Is there something to Briggs-Meyers personality types?

I've been thinking a lot about personality recently. I'm not exactly sure what got me thinking about it, but it's been going on for a few months now. Since October, I think.

Regardless, part of my meditations have revolved around whether there is some truth behind Briggs-Meyers (BM) (or any other) categorization. Put another way, to paraphrase a much more rigorously minded friend: are personality categorizations convincing because they are vague enough that someone can read a description and say "ZOMG that is totally me"?

I'm not going to answer that. I _will_ say that it was sort of creepy how dead on the description of me at 16 Personalities was. I even had my wife read things as at an attempt at an objective outside observer, and she laughed while reading it saying again and again, "This is totally you."

So I can't answer whether there is just the magic of vague categories going on, but that's ok. What I was interested in was whether there are other ways to converge on a BM personality type.

One thing that occurred to me was to use software like what is at I Write Like (the github repository is at https://github.com/coding-robots/iwl). I threw a few writing samples at it--a long email, a previous blog entry, and some text from chatting online with a friend--to see what it would spit out. I specifically left out a sample of my scientific writing because that does not feel spontaneous or authentically me. The results looked like this:

• Blog entry: I write like H. P. Lovecraft
• Email: I write like David Foster Wallace
• Online chat: I write like Stephen King

From there I did a quick search to see what people online thought these author's BM types might be:

• H. P. Lovecraft: INFP
• David Foster Wallace: INTP or INFP
• Stephen King: INTP

And here is the interesting bit for me: when I take the BM tests, I score as a IN(T/F)P. It is T/F because the T and the F have exactly the same score. It's neat to see that the writing assessment and the (admittedly) non-rigorous BM assignment of the resulting writers matched my BM results so well.

The implication is that, depending on the medium I choose to communicate in, I could seem to be different. Email? INTP or INFP. Online chats? INTP. On a blog where I just spill my ideas? INFP.

Neat. Suggestive. Not at all something I am ready to say is Meaningful.