welcome to the forum and kudos for writing your first post.
My intention in writing this comment is to provide constructive feedback, which I am doing because I find your text, but more so, your sincerity, curiosity and openness welcoming. Furthermore, I am similarly interested in MBTI and its applications, and I want to acknowledge your effort.
And I’ll get right to it. The title you chose was “In defense of the MBTI”. This is your opening paragraph:
I’ve been doing some thinking and research about the nature of cognition and I wanted to share thoughts as to why we need to look beyond the Big Five for information on cognition. Some people seem to be under the impression that I stick to the MBTI just because it’s what I’ve heard or because other people have told me it’s good, but I’m going to explain in this post that it’s actually just based on an open minded investigation of the reality of cognition.
And this is the ending.
Unfortuantely, I haven’t yet seen a scientific exploration of all the things posited in these MBTI-adjacent theories but I think it is pretty clear that the field of psychology needs to start taking this seriously, looking into the nature of cognition, not just looking at what people answer to simple questions on tests because of the flaws of that method. There are a lot more to these theories than I have covered in this post. Some good resources to learn more about these theories are CS Joseph’s YouTube channel and alittlebitofpersonality.com.
Your opening paragraph explains neatly the three intentions you have for this text:
1. Why we should look beyond the Big Five for information on cognition. 2. Comment on why you stick to MBTI contrary to what people believe. 3. Describe the real reason, which is related to the reality of cognition.
What I am wondering reading the first paragraph is: Why did you choose to ‘defend’ MBTI this particular way? If you could explain this, I believe some interesting connections would surface. And also maybe give a written answer to why you chose the title.
The second feedback I have is with regard to the last paragraph. Where you urge more psychology research on the area, as well as inform us about sites relevant to the field of “MBTI-adjacent theories”. Here I am wondering what the direct link between your title, your intention and writing this paragraph is.
However, the overall feeling I get from reading your post, isn’t that it is a post with a specific goal, using one particular method, but a post using several simultaneously. It is an expression of the direction of your own thoughts, beliefs and ideas; a meta-overview of your reasoning behind your support for an improvement of the MBTI. Moreover, it is like a meta-dialogue with imagined opponents in the Big Five vs MBTI debate. Thirdly, it is exploratory and open-ended with regard to cognition and MBTI. So it has a lot going on at the same time. Which brings me to my next point, acknowledgment. Even though you could say your post needs sharpening and precision, the way I see it, it is more important to acknowledge it as an expression of your versatility in understanding and your ability to juggle different things simultaneously. You have already discovered things I wasn’t aware of, and I believe that if you continue, your contribution will undoubtedly be even more substantial. I also believe that many of your paragraphs are seeds that can sprout into interesting texts, if given the attention.
And finally, some of my thoughts: ”CS Joseph theorizes that the cognitive functions are something like 100 rpm − 75 rpm − 50 rpm − 25 rpm − 20 rpm − 15 rpm − 10 rpm − 5 rpm”
In my own experience, when I experiment with developing functions directly, I can affirm both Jung- and Joseph’s claims to a certain degree. There is an underlying dynamic between all the functions, and they are not operating at the same speed. And I also agree with CS Joseph in that these limitations aren’t necessarily bad, they open up for human relationships and collaboration, to complement each other. I could say more, but to keep it withing the bounds of your text, I’ll stop here.
I hope this comment is useful to you in some way, and welcome you, as a senior newbie, to the site. :)
Hi Caerulea, thanks for your good questions. I will try my best to answer your questions here.
Your opening paragraph explains neatly the three intentions you have for this text:
1. Why we should look beyond the Big Five for information on cognition. 2. Comment on why you stick to MBTI contrary to what people believe. 3. Describe the real reason, which is related to the reality of cognition.
What I am wondering reading the first paragraph is: Why did you choose to ‘defend’ MBTI this particular way? If you could explain this, I believe some interesting connections would surface. And also maybe give a written answer to why you chose the title.
