One of the test results I remember distinctly was among waitbutwhy readers. Very likely a majority of them have never taken MBTI, and the results were extremely skewed. I think that itself disproves everything you just said. If the results were just random, you would get approximately even distributions on every community due to the central limit theorem. (A distribution becomes tight around its mean.)
I bet if you asked waitbutwhy readers to do a
Which Moomin character are you? quiz, you would also get extremely skewed results. That doesn't mean it's scientific.
And perhaps most importantly, if you strongly believe you fundamentally are a specific way because of an MBTI test result you have gotten, and you find yourself in a situation where you would benefit from being different, that belief itself can become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy and hinder your brain's ability to adjust to the circumstances.
This is a fully general counterargument against any and all personality tests. If you argue like this, and I see people arguing like this all the time, you can refuse to believe in every test no matter what results you get. This is part of the thing that annoys me.
It's not a counterargument against personality tests themselves, it's a counterargument against how some people understand the results. I'm not worried that Moomin quizzes will prevent people from overcoming their difficulties IRL. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the impression that people treating MBTI results in particular as more significant and permanent than they should is a real phenomenon that exists (and is apparently based on the theory behind the MBTI itself?), and the more scientific attempts at personality tests don't seem to have the same kind of following.
Since you are close to the middle, it's not very surprising that your results change. This is not an argument against the test. The test tells you that you're close the middle. It may be an argument against how the results are communicated. The ENFP label is silly with E and F so close; it should be ?N?P or ???P. I am not close on any axis and have gotten the exact same result every time I've done the test. (Itself p = 1/256 if I remember correctly that I did it thrice.)
I'll go even further and flip it around. If you're close to the middle every time you do the test, this is just more evidence that the test is measuring something real.
A ton of people are close to the middle.
50% of people will get a different result after just five weeks. If the test was legit, it would give up trying to map the spectra into binary values so that it can sort people into neat categories, because what results people get IRL is the opposite of a clear dichotomy, it's a bell curve. But, because it is a pseudoscientific test, it's more important for it to uphold the tradition than to reflect the world.
And you're allowed to change from 2013 to 2021 -- in fact, I would argue you did.
it's 2022 nowSure. But it's not just that I have changed since 2013, I have changed multiple times back and forth, and right now even the way I visualize a lot of the questions is influenced by the fact that I just had an absolute blast drinking calvados and watching Sora no Woto with a bunch of /a/nons over IRC last Saturday, so if it asks me whether I enjoy group activities, of course I'm going to completely agree with that. Which might not be the case if I was instead visualizing a school project with difficult people.
By the way, I wish you would have asked me to predict your results before posting.
Eh, good point. Well, you can predict my Moomin character if you want.