Victor,
I am not disagreeing (or agreeing) with you. All I am saying is that in order to debate something with you I need to have details. If I don't have details I don't have anything to craft an argument aaround.
For example, why is it concidered invalid and unreliable? I don't want any circular logic. By that I mean things like "it is concidered unreliable because it is unreliable." These are statements that don't really explain or add any more information.
I get the impression you hold your beliefs based on what qualified psychometricains believe (or don't believe). What I want to know is why they feel it is unreliable and invalid. Something more that "because it is." Surely the must have good reasons for believing this, but so far you haven't given us any.
What specifically is wrong with it? Is it the idea that everyone fits into one of 16 categories? Is it the idea that personality is constant? The choice of function? The descriptions of the functions? The way the functions alternate between i and e? Is it the test itself (rather than the personality type theory) you find flawed? All of the above? Something else?
And for the parts you object to, I want to see the "why" behind it, was is the reasoning? Is it based on logic, personal experience, ideals, something else?
An aside about astrology: I don't believe in astrology, but that decision was not based on astronomers not believing in it. I am simply agreeing with them, not believing something because they convinced me.
Ilah
I try to base my beliefs on the evidence - what do you do?
For instance, just now, an extensive test of astrology has been published. And found there is no connection between star sign and compatibility.
Psychometricians write personality tests that rigourously follow the principles of validity and reliability. Then they rigourously test them against the evidence.
MBTI was written without any concern for validity and reliability and was not tested against the evidence.
Unfortunately when you or I compare MBTI against our personal experience we get false positives. And we take this as evidence when it is merely anecdotal.
This is exactly what happens with astrology - we compare astrological predictions against our own experience and get false positives - this is very reinforcing so we keep coming back again and again, like millions of others, to astrology. But astrology is simply a confidence trick like MBTI.
When we keep getting false positives, we intuitively feel them to be true just as for 200,000 years we believed the earth was flat because our senses gave us false positives.
But with the Enlightenment we started to ask for evidence for belief. This has been deeply unsettling for intuitive belief. And so a reaction set in called the Romantic Movement and the New Age Movement is part of the Romantic Movement.
And it is nice and comfortable and even exciting to be Romantic but it is not scientific - anymore than MBTI is scientific.
I understand this is unsettling for you, particularly as you have found MBTI to be personally helpful.
I don't like to unsettle you. But Galileo was unsettling by looking through his telescope and concluding the earth went round the sun. Pasteur was unsettling with his discovery of germs. The discovery of the periodic table was unsettling. Darwin's discovery of the origin of species was extremely unsettling. Einstein unsettled our whole view of the universe. And we can be further expected to be unsettled by the evidence as it is discovered.
Adam Smith completely unsettled our view of economics. Politics was completely unsettled by liberal democracy and the limitation of power. Why, our own Germaine Greer unsettled our gender relations. Our relations with children have been unsettled by the discovery of the damage to the sense of self by child sexual abuse. And so it goes on.
We don't like to be unsettled because it brings cognitive dissonance which is painful - and we intuitively avoid pain and seek pleasure and comfort. We are human after all.
But the price we pay for comfort is blindness.