1. Why we should look beyond the Big Five for information on cognition.
I wrote this post in response to someone who said that the MBTI was inferior to the Big Five because it was less scientific. I just wanted to explain why we had to broaden our horizons a bit and have an honest look at the differences between the MBTI and the Big Five, and what we could expect to get out of both. I think that if the field of psychology would broaden their horizons a bit, we could make a lot of progress on the science of cognition. There an infinite number of different theories of cognition that could be proposed. I just think that by explaining some issues with the Big Five, I could encourage people to take a look at new theories. Just asking 200 questions of a human and finding correlations is pretty clearly not going to result in not going to result in the be all and end all of psychology. Maybe if you trained a neural network on the answers to those questions, looking at the weights might give us more insight, but just looking for simple correlations is clearly going to result in a very shallow understanding of the brain. More advanced aliens than us wouldn’t be impressed if they saw that our understanding of cognition was limited to some researcher asking a bunch of random questions and finding a few factors that could predict how people would answer the questions to a limited degree.
2. Comment on why you stick to MBTI contrary to what people believe.
This point leads straight from point one which is that the Big Five really isn’t that great. Given that, I am completely open to exploring any theory of cognition I come across. There could always be more theories to explore but the MBTI is by far the most promising theory I have come across. I find that if you can find multiple people of the same MBTI type, you can notice a lot of similarities. That seems to me like strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that it is a good model. If you want to try this experiment for yourself, you can go to CS Joseph’s list here or you can try with A Little Bit of Personality’s list here (scroll to the bottom of the article). They both have their own theories for subtypes as well to give a more comprehensive picture, CS Joseph has Octagram and A Little Bit of Personality has subtypes (you have to create a free account to view). So, when you combine that the Big Five isn’t that good of a theory with the anecdotal evidence that the MBTI is better than the Big Five when you compare people with the same traits in both, it makes sense to conclude that the MBTI is the better theory.
3. Describe the real reason, which is related to the reality of cognition.
Here I explain that the real reason I believe the MBTI might be worth taking a look at is because if you open-mindedly explore what the brain does, the MBTI just at an obvious level seems much closer to describing what it does than the Big Five. While the Big Five will describe that the reason you decided to go to a new restaurant was because you were high in openness and low in neuroticism, the MBTI can describe you being told about the restaurant activating through your extraverted sensing and you assessing whether you would enjoy it through introverted sensing (looking at similar past situations) and introverted intuition (imagining the likely course of events that would play out if you decided to go there). That is by any account a much more in depth view of cognition than can be provided through the Big Five. This simple classification of cognitive functions seems to have quite a lot of validity in terms of how people actually think—I would not take that lightly.
What I am wondering reading the first paragraph is: Why did you choose to ‘defend’ MBTI this particular way? If you could explain this, I believe some interesting connections would surface.
First, I described the issue with the current model (the Big Five).
If you want to propose a new model, you have to first show where the current model is flawed.
Second, I described what anecdotal evidence I had to support my model (the MBTI).
If you want to propose people research something, you’ll have better luck if you first show some anecdotal evidence to suggest your hypothesis is correct.
Third, I described why this matters (because understanding cognition is the holy grail of psychology).
If you want to propose people research something, you’ll have better luck if you explain why the research matters in a broader sense. For this point, we could imagine how I could talk about the importance to managers in professional settings and to people’s personal relationships to be able to understand their and others’ cognition accurately.
And also maybe give a written answer to why you chose the title.
I believe the original title was something like “An Open-Minded Exploration of the Nature of Cognition” but I changed it to “In Defense of the MBTI” to more accurately represent the thesis of my post that the field of psychology should look into these MBTI-adjacent theories further. For that, I realized I needed to defend the MBTI especially given how bad the MBTI test itself is. Basically, I felt like a bunch of corner cutting by MBTI theorists had led people in the field of psychology to write it off entirely and that the MBTI needed to be defended so that it wasn’t equated with the work of all these corner cutters (including the Myers-Briggs company itself) which are commonly associated with the MBTI.
The second feedback I have is with regard to the last paragraph. Where you urge more psychology research on the area, as well as inform us about sites relevant to the field of “MBTI-adjacent theories”. Here I am wondering what the direct link between your title, your intention and writing this paragraph is.
Unfortuantely, I haven’t yet seen a scientific exploration of all the things posited in these MBTI-adjacent theories but I think it is pretty clear that the field of psychology needs to start taking this seriously, looking into the nature of cognition, not just looking at what people answer to simple questions on tests because of the flaws of that method. There are a lot more to these theories than I have covered in this post. Some good resources to learn more about these theories are CS Joseph’s YouTube channel and alittlebitofpersonality.com.
