Full transcript and links:

https://sponge.ithakaonmymind.com/audio/017-hey-sister-hey-mister-am-i-your-type-was-will-be/

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Personality tests cannot help but be accurate representations of the present, but they cannot predict the future. That is what I absorbed from my recent re-taking of the MBTI test.

Yes, fellow absorbers. I heard recently that there was a new version of the MBTI test, which stands for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Some of my friends retook it for fun, so I figured, I’d do the same. Now, that said, I did not retake this test from the official MBTI website, because I didn’t feel like paying for it again. So I’m actually not entirely sure if the version I retook is the official new version or not. In fact, I don’t think I saw anywhere where the information indicated anything about a new version.

But, for the purposes of this episode, the newness of the test doesn’t matter, because, well, the result is different from before. I will link in the transcript to the site where I took the test. It’s called truity.com. If you find this episode interesting, you might wanna go there and take the test yourself. It’s not that long. Might take you about fifteen minutes or so. For the full report, you have to pay, but you can see the results, you know, the four-letter MBTI results, without paying. That was enough for me.

And it was enough for me because I could kind of predict that the test result would be different from many years ago. And this is where today’s theme comes in. Personality tests cannot help but be accurate representations of the present, but they cannot predict the future.

x x x

The way the MBTI test works, and many other similar personality tests work, is that they ask you a bunch of questions about how you are already behaving. For example, on the test I took, they might give you a statement like this: “Being around lots of people energizes me.” And then you choose between Very inaccurate, inaccurate, neutral, accurate, very accurate.

So, given this structure, I think it’s actually quite impossible for a test like this to be completely inaccurate. I mean, this is a very basic voting machine.

At this point, I will tell you how the test results are labeled for MBTI, specifically. MBTI is sometimes called something along the lines of “the sixteen personality test,” because, according to Wikipedia, quote, “The test attempts to assign a value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result, such as "INTJ" or "ESFP”.” End quote.

So for the first letter it’s I or E for introversion or extraversion.

For the second letter, it’s N or S for intuition or sensing.

For the third letter, it’s T or F for thinking or feeling.

For the fourth letter, it’s J or P for judging or perceiving.

So, going back to the voting machine idea: you raise your hand for extroversion and you get the E letter. You raise your hand for introversion and you get the I letter. Thus I think a test like this isn’t just useless categorizing if you’re trying to examine your current personality. Your current behavior. Your current state of mind.

However, does this test predict the future? Absolutely not. And I am living proof of this, because my personality, according to this test, changed within a period of, oh, I don’t know. Three or five years or so.

Let me tell you what I used to be.

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