I’m having difficulty in distinguishing between the INTP and INTJ personality types from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Please enlighten me.
An INTJ would say he knows exactly what the difference is, and he would never ask for enlightenment. 
Namby-pamby INTPs need someone else to make up their mind for them. 
The way I learned it, Perceiving and Judging are sort of misnomers; the real difference is in how much order and planning you like in your life. INTPs like to roll with changes and take life as it comes along, INTJs like to come up with plans and follow them.
This reminds me of the joke of the M-B facilitator who got kicked out of her own class. She had been hired to give an employee workshop by a company owner who had been talked into sponsoring the program, but who wasn’t completely sold on it.
During the workshop he peppered her with questions, asking over and over again how this could possibly benefit his company. So she decided to use him as an example. He was heavily J, and liked quick decisions. She came close to convincing him as she talked about the need to get enough information to base a good decision on. That although other people might have the opposite problem and need his motivation to stop saddling up and ride, his need was to know that he might come to a decision too soon, and to develop enough awareness to ensure that this does not happen.
She almost had him convinced until she said: “Your problem is that you have too much J-ness and not enough P-ness.”
I think the rolling with the changes vs planning behavior stems from the root meaning of the perceiving/judging terms. They’re not really misnomers. The Perceiving person is looking around saying “This is all very interesting. What should I do with it?” while the judging person looks around and says “This part is good, but this part is bad - how do I fix it?” The J person is constantly comparing to the outside to an internal model or set of expectations.
That’s why P people dance in the rain while J people go get an umbrella. 
That’s more of the T/F difference than the P/J difference.
Both the P and the J will have use an umbrella. The J’s umbrella will be in the umbrella stand that’s positioned exactly 2 feet from the front door. Where it always is. Because that is where umbrellas go. The P’s will also be exactly where it always is, that place being “wherever they left it the last time it rained.”
And INTP is a person who got an INTP result on a Myers-Briggs test, whereas an INTJ got an INTJ result.
INTPs are slobs, INTJs aren’t. At least in my experience.
I’m just kind of winging it here without reading any official Myers-Briggs documentation, but in a linguistic context Perceiving sure sounds like descriptivism and Judging sure sounds like prescriptivism.
If you Perceive, you care about what is. If you Judge, you care about what should be.
Indeed. What evidence is there that the results of a Myers-Briggs test, or even the particular system of “personality types” they are based on, are in any way useful?
I’m not sure what the difference between MBTI, Keirsey, and Jungian types are, but since they share the same 4-letter characterization scheme, I’m going to assume there is some overlap. With that in mind, I’m going to quote from Keirsey’s book, “Please Understand Me II” as excerpted here:
They are very useful to CPP Inc., which publishes the tests, and to the numerous psychologists who are paid to administer the tests.
Wait, did you mean beneficial to the people being evaluated? In that case they are probably useless.
They’re entertaining and amusing. That counts, right?
Entertainment value does count for something. But it doesn’t count for much in the way of establishing the scientific validity of concepts like INTP, INTJ, and the distinction between them.
From what I googled, I got that INTPs have dominant thinking, while INTJs have dominant intuition. Both are very thoughtful, but an INTP is more likely to to rely upon logical facts to make a conclusion, while an INTJ is more likely to trust their intuition, and only then think about it and see if their intuition is wrong.
Both have their advantages. When quick decisions are necessary, and INTJ is very useful. When you have more time to think about something, an INTP is more useful, as they are less likely to be biased by their initial observation.
No argument there.
On the other hand, on a casual, non-scientific level, imagine sitting down with someone and asking them 70 questions about themselves over an hour or so. Don’t you think you’ll learn a little about them – at least what they think of themselves, if nothing else?
That’s what these tests do, in broad, sweeping categories. They’re not perfect. They’re not individualized to each of 7 billion people. But they provide one method of thinking about people and personalities.
I do find it fascinating, the Myers-Briggs or Kiersey temperament, but I have to admit, they read almost like horoscopes to me. While I consistently score E/I NFP (the E/I score flip-flops–I’m pretty much the quintessential ambivert), I feel like reading pretty much any of the personality descriptions applies to me. Reading the description of the supposed exact opposite personality type (ISTJ), were somebody to ask me whether that accurately describes me, I would say yes.
I’ve known people who’ve said that and people who are entirely different from their opposites (I’m one of the latter). Some variants of the tests will score you in more detail, telling you how much you lean in any direction (49% I and 51% E, for example)… perhaps you’re just on the fence for many of the traits?
As an E/INFP myself, much of the ISTJ personality contradicts what I believe about myself. For example, the following line:
is directly opposed to the ENFP
which is much more accurate for me.
To some degree, society and work train people to behave in certain ways, so over time you can learn to behave differently no matter your innate personality – or perhaps your personality is largely shaped by your experiences to begin with. That said, I’ve been taking these things since I was 14 or so; a decade later my results are still the same except the I sometimes crosses over into E.
They’re different from horoscopes because they judge you based on self-reported attributes, not arbitrary dates. They’re similar in that they both report findings in broad generalizations, making it easy to find overlaps, but taken as a whole any given type should be different from another. In theory, anyway 
If you’re bored and this stuff really interests you, I found the Ansir test to be more insightful than the MBTI and anything else I’ve tried. Unfortunately, the company behind it never became very successful and they eventually moved to a business-to-business model, and the free personal stuff is no longer available online. The book has all the same info, but you’d have to score it yourself with pen and paper.
Ack. For some reason I thought this was in MPSIMS and not GQ . It should be obvious, but my comments were just opinions and not factual advice. I’ll leave them be for the sake of discussion, but don’t take them too seriously.