stuff - it's one where if someone knew me well, they'd probably figure out it's mine - and I'm ok with that. The other is for discussion topics that I don't want tied to me in an obvious way (ie, politics, religion). I won't share the name of either account, but it's interesting that the "main" account, got 60% ESFP, and "discussion" account got 40% INTJ/INTP and 30% INFP/INFJ.
I don't feel like my writing style is incredibly different between each account, so I wonder if the specific subreddits that a user prefers contribute to the label. It's either that, or I really do self-censor more dramatically than I had imagined.
Edit: I've always got INTP or INTJ in past MBTI tests - though it's been near a decade since I took one last.
Back when I got tested, one of the smart things the huckster said was that we can adopt personas as needed, but not being our natural state it takes more effort.
Better than a 501 I guess. Although, some other codes could be fun to interpret this way as well [0]. A 403 would just be not for you. A 410 could be apropos. I'd love to test positive for a 426, however, I would probably get a 300.
Myers-Briggs has almost zero validity as a method of assessing personalities (check the straight dope) so this is really a fools errand. Anyone wanting to use a validated assessment should check out the big five personality test. And it's free.
If you’re using validity in its psychological jargon sense here I think a lot of mbti enthusiasts on Reddit would say that the tests are unreliable, but the classification is still good for finding a sense of community with people who think in similar ways to you.
One thing you need to separate out the 16 MBTI archtypes with the test(s) used to determine which type you are. Not everyone fits into one of the 16 types perfectly and not every test reliably figures out which of the 16 types you are, not to mention that dividing the entire human population into 16 types is an overly simplistic way of categorizing personalities.
That doesn't mean MBTI is useless. You can take a test and hope that it reasonably finds what type you are or you can simply read the archtypes for all 16 types and figure out which type you are closest to.
I think the community element is the most underrated aspect of MBTI, esp if you're a rare type that's been misunderstood most of your life. I can certainly related as an INTP and have struggled most of my life when taking the advice of my parents, teachers, professors, mentors, even self-help gurus only to get limited results despite following their advice almost exactly. When I learned that I was an INTP and followed the advice from other INTPs, I finally felt understood and was able to follow a different set of advice that got me much further in life than following the conventional advice from the former parties.
Is it scientific? It's debatable. Is it useful? It depends but personally, it has been tremendously helpful.
"Astrology for nerds" is one way of describing it that I always liked even though I don't know who is the original author of the expression (if there even is one).
What's interesting about it is that normally learning someone's MBTI type requires their active involvement. They either have to fill in some type of survey or tell you their type. This would be fine, were it not that there are plenty of people who attach WAY too much importance to MBTI types.
Hmm, mine gave me very high coefficients for INTP (0.36) and INTP (0.18), which seems to line up with what I remember from when I've taken these sorts of tests. Except... my reddit is very sparse. From where did it draw these conclusions?
This tool highlighted my suspicions. It's very biased towards these results (I don't know if Myers-Briggs is also, which might be possible). For example, "lorem ipsum" scores INXX all above 0.13, with everything else below 0.08. Similar results for "youtube reddit" or "the quick brown fox".
This is extremely interesting! Thank you for sharing.
I haven't taken a Myer Briggs in a while, so I can't remember what "I am".
I'm curious how my Reddit persona compares to an actual test. I know for a fact that I have a different personality on Reddit than I do in other conversations. Over the years, I've "figured out" a Reddit (and Hacker News) communication style that trends towards populist (i.e. tending to receive upvotes). I'll also jump straight to conclusions on Reddit - especially if I know they're "hivemind" opinions.
In real life, I have a much different approach to most communication - which I'd expect to reflect differently in a personality test.
I'm not sure that's what they meant - any group of people shares certain beliefs and values, and those beliefs differ from another group's. Values and beliefs influence our communication style as well.
Further, on an anonymous discussion board, the risks of things like "jumping to conclusions" [not what I would call "less contrarian"] are much lower than in real life, where your reputation as a human is on the line.
Anonymous message boards have points, gotta post what people want to hear for upvotes that give that self-validating dopamine hit when you check your score and it's higher than ever.
I got the same result across 4 different accounts.
