Article against the Myers-Briggs Jung typology concept.....thoughts?

I think being typed should be added information to consider but that it should not be used to confine you.

I also dont like businesses that demand you take these tests. Its a business and they have no right to know this about you if you dont want them to. I work for a company currently that somehow believes they own their employees and have the right to inject themselves into thier personal lives.

 

The instrument itself is indeed of limited use, but that does not necessarily discredit the conceptual framework it attempted to standardize. Jung's personality theory is receiving some renewed empirical attention from a researcher in California. I haven't read all of his work, but his preliminary studies yielded some interesting neural circuitry that correlates well with typological theory. Look into the work of Dr. Dario Nardi from the University of Califorinia-Los Angeles if you want some references.

It is also useful to consider the historical division between clinicians and experimenters in psychology. What is found in the lab does not always generalize to the world beyond, and what is done in the therapy room does not always receive empirical support, to both good and ill ends.

 

I feel a corporation would understand if a person would rather not take this test.

I think the outcome of working with someone awhile should get someone close to knowing or noticing them, anyway. People are ignorant if they forget each person is an individual. People are who they are.

 

I agree with EventHorizon here... I certainly do not think employers should force employees to take the MBTI. In my experience it can provide valuable information and insight to a person if they so choose. It adds another piece to the complex unique puzzle of humanness. Love our puzzles.

 

I think that we have as a society been conditioned to think that anything we can't measure has no validity

For example many in mainstream 'science' totally discount dreams because they cannot measure them

It is the same with personality...some struggle to get to grips with these intangibles but it does not mean they don't exist

So no it is not meaningless

 

I'm not sure you and the author disagree. He's arguing that the MBTI has no experimental grounding in how it categorizes people into one of sixteen categories, and is therefore incapable of meaningfully categorizing them. That's what science is: taking data and interpreting it to find a common thread, then using that to make predictions. Unless I'm mistaken, it seems you're implying that the personality is more intricate than can be measured. Those two ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

 

A valid criticism, but to call it useless is overkill.
It is a trap to assume that lack of measurement or an inability to be measured, tested, quantified means they are automatically useless.

Of course, they are also talking about profit, and how companies are using them as some sort of quantified guidelines about people's individuality. Which is also...wrong.

The lack of data is real.
The idea that 16 boxes is enough to categorize every people in this world is laughable.
Check around. There are MANY people with a particular MBTI taking many non-stereotypical jobs associated with their types, and they still rock it.
And not all MBTI acts the same.

Culture. Experience. Belief. Perspective. Worldview. Trauma. Life lessons. Priorities.

Those are many aspects of humanity that ARE NOT that related to MBTI, not directly. You can be an atheist INFJ, a feminist INFJ, a religious INFJ, etc, etc etc.
MBTI only talked about how we act or react to our circumstances.

To use it as a guideline is a common temptation; I myself had fallen into that. But to ignore personal perspective in that is...sad.

And to use MBTI as standard in companies is just another softer, subtler form of putting people inside boxes -- a gentler form of management, for better or worse. And yes, sometimes it can be damaging. ("You're an INFJ? How can you -lead-?")
Honestly, they probably will do better with the Big Five. It's more specific; more made for practical purposes.

It's just another tool of self understanding, and in another level, a tool for self-narrative and self reflection.

 

No it can be discearned and therefore has meaning and validity

It could be measured for those able to discearn it. But in terms of measuring say 'extroversion' then we do not currently possess a machine called an 'extrovertometer' that can measure extroversion

We can however interview many people and discearn whether or not they are energised around people and then find out the extent of extroversion

As long as you hold their testimonies to be valid and you do a large enough sample size and take into account variables then your results will have meaning

 

But the extroversion-introversion spectrum has a basis in evidence, empiricism, and experiment. It's well-researched with a pretty good amount of data from a pretty wide stretch of scientists. We can safely say that we know it's a real thing.