This last paragraph relates to my intention with writing this post which was as a call to action for these theories to be studied through experimental methods and to be developed further so we can develop models for describing cognition ever more accurately. Since I felt like the MBTI is a good starting point for understanding cognition, I thought that by defending the MBTI here on LessWrong, this would be studied further and psychology would be able to develop its understanding of the brain rapidly. I watched a video a while back on paradigms (sadly it seems it is gone) but it is where the paradigm shifts where science is able to make progress and people are consistently unwilling to change paradigm but that is where what I would call real science happens. I gave links to these MBTI-adjacent theories so people could take a look for themselves.
However, the overall feeling I get from reading your post, isn’t that it is a post with a specific goal, using one particular method, but a post using several simultaneously. It is an expression of the direction of your own thoughts, beliefs and ideas; a meta-overview of your reasoning behind your support for an improvement of the MBTI. Moreover, it is like a meta-dialogue with imagined opponents in the Big Five vs MBTI debate. Thirdly, it is exploratory and open-ended with regard to cognition and MBTI. So it has a lot going on at the same time. Which brings me to my next point, acknowledgment.
I tried my best to write the post without an agenda other than finding what cognition is really about, trying to see reality as it really is at the essence of science. I would say this is only secondary to another tennet of science which is broadening your horizons beyond what is already the consensus and being willing to look beyond the Overton window for things beyond what people think could possibly be true.
I could have said I think this theory is true and that one isn’t, but really I have no idea. That’s why I decided it was better to write this post to explain the direction I took in trying to understand cognition, and from there, others could benefit and hopefully me too. The MBTI vs Big Five debate was a reflection of my reasoning as to which one was a better starting point for understanding cognition.
Even though you could say your post needs sharpening and precision, the way I see it, it is more important to acknowledge it as an expression of your versatility in understanding and your ability to juggle different things simultaneously.
I would say my post could do with sharpening but it’s not really within my ability set to be able to do that sharpening myself. I wrote the post mostly to provide information to others who are better at that so that they could study cognition further. I definitely juggled a lot in this post and I think it’s important for science to move forward that we have people who can explore lots of different theories and see which ones make more sense, and also the people who study the theories more in depth to find the nitty gritty issues and can refine them all into a more comprehensive theory. (In the MBTI theory as I understand it, the first group would be the Te users and the second group would be the Ti users.) Both are necessary for science to move forward.
You have already discovered things I wasn’t aware of, and I believe that if you continue, your contribution will undoubtedly be even more substantial.
I think a lot of that is just having a commitment to trying to see things as they really are. As I mentioned in another comment, I had the affirmation: “I do not limit my horizons”. This was vital and I believe the attitude to explore things instead of limiting where you will explore is vital. Anyway, thank you for you comment as it gives me the inspiration to continue working on this and myself in general in terms of keeping a horizon-not-limiting attitude.
I also believe that many of your paragraphs are seeds that can sprout into interesting texts, if given the attention.
If you have any ideas, let me know.
And finally, some of my thoughts: ”CS Joseph theorizes that the cognitive functions are something like 100 rpm − 75 rpm − 50 rpm − 25 rpm − 20 rpm − 15 rpm − 10 rpm − 5 rpm”
In my own experience, when I experiment with developing functions directly, I can affirm both Jung- and Joseph’s claims to a certain degree. There is an underlying dynamic between all the functions, and they are not operating at the same speed. And I also agree with CS Joseph in that these limitations aren’t necessarily bad, they open up for human relationships and collaboration, to complement each other.
Yeah, CS Joseph extends the original theories of Jung as well as those of others who were expanding on Jung’s theories. It is definitely an interesting question if you could, let’s say, get 35 rpm of each function or you could get this spiral pattern of 100 rpm all the way down to 5 rpm, which would be better? Of course, I’m not really sure if that would be possible because of economies of scale within a cognitive function in the brain, but if that is a good model, it is rather interesting that evolution chose that over having 35 rpm of each, and I can definitely see the advantage, especially when you consider that humans are social animals so they can complement each other.
I could say more, but to keep it withing the bounds of your text, I’ll stop here.
Don’t limit your horizons or mine for that matter.
I hope this comment is useful to you in some way, and welcome you, as a senior newbie, to the site. :)
I appreciate that you took the effort to write it and it definitely gives me more inspiration to work on this. As I said, if you have ideas for elaborations on this, let me know.
thanks for this extensive reply to my comment. I must say, I was impressed by your reasoning and answers to my comment. Here I will respond by giving my thoughts on what might be more in line with LessWrong, with regard to your post, and also extend on my thoughts on what you wrote more at the end of your comment as well.
