The MBTI self-reports on Less Wrong is something I had never looked into and seems to explain or correlate as expected with a lot of other info (such as how people found the LW community). More specifically, the INTJ-ish numbers are “low.” The “baseline” of “college educated male actively doing anything on the Internet” for INTJ is probably something like 10-15%, Bayesianly speaking. For example, garden variety eSports communities that are thought to be nowhere near as allegedly “selective” as the Less Wrong community report far higher percentages of INTJs. Estimates of INTJs and INTPs alone being over 50% in total are not uncommon, but this is mostly an aside on the makeup of LW as referenced by others and a general plausibility reference point. Also out of curiosity something I have not seen spelled in any comments since the original post is that INTJs are often put as about 3-to-1 male (for any group anywhere). As a general point it would be nice to know if anyone had more recent evidence on general population MBTI prevalences (limited by the fact that MBTI isn’t in great scientific repute as has been discussed).

As for the numbers you cited it seems you were overlooking that what was specified was not specifically Americans. This is particularly important to the total population estimate for bronies. Most of the brony population would be Western, true, and including Native English speakers in the non-Western world (which statistically would be mostly from India) pushes our estimates to the lower end of the range but not overwhelmingly so even assuming Indians are entirely not bronies. However an artificial limit to only Americans tremendously throws the numbers off.

I would say we are working with an estimate of 2-3 million INTJs in the relevant word population (by age and native/fluent English again). This is not inconsistent with your numbers, just the distinction that Americans were not the limited reference population. As for the percent of bronies which are INTJ, I think there are multiple surveys out there that show that 25% as you cited in one source as a floor to the range so that estimate is good. Interestingly other commenters here seem to think Internet surveys in general underestimate the proportion of INTJs, I’m not sure I agree with that but the data on bronies isn’t less reliable or accurate than anything else done by similar methods one way or another. It’s not the point that is most contentious because any estimate at many times the general population rate results in the same conclusion for predictive validity.

What I do have as off is your estimate of the number of bronies worldwide (made a little more understandable with the assumption that Americans were the limit of discussion)

For a total population estimate, to start, Fimfiction has well over 100,000 user accounts, even allowing for novelties and duplicates an estimate of 50,000 unique users would be reasonable. That number clearly would be on the order of 1% of the brony population. Likewise it would seem any assumption of most given Internet sites representing a huge proportion of unique bronies is off and inconsistent with how any other demographic would be counted.

That produces an estimate around the 5 million mark for adults worldwide, which seems in line with other evidence.

To take a second source of evidence, we can look at Youtube video views. Regardless of confounding issues like previous copyright takedowns one can still find specific instances in the range of 20 to 30 million views. Obviously there are a ton of assumptions to deal with on making an estimate of “unique persons” from youtube views, but we can use simple comparisons instead of trying to calculate from scratch. Consider any example you like in pop culture music, to take an example I’d argue that the estimate of “the number of people who are fans of Katy Perry” would be around 20x the numbers of the bronies. That’s with years old music videos to songs in the top of the charts being in the proportionate hundreds of millions viewcount.

So the worldwide estimate is 5 million on the low end total bronies, within the relevant age range and language categories somewhat less but the majority share (partly by definition) falling there. The least reliable numbers are the proportion of bronies who are INTJs as self-reported, which we’re taking as 25%. However even if that number is too high and it’s more like 10% that is still an interestingly large proportion of worldwide INTJs too, quite amazing of a bijection of a human population.

What has to be understood is the relative rates versus absolute numbers. We have an estimate that 15% of LW may be INTJ but not 15% of all INTJs are members of the LW community. Similarly, just as a hypothetical example, 50% of INTJ voters in the last US election might have voted for Obama but 50% of Obama voters are not INTJs. What is impressive here is the relationship cutting both ways over a large population (millions), with 25% of bronies being INTJ and 25% of worldwide INTJs in the same demographics being bronies. These estimates are a little fuzzy, they could be higher, or even if one number is lower, closer to like 15%, the relationship still has astounding predictive validity.

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Actually, more recent tests peg me as INTx – on a knife edge between J and P. I wish my type would make up its mind.

I’m also French.

Now, please derive some useful predictions about me from the above facts!

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This is actually completely crazy. Every paragraph is a new “What the fuck…?” moment.

(Of course, every so often there is something that I look at and just think “…no”.)

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http://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/human-types-part-1/

If I say “Eliezer Yudkowsky has trouble losing weight because he’s Jovial” is that even a testable statement? Are there testable statements in human typology at all? What are types for?

In case it’s not clear — the above type system cannot possibly be “true” as stated, since planets don’t affect glands at all, it’s standard astrology fakery. The question is, in what way is Meyers-Briggs “true” while above is “false?”

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The Myers-Briggs types could be improved by adding “neutral” types. Then there would be 81 different types.

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1 – are drawn to match existing cultural boundaries,
or
2 – cultural boundaries come to match existing national border due to movement of people within a nation and schooling in the national language and culture.

So it’s only natural that if you hear coordinates, you convert them to country names, and not viceversa.

(If it’s neither 1 nor 2, you get Belgium or Switzerland, which are rarities).

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