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Not even close on my profile. Did this work for anyone?
It worked quite well for me (u/Oscar_Cunningham). I usually measure as INTJ, sometimes as INTP. It predicted

    INTP 0.235691
    INTJ 0.198247
    INFJ 0.114691
    INFP 0.111443
    ENTP 0.074658
    ENFP 0.057476
    ISTP 0.040370
    ISFP 0.030426
    ENTJ 0.027369
    ESTJ 0.026705
    ISTJ 0.025700
    ENFJ 0.023411
    ISFJ 0.016983
    ESTP 0.009655
    ESFP 0.004322
    ESFJ 0.002852
I got INTJ, which is correct. But given the Reddit and HN demographics, you could just always guess that.
Same.

  INTJ 0.170579
  INTP 0.158083
  ENTP 0.140082
  INFJ 0.121986
  INFP 0.115873
  ENFP 0.070730
Same issue here. Can anyone track down a non INTP/INTJ?
I could, but as an INTJ, why would I? They're vexatious things.
+1

INTJ 0.299023

INTP 0.155863

INFJ 0.113193

INFP 0.104380

ENTP 0.072341

similar result...

Personality Probability INTJ 0.198738 INTP 0.163618 INFJ 0.135469 INFP 0.111934 ENTP 0.102679 ENFP 0.058846 ISTP 0.051312 ISFP 0.032267 ENTJ 0.030964 ISTJ 0.027256 ESTJ 0.026231 ENFJ 0.024828 ISFJ 0.018011 ESTP 0.010239 ESFP 0.004584 ESFJ 0.003024

INTJ 0.297332

INTP 0.164725

INFJ 0.111596

INFP 0.108814

... then results drop to .06 and continue down.

INTJ is correct.

For me it guessed ISTJ at 60%, INTJ at 8%, then INTP at 6%, the last of which is what I test as.
Seems broken at the moment. I get a 502 error.
Can I ask how is working? I am mostly ENTP, but your test told me that I am INFP
Can it guess my star sign too?
It can guess your Reddit birthday-based star sign.
The birth date effect is actually real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_age_effect

So maybe machine learning can turn astrology into a real science after all!

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?
I read research a long time ago that people who believe in astrology tend to behave more like their star sign. I forgot where I read it though.

Definitely a self-fulfilling prophecy effect.

(comment deleted)
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.

You have them for work related purposes?

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.

But yes, they are very common.

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.
Interesting.

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.

Thanks for sharing your experiences here.

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.
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.

You are more contrarian in real life, versus an anonymous message board? That seems unusual.
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.

Real life has consequences.

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.

What is the distribution for HN & Reddit? I've found that most tech people self-describe as xNTx so I expect that for most HN users.

I was INTP the last time I checked and got ISFP 0.320051 ENFP 0.170778 INFP 0.121951 INTP 0.111226 INTJ 0.101262 ...

I put my reddit name in and it broke the site. Either that or it was hugged to death.
Today I learned my Myer Briggs type is "Error 502". I should have expected that.
Must be the http error code for bad personality when the webserver doesn't want to serve you.
That's the new type for 2020.
I'm a little teapot.
Fun, but keep in mind that Myers-Briggs is largely disproven and non-scientific. There is almost no (quality) evidence behind it.
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 know my profile is correct, I took a lie detector test that proves it
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.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309...

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"

What about the Big five? Has it been disproven?
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.
Next up: "Predict a Twitter user's Myer Briggs type solely by whether they talk about Myer Briggs types in their bio" ...
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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

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.
The two key dimensions have a lot of evidence.

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

I suspect there are differences of opinion over this within the academic community, but IIRC https://www.jstor.org/stable/3132137 describes the response to "Wason Selection Tasks" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task) as being remarkably strongly bimodal indicating binary preferences.

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.

Good job. INTP. :)

Personality Probability INTP 0.215613 INTJ 0.198558 INFP 0.133773

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.
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.

AutoModerator is INFP, with 50% confidence, INTP with 11%.
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.

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.

Also my MBTI is GTFO.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/spc3.12441

[1] https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personali...

[2] https://nesslabs.com/mbti

> In 2004 I lost my job because I was a specific MBTI type

Holy Lord that is unfair. MBTI is egregious mumbo jumbo.

(comment deleted)
That’s so fucked up it’d make a dilbert cartoon.
Someone please re-purpose this to use Twitter handles!
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.

/shrug

pffft while I find these sorts of profiling tools a load of crap, I'm mildly amused by my results.:

Personality Probability INTJ 0.191244 INTP 0.163233 INFP 0.117823 ENTP 0.116617 INFJ 0.116165 ENFP 0.061458 ISTP 0.053393 ESTJ 0.034183 ISFP 0.031543 ENTJ 0.028374 ISTJ 0.026644 ENFJ 0.024270 ISFJ 0.017606 ESTP 0.010009 ESFP 0.004481 ESFJ 0.002956

I wish it had more explanation about how the model works. The same website also has a "Predict MBTI Personality from Text": https://gimmeserendipity.com/mbtimodel/text/

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.

Same here. Do they have a dataset of writings that are labeled with their respective author's MBTI category? I wonder how they managed to get that.
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".

I got ENTJ which matches my test from few years ago.
Yes, if the site does not explain this method then I have little reason to believe the prediction. It's no different to a Buzzfeed quiz.
Hah, it gave me pretty much the opposite of my type.