Below are excerpts from your answer to when I asked for elaborations on your intentions, going from 1-3 I’ll start with that first, as well as your answer to why you chose to defend MBTI this way. (My text in bold)
1. Why we should look beyond the Big Five for information on cognition.
I wrote this post in response to someone who said that the MBTI was inferior to the Big Five because it was less scientific. I just wanted to explain why we had to broaden our horizons a bit and have an honest look at the differences between the MBTI and the Big Five, and what we could expect to get out of both.
2. Comment on why you stick to MBTI contrary to what people believe.
So, when you combine that the Big Five isn’t that good of a theory with the anecdotal evidence that the MBTI is better than the Big Five when you compare people with the same traits in both, it makes sense to conclude that the MBTI is the better theory.
3. Describe the real reason, which is related to the reality of cognition.
Here I explain that the real reason I believe the MBTI might be worth taking a look at is because if you open-mindedly explore what the brain does, the MBTI just at an obvious level seems much closer to describing what it does than the Big Five.
What I am wondering reading the first paragraph is: Why did you choose to ‘defend’ MBTI this particular way? If you could explain this, I believe some interesting connections would surface.
First, I described the issue with the current model (the Big Five).
If you want to propose a new model, you have to first show where the current model is flawed.
Second, I described what anecdotal evidence I had to support my model (the MBTI).
If you want to propose people research something, you’ll have better luck if you first show some anecdotal evidence to suggest your hypothesis is correct.
Third, I described why this matters (because understanding cognition is the holy grail of psychology).
If you want to propose people research something, you’ll have better luck if you explain why the research matters in a broader sense.
In the FAQ of LW, they write that this site is dedicated to: ”LessWrong is a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. [...] “
With regard to sharpening, I’ll get right to it. I believe it might be better if you wrote this post somewhat differently. I want more of your reasoning process, I want more of what you know, and what I believe will have to go is writing this with the intention of reaching researchers. On the FAQ I have linked above, there isn’t a focus on research per se, which is the only thing that you have written about here I do not find fits with the overall intention of LW.
Firstly, do I believe the Big Five is a great theory of cognition? As pointed out on another comment here, it is focused on behavior, not cognition. Still, I am not familiar with it. When you say you want to point out its flaws, I see the point you make, but if we assume you are the expert, how well do you know the Big Five, and what specifically are its flaws? If you aren’t that familiar with it, maybe you can latch this part of your text onto what others have written here on LW. If you use the search function, maybe there are some posts that are useful, that you can use as a springboard for your approach. In my opinion, your claim with regard to Big Five doesn’t seem wrong, but if you want to use it as a foundation for why MBTI is a better option, I believe it would improve by being solidified.
Secondly, I do not want you to write to convince potential researchers, but to compel to other LW users. In other words, if you can choose one thing you want to get across from the MBTI, what would it be? What if you, with regard to this one thing, focuses on what the MBTI itself say and aligns that with your anecdotal evidence. To say that MBTI is Better than Big Five in general is a very strong claim. Rationality-wise, I understand strong claims to similarly need strong evidence. On the other hand, if you make a ‘smaller’ claim, it is reasonable with less evidence. If you ‘just’ want to convince people that MBTI can be ‘useful’, I believe that is viable. The point is that your claim will have to rest on your arguments alone, and it is better if the claims fit the strength of the evidence.
Thirdly, I would have liked for you to write a bit about cognition in your text, and how you view it. You explain about its importance, for impressing aliens and true self-understanding, but I am not seeing a direct link between MBTI and cognition that extends beyond MBTI being part of cognition, and I was hoping for more substance to it. Cognition is a big part of your text as well, so I believe there need to some foundation-building here as well. And using references if something has already been written that you like here on LW, I believe, is a big plus.
The below two answers from you, I believe, is great, and I would love to see it in your text somehow.
I tried my best to write the post without an agenda other than finding what cognition is really about, trying to see reality as it really is at the essence of science. I would say this is only secondary to another tennet of science which is broadening your horizons beyond what is already the consensus and being willing to look beyond the Overton window for things beyond what people think could possibly be true.
