Categorizations in general are fine, but most people assume too much of them. The best way to think of personality is as the average class of behaviors across most circumstances.
Suppose I show you a video of someone quite talkative, monopolizing the conversation for an hour, gesturing a lot with their hands. Sounds like an extroverted person? What if I told you this was a video of an introvert giving a polished presentation? The circumstances make a big difference in how people act.
The problem is many people misapply a categorization as this behavior all the time, not this class of behaviors most of the time. So skeptical people obviously bristle at this suggestion. Furthermore, the generalizations often don't stop there, and many people usually extrapolate far more ridiculous ideas: "You're an X, so that means you aren't good at Y."
I also agree that these categorizations make sense and that something like Meyers Briggs is a 0th order approximation to something that really exists. The fact that many people declare it pseudoscience annoys me because it at least tries to be useful (although something like the Big 5 linguistic approach is a better model).
Personally, I think the most fruitful way to engage people on the topic of personality is to discuss very specific and narrow traits (like talkativeness or gesticulation). I think you are more likely to get a meaningful conversation. People of course want to know correlations, but those are tricky and you need to be slow to generalize.
Suppose I show you a video of someone quite talkative, monopolizing the conversation for an hour, gesturing a lot with their hands. Sounds like an extroverted person? What if I told you this was a video of an introvert giving a polished presentation? The circumstances make a big difference in how people act.
The problem is many people misapply a categorization as this behavior all the time, not this class of behaviors most of the time. So skeptical people obviously bristle at this suggestion. Furthermore, the generalizations often don't stop there, and many people usually extrapolate far more ridiculous ideas: "You're an X, so that means you aren't good at Y."
I also agree that these categorizations make sense and that something like Meyers Briggs is a 0th order approximation to something that really exists. The fact that many people declare it pseudoscience annoys me because it at least tries to be useful (although something like the Big 5 linguistic approach is a better model).
Personally, I think the most fruitful way to engage people on the topic of personality is to discuss very specific and narrow traits (like talkativeness or gesticulation). I think you are more likely to get a meaningful conversation. People of course want to know correlations, but those are tricky and you need to be slow to generalize.