
Astrology For Businesses - edent
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/12/astrology-for-businesses/
======
jpdoctor
The value of Myers-Briggs has nothing to do with its accuracy: Good tests
start by telling you that humans are too complex for a 4 axes
characterization.

The value of MB _is_ teaching interaction. Many people, esp those in tech
fields, have a high degree of "I'm like me, therefore everybody is like me."
Thinking about how "the other half" lives and works causes a new language to
develop between different folks which can be very powerful.

Here's an example: Development people are quite different than straight
operations people. In MB-land, you might say the devs tend more towards N and
ops tends towards S. I can't tell you how many hardware products I've seen die
because of the failure to bridge that gap, with each side driving the other up
a wall.

------
gregpilling
A more interesting question for me is - Are there distinct personality types
at all? My anecdote: I lived in a very white, very blue collar suburb of
Vancouver for the first 20 years of my life and did not know anyone who wasn't
in the same boat as me. Then I started working in an area that was dominated
by Indian immigrants. I was surprised to find out that people where the same
they just had different faces and names.

By that I mean that Raj was very similar to Steve, they laughed at the same
sort of humor, they acted similar, they could have traded bodies (ala "Freaky
Friday") and nobody would have noticed. At 26 I moved to Tucson AZ and the
whole cycle repeated. Now I was living in an area that was 50% Hispanic. The
same cycle repeated itself, where I met people that seemed to me to be
personality clones of others I had known before. Now it was Juan who was just
like Raj or Steve from my past. It felt like to me there was 12-16 basic
personalities out there and I thought I could understand where the seed of
Astrology or Meyers-Briggs sprouted from.

Now I am an employer of about 10 people in a manufacturing company. I have
seen many people come and go, and after a while you see patterns. Of course
humans are known to find patterns where none exist, so maybe I am just fooling
myself. This foolishness keeps popping up though, whenever I meet someone new
and I think "He is just like Steve, or Raj or Juan" and possibly this helps or
hurts our relationships on some hidden level.

edit: I am Scorpio but have never taken the Meyers-Briggs test. I do
apparently have nine of my planets in the house of money for any investors out
there that are basing their portfolios on astrological principles :)

~~~
eshvk
I dunno. I try to consciously avoiding reframing people in the context of a
certain personality template or whatever. I prefer taking people at face value
and gradually forming an opinion as to who they are while consciously
dissociating the superficial characteristics. This is not an easy task and
something I work very hard to do (and often fail).

( This is mainly because I was born and have lived in quite a few countries
which were very different from the region that my race originates from: I have
found that people take a shortcut to judging others which always annoys me.
Some do it based on race, e.g. You are Ashkenazi jewish, you must be so smart.
Others based on superficial personality traits observed in biased
environments: You look so vibrant and love to talk, you clearly are an
extrovert. )

I suspect the evolutionary advantage of having these short cuts is that it
helps you size up a situation really quickly. However, in this rapidly
changing world of ours, I find this to be a hindrance. People rarely are
unidimensional and have significant personality shifts depending on who they
interact with or who they talk to. E.g. I was working with a potential advisor
back in School who is known to be a paranoid insecure tyrant who is incredibly
sarcastic and mean to his grad. students. On the other hand, this person has
been in a committed, long term relationship with his significant other,
brought up kids in what could be described as the most gentle patient person.

( I realize that we are both trading anecdotes here but I tried looking for
hard science to back this up a few years back and all I found were
speculations.)

------
alan_cx
Don't get me wrong I don't buy in to any of this, but while people, like say
the last POTUS, say publicly that they believe in god, talk to god and are
guided on policy by god, and that's seen as a plus point to a lot of voters,
then I fail to see why astrology gets put down as some thing less credible. If
anything, astrology is a bit less dangerous, since its little more than empty
cold reading, etc.

In the end, a lot of decisions end up being take on the flip of a coin. Its
this just an over complicated coin toss?

