See, I genuinely don’t know whether you’re joking or not.

This is such a weird little thing, but I write in an online journal app every day, and I had the thought last night, “What if I played with the font and text to make it pink and feminine-looking?”

This feels like a joke, and maybe it sounds like a joke, but for some reason, typing with a pink, slightly-more-girly font made me feel a bit “lighter”. It is so weird. For some reason, I have this association between visually customizing the everyday things around you (e.g. using colourful pens and notebooks, putting stickers on things) as being very “girly”, in a way that I used to avoid, and am, deep into my adulthood, finally starting to embrace.

Somewhere down at the 10th level: The parts in Sonic the Hedgehog where Sonic is about to drown underwater and the music gets really fast and dramatic.

I was thinking Rob Reiner from the thumbnail.

I visited the Wikipedia article on Henry Kissinger, and I noticed this sentence:

In contrast, Kissinger is an immensely beloved figure within China, with China News Service describing him in his obituary as someone “who had a sharp vision and a thorough understanding of world affairs”.[11][12]

What’s the deal with that?

From the original article:

Transit: Five percent of U.S. commuters use transit to get to work. New York City, with its extensive subway and rail system, is the big outlier here—more than 30 percent of workers get to their jobs by transit in greater New York City. The only other metros where 10 percent or more of workers commute via transit are San Francisco (17.4 percent); Boston (13.4 percent); D.C. (12.8 percent); Chicago (12.3 percent); Seattle (10.1 percent); and Bridgeport-Stamford, Connecticut (10 percent).

So, New York is a big outlier at over 30%, the rest of the big cities have between 10 and 20%, and there aren’t any cities with 20-30%.

What are all the cities? I can point out some on a map easily, but not others.

I see Seattle, Portland, New York City, Boston, and Chicago for sure. Possibly Pittsburgh, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and maybe Springfield Illinois? A bunch of them are hard to tell without the state borders.

The school I’m a grad student at is still on strike. Some faculty aren’t on board, but some are, including a history professor who specializes in labour studies. He played a bit of banjo at the picket line yesterday.

Thanks. 1 and 2 should make people suspicious of the theory, but don’t necessarily invalidate it. 3, on its own, should be enough for most people to reasonably dismiss her work (assuming scientists haven’t been systematically biased for the past 80 years).

I guess I’m more interested in the moving parts of WHY the theory is invalid (hearing that a million studies show a certain result is certainly strong evidence, but it’s not the same thing as an explanation). In the case of astrology, knowing literally anything about what stars and planets are makes it obvious that they don’t determine people’s destinies. Whereas I suspect most people would be unable to give a technical answer as to why scientists don’t take MBTI seriously, but DO take the Five Factors Model seriously.

after listing 3 reasons, you only focused on 1 and try to use the other reasons as weapons against it.

Can you clarify this?

Thinking about this further, I do want to acknowledge that I’ve failed to consider the element of power. Astrology is incorrect, but there’s not really a system of power that’s using astrology to oppress people, whereas there IS an infrastructure for using MBTI to oppress people.

I’m sorry to have spent so much effort nitpicking about this.

But honestly, “I think you’re dismissing MBTI for mostly correct but imperfect reasons, whereas my reasons for dismissing it are better reasons” is not a hill that strikes me as worth dying on, so I’m going to tap out here.

Putting aside the much longer and complex discussion that all science can be shaped by racism, anything that specifically involves psychology or sociology absolutely can and must be examined and invalidated for racist (or homophobic, transphobic, etc) history or we are just reinforcing white supremacy.

Sure, but that’s not the same thing as saying “This person said something racist, therefore we don’t need any other evidence to refute anything else they’ve ever said”. (The phrase “critical support” exists for a reason – sometimes people who are wrong about one thing are right about another). You mentioned that MBTI has been dismissed as pseudoscience by scientists for 80 years. I’m pretty sure those scientists were more rigorous than just “This person wrote a racist novel, therefore their argument is invalid”.

No need to fall back on fallacies.

I’m a bit confused by this. Are you saying I’m committing a fallacy (and if so, which one?) Or are you criticizing me for pointing out your fallacy (“This person was bad, therefore their theory is wrong” is just about the most textbook example of the genetic fallacy imaginable).

I don’t think MBTI is invalid because of it’s history (if I did that, I’d have to be opposed to EVERYTHING that has something bad in its history). I think it’s invalid for other reasons that I’ve discussed in other comments. I don’t think being a leftist means I have to be imprecise.

Yes, I’m aware of the history of MBTI as well. How does this interact with anything I’ve said?

Actually, I want to go back to this comment. It’s been my experience that there are a lot of people who dismiss MBTI for the wrong reasons, usually out of incuriosity.

The reason I’m not a fan of MBTI isn’t because of a vague sense of it being pseudoscientific or because I’m dismissive of the idea of people using personality tests to understand themselves. The reason I’m not a fan of MBTI is because it gets taken seriously by schools and businesses even though I’m not convinced the results have any predictive power, which is kind of important if people want to consider it a scientific test. For example, the reason Mendeleev’s period table was important wasn’t because he put the elements in an arbitrary order – anyone could have done that. The periodic table was important because it revealed something meaningful about chemistry and could be used to predict the properties of elements that hadn’t been discovered yet. In contrast the MBTI doesn’t really predict anything, it just divides results up in an arbitrary way.

But at least in the case of MBTI, the act of answering questions about one’s behaviour might be a useful exercise in introspection, even if the result is meaningless. It may be useful in the way that I described tarot cards as being useful. I don’t see anything in astrology that even manages to be THAT engaging.

I can understand the appeal of cold readings better than I can understand the appeal of astrology.

When I answer the questions one way, I get one result. When I answer the questions another way, I get another result. So, yes, my behaviour has some causal interaction with the result in a way that it doesn’t with my star sign.