I could have said I think this theory is true and that one isn’t, but really I have no idea. That’s why I decided it was better to write this post to explain the direction I took in trying to understand cognition, and from there, others could benefit and hopefully me too. The MBTI vs Big Five debate was a reflection of my reasoning as to which one was a better starting point for understanding cognition.
I definitely juggled a lot in this post and I think it’s important for science to move forward that we have people who can explore lots of different theories and see which ones make more sense, and also the people who study the theories more in depth to find the nitty gritty issues and can refine them all into a more comprehensive theory. (In the MBTI theory as I understand it, the first group would be the Te users and the second group would be the Ti users.) Both are necessary for science to move forward.
I believe we will have to be those people, and moreover I hope we one day will add in the FI and Fe just as casually and effortlessly as we do the Te and Ti, when building a theory like this.
In my own experience, when I experiment with developing functions directly, I can affirm both Jung- and Joseph’s claims to a certain degree. There is an underlying dynamic between all the functions, and they are not operating at the same speed. And I also agree with CS Joseph in that these limitations aren’t necessarily bad, they open up for human relationships and collaboration, to complement each other.
Yeah, CS Joseph extends the original theories of Jung as well as those of others who were expanding on Jung’s theories. It is definitely an interesting question if you could, let’s say, get 35 rpm of each function or you could get this spiral pattern of 100 rpm all the way down to 5 rpm, which would be better? Of course, I’m not really sure if that would be possible because of economies of scale within a cognitive function in the brain, but if that is a good model, it is rather interesting that evolution chose that over having 35 rpm of each, and I can definitely see the advantage, especially when you consider that humans are social animals so they can complement each other.
I could say more, but to keep it withing the bounds of your text, I’ll stop here.
Don’t limit your horizons or mine for that matter.
Yeah, I have no idea why things are the way they are. I guess with regard to MBTI, I find it interesting that I, as an ENTP, didn’t like MBTI at first. At all. And still find it clunky, and I do not feel very inclined to read about it much atm, but I have no troubles using it as a reference-point in something as important as my relationship.
I did talk a couple of months with someone that was into NVC, a model that focuses on connecting feelings to needs. I’m pretty sure they were an ESTP. We delved into ‘intuition’ territory, me saying things like “Your inner child wants something”, and to my surprise, we could have a conversation around that, and even role-play inner parts. When looking at this from an MBTI perspective, I have noticed that it is in many instances much more fruitful to communicate from similarly less developed functions, than trying to see everything from our primary. Maybe some of our feelings arein other functions, and being there directly works so much better than working on it from a distance.
I have a lot of questions regarding MBTI, and there are nuances I do find missing. Still, I find it useful as a framework, and something to work upon and improve. However, as a person that likes to introspect and understand myself, I wouldn’t say MBTI is a very easy model to understand or apply. With NVC for example, it is hard to connect to and differentiate many feelings, but it is doable. There is this kind of feedback from the body/mind when you speak the right note, so to speak. It is harder still to connect those accurately to the fundamental needs. But comparatively, it was and is still way, way easier than consciously choosing to be in a cognitive function other than the two primaries.
I appreciate that you took the effort to write it and it definitely gives me more inspiration to work on this. As I said, if you have ideas for elaborations on this, let me know.
Kindly, one Z followed by five more
Thank you for saying so. I believe commenting is also very useful, and I enjoy it and find it useful. Giving you this feedback also helps me single out things I find interesting, and has some value to me.
Hello ZZZZZZ,
welcome to the forum and kudos for writing your first post.
My intention in writing this comment is to provide constructive feedback, which I am doing because I find your text, but more so, your sincerity, curiosity and openness welcoming. Furthermore, I am similarly interested in MBTI and its applications, and I want to acknowledge your effort.
And I’ll get right to it. The title you chose was “In defense of the MBTI”. This is your opening paragraph:
And this is the ending.
Your opening paragraph explains neatly the three intentions you have for this text:
1. Why we should look beyond the Big Five for information on cognition.
2. Comment on why you stick to MBTI contrary to what people believe.
3. Describe the real reason, which is related to the reality of cognition.
What I am wondering reading the first paragraph is: Why did you choose to ‘defend’ MBTI this particular way? If you could explain this, I believe some interesting connections would surface. And also maybe give a written answer to why you chose the title.