~~~
aroberge
Rationality in the world is not going to happen all at once: chipping away at
the irrational beliefs of people, and educating them in rational thinking is
most likely the best way to get there.

~~~
jopt
Well said. Furthermore, let's try to root out these beliefs early. It's easy
for great power structures to form around them if left unchecked.

------
dizzystar
I recently applied for a job and they sent me this test and another
personality test. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but is there any way to
politely decline wasting 30 minutes of my life to taking a test that I refuse
to take on the ethical grounds that this is pure bunk? I guess it is a great
way to filter out people I wouldn't want to work for, but I wonder if refusing
to take the test is somehow a litmus.

When legitimate _knowledge_ exams are found "discriminatory" by judges across
America, shouldn't it be time to look at these so-called, non-scientific tests
and ask if they aren't discriminatory against what, exactly? Wouldn't it be
egregious if it were more likely that women or Latinos often fall into one of
the "no hire, no promote" letters? That last is stupid hypothetical, but
something has to get the madness to stop.

~~~
DanBC
Working for someone else often involves jumping through arbitrary stupid
pointless hoops.

Refusing to take the test, even if you have excellent reasons to do so, is
probably a reason to not employ you. That early part of recruitment has little
t do with getting the best person. It's mostly about trimming away hundreds of
people applying for 2 positions.

You need your own assessment about where the benefits of cash, job security,
job fun, etc outweigh the disbenefits of PHBs with idiot job demands.

> but something has to get the madness to stop.

Recruiting is hard job and is not a solved problem. I suggest a consulting
company that i) works carefully to avoid discrimination and ii) just randomly
places people with suitable experience and qualifications into a company.
Market it as using advanced algorithms to place workers and it might take off.

~~~
pitt1980
There are a hundred different ways to look at this

1) you could look at it as a nuisance that isn't worth wasting any career
capital fighting (that's a perfectly valid way to look at it, you can only
fight stupidity on so many fronts, this probably isn't worth the effort)
(seems relevent <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448755>)

2) you could say you don't want to take the test and see how much they care.
You should have some wariness of how seriously a place takes their arbitrary
hoops. If an organization can't deal with a nail sticking up over an arbitrary
personality test, how are they going to deal with a nail sticking up over
something that really matters?

~~~
dizzystar
Thanks for that link. Pretty interesting.

Point 2) I tend to be the nail sticking up, but that is more a function of my
job descriptions in the past where it was my responsibility to say "no" or
question things. It takes a a certain amount of deftness to pull it off
consistently combined with a fearlessness of not getting your head chopped
off.

The results of the test I recently took said something on the order that I am
a very blunt person that appreciates honesty. While this is true in many
cases, the test dismissed the idea that I have situational awareness. There is
a time for letting someone know that they could have done better and there is
a time for congratulating people for doing their best, even if my expectations
were disappointed. Empathy didn't seem to be an important measurement for this
particular version of the test. People are complex and slippery, with their
own motives, and sometimes you can't expect people to be what they aren't.

To say the least, it was upsetting to read a small part of my personality
painted with such a thin brush. Ultimately, if I was a hiring manager and read
such a description, I would probably think twice about speaking to this person
again. This seems to suggest that whoever created the test, or whoever wrote
the descriptions, had axes to grind vs certain personality "traits."

------
pbateman
Myers-Briggs is the corporate equivalent of those "Is He Right For You? - Take
Our 10 Question Soulmate Quiz" things that have done a brisk trade in
magazines since time immemorial.

------
impendia
I love personality tests, I find them addictive, I've taken the Myers-Briggs
test at least half a dozen times at various times in my life, with results
from INTJ to ENFP and everything in between.

One flaw in the test is that it doesn't distinguish between how you
instinctively act and what you value most. Naturally I am a _total_ introvert,
but at times in my life I have made an unusual effort to have an active social
life and make a lot of friends. And I scored an E on the introvert/extrovert
dimension. For whatever reason I was proud of this.

