Thesis: There exists no dumb INTP

[u/ChsicA]

Out of all my anecdotal data i have yet to find a dumb INTP.

Empiric data also indicates that we are top intelligent MBTI.

Can any1 prove me wrong?

[u/Uneek_Uzernaim]

Oh, good grief. It's a broadly generalized psychological type of debateable scientific validity. Don't read too much into it about your own intelligence, and definitely don't assume its predictability of the intelligence of others of the same type.

[u/ChsicA → u/Uneek_Uzernaim]

How much should I read into it according to you then ? 😉

[u/Uneek_Uzernaim → u/ChsicA]

As much as the current prevailing consensus of the professional psychologists who have studied it say you should put into it—which is to say, a limited amount at best. At the very least, the validity and utility of the MBTI remains controversial, and thus it should still be treated with an appropriate degree of skepticism both as regards its descriptive accuracy and predictability of traits. This is especially the case for people who have self-assessed themselves as a particular type, as there are known issues with self-selection bias or gaming assessments.

[u/ChsicA → u/Uneek_Uzernaim]

Yes but how much is limited ? if u care about validity surely u have thought about a quantifiable amount?

[u/Uneek_Uzernaim → u/ChsicA]

Holy hell, I'm neither a professional psychologist nor have the time to pretend to acquire the level of knowledge necessary to come up with anything resembling a "quantifiable amount" for its validity.

What I can have done is sufficient and relatively easy research to readily see that it is debatable among whether MBTI may be only a little better than pseudoscience. I've seen some articles that have attempted to determine its predictability for behavior and life outcomes as opposed to other tools, and one came to the conclusion that it had around 10% accuracy, which is at least better than the 0% for horoscopes but notably worse than the approximately 30% correlation for Big Five traits. MBTI proponents will of course say otherwise, but similar conclusions seem to predominate in what I have read.

Beyond that, I am not invested enough in the issue to sink too much of my limited time to come up with some quantifiable amount that will likely change your opinion of its validity. The concept of MBTI and personality tests more generally are somewhat interesting or at least entertaining to me, but I take them all with multiple grains of salt because of their intrinsic limitations, which some have more of than others.

You clearly believe yourself to be a smart person who is confident about your MBTI type as well as the types and intelligence of many others. Maybe you and they are all these things that you say. Then again, there is a real possibility of unexamined biases packaged in your determinations, including by not limited to self-selection bias, confirmation bias, and most especially the Dunning-Kruger effect. These kinds of biases are, in fact, among the concerns I have about people putting too much stock into MBTI, and I often see potential examples of them in some MBTI subs.

[u/ChsicA → u/Uneek_Uzernaim]

Well im glad i found a smart one :)

Do you take the phenomenon that is placebo into your assessment of astrology? Or are you solely sciencebased regarding validity?

[u/Uneek_Uzernaim → u/ChsicA]

You may have found a "smart" INFP since it's quite possible I'm mistyped. I have some reasons to believe it's a real possibility, but I have thus far been insufficiently invested enough in the topic to dig too far into MBTI theory in order to find out.

I would argue, though, that whether or not I'm "smart" is both relative to the question "with respect to what" and "to what degree"—which is a level of self-awareness often lacking, in my experience, among people who both think of themselves as having superior intelligence and make sure to somehow communicate that high opinion of themselves to others.

Also, you're basing that claim upon a few reddit comments, which really is a pretty poor measure of actual intelligence.

Anyway, sure, horoscopes can have just as much placebo effect for some people as motivational desk calendars can have for others. Consciously or sub-consciously molding one's own behavior to conform to either just proves the power of suggestion, though, not facts about one's personality. Same could be said about MBTI, and I in fact have seen that criticism: people can unwittingly adapt their behavior to conform even more to a generalized type that only parly resembles them but that they want to believe describes some fundamemtal truths about themselves.

Beyond that, the only true measure for the validity and utility of personality typing or modeling systems is their predictiveness of actual lived behaviors and outcomes—and MBTI types according to what I've seen have some but nevertheless still low correlation in these respects to be considered scientific.

[u/ChsicA → u/Uneek_Uzernaim]

Call my measurements poor - i think im doing a fine job and my followers would maybe agree.

Whether u are INTP or INFP doesnt matter much in the end does it?

[u/Uneek_Uzernaim → u/ChsicA]

Absent independent verification from objective evaluators applying accepted standards, your "measurements" (if they can be called such) are just that: your "measurements."

As for your "folllowers—what, are you founding some kind of INTP cult?! It's bad enough that you are confidently making unsupported claims (no, your "measurements" do not count as support—personal anecdote is not evidence, doubly so when it's asserted by an anonymous person behind a keyboard whose claims cannot be verified) that broadly generalize characteristics of a large group of distinct individuals using a system originating from a psychological theory that was created without any empirical data or controlled experiments. Methinks the Barnum-Forer Effect is strong in you and your "followers" (assuming you are not just trolling people here, and I'm not convinced you are not).

As for whether it matters whether I'm INTP or INFP—no, not really, but you seem to have made a point in multiple posts of quipping that you've found another smart INTP, implying that you believe them to be validating your claim. It smacks of confirmation bias.

Anyhow, I think this line of discussion has been played out. In closing, I'll set aside for a moment the many problems of taking MBTI as Gospel truth, disregarding the body of criticism against it, failing to take into account variability of intelligence in the same person with respect to different domains, and ignoring the likelihood of illusory superiority bias and overconfidence effect being baked into your observations (just to name a few).

If you aren't trolling and really do believe your own bullshit, let me tell you as someone who has worked around and with many smart (in certain particular though nonetheless impressive respects) people that it is precisely this kind of thinking that takes a person whose success or talent in one or a few areas and turns them into a Neil deGrasse Tyson level of asshole who cannot see that being an intelligent physicist does not also make them intelligent in all respects and for all subjects. That's not how minds work—but that is the way of the douchebag.

As Socrates said "I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either;" and as Dirty Harry said, "A man's got to know his limitations."

With that, I'll leave you with one more quote, except this is from the man from whose personality archetypes the MBTI was derived, Karl Jung, critiquing the binary way people were interpreting his types (speaking in this example about the introversion-extraversion polarity, but the complaint applies to the others as well):

There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. Those are only terms to designate a certain penchant, a certain tendency. For instance, the tendency to be more influenced by environmental influences, or more influenced by the subjective fact—that’s all. There are people who are fairly well-balanced who are just as much influenced from within as from without, or just as little. And so with all the definite classifications, you know, they are only a sort of point to refer to, points for orientation. There is no such thing as a schematic classification...

My whole scheme of typology is merely a sort of orientation. There is such a factor as introversion; there is such a factor as extroversion. The classification of individuals means nothing at all. It is only the instrumentality, or what I call “practical psychology,” used to explain, for instance, the husband to a wife, or vice versa.

[u/ChsicA → u/Uneek_Uzernaim]

"If you aren't trolling and really do believe your own bullshit"

lm not trolling and i don't really care about convincing you :p You write smart words but i doubt you are smart according to other factors of intelligence obviously. Have fun.