The second feedback I have is with regard to the last paragraph. Where you urge more psychology research on the area, as well as inform us about sites relevant to the field of “MBTI-adjacent theories”. Here I am wondering what the direct link between your title, your intention and writing this paragraph is.
However, the overall feeling I get from reading your post, isn’t that it is a post with a specific goal, using one particular method, but a post using several simultaneously. It is an expression of the direction of your own thoughts, beliefs and ideas; a meta-overview of your reasoning behind your support for an improvement of the MBTI. Moreover, it is like a meta-dialogue with imagined opponents in the Big Five vs MBTI debate. Thirdly, it is exploratory and open-ended with regard to cognition and MBTI. So it has a lot going on at the same time.
Which brings me to my next point, acknowledgment. Even though you could say your post needs sharpening and precision, the way I see it, it is more important to acknowledge it as an expression of your versatility in understanding and your ability to juggle different things simultaneously. You have already discovered things I wasn’t aware of, and I believe that if you continue, your contribution will undoubtedly be even more substantial. I also believe that many of your paragraphs are seeds that can sprout into interesting texts, if given the attention.
And finally, some of my thoughts:
”CS Joseph theorizes that the cognitive functions are something like 100 rpm − 75 rpm − 50 rpm − 25 rpm − 20 rpm − 15 rpm − 10 rpm − 5 rpm”
I looked at the video, and this is a continuation of the original thoughts of Jung, as far as I know. From ‘Hero’ through ‘Demon’
https://www.careerplanner.com/8CognitiveFunctions/Cognitive-Functions-Simply-Explained.cfm (I’m not familiar with this site, or endorse it, it just had a nice overview to show all the personality types as well as all their functions.)
In my own experience, when I experiment with developing functions directly, I can affirm both Jung- and Joseph’s claims to a certain degree. There is an underlying dynamic between all the functions, and they are not operating at the same speed. And I also agree with CS Joseph in that these limitations aren’t necessarily bad, they open up for human relationships and collaboration, to complement each other.
I could say more, but to keep it withing the bounds of your text, I’ll stop here.
I hope this comment is useful to you in some way, and welcome you, as a senior newbie, to the site. :)
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Hi Caerulea, thanks for your good questions. I will try my best to answer your questions here.
I wrote this post in response to someone who said that the MBTI was inferior to the Big Five because it was less scientific. I just wanted to explain why we had to broaden our horizons a bit and have an honest look at the differences between the MBTI and the Big Five, and what we could expect to get out of both. I think that if the field of psychology would broaden their horizons a bit, we could make a lot of progress on the science of cognition. There an infinite number of different theories of cognition that could be proposed. I just think that by explaining some issues with the Big Five, I could encourage people to take a look at new theories. Just asking 200 questions of a human and finding correlations is pretty clearly not going to result in not going to result in the be all and end all of psychology. Maybe if you trained a neural network on the answers to those questions, looking at the weights might give us more insight, but just looking for simple correlations is clearly going to result in a very shallow understanding of the brain. More advanced aliens than us wouldn’t be impressed if they saw that our understanding of cognition was limited to some researcher asking a bunch of random questions and finding a few factors that could predict how people would answer the questions to a limited degree.
This point leads straight from point one which is that the Big Five really isn’t that great. Given that, I am completely open to exploring any theory of cognition I come across. There could always be more theories to explore but the MBTI is by far the most promising theory I have come across. I find that if you can find multiple people of the same MBTI type, you can notice a lot of similarities. That seems to me like strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that it is a good model. If you want to try this experiment for yourself, you can go to CS Joseph’s list here or you can try with A Little Bit of Personality’s list here (scroll to the bottom of the article). They both have their own theories for subtypes as well to give a more comprehensive picture, CS Joseph has Octagram and A Little Bit of Personality has subtypes (you have to create a free account to view). So, when you combine that the Big Five isn’t that good of a theory with the anecdotal evidence that the MBTI is better than the Big Five when you compare people with the same traits in both, it makes sense to conclude that the MBTI is the better theory.
Here I explain that the real reason I believe the MBTI might be worth taking a look at is because if you open-mindedly explore what the brain does, the MBTI just at an obvious level seems much closer to describing what it does than the Big Five. While the Big Five will describe that the reason you decided to go to a new restaurant was because you were high in openness and low in neuroticism, the MBTI can describe you being told about the restaurant activating through your extraverted sensing and you assessing whether you would enjoy it through introverted sensing (looking at similar past situations) and introverted intuition (imagining the likely course of events that would play out if you decided to go there). That is by any account a much more in depth view of cognition than can be provided through the Big Five. This simple classification of cognitive functions seems to have quite a lot of validity in terms of how people actually think—I would not take that lightly.
