They're pseudoscience that businesses continue to pay to bring into their offices for questionable benefits. They may as well simply hire fortune tellers.
Some of MB (E-I axis) correlates with Big 5, which is the golden standard for personality trait testing. Dismissing MB as complete voodoo is a hipster affectation.
> Although popular in the business sector, the MBTI exhibits significant psychometric deficiencies, notably including poor validity (i.e. not measuring what it purports to measure, not having predictive power or not having items that can be generalized), poor reliability (giving different results for the same person on different occasions), measuring categories that are not independent (some dichotomous traits have been noted to correlate with each other), and not being comprehensive (due to missing neuroticism).
An inaccurate measure like this being used for things like career tracks is worse than nothing.
What I'm reading here is that the best thing it does is tell us whether someone is introverted or extroverted. Well, that's also the most obvious one and I don't agree that that justifies using such a flawed test. If you have a test where half the results and half are bad the test is more or less useless.
> I began to read through the evidence, and I found that the MBTI is about as useful as a polygraph for detecting lies. One researcher even called it an “act of irresponsible armchair philosophy.” When it comes to accuracy, if you put a horoscope on one end and a heart monitor on the other, the MBTI falls about halfway in between. [...] Research shows “that as many as three-quarters of test takers achieve a different personality type when tested again,” writes Annie Murphy Paul in The Cult of Personality Testing, “and the sixteen distinctive types described by the Myers-Briggs have no scientific basis whatsoever.” In a recent article, Roman Krznaric adds that “if you retake the test after only a five-week gap, there's around a 50% chance that you will fall into a different personality category.”
That's among the sources cited by the article you're dismissing:
> As personality psychologists Robert McCrae and Paul Costa sum it up, “the MBTI does not give comprehensive information on the four domains it does sample.”
As I said, a sometimes-reliable survey with wild variance that poorly measures what it purports to is worse than nothing because it gives false confidence in someone's hunch. The MBTI test was not constructed in any scientifically rigorous way and if it accurately correlates to anything it's an accident.