There are 4 different ones I use. One I use professionally, one to mod an extremely large subreddit, one I use that’s semi-anonymous, and one I’ve had for like 8 years.
Different audiences for each account but apparently all indicating the same type. I guess that validates the consistency of the tool.
Not even close for me. Every result I have ever had is a insanely strong ENFP. This tool came up with INFJ (.23). That said, I work really hard when I write something to advocate for a position and to examine how it could be interpreted (something that has burned me badly in the past), and it may be that behavior that is throwing it off.
ENFPs can be "fake extroverts", but I don't think anyone my entire life has accused me of being introverted.
edit: The below text is not true, I didn't read the chart correctly - they are all different. (Inverse introversion/extraversion, but in the same order.)
ENFP and INFJ are actually very similar - if you believe in the personality test.
Despite the difference in letters, they share all the same cognitive functions, just in a different order.
If you have a system of four binary indicators, and swapping position on two of the four makes little difference, you probably have a very poor system.
Not to be snarky, but this is spoken like someone who hasn't tried to understand the system at all - not that I believe in it either.
Typically MBTI personality tests measure you based on four indicators: Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/iNtuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving
Each combination of indicators is given a "type." There are 16 possible types.
The MBTI personality test also defines 8 cognitive functions, believing that everyone must absorb information (perceiving) and turn it into actions/decisions (judging). It states that there are four ways of perceiving, and four ways of judging... extraverted/introverted sensing/intuition and extraverted/introverted thinking/feeling.
Each personality type has four cognitive functions associated with it: primary, auxiliary, tertiary, and inferior. You will have both an extraverted and introverted perceiving function as well as an extraverted and introverted judging function. Your primary cognitive function will match your introversion/extraversion trait, and then will flip back and forth between introversion/extraversion for the rest of your functions.
Since there are only 8 cognitive functions, and each personality type has 4, it's not surprising that they will often share cognitive functions - it also means that types can behave more similarly than one would expect based on their indicators.
Its entirely consistent with my past scoring on the test:
Personality Probability
INTP 0.319997
INTJ 0.210713
I've always pretty much scored as an INTP with the P/J fairly evenly matched.
As far as MB being scientific or not- they are measuring something persistent, so in that sense it is measuring something durable/real. Whether it is useful or not... shrug.
I tested two of the accounts that I can remember having that still have content available and my wife's account.
Her account has "Controversiality" well below that of either of my accounts. What is the meaning of that term? I couldn't find it explained anywhere.
I found that both of my accounts gave nearly identical results. Interestingly enough my wife's account also is nearly identical to mine through the first half of the results and the last 6 entries are in identical order and similar percentages. Did I accidentally find my match all those years ago?
Maybe something in the way this algorithm is designed pigeonholes everyone into similar groups. It's pretty hard to trust something when so many people from such different backgrounds get similar results.
In 2004 I lost my job because I was a specific MBTI type usually associated with "entrepreneurial skill", "thinking outside boxes", "natural LeAderShIPP", and "causing trouble", and because there were already 2 others with that MBTI in the team it was used as the justification to not extend my contract. The test was conducted by an external HR consultancy that pictured itself as an expert in MBTI and all things psychology. (they should have just told me they don't like my personality which would have been less of an insult and more honest)
So no doubt with a bit of marketing this nonsense can be sold into HR departments. The Karen's and Kyle's of this world will no doubt think it's brilliant, buy it and feed their own biased decision making process.
MBTI's are astrology for people who think they're too smart for astrology. Both are total nonsense and dangerous in the hands of the wanna-be psychologist Karen's usually in charge of HR. [0][1][3]
It's all fun and games until people lose their jobs. Unlikely you will lose your job because you got the wrong MBTI, but when a company is downsizing and wants to pretend they're using scIeNtiFfic measures to make that decision in the name of performance it's likely they use garbage software like this to dress up their "cultural fit" bias.
I urge OP to put a big fat warning label on their product and market it as a way to educate people why MBTI's are dangerous garbage and guide those that use it onto a path that helps them understand why it's dangerous. Make it educational by showing the users where the problems are instead of claiming that this is in any way safe.
What I find interesting about these kinds of personality systems is how they can provide you with additional concepts for thinking about people you don't really understand, or people who aren't on your wavelength. They may not be accurate, but they give you a starting point for engagement.
