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.
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.