Originally posted by RanAS
well, if anything the mbti functions (only the functions, not the letters) actually helped me understand myself a bit, but there's still a bunch of things that it doesn't explain or that creates contradictions depending on other's own interpretations of mbti, so ultimately i only really use it for basic self-reflection
it serves as a starting point, but not as a conclusion
My functions are almost NTFS, but not quite.
i'm a layperson (i've spent 0 seconds in academia, ever, in my life) so take everything i'm saying with a gigantic mountain of salt, but my understanding is that jungian functions, foundational for myers-briggs, are at best unproven. from a neuroscientific perspective, while individual researchers have claimed observation of cognitive functions in the brain, there's been no consensus observation of their existence
or at least, that's my understanding. i've had to learn all of this on my own because the guy who brought to my attention that the MBTI was pseudoscientific didn't give any explanation or rationalization, he just mocked me (again, probably deservedly, but it did leave me with no real further understanding... i didn't even really understand falsifiability at the time so idk how i was supposed to have worked all this out already)
in general, older psychiatric theories can be ignored, tbh. they're all based on imprecise, weak observations at best and at worst are preformed sexist bullshit notions about how people work disguised as observational (freud)
i think the problem with myers-briggs contra something like astrology is myers-briggs assumes a framework of scientific understanding by attaching itself to a scientific discipline (psychology) and astrology doesn't assert itself as working within a scientific understanding of the world, more of an intuitive one, so i actually think it's better at what it's trying to accomplish
still, i understand how they can be useful for self-understanding -- when i was a teenager/young adult and trying to become my own person, i found the MBTI and later learned about cognitive functions and it actually helped me sort of crystallize a self-understanding that i'd sort of been feeling pulled in the direction of... but i'm not sure i can attribute that to anything that those theories accomplished, and it's more that i was using the "language" of those things to express my own understanding of my own personality traits
anyways hi sorry for the long post whew
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