With 45%, Shittymorph (the 1991 undertaker threw mankind... ) account is very strongly ESTP. When using my own account, it was only 20% for the first entry (which did not match any test result I've ever had). I guess this sort of makes sense. My posts are kinda all over the place but Shittymorph is very... consistent
Classic! I ran my own Reddit username first, and then read about my result (I know nothing about these personality types). It was pretty accurate to be honest. Then I immediately went back to that page to look up /u/shittymorph, but the page wouldn't load. I'm assuming they're getting hammered by traffic right now, and hoping they'll be able to serve more traffic due to the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
Edit: Sorry I had to. The point being that after reading through multiple types of these results, mine was 100% spot on compared to 2nd-5th place.
I consistently score INTP. Another account which I have about 8 years of sometimes voluminous comment history with for non-technical topics produces the same results in the same order. Hmm, maybe I'm turning into an INTJ with age... Kind of makes sense.
Like others, I'm wondering what the "controversiality" value indicates.
Wow, it nailed it for me, this is wild. How in the world does this work so well? Is this based on some kind of research re: personality & vocabulary or something?
Assuming !/s the reason it worked so well on you is because odds of 16-1 are not odds of infinity to 1. The same reason you bump into an old friend in a foreign airport, or someone calls you at some point in your decades of living at the moment you thought of them. Etc.
It's in the works. I privately tested it on Twitter users but it wasn't giving the results I expected (for example, classifying Trump as an INTP most likely.) It seems the general writing style on Twitter is different than Reddit which may explain it. In the worst case, I may need to build my own custom dataset scraping the Twitter profiles of known celebrities and their MBTI types from personality-database.com and train a separate model.
Of course, I may simply repurpose this same model for Twitter once the current excitement dies down (to minimize 502 errors since I'm on a cheap hosting plan.)
Got pretty close. Self assessed type was in second place. But the first one was just one letter off, which I can also be sometimes. So, overall, not bad.
But at the same time, the science says these categories are BS. So I don’t really know what to do with these types.
My actual type was ranked as my fifth by this analysis. I wonder if this says more about how I portray myself online, how I think of myself when I take the test, or if it's just plain wrong.
As I always suspected I don’t have a Myers Briggs type. Is there any compelling evidence that they exist? I’ve always been a bit bemused by these tests but they seem very popular in startup world.
They are simply categories that are defined, so they exist by definition. But they have poor predictive power. From wikipedia:
Though the MBTI resembles some psychological theories, it is generally classified as pseudoscience, especially as pertains to its supposed predictive abilities. The indicator exhibits significant scientific (psychometric) deficiencies, notably including poor validity (i.e. not measuring what it purports to measure, not having predictive power or not having items that can be generalized), poor reliability (giving different results for the same person on different occasions), measuring categories that are not independent (some dichotomous traits have been noted to correlate with each other), and not being comprehensive (due to missing neuroticism). The four scales used in the MBTI have some correlation with four of the Big Five personality traits, which are a more commonly accepted framework
EDIT: My theory is that Myers-Briggs is more popular among laypeople than Big5 precisely because it's less scientific. People feel like their Myers-Briggs type tells them something non-obvious about themselves. Big5 is so straightforward that it doesn't tell them anything they didn't know before.
By exist I am referring to the validity of the binary measurements. If I ask you where you generally sit on the binary scale of awake and asleep you couldn’t give a definitive answer because it changes depending on the circumstances. It’s a meaningless measurement (as alluded to in your copy paste). I get the same from MBTI.
> My theory is that Myers-Briggs is more popular among laypeople than Big5 precisely because it's less scientific.
My theory is that it is more popular not directly because it is less scientific, though for a closely related reason--because its so heavily marketed by the private firm behind it and their army of certified consultants, which has created lot of visibility (much of which is at least one step removed from the marketing, so that people are often not directly aware of the marketing.)
I think you have quite a limited view of science if you think it can only tell you obvious things. My view is that Myers-Briggs is less popular with scientists/academics than Big5 because they haven't worked out how to measure it accurately yet.
You might be normal. MB doesn't have a type for being in the middle of the range in any dimension so those people would get random scores each time the take a test. If being normal in all 4 dimensions is correlated (unexceptional well adjusted person?), then that might be the majority of the population for whom it's meaningless.