It would be trivially easy to game this test, but even if you take it
honestly, the test is telling you something ambiguous: a mixture of who you
are now and what you aspire to.

~~~
edent
In other words, feel good nonsense.

------
motters
There's a long history of the use of pseudoscience by companies to pick job
candidates. In the 1980s there was a craze for handwriting analysis, where a
person's handwriting style was supposed to reveal various aspects of their
personality.

If a company wants you to complete personality tests it's a sign that the
management is easily influenced by the claims of fashionable "gurus" and isn't
very rational.

------
RyanZAG
This is very widespread across all industries, especially at higher levels of
management. Pharmaceutical companies are extremely prone to 'managing by
nonsense' and pour immense amounts of money into these tests (especially the
red/blue/yellow/green energy ones that are currently popular). Novartis is one
of the worse in this area. They generally try to have a management team that
is 'balanced across the color energies' and that.

------
waterlesscloud
I wonder what companies actually use these for. I've worked for a couple of
companies that gave them to all the employees and then completely ignored the
results. Probably just a ritual thing, I guess.

~~~
edent
I think that's a large part of it - just a cargo cult.

------
kosmogo
I agree these practice gives the feeling to do something without the burden of
actually doing something. A more optimistic view would be, it creates some
dynamic to introduce the idea of doing something. In any cases, the hard work
remains to be done.

------
avar
Here's a good overview of the non-science behind NLP:
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/neurolinguistic...](http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/neurolinguistic-
programming-and-other-nonsense/)

~~~
naftaliharris
I just learned today that the first few google hits for NLP are about Neuro-
Linguistic Programming and not Natural Language Processing. Imagine my
disappointment!

------
andrewcooke
if you try these things online you'll soon see it's pretty easy to play them.
if you're given one in an interview, answer the "obvious" ones obviously and
then with the ones that seem ambiguous or pointless, simply answer according
to what you think appropriate for the job. for example, if they are looking
for leadership, answer positive to whatever implies you enjoy telling others
what to do (it's really that trivial).

given that, i assume they select for people smart enough to play them. which
might have some value, i guess.

------
genuine
What a great post! I've been a different Myers-Briggs type in the few times
that I've taken them, and outside of its usage in business, I've heard things
like if you and your partner only differ by one type, that could mean that you
will have relationship problems. In addition, if both of you are (some
astrological type) then depending on the type you may also have problems. This
is such B.S. and there is no scientific study that proves it.

But, lets examine this a bit further. These tests do ask questions that
identify behavioral traits, and it is true that some behaviors could more
likely be less compatible, and that there are studies to support this. So, to
some extent these tests are onto something.

And what about psychological tests? If each test was perfect, you would not
need to take several tests that each vary a lot in the results. Both a family
member and I have taken a number of psychological tests, over time and result
were really inconsistent.

It isn't just in business that they use these types of tests, whether they are
Myers-Briggs or widely accepted and used psych tests. These tests are used for
college students in dorms to assess whether they are compatible. They are used
to access psychological problems. This is very important stuff, and it is
guesswork! The human mind and accessment of our behavior is beyond our current
ability to measure and diagnose properly.

------
nshepperd
I thought Myers-Briggs was obsoleted by the Big Five, anyway.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Hardly, they occupy different spaces. Big 5 is the current faith in academia,
while MB is the current cult within business.

In any case, the Big 5 has little more of a scientific basis than the MBTI,
but as most psychologists don't understand the importance of statistics (and
what factor analysis can and can't tell you) it still survives, zombie like. I
hate the big 5, but I hate myers briggs more.

~~~
wisty
Big 5 isn't particularly good, and hopefully no-one says it is (except when
they follow up with a "compared to MB"). And unlike MB, it doesn't _claim_ to
be anything deep or fundamental. It is just a lens which might be useful, and
that's what it says on the tin.

The most important part of Big5 (IMO) is that it gets away from archetypes.
Changing "introvert / extrovert" to "level of introversion / extroversion" is
very important.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Well the constant refusal of Costa and McCrae to accept the results of
confirmatory factor analyses is what gets me. To argue that personality must
necessarily have a different method because the current method does not agree
with your (essentially qualitative) conclusions is not science in my view.

Certainly in my areas (social especially) there's a lot of flag waving for the
Big 5 which really upsets me. Then, when I told my lecturers during the course
of my PhD that all psychologists should have to learn a little matrix algebra
i was essentially laughed at. Unfortuntately, until they do, stupid over
interpretations of flawed statistical models are likely to remain commonplace.