However, things like the T/F dichotomy have little evidentiary basis. The only scholarly items that I have seen even looking for a link (let alone supporting it) between functional brain scans and that aspect of MBTI come from Dario Nardi. You could suppose that it's because people learn to balance out those judging functions as they age, but that's not something you can test without a decade or more of study.

Furthermore, the fact that so many MBTI practitioners have their own individual ideas about the finer workings of the mind shows that there's nothing predictive about the instrument. Science predicts. It paves a road to move forward. MBTI is a 93-question test that raises many questions and doesn't allow for the development of any of them. That's why it is useless in practical applications. That's what the author is getting at.

 

It's because the less easily definable something is the more the concrete thinkers brains begin to stall

Their brain begins flashing with a big neon sign that says: CANNOT COMPUTE! CANNOT COMPUTE! and steam starts coming out of their ears

But they must recognise that not everyone is a concrete thinker and that those other people have valid perspectives to bring to society too

Mainstream science is nothing more than a bunch of people afraid that they will not get certain posts at certain institutions or afraid that they will not be awarded funding from certain concentrations of wealth or afraid that the idea they have written books on will be overturned or undermined or afraid that their research will not be published by the money dominated publications or afraid that they will be ridiculed by their afraid peers for having said something that goes against the grain

There are mountains of fear that 'science' is often unable to climb in order to progress

 

Why is the only response you can mount to me a total dismissal of a premise that has been 100+ years in the making and still going strong?

 

No what i am saying to you is that science is full of disputes

How can a field built on measurements be full of disputes?

It can be full of disputes because there is a human element to the field

The human element is often affected by personal ambitions, fear, political agendas, religious agendas, social agendas, economic agendas etc etc

 

I do agree that introducing MBTI to the workplace seems wrong but more than anything weird, maybe it's something personal. The MBTI works mostly as a tool to know oneself imo.

I think what he tries to say is that sometimes mainstream science is represented by people who seem to be incredibly skeptic and close minded, and by some reason they take on an needlesly arrogant attitude towards subjects that go beyond the scientific method. In my opinion and i assume muir's as well given what he wrote, is that this attitude doesn't contribute in the long run, because then science will start to sound more like a dogma, which is not. It's funny, because there are a lot of well renowned scientist out there who are against propagating skepticism, because it's based on assumptions.
When it comes to psychology things get blurry. Even the extraversion introversion thing, since the critique actually said something among the lines that we are all ambiverts.

 

What is mainstream science? Be precise for me, in the same way you would describe "mainstream media", because I've literally only ever heard the term from you and muir.

Do you understand what skepticism means, as a concept or even as a word? If you are a skeptic and nothing else, your defining aspect is merely questioning that which is posited as fact. It is neither assuming nor asserting. In scientific work, this means poking holes in everything, and openly asking questions when one's conclusion doesn't make sense; it is the bulwark against lazy and dishonest scientific study. Ptolemy's geocentric model of the solar system held sway for 1500 years before Copernicus started poking holes in it and came up with the heliocentric model. And even that had to be corrected and developed by his successors like Kepler and Galileo. Can you show me those scientists who think skepticism is a bad thing? I'm very interested.

Also, please understand that the scientific method is not some arcane process that only applies to certain fields. Science is, quite literally, knowledge. The scientific method is a very basic, systematic approach to acquiring knowledge, and can be readily applied to a wide range of studies and even your daily life. It applies to anything regarding the acquisition of knowledge, which is why it's relevant when talking about the objective functions of the brain.

And all the critique noted as far as E-I was that a study he read showed that people do not rank at one end of the spectrum or the other, but at different points in the middle. That's one study of many, and it doesn't challenge the idea that certain people prefer to spend most of their time either alone or in company.

 

I guess you're talking about leading theories, from the sound of it. So when you say "mainstream science", you mean the most prominent and bleeding-edge research within a field of study, like the multiverse in physics or evolution in biology, yeah?