First, I described the issue with the current model (the Big Five).
If you want to propose a new model, you have to first show where the current model is flawed.
Second, I described what anecdotal evidence I had to support my model (the MBTI).
If you want to propose people research something, you’ll have better luck if you first show some anecdotal evidence to suggest your hypothesis is correct.
Third, I described why this matters (because understanding cognition is the holy grail of psychology).
If you want to propose people research something, you’ll have better luck if you explain why the research matters in a broader sense. For this point, we could imagine how I could talk about the importance to managers in professional settings and to people’s personal relationships to be able to understand their and others’ cognition accurately.
I believe the original title was something like “An Open-Minded Exploration of the Nature of Cognition” but I changed it to “In Defense of the MBTI” to more accurately represent the thesis of my post that the field of psychology should look into these MBTI-adjacent theories further. For that, I realized I needed to defend the MBTI especially given how bad the MBTI test itself is. Basically, I felt like a bunch of corner cutting by MBTI theorists had led people in the field of psychology to write it off entirely and that the MBTI needed to be defended so that it wasn’t equated with the work of all these corner cutters (including the Myers-Briggs company itself) which are commonly associated with the MBTI.
This last paragraph relates to my intention with writing this post which was as a call to action for these theories to be studied through experimental methods and to be developed further so we can develop models for describing cognition ever more accurately. Since I felt like the MBTI is a good starting point for understanding cognition, I thought that by defending the MBTI here on LessWrong, this would be studied further and psychology would be able to develop its understanding of the brain rapidly. I watched a video a while back on paradigms (sadly it seems it is gone) but it is where the paradigm shifts where science is able to make progress and people are consistently unwilling to change paradigm but that is where what I would call real science happens. I gave links to these MBTI-adjacent theories so people could take a look for themselves.
I tried my best to write the post without an agenda other than finding what cognition is really about, trying to see reality as it really is at the essence of science. I would say this is only secondary to another tennet of science which is broadening your horizons beyond what is already the consensus and being willing to look beyond the Overton window for things beyond what people think could possibly be true.
I could have said I think this theory is true and that one isn’t, but really I have no idea. That’s why I decided it was better to write this post to explain the direction I took in trying to understand cognition, and from there, others could benefit and hopefully me too. The MBTI vs Big Five debate was a reflection of my reasoning as to which one was a better starting point for understanding cognition.
I would say my post could do with sharpening but it’s not really within my ability set to be able to do that sharpening myself. I wrote the post mostly to provide information to others who are better at that so that they could study cognition further. I definitely juggled a lot in this post and I think it’s important for science to move forward that we have people who can explore lots of different theories and see which ones make more sense, and also the people who study the theories more in depth to find the nitty gritty issues and can refine them all into a more comprehensive theory. (In the MBTI theory as I understand it, the first group would be the Te users and the second group would be the Ti users.) Both are necessary for science to move forward.
I think a lot of that is just having a commitment to trying to see things as they really are. As I mentioned in another comment, I had the affirmation: “I do not limit my horizons”. This was vital and I believe the attitude to explore things instead of limiting where you will explore is vital. Anyway, thank you for you comment as it gives me the inspiration to continue working on this and myself in general in terms of keeping a horizon-not-limiting attitude.
If you have any ideas, let me know.
Yeah, CS Joseph extends the original theories of Jung as well as those of others who were expanding on Jung’s theories. It is definitely an interesting question if you could, let’s say, get 35 rpm of each function or you could get this spiral pattern of 100 rpm all the way down to 5 rpm, which would be better? Of course, I’m not really sure if that would be possible because of economies of scale within a cognitive function in the brain, but if that is a good model, it is rather interesting that evolution chose that over having 35 rpm of each, and I can definitely see the advantage, especially when you consider that humans are social animals so they can complement each other.
Don’t limit your horizons or mine for that matter.
I appreciate that you took the effort to write it and it definitely gives me more inspiration to work on this. As I said, if you have ideas for elaborations on this, let me know.
