People who are S instead of N take things at face value and resist using induction or intuition to extend their reasoning. These people can guess the teacher’s password, but they’re not doing the same thing that you call “thinking”. And if you’re not a T (Thinking), then that means you’re F (Feeling). And if you’re using feelings to chose beliefs in lieu of thinking, there’s nothing we can do for you—you’re permanently disqualified from enjoying the blessings of rationality.
I’ve spent the past 24h thinking this over, but I can’t find a different way to say it and I still think it needs to be said: the four sentences above strike me as among the most offensively stupid things I’ve come across on LW.
You’re totally missing the point of MBTI and I wouldn’t be comfortable trusting you with any other psychometric instrument until I saw evidence you’d understood your mistake. MBTI is supposed to measure preference and not ability; and like any other similar instrument should be used to help bridge over communication difficulties rather than to pigeonhole people. It freaks the hell out of me when I see people doing that pigeonholing thing; it’s the same problem as with horoscopes—people just aren’t that damn simple!
More directly adressing the nonsense above, absolutely nothing I’ve ever read about MBTI has led me to the conclusion that people with an S preference “take things at face value and resist using induction or intuition” or that people with an F preference are “using feelings to chose beliefs in lieu of thinking”.
A typical reference on MBTI would say that an S preference means you “approach situations with an eye to the facts” or “work from the facts to the big picture”, both things that strike me as being perfectably compatible with a community which prides itself on “updating on the evidence”. Someone with an F preference would take into account others’ feelings when making a decision, when someone with a T preference would tend to discount their own as well as others’ feelings. In many situations the former can be a more (instrumentally) rational thing to do and the latter less rational. (As for epistemic rationality: feelings are facts, and denying that people have feelings is not a mark of rationality but a caricature of it.)
MBTI … should be used to help bridge over communication difficulties rather than to pigeonhole people.
If MBTI can be used to improve communication, then it can be used to predict whether a fixed method of communication will work. That is exactly the purpose of the post: asking whom can be reached by LW in its current form. Even if Louie is completely wrong about the meaning of NS,TF, the empirical regularity seems perfectly appropriate for the project.
I don’t think this statement communicated well (I almost reflexively downvoted) because “instruments” is a term that typically implies design and hence purpose.
It might be better to say that the purpose of psychometric instruments is simply to reveal truth, and truth doesn’t have a specific purpose (it’s just useful for lots of things you might want to accomplish).
Compare the statement “an inch has no purpose” to the statement “a ruler has no purpose”—the latter has the purpose of measuring the former, whereas length itself is just a property of an object in the universe.
I’ve spent the past 24h thinking this over, but I can’t find a different way to say it and I still think it needs to be said: the four sentences above strike me as among the most offensively stupid things I’ve come across on LW.
You’re totally missing the point of MBTI and I wouldn’t be comfortable trusting you with any other psychometric instrument until I saw evidence you’d understood your mistake. MBTI is supposed to measure preference and not ability; and like any other similar instrument should be used to help bridge over communication difficulties rather than to pigeonhole people. It freaks the hell out of me when I see people doing that pigeonholing thing; it’s the same problem as with horoscopes—people just aren’t that damn simple!
More directly adressing the nonsense above, absolutely nothing I’ve ever read about MBTI has led me to the conclusion that people with an S preference “take things at face value and resist using induction or intuition” or that people with an F preference are “using feelings to chose beliefs in lieu of thinking”.
A typical reference on MBTI would say that an S preference means you “approach situations with an eye to the facts” or “work from the facts to the big picture”, both things that strike me as being perfectably compatible with a community which prides itself on “updating on the evidence”. Someone with an F preference would take into account others’ feelings when making a decision, when someone with a T preference would tend to discount their own as well as others’ feelings. In many situations the former can be a more (instrumentally) rational thing to do and the latter less rational. (As for epistemic rationality: feelings are facts, and denying that people have feelings is not a mark of rationality but a caricature of it.)
If MBTI can be used to improve communication, then it can be used to predict whether a fixed method of communication will work. That is exactly the purpose of the post: asking whom can be reached by LW in its current form. Even if Louie is completely wrong about the meaning of NS,TF, the empirical regularity seems perfectly appropriate for the project.
Psychometric instruments don’t have purposes.
I don’t think this statement communicated well (I almost reflexively downvoted) because “instruments” is a term that typically implies design and hence purpose.
It might be better to say that the purpose of psychometric instruments is simply to reveal truth, and truth doesn’t have a specific purpose (it’s just useful for lots of things you might want to accomplish).
Compare the statement “an inch has no purpose” to the statement “a ruler has no purpose”—the latter has the purpose of measuring the former, whereas length itself is just a property of an object in the universe.