Myers-Briggs theory actually suggests that people trend towards balanced as they age. There are still more subtle differences that can be picked up, but an online test is unlikely to find them.
When I took this in my 20s I was within a couple points of halfway on every category. I've always been quite adaptable and have tested myself enough to eventually decide what I'm not. Less official tests taken later in life have been less middling; but they haven't been consistent, either.
But don't worry, it's pseudoscience. I took a quiz to determine my astrological sign once, too.
Introversion/Extraversion is well known and accepted as part of the Big5 and other more mainstream models (the MBTI definition is actually slightly more general, defining extraversion as a preference for external stimulation in general rather than specifically socialisation, but I think the evidence is still relevant).
The Judgement/Perception dichotomy (called Rational/Irrational by Jung) corresponds to System 1 and System 2 thinking in Dual-process theory for which there is a large body of evidence, including the work of Kahneman and Tversky which is well respected enough to have won a nobel prize (in economics). Interestingly from an HN perspective this also seems strongly analogous to CPU (serial) vs GPU (parallel) processing.
The Thinking vs Feeling and Sensing vs. Intuition distinctions have less evidence at this point.
First, their interpretation of I/E is not the same that the Big5 label it. The Big 5 also don't look at it as binary.
I'm also not sure how to interpret your System 1 vs System 2 comment, as thats also not binary. Everyone uses both. Is it supposed to be a preference? Do you have a link describing that? It doesn't make sense to the way the two are described to me either.
> First, their interpretation of I/E is not the same that the Big5 label it. The Big 5 also don't look at it as binary.
The MBTI also doesn't look at thing like E and I as binary when it comes to the "type of a person". A single preference is binary under the MBTI, but everyone has multiple preferences. For example, if someone's primary function is "Extroverted Thinking" then their secondary function may be "Introverted Intuition". As the relative strength (degree of preference) may vary continuously, that leads to a continuous grading of "extraversion" when describing a person
As far as I can see, the Big 5 doesn't even attempt to explain what's going on at a sub-person level, which probably does mean that there is little evidence for those parts of the MBTI theory, but it also means there is little evidence against it. In any case, I've seen a lot of people arguing that the MBTI is rubbish because there are degrees of extraversion (and other described properties) in people, and that's a poor reason to dismiss the theory because it predicts exactly that.
> I'm also not sure how to interpret your System 1 vs System 2 comment, as thats also not binary
N+1: it produced very similar results as some of the surveys I have previously used, with about the same (low) probability and near tie between INTP, INTJ and INFP.
It would be nice to see a breakdown of each of the dimensions on the model. I personally find those more insightful than just the archetype and – in my case – explain the low accuracy by showing on which dimensions I rate near the middle of the scale.
Auto-completion and shortcuts only work well with languages like English and alike which don't make heavy use of [often irregular] morphology. In many languages the same word could have a hell lots of forms (different endings) depending on the grammatical case and other things[1]. Ordinary autocompletion provides little help when typing these languages. Perhaps GPT-3 could manage but I don't feel like sending everything I type to the cloud monster.
I’m guessing text classification model trained on https://www.kaggle.com/datasnaek/mbti-type or similar dataset. The script parses all the comments of the user from reddit and feeds it to the model and model predicts the probabilities of the 16 possible personalities.
I'm not sure what my personality is anymore. Since I moved to a new city my personality has been shifting, I'm more extraverted and judgemental now but before I was more thinking and introverted.
I wouldn't rely on MBTI to making hiring or other high stakes decisions. But it's not completely off base either. I've almost always tested as INTP (and occasionally INTJ) and strongly identify with the archetypes for both.
It's missing one extra axis (should have 5) and the labels are binary which is unfortunate for precision, but it's much more fun and a nice exercise in self knowledge.
I've heard this too, but I'm not sure how it could be true.
What would we hope for from a personality indicator? We'd hope that it would be useful for making predictions.
At an absolute minimum, MBTI could be used to predict the answers people give on an MBTI questionnaire. And what about beyond that? On the basis of someone testing as an I (introvert) vs E (extrovert), we might be able to predict whether someone would feel drained or invigorated after a busy social event. Has there really been work done to show that MBTIs have zero useful predictive value?
