Item — HN Reader

I don't know if I buy into that as a line of reasoning. I'm ostensibly an INFP and I actually love problem-solving (hence being a programmer). When I work from home I am motivated to work for a number of reasons:

- It's interesting / challenging

- A sense of duty / professionalism

- A sense of teamwork / camaraderie

This is entirely anecdotal of course. I also will often head to a cafe to get some 'human/ambient' time (another motivator). Being at home can be lonely.

2 comments

The fact that INTJ and INTP may usually be problem-solvers does not mean that other types may not be as well. A -> B doesn't mean than ¬A -> ¬B

I'm just saying that HN is really biased toward known problem-solving personalities, this should be taken into account in the context of this discussion :-)

Hate to break it to you guys: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/go...

This is one opinion.

I always see people criticizing all sort of tests because they are not good regarding to some criteria. Well, this is true for all of them. Those tests are trying to divide billions of people into few categories, you lose information anyway. There are 8 billions of personalities that should be split into 16 categories, some people will match exactly, other will lies in-between and will not match the characteristics.

I don't know these big-five or hexaco tests, but by the principle they also try to reduce the dimensionality of 8 billions people to n<100 categories, the same as MBTI. They may be better than MBTI, probably, but this does not mean the later may not bring useful information for our discussion.

I made some quick stats one of the HN pool (probably not statistically significant, but still a good indication), INTJ are 2.5% in the real population but 30% of HN, INTP 4% but 28.7% on HN, ENTP 6% but 10% on HN, and ENTJ 5.5% but 7.5% on HN. The four together represent ~80% of HN, but only ~20% of the real population. Those are also the four most represented categories on HN, and curiously belongs to the "Intellectual" class of personalities [1], as you would except to find on HN.

Maybe it's not the best test, maybe it has some problems, but it is still a tool that can give us some bases for thinking and discussions.

[1] https://mypersonality.info/personality-types/population-gend...

It's not because the model is broken / wrong. That it no-longer holds any information.

Example: witches didn't float, yet you can probably assign some properties that would cause people to label them as such.

INFP are also strong problem solvers as can be any type when motivated... I think an INTP won't be deeply aware of motivations outside of the problem itself while INTJ will be much more selfishly calculated which is why they tend to make more money.