<story><title>Poll: Hacker News (Myers-Briggs) Personality Types</title><text>What is your Myers-Briggs personality type?&lt;p&gt;If you don’t know you can find out at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp or on Facebook at http://apps.facebook.com/my-type/.&lt;p&gt;For info on the types, check out profiles at http://www.personalitypage.com/portraits.html and http://typelogic.com/&lt;p&gt;I am interested to see how much we differ from the average population.  The average #s appear in parenthesis after the choices, and were copied from http://www.geocities.com/lifexplore/stats.htm&lt;p&gt;Obviously only choose one type.  (And none of the links above are associated with me in any way aside from the fact that I just copied and pasted them.)</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>sah</author><text>It&apos;s instructive to read the prose about all of the types this test partitions people into.  Do it before you see your results.  Can you pick the one that describes you ahead of time?&lt;p&gt;They&apos;re all flattering and describe experiences that I think most humans have at some point.  The sense that something written for a very broad audience applies specifically to you can be deceiving.  That&apos;s part of why horoscopes are popular.&lt;p&gt;I came out as an ENTP this time (I&apos;ve scored as an INTP and INFP in the past) but the profile for ISFP also describes characteristics I&apos;d like to think I have.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m suspicious of things like personality sorters.  This one takes the more continuous and multifaceted range of human personality and quantizes it into four binary dimensions.  Even assuming those categories represent some kind of tendency for human personalities to cluster around certain traits, are sorters like this helpful?  Do they provide some genuine insight you didn&apos;t have before?  Or are they just a more sophisticated variety of horoscope?&lt;p&gt;You answer a bunch of vague and general questions, and get a vague and general answer.  Your input is 72 bits, and the output is only 4 bits.  Were those 4 bits really such a mystery to begin with?  Would the results be different if the test just briefly described both categories for each dimension, and had you pick the one that sounded more like you?&lt;p&gt;If you can pick your personality out beforehand by reading short descriptions of the personality types, what was the point of answering 72 questions?  If you can&apos;t, are you still willing to accept that your type really describes you?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JesseAldridge</author><text>Well the questions can help you reflect on yourself as well as people in general.&lt;p&gt;Also, the fact that the responses to this poll skew massively toward INTP/INTJ tells you &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt; doesn&apos;t it?</text></comment>
<story><title>Poll: Hacker News (Myers-Briggs) Personality Types</title><text>What is your Myers-Briggs personality type?&lt;p&gt;If you don’t know you can find out at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp or on Facebook at http://apps.facebook.com/my-type/.&lt;p&gt;For info on the types, check out profiles at http://www.personalitypage.com/portraits.html and http://typelogic.com/&lt;p&gt;I am interested to see how much we differ from the average population.  The average #s appear in parenthesis after the choices, and were copied from http://www.geocities.com/lifexplore/stats.htm&lt;p&gt;Obviously only choose one type.  (And none of the links above are associated with me in any way aside from the fact that I just copied and pasted them.)</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>sah</author><text>It&apos;s instructive to read the prose about all of the types this test partitions people into.  Do it before you see your results.  Can you pick the one that describes you ahead of time?&lt;p&gt;They&apos;re all flattering and describe experiences that I think most humans have at some point.  The sense that something written for a very broad audience applies specifically to you can be deceiving.  That&apos;s part of why horoscopes are popular.&lt;p&gt;I came out as an ENTP this time (I&apos;ve scored as an INTP and INFP in the past) but the profile for ISFP also describes characteristics I&apos;d like to think I have.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m suspicious of things like personality sorters.  This one takes the more continuous and multifaceted range of human personality and quantizes it into four binary dimensions.  Even assuming those categories represent some kind of tendency for human personalities to cluster around certain traits, are sorters like this helpful?  Do they provide some genuine insight you didn&apos;t have before?  Or are they just a more sophisticated variety of horoscope?&lt;p&gt;You answer a bunch of vague and general questions, and get a vague and general answer.  Your input is 72 bits, and the output is only 4 bits.  Were those 4 bits really such a mystery to begin with?  Would the results be different if the test just briefly described both categories for each dimension, and had you pick the one that sounded more like you?&lt;p&gt;If you can pick your personality out beforehand by reading short descriptions of the personality types, what was the point of answering 72 questions?  If you can&apos;t, are you still willing to accept that your type really describes you?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dkokelley</author><text>I once took a similar, but much simpler test consisting of choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic, and scored near evenly in each category.&lt;p&gt;I was told that it was because I was a super-rare type of person, who was essentially capable of exhibiting whichever type of personality suited me at the time.&lt;p&gt;I think it was because I gamed the test.&lt;p&gt;While I can see the value in attempting to define the traits of certain people, I don&apos;t think that a set 4, 16, or even 200 categories will help you understand someone as well as spending a week with them will.</text></comment>