Scientific research isn't about coddling all the people with minority views. It is about discerning truth using a set of standards. When all the researchers within a field come together to compare notes, they are deciding, in aggregate, what conclusions are most valid based on the evidence and experimental data available. This has caused ideas, unsupported by evidence at the time of their proposition, to be marginalized until such time as that evidence can be acquired. Such is the nature of study.

Yeah reductionism can be bad juju when dealing with highly complex systems, especially the brain. But it is human nature to seek to explain things in the simplest manner possible. This is why mathematicians are always looking for ways to break down lengthy and cumbersome functions to a couple characters (because they're lazy tbh but don't tell them that.) This is not the same thing as precise knowledge. Sometimes the things we can discern as fact can be fully described, but only in an intricate and circuitous manner. That they are hard to understand does not make them unknowable.

Right, what works for someone might not work for someone else, because we all have different genetic dispositions, different early-life developments, are subjected to stimuli in different manners, and we do things in different ways to change our own synaptic structures. These are complex interactions that we have only recently (in the past 25 years or so) begun to even discover, let alone understand. Anything that is not known is, at the moment. subject to peoples' own feelings and interpretations, and I think that's fine, but I also take into account that if later facts turn out to contradict those feelings and interpretations, then I will discard them.

You should try science sometime. I don't have a formal education in it, I just go to the library and steal JSTOR prints off the internet. It's heavy and dry as all hell, but it can be interesting once you learn how to read scholarly papers.

 

Unhealthy Skepticism

According to Webster’s dictionary, a skeptic is “One who is yet undecided as to what is true; one who is looking or inquiring for what is true; an inquirer after facts or reasons.”

Marcello Truzzi (1935—2003), a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University, coined the term “pseudoskeptic” to describe people whose inquiry starts instead with a preconceived notion of what is true.

Here are some points to ponder from scientists and other thinkers who have discussed pseudoskepticism.
Many of these points describe characteristics of pseudoskeptics, or as electrical engineer William Beaty calls them, “pathological skeptics.”


1. Debunking as the Main Goal

“Rather than inquiring, or asking questions to try to understand something, they seek to debunk, discredit and ridicule anything that doesn’t fit into their belief system,” states the Scientific Committee to Evaluate PseudoSkeptical Criticism of the Paranormal (SCEPCOP) website.

2. Manipulating Language

Words such as “conspiracy theory” and “new age” are used to dismiss some theories or findings, wrote psychologist Dr. Greg Little in a 2005 paper on findings at an underwater site near the Bahamas.

“Skeptics invoke emotion-laden, ridiculing terms,”he said. Little took an interest in Bimini Wall, said by him and archaeologist Bill Donato to be an ancient man-made wall but said by many others to be a natural formation.

A vocal critic of the findings, Geologist Dr. Eugene Shinn, dismissed them as “new age” and associated them with a hunt for Atlantis. Little said Bimini investigations were not part of a search for Atlantis.

SCEPCOP said pseudoskeptics have “hijacked terms such as ‘rational, reason, logic, critical thinking’ to mean the ‘proper’ thinking and behavior that supports materialism and orthodoxy, and rejects against anything that challenges it.”

The word “anecdotal” can also be misused to dismiss controlled research, said Dr. Gary Schwartz on his website.

3. Dismissing Research

Carefully documented observations are often dismissed as “anecdotes” without scientific worth, said Dr. Schwartz.
Even if evidence is collected using established scientific standards, some excuse is found to reject it.

Dr. Schwartz received his doctorate from Harvard, taught psychiatry and psychology at Yale, and is now a professor at the University of Arizona.
He is a self-professed reformed pseudoskeptic.

He said in a video on his website: “My degree of doubt in the presence of data was irrational and I was experiencing skeptomania.”
In the video below, he talks about a media outlet that interviewed a skeptic of Dr. Schwartz’s research.

The skeptic had not read Dr. Schwartz’s research at all.

