No, the history of personality typing is a much more interesting story than that, and depends very specifically on data.
Myers/Briggs/Jung identified 4-5 personality "axes" on which people vary. How did they do that? They basically gave a bunch of people surveys with hundreds of questions and did PCA on the data. They found that 4-5 dimensions explained a lot of the variance. That was a new finding based on data, at the same time that the field of statistics was developing. And it gave insight into how people behave. It's important enough that we frequently use it as a heuristic in workplaces today.
In modern times, we can do the same on much larger data sets. Given Facebook "like" data for 50 million people, you can do dimensionality reduction on the data and extract personality "types". There's no question that this gives you information about people. The question is how well it can be weaponized - that's the debate around CA now.
Myers/Briggs/Jung identified 4-5 personality "axes" on which people vary. How did they do that? They basically gave a bunch of people surveys with hundreds of questions and did PCA on the data. They found that 4-5 dimensions explained a lot of the variance. That was a new finding based on data, at the same time that the field of statistics was developing. And it gave insight into how people behave. It's important enough that we frequently use it as a heuristic in workplaces today.
In modern times, we can do the same on much larger data sets. Given Facebook "like" data for 50 million people, you can do dimensionality reduction on the data and extract personality "types". There's no question that this gives you information about people. The question is how well it can be weaponized - that's the debate around CA now.