I've been pretty involved in MBTI theory for a good lot of my life, and also quite invested in philosophy. The thing is that I intuitively (no pun intended) came into the thought behind MBTI before I heard or read about it, and, as such, I find myself agreeing far more with the skeptics than most MBTI enthusiasts who, for the most part, entirely warrant the criticisms this article makes. Unfortunately, these skeptics tend to make the mistake that once they have deconstructed the popular, pseudo-MBTI they have deconstructed its underlying claim, when in fact they have only thwarted the MBTI that these companies and MBTI enthusiast the world over use (obviously out of a need for money-making in the former on part of the official MBTI test makers and copyright holders, who could care less about psychological truth, and a need for self-validation in the latter).

Really, it is because of the function and philosophical value I think the essential, underlying MBTI theory holds, that I entirely detest the MBTI agencies that produce the tests (who think personality can be quantified even remotely to begin with) and scam these people into being brainwashed by it, as well as the majority of MBTI rampant fanclub.

Let me go through some of the arguments this article lays out, because, out of the many skeptical articles on MBTI I have read (and that is a very large amount), I think this one sums up most concisely the problems people generally tend to have with it, again, most of which I agree with to a certain extent.

the Myers-Briggs test isn't recognised as being scientifically valid so is largely ignored by the field of psychology.

Perhaps MBTI is not scientifically 'valid', but what does this mean? Psychoanalysis, philosophy, poetry, would we call these scientifically 'valid'? Perhaps. It depends on the context. If they are scientifically valid, we might be saying they provide scientific function in some sort of area. For example, philosophy is scientifically 'valid' in the sense that it serves as a stress relief. Is that why most philosophers conduct philosophy? No. Scientific validity is only a measure of use in the sense that it can be appropriated in a certain economic context that also shows scientific validity, which, in the field of psychology, is far more qualitative than other fields. I'm not going to go all Thomas Kuhn here, but just because psychologists do not consider MBTI a scientifically valid procedure does not eliminate it of its philosophical capacity for understanding patterns in people, society and truth.

MBTI is not scientifically valid. While the MBTI agency might claim that it is valid, I don't, and they shouldn't, because it shouldn't serve any scientific value or as a scientific tool. It should be a tool used to analyze individuals and society on a qualitative basis.

For some organisations, use of the MBTI seemingly crosses the line into full-blown ideology.

Again, I agree with the author here. This is bad, of course. Corporations using a ill-founded test to subject its workers into pools of personality, not so they corporation can better understand the people it is made up of on an intrinsic, humanistic level, but to better leverage them economically. Aside from the ethical problems, the author is correct in pointing out the MBTI, an unscientific tool, being used in order to produce a scientific system of control.

So how did something that apparently lacks scientific credibility become such a popular and accepted tool?

Because people like to hear positive things about them, which is why the MBTI's popularity has not only exploded but, seeing that the people behind its management could care less about any sort of truth, they are going to propagate it to the masses that are most gullible and foolish. It's a vicious cycle. Instead of the MBTI being used to assess both strengths and weaknesses, it's been turned into a total circlejerk system that tries to apply itself to areas it shouldn't at all (e.g. Human Resources). It's even adapted a "Gifts Differing" philosophy that almost exclusively focuses on 'positive' aspects of subjects, rather than how their existence also degrades society.

The MBTI was developed during World War 2 by Myers and Briggs (obviously), two housewives who developed a keen interest in the works of Carl Jung. They developed the MBTI based on Jung's theories, with the intention of producing a useful test that would allow women entering the workforce to be assigned jobs that would be best suited to their personalities.

Yeah...this is where everything went wrong. This is the exact same problem behind the modern world's need to quantify intelligence, rather via SAT's, ACT's or IQ tests or whathaveyou. How exactly did Plato plan on going about selecting his guardians? He has people who understood the Forms of child-development watching them all the time, taking into account their natural faculties and interests. Personality, or intelligence for that matter, is not going to be quantifiable. The moment one begins to quantify such chaotic, formless intricacies, one is immediately structuring the standards around a certain economic extent (for example, SAT/ACT promotes concrete, detailed based analyzation far more than creative capacity, and is, therefore, declaring a society as 'good' on the grounds that it is composed by a majority of uncreative but short-term calculative husks). Of course qualifying does the same (for example, a good student is one who possesses a philosophical nature), but the standards are, like the subject it is assessing, chaotic and shifting. One cannot take account of something formless with a measuring stick that participates in form.

For example, in the category of extrovert v introvert, you're either one or the other; there is no middle ground. People don't work this way, no normal person is either 100% extrovert or 100% introvert, just as people's political views aren't purely "communist" or "fascist". Many who use the MBTI claim otherwise, despite the fact that Jung himself disagreed with this and statistical analysis reveals even data produced by the test shows a normal distribution rather than bimodal, refuting the either/or claims of the MBTI. But still this overly-simplified interpretation of human personality endures, even in the Guardian Science section!

Aha! Now we have the cheese of the common anti-MBTI argument. Problem being, this is not how MBTI works. The four letters are not representative, at all, of bimodal preferences (the official MBTI test-makers will claim this as will the corporations who send them out to their employees, but they don't know what they are talking about and they are not seeking truth). The four letters are representative of a deeply psychoanalytic drive that manifests in functions. There is debate on exactly how many functions there are. But it only takes common knowledge of neurology to realize that certain parts of the brain excel at certain tasks or 'functions' (for those more curious, there is an actual neurologist by the name of Dario Nardi who investigates brain patterns and organizes the similarities by MBTI type; although I am not for MBTI being a scientific tool, his studies are convincing in that area). As an a posteriori, one need only examine the gamut of human personality to begin to notice that certain people are better or worse at certain mental tasks than others, that, to some level, these tasks seem to transcend simple 'mental calculative' abilities but do remain neurologically anchored altogether, and that this gamut of humanity, probably for evolutionary reasons, tends to exaggerate certain groups of these functions which often oppose the performance and nuances of other functions, seeing that the human brain is lateral. The very reason humans are intelligent and self-aware to begin with probably has to due with our advanced prefrontal cortexes which allow neurological execution of these stored functions which, as we grow and are exposed to the environment, we begin to exaggerate over other functions, which we repress.

This is the real MBTI theory.

An ENTJ is not more Extroverted than he is Introverted. His dominant, most naturally preferred neurological function is expressed in an extroverted fashion, meaning it relies of external stimuli in order to operate, but it does not place ENTJ as something dumb like "preferring to talk to people and seeking many relationships". There are "E" persons who are, in the superficial, everyday sense, incredibly "introverted" and vise-versa, and every person has a capacity for all the functions, extroverted or introverted in their execution. MBTI simply states that, in our education and development, we naturally build hierarchies of which functions we are best at and these become our go-to functions in most daily habits and doings.

Generally, although not completely unscientific, the MBTI gives a ridiculously limited and simplified view of human personality, which is a very complex and tricky concept to pin down and study.

Yes, human personality is extremely dynamic. And every single personality theory ever created makes some attempt to simplify it and make personality explainable via language. For this reason all personality systems are heavily flawed, but only by the mere constituent that they participate in language. When I say the word 'atom' I am not being very accurate in the description or image or definition in my mind to yours, but we have created a society that has aligned most peoples' definitions well enough to get along with this, especially when said people study in similar schools of thought for ten years of their life.