[video=youtube;1pOVoxC_Su0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1pOVoxC_Su0[/video]

4. Unequal Requirements

Online commentators on the topic speak of a double standard.
A user on HappierAbroad.com wrote: “I’ve never trusted skeptics, for the very reason that they are willing to accept the official version of things without a shred of proof but require unrealistic amounts of evidence to accept any other possibility.”

A YouTube user wrote: “What skeptics fail to understand is that skepticism involves being skeptical of your own position, it does not mean just being skeptical of that which you do not believe in, otherwise we are all skeptics and that renders their use of the term ‘skeptic’ meaningless.
A true skeptic casts skepticism on their own position as well.”

5. Defining Science

SCEPCOP wrote of pseudoskeptics: “They treat Science as if it were some kind of authoritarian ‘entity’ that takes positions and views on issues (their own of course), when it is in fact merely a tool and method of inquiry based on logical principles. In reality, science does not take positions or hold dogmatic beliefs on paranormal or conspiratorial subjects. People take positions, not Science, which holds no more views than my computer does.”

6. Pseudoskeptics Will Deny They’re Pseudoskeptics

Dr. Schwartz said pseudoskeptics will claim they are open to new information, but they will often react strongly and with hostility when their assumptions are challenged by new ideas.

SCEPCOP states: “All pseudoskeptics will claim to be true skeptics, just like all high pressured salesmen claim to not be high pressure, all liars and con artists claim to be sincere, and all politicians claim to be honest. But as you know, actions speak louder than words.”

7. Lessons in History

Beaty, who has appeared on television programs speaking on static electricity and other topics, wrote a paper titled “Symptoms of Pathological Skepticism.”
He wrote of the tendency in pseudoskeptics to forget that scientific principles thought to be infallible in the past have proven completely wrong.

He wrote of the “belief that certain fields of science are complete, that scientific revolutions never happen, and that any further progress must occur only in brushing up the details.”

8. Herd Mentality

Only when a majority of reputable scientists state that something is true, will a pseudoskeptic say it is true, said Beaty.
When a few reputable scientists stand behind a controversial claim, pseudoskeptics will dismiss them instead of reconsidering the claim. “If other reputable people change sides and accept the unorthodox view, this is seen as evidence of their gullibility or insanity, not as evidence that perhaps the unconventional view is correct.”

9. Fear of Being Wrong, Fear of the Unknown

Admitting an unconventional theory is or may be true can threaten a person’s sense of security.
Having to admit that what seems to be known, solid, and established, may be false can open up an uncertainty people find it hard to cope with.

Beaty wrote also of “a fear of having personal errors revealed, and a habit of silently covering up past mistakes.”
Little wrote of Bimini Wall skeptics: “All contradictions to their beliefs are probably perceived as a direct threat to them professionally and psychologically.”

10. Self-Elevation

It is easier to gain esteem or seem rational and clever through debunking efforts than to risk credibility by seriously investigating a controversial finding.
Beaty wrote of “elevating skepticism to a lofty position, yet … opening the way to pathological thinking by refusing to ever cast a critical, skeptical eye upon the irrational behavior of scoffers.”

11. Denying Scientists’ Subjectivity

Pseudoskeptics will likely present scientists as inherently objective, unswayed by personal belief or motives; they will excuse the instances in which scientists have been shown to be subjective as being isolated instances, Beaty said.

12. Changing the Criteria for Acceptance

Beaty described the practice of shifting requirements for the acceptance of a theory as “moving the goalposts.”
A pseudokeptic will say something like “‘I’ll believe it when X happens’ (but when it does, this immediately is changed to, ‘I’ll believe it when Y happens.’”

 

Not really. Actually the most "materialistic" side of it, i don't want to sound too snob or phony with the words i use anyway. What [MENTION=5045]Skarekrow[/MENTION] posted explains it very well.

 

All I asked is that you be precise. Do you mean "materialistic" in the philosophical sense or "materialistic" in the 'she's got one too many cars and loves her money' sense? Skarekrow's article is nice but is talking about intellectual dishonesty; it doesn't really touching on anything that could be described as "mainstream science".