------
DanielBMarkham
I do Agile coaching. That is, I help teams work in a productive and fun way.
Basically it's best practices of iterative and incremental development.

Because Agile is a best practices thing and not a standard, we're always
interested in how some teams do better than others. A professional colleague
has put together an online test where you can measure your personality and
then find the perfect team-mates. It's a very similar concept to what the
article is talking about.

I'm not a believer in personality tests at all, but I wonder if in the
aggregate they might be marginally useful for team formation. I've heard some
rumors that sports psychologists have been using systems like this for years.
So, while personality test X might suck for detailing anything about me as a
person, if all 100 people at my company take it, would it help optimize team
formation? Even if helps out only 10% or so, it could be worth the investment.

Beats me. It's an interesting question. I'm all in favor of calling out the
over-sold quackery for what it is, but let's not throw the baby out with the
bathwater. There still might be something useful in there, even if it only
works by accident.

~~~
Retric
It's vary hard to get good data from team sports, so they often end up using
'plausible' quackery. Sadly, the same is often true in bushiness which is why
training fad's are so common. That and milking training budgets is profitable.

PS: Might be something there is only worth something if you can develop a test
and compare results. If you can't then it's best to ignore 'gut' feelings on
such things as you have no idea if your wasting time and money or even making
things worse.

------
atamyrat
Another anecdote: investor decided not to invest in a startup because his
astrologist advised against it. The date company founded was not a "good" day.
Yes, investor actually called founders to ask for this piece of info, as far
as i remember the story. :-)

~~~
dredmorbius
Look up Nancy Reagan's astrologer some time.

------
Cyranix
My current employers have invested in the Birkman method[0][1], which many
people at the company see as quite helpful. I remain skeptical, but then again
I found the Enneagram[2] to be helpful in giving me some guidance during a
particularly trying time in my life.

[0] <http://www.birkman.com> [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Birkman>
[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality>

------
pdonis
I've taken Myers Briggs a number of times, and seen it given by three
different employers. I've never seen it used for anything more than giving
people a little more insight into themselves and others. In particular, I've
never seen it used to make decisions about hiring, promotion, or anything that
affects people's jobs, pay, or the business.

So while I agree that M-B can be overinterpreted, I am skeptical of the claim
that businesses are actually trying to use it to decide who to hire, fire,
promote, etc.

------
overgard
As the famous saying goes: All models are wrong, but some are useful.

I agree that MBTI is largely unscientific, but I would point out that a model
doesn't necessarily have to be scientific to be useful. To me, the value of a
model is in the conceptual framework it provides you to work with, and the
common language it gives you for discussing ideas with others.

One doesn't have to believe that anyone is absolutely an "introvert" or an
"extrovert" for the idea of an introvert or an extrovert to be useful, for
instance.

~~~
tieTYT
These are all nice words, but when MBTI is tested it fails (citation from the
article). So this model is wrong AND it's not useful.

~~~
overgard
"Tested" is vague. Tested for what? That a model fails to be predictive for
certain tasks only really demonstrates that it's a bad model for that task,
not that it's categorically useless.

~~~
tieTYT
Read the article and the citation inside if you want to know what it was
tested for

------
systemtrigger
I am no expert on this topic, so can only speak from my own experience having
taken MB twice, 7 years apart, scoring INTP on both occasions. Each time
following the test I read a few pages in the book about INTP as well as a few
pages on each of the archetypes on which I was judged not to be. Generally I
regard personality tests with enormous skepticism but in the case of MB I must
confess I was impressed with how accurate the INTP profile described my world
view. More importantly, I found no such positive correlation between how my
mind works and the other profile descriptions.

If the test is worthless, as the author of this article suggests, how would he
explain people like me who upon reading the profile for their archetype in the
book attest "yes that is a shockingly accurate description of me" and upon
reading others' profiles react "no absolutely nothing about that resonates
with me"? My own view is that MB, while hardly perfect, is surprisingly
revealing for many individuals and can help one understand and be more
tolerant of people whose profiles are in sharp contrast to one's own.

That said, I have taken other personality tests which highly intelligent
people have recommended to me and found absolutely no value in those results.
But I would not make the claim that those other tests are therefore
universally useless, because after all I am but one data point.