Kindly, one Z followed by five more
Hello Z followed by five more,
thanks for this extensive reply to my comment. I must say, I was impressed by your reasoning and answers to my comment. Here I will respond by giving my thoughts on what might be more in line with LessWrong, with regard to your post, and also extend on my thoughts on what you wrote more at the end of your comment as well.
Below are excerpts from your answer to when I asked for elaborations on your intentions, going from 1-3 I’ll start with that first, as well as your answer to why you chose to defend MBTI this way. (My text in bold)
In the FAQ of LW, they write that this site is dedicated to:
”LessWrong is a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. [...] “
With regard to sharpening, I’ll get right to it. I believe it might be better if you wrote this post somewhat differently. I want more of your reasoning process, I want more of what you know, and what I believe will have to go is writing this with the intention of reaching researchers. On the FAQ I have linked above, there isn’t a focus on research per se, which is the only thing that you have written about here I do not find fits with the overall intention of LW.
Firstly, do I believe the Big Five is a great theory of cognition? As pointed out on another comment here, it is focused on behavior, not cognition. Still, I am not familiar with it. When you say you want to point out its flaws, I see the point you make, but if we assume you are the expert, how well do you know the Big Five, and what specifically are its flaws? If you aren’t that familiar with it, maybe you can latch this part of your text onto what others have written here on LW. If you use the search function, maybe there are some posts that are useful, that you can use as a springboard for your approach. In my opinion, your claim with regard to Big Five doesn’t seem wrong, but if you want to use it as a foundation for why MBTI is a better option, I believe it would improve by being solidified.
Secondly, I do not want you to write to convince potential researchers, but to compel to other LW users. In other words, if you can choose one thing you want to get across from the MBTI, what would it be? What if you, with regard to this one thing, focuses on what the MBTI itself say and aligns that with your anecdotal evidence.
To say that MBTI is Better than Big Five in general is a very strong claim. Rationality-wise, I understand strong claims to similarly need strong evidence. On the other hand, if you make a ‘smaller’ claim, it is reasonable with less evidence. If you ‘just’ want to convince people that MBTI can be ‘useful’, I believe that is viable. The point is that your claim will have to rest on your arguments alone, and it is better if the claims fit the strength of the evidence.
Thirdly, I would have liked for you to write a bit about cognition in your text, and how you view it. You explain about its importance, for impressing aliens and true self-understanding, but I am not seeing a direct link between MBTI and cognition that extends beyond MBTI being part of cognition, and I was hoping for more substance to it. Cognition is a big part of your text as well, so I believe there need to some foundation-building here as well. And using references if something has already been written that you like here on LW, I believe, is a big plus.
The below two answers from you, I believe, is great, and I would love to see it in your text somehow.
I believe we will have to be those people, and moreover I hope we one day will add in the FI and Fe just as casually and effortlessly as we do the Te and Ti, when building a theory like this.
Yeah, I have no idea why things are the way they are. I guess with regard to MBTI, I find it interesting that I, as an ENTP, didn’t like MBTI at first. At all. And still find it clunky, and I do not feel very inclined to read about it much atm, but I have no troubles using it as a reference-point in something as important as my relationship.
I did talk a couple of months with someone that was into NVC, a model that focuses on connecting feelings to needs. I’m pretty sure they were an ESTP. We delved into ‘intuition’ territory, me saying things like “Your inner child wants something”, and to my surprise, we could have a conversation around that, and even role-play inner parts. When looking at this from an MBTI perspective, I have noticed that it is in many instances much more fruitful to communicate from similarly less developed functions, than trying to see everything from our primary. Maybe some of our feelings are in other functions, and being there directly works so much better than working on it from a distance.
I have a lot of questions regarding MBTI, and there are nuances I do find missing. Still, I find it useful as a framework, and something to work upon and improve. However, as a person that likes to introspect and understand myself, I wouldn’t say MBTI is a very easy model to understand or apply. With NVC for example, it is hard to connect to and differentiate many feelings, but it is doable. There is this kind of feedback from the body/mind when you speak the right note, so to speak. It is harder still to connect those accurately to the fundamental needs. But comparatively, it was and is still way, way easier than consciously choosing to be in a cognitive function other than the two primaries.
Thank you for saying so. I believe commenting is also very useful, and I enjoy it and find it useful. Giving you this feedback also helps me single out things I find interesting, and has some value to me.
I hope this is useful to you somehow.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence