Quote Originally Posted by Jonathan
The one area where MBTI is the strongest is that there's a lot of statistical research that uses one standardized instrument; and a lot of statistical research went into creating the MBTI as well. As a result, there's a lot of hard data to look at....and, at least initially, practitioners stuck more or less to what was supported by hard data in drawing conclusions....but that may have changed as the MBTI got more popular.
Those "hard data" are only "hard" if you take for granted that the typings are correct.

I work with real "hard data", and I find highly questionable the notion that any data stemming from human psychology as per the subjects' self-perception can really be called "hard".

That is where I find Socionics more realistic, since, at least the way I have perceived it so far, its proponents tend to realize that typing someone remains a "soft" thing.

Quote Originally Posted by Phaedrus
Yes, and that is why we should focus on the types -- not those faulty and misleading descriptions of the functions. (How many times have I said that by now? But no one is willing to listen anyway ... or they are to lazy to try to understand what it means ...)
The descriptions of the functions are essential to Socionics in order to explain the intertype relationships. They also provide another dimension to understanding the types with such concepts as quadras and the PoLR, which are (as far as I know) fully absent in MBTI.

Maybe I have misunderstood you but it seems to me that your main reason to want to almost "merge" MBTI and Socionics is because one finds useful stuff on some types in some MBTI profiles that Socionics' have "missed". Even if true, does that apply to other types besides INTj and INTp, the ones you have focused most on?