~~~
samspot
I also found the results of this test surprisingly accurate, but I think it is
likely that you and I are the victims of coincidence.

------
mblake
This reminds me of the day one of my work 'colleagues' asked me what my star
sign was and various other similar questions, indicating he was evaluating me
as a potential mate.

Disregarding the sheer immaturity of the approach and inappropriateness in a
work-related context, I had a good amount of laughs over it with one of the
company's bosses.

------
walshemj
I can hear the screaming sound of Patrick Moore rotating in his coffin as i
type this response.

~~~
walshemj
Oh dear someone doesn't have a sense of humor do they

------
tokenadult
I have some other links about the test mentioned in the interesting submitted
blog post here.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-
leadership/myers-b...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-
leadership/myers-briggs-does-it-pay-to-know-your-
type/2012/12/14/eaed51ae-3fcc-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_story.html)

"Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-
Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t
want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either.

. . . .

"Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it
was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists
of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific
community."

<http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html>

[http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-
tests/person...](http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-
tests/personality-tests-popular-tests.htm)

"Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated
adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily
increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that:
'at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the
use of the MBTI in career counseling programs,' the very thing that it is most
often used for."

[http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/deve...](http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/develop/mbti.pdf)

The book-length treatment of the subject, by Annie Murphy Paul, in _The Cult
of Personality Testing,_ is quite interesting.

[http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Personality-Testing-Annie-
Murphy/...](http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Personality-Testing-Annie-
Murphy/dp/0743280725)

There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. From
participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful
references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The
review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and
Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical
Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol.
124, No. 2, 262-274

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed
professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology
devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring
criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews
for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so
on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after
they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

[http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...](http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States,
prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most
other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general
mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable
secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work
reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test,
such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample
test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the
applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of
the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample
tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests
has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general
mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be
trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on
the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than
any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous
research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your
company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into
all of your hiring processes.

The long version of my company hiring procedures FAQ was last posted at

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879803>

18 days ago, with uncharacteristic snark in response to a snarky blog post
title.

~~~
sageikosa
My understanding of Myers-Briggs is that it is only useful when undertaken
voluntarily, and the subject accepts and recognizes the validity of the
outcome. Jung was a therapist, so his main purpose was to help people seeking
to attain mental health. The idea of the test is for individuals to understand
themselves, not for other people to understand them.

------
mblake
Excellent write-up btw; thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

~~~
edent
Thanks!

------
michaelochurch
The problem with these personality tests is their belief in an atomic,
immutable "personality" or identity. It doesn't exist. People change
radically. The person I was at 5 is gone. He's effectively gone, forever.
That's not a bad thing. It's to be celebrated.

One thing I like about Buddhism is that it dovetails well with my skeptical,
nonreligious inclination. You're expected to find things out for yourself, not
take your beliefs from on high. If you don't believe in reincarnation (I do,
but it's not required) you can still meditate. You're still invited to
participate. It doesn't matter if you believe in God or an afterlife.

One teaching of Buddhism, that I find to be very useful, is that most of what
we call "me" is an illusion. It's inherently empty. To the extent that it
exists, it's dependent on so many other conditions and relationships. People
get into traps. "I'm just not a happy person." "I'm a neurotic mess." "I'm a
programmer, so I could never be a good writer." Bullshit. People also inflict
it on each other (crab mentality) by focusing on reputation and "track
record"-- this illusion that observable state reflects inherent traits rather
than an interaction between a person and external conditions-- rather than
real capability.

People get deeply invested in, and limited by, these identities they build for
themselves and each other that actually make no sense.

Ok, rant over.

~~~
vasco
If one were to read on this subject just as an outsider peeking in, what book
would you advise?

~~~
michaelochurch
A very good start is the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, but there are a lot
of great books out there on these topics.

~~~
carbocation
I know it's a completely different arena, but how do you feel about Hesse's
Siddhartha?

~~~
michaelochurch
I haven't read it, but it seems cool.

