as small as a world and as large as alone, This might be weird, and you might consider mbti...

7:47am July 9, 2015

Anonymous asked: This might be weird, and you might consider mbti to be astrology for business people, but I was wondering if you know your myers-briggs type?

dduane:

Short answer: No.
Long answer: People ask me about this occasionally, and I do indeed consider Myers-Briggs as a kind of astrology – definitely now a powerfully business-sanctioned one, originally cobbled together by well-meaning but essentially clueless amateurs based on an instrumentality (Jungian archetype) which is good for some things but not for this – with exactly the same scientific validity as astrology for accurately describing the profound complexities of the human psyche and personality*.
MBTI is in my view simply an attempt to pigeonhole the uniqueness of individuals into neat manageable packages that will allow others (as the “others” are still being bamboozled into thinking) to more effectively predict, control and manipulate the test-subjects’ behavior. There are simply a few more boxes in this system than there are in astrology. And the cynicism of it is breathtaking, because there’s a multimillion-dollar industry built around it (but then there is about astrology, too. It would be interesting to do the math and find out which is worth more worldwide, but it would just infuriate me, so I’ll leave that exercise to someone else).
…I’m sorry if this comes across as a bit harsh. But Myers-Briggs and astrology are both hot buttons for me: an almost infallible way to get me very annoyed. When still practicing psychiatric nursing I saw various of my patients who’d been MBTI’d for one reason or another go through all kinds of personality-stifling mental gymnastics to try to shut themselves into those effing four-letter behavioral and affective boxes so that the test would be proven right and they would therefore, in some way at least (they thought), be considered “normal”. It was heartbreaking. My fellow psych professionals had no truck with the MBTI, and (having investigated its origins thoroughly enough to understand that it is statistically unreliable and the “science” behind it is not merely invalid but essentially nonexistent) neither do I.
…Meanwhile, if anyone wants to know my sign, it’s RUNWAY 24L: HOLD FOR CLEARANCE. :)
*I.e., none.

Honestly I think there’s more to astrology than there is to the MBTI. Not that I think there’s much to astrology, especially in its most popular forms and used to predict the future or assign people’s personalities based on really superficial BS. But at least astrology can, at best, be a system of useful concepts and symbols for things English doesn’t otherwise have words for. The MBTI doesn’t even have that going for it.

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