I will readily believe that there might be more useful models of personality, and that MBTI is no longer in vogue in psychological literature, and that MBTI was originally motivated on pseudoscientific principles, and that there more principled alternatives — but it doesn't necessarily follow that MBTI cannot be used to make useful predictions.
>What would we hope for from a personality indicator?
Consistency, to begin with. (among other things) MBTI is not consistent, The thing Adam Grant did [1] I tried myself: Take the SAME test twice(or more) with about 3 weeks in-between. Hilariously enough, on one test I got that I were "entrepreneurial" and "social" while the second time I got "introverted" and "analytic/cautious". Not by itself contradictory but inconsistent nevertheless.
>but it doesn't necessarily follow that MBTI cannot be used to make useful predictions.
The problem is that it does follow that! Especially when it is used in HR practice! I have seen HR people construct "project groups" based on the members MBTI score!
When you take in to account these "personality tests" you have to consider the false classification too; If you base your judgement on false classification the test have now done damage to whatever process you used it for.
Would you be willing to follow & trust a medical diagnosis test that have NO scientific backing, not consistency, have a lot of false diagnostics, and based on that test, conduct life-endangering surgery?
It's fun for personal recreation, but MBTI is used in more than that, and have lasting effects to the individual and organizations when practiced. And that's why the fad has to die.
I wonder if there may be some component of how one interprets the questions having a strong influence on the quality of the results. Maybe not, but, everyone I've talked to that has a strong opinion on MTBI being bs often grounds it in part with personal experience of taking the test multiple times and getting different results. I have taken the test at least about once a year since I found out about it many years back. I've taken the test in different forms, different environments, different moods when taking it, and still almost every time I got INTP. For a short period where I was going through a bit of a social growth spurt, I got ENTP. Also when taking the test a week or so after my first exposure to psychedelics, I tested INFP. I took care to go to answer the questions as honestly and accurate as I could, and that is the resulting experience I had. As well, when introducing others to it, I've guessed their type prior to knowing their result and been right on 3/4 letters most every time. Only a handful of trials of that and certainly not a conclusive scientific test, but this is part of what kept me interested in the test.
So given that, along with the anecdotal alignment of the personality descriptions with my experience, I personally believe MTBI may have more value than its given credit for. Its remarked by others it does already have similarity with Big 5. My thinking is that people want more from it than it is and they are somehow thinking it claims to be more than it is. In the most simple form the personality types seem to be more about describing particular (potentially somewhat arbitrarily categorized) archetypes as opposed to specific behavior types. Or put another way, it seems more about describing internal personality experience than external behavior. So it may call me introverted, but I may not be introverted by behavior according to others, but I may view myself as introverted, so that is the correct result. Am I just grasping at a belief here, or is there really absolutely "NO scientific backing"
Myers Briggs is completely without value, and gives all personality inventories an undeserved bad name! There certainly exist well-validated personality inventories that reflect the scientific consensus that personality can be represented within the Big Five or similar HEXACO frameworks, but they bear no resemblance to Myers Briggs. Frankly at this point it’s irresponsible and borderline unethical to keep Myers Briggs alive as anything other than an embarrassing historical footnote.
> Myers Briggs is completely without value, and gives all personality inventories an undeserved bad name! There certainly exist well-validated personality inventories that reflect the scientific consensus that personality can be represented within the Big Five or similar HEXACO frameworks, but they bear no resemblance to Myers Briggs.
That's not entirely true, since two of the Meyers-Briggs axis are strongly correlated with Big Five axes; so something that maps well to Big Five will likely bear a resemblance to about half of MBTI.
Could this be explained by children being older when they're going through school, allowing them to be more able to play successfully in sports / be in the middle of puberty at a more convenient time in the years where they would join a sport?
Which is actually rather accurate to how I test. My work profile is ESTP, my private life profile is ISFP. The weights are obviously off, and my Reddit account is completely tied to my personal interests around blood bowl.
Either way, I’m surprised to see astrology for people who don’t believe in astrology on HN. I never fully understood HRs reliance on these tools, once you’ve taken a few, you can score exactly as you want to, but I’m truly surprised to see them on HN.