Why I don't want to do anything with my life
onescientist.com
onescientist.com
So it's not serious, or what? I can totally relate to all this, I really don't want to do anything. Too much hassle.
I'm totally happy being a good Dad, husband, son, grandson, Christian, citizen, whatever. What I do to put money in the bank account and food on the table is just not that big a deal for me.
> For $50 a month, you'll get to download my new e-book "Waves and Wavelengths" (www.onescientist.com) for FREE. You will also get to download all my upcoming e-books that I'm currently working on for FREE
Gave me a giggle anyway. For $50/month I get all this free stuff!
I liked the sound of your book so went over to your page, but $30 per month minimum isn't something I would want to pay. I suspect others will feel the same.
I for one simply enjoyed the read.
In a world of 7 billion people you've heard of everyone worth knowing about?
There's this standard advice about making time for relationships, and not being such a bloody workaholic. About psychological deathbed agony, wishing that one had spent more time with family and friends. But for me, I suspect that the agony will be more about all the time that I wasted keeping people happy.
Oh, and it probably isn't shitty, based on the strength of this article. I'm assuming there will be some light-cringing involved if engineers read it, but I may be wrong, and I'm sure there's a huge audience for this out there. I know self-help stuff gets a bad rep. Completely understandable most of the time. But there's probably a reason it's so popular - i.e. the good stuff is good!
It's like Dungeons and Dragon - people identify with their type/class, except people take MBTI more seriously than they do D&D.
Another thing that truly gets me annoyed is the listing out of all these "things" that an author has been, none of them the reader would know if they have actually been any good at it. I could list a myriad of things "I have been" and make me look like a renaissance man except half of them I have been not even average at.
What is true is that there's no bimodality in the distribution - each factor is a bell curve - and so talking about E/I is similar to talking about above-average IQ/below-average IQ rather than talking about the numbers. But it's not pseudo-science.
[1]: http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personalit...
Saying that MB is "not scientific" is laughable. It is a measure. Probably more scientific than deriving a measure called QI from 20 random questions
You can of course question if conclusions based on each MB type are scientific.
The personality descriptions for the most part are just concluded from the measure (which of course have some variance between people, it's not a cookie cutter approach) and of course some people have a different measure in each axis.
If the descriptions fit you you're probably in the middle, because some of them certainly don't fit me
From the link you quoted: "The characteristics measured by the test have almost no predictive power on how happy you'll be in a situation, how you'll perform at your job, or how happy you'll be in your marriage."
Apart from the 1st measure, I wholeheartedly agree. But that's not how it should be used
"Actual data tells psychologists that these traits do not have a bimodal distribution. Tracking a group of people's interactions with others, for instance, shows that as Jung noted, there aren't really pure extroverts and introverts, but mostly people who fall somewhere in between."
Correct. And people may be more introverted or extroverted in some situations.
But it still measures if a certain person is more introverted than extroverted
Now the warning about taking it as a clear-cut indicator of performance in a certain job or position is definitely correct
One problem is that the thing being measured can decide how it wants to be measured. It's easy for me to select a type from MBTI.
The claim "you have one of 16 personality types" is not falsifiable. Why does it have to be one of those types?
The things that MBTI purports to measure - E/I, S/N, F/T, J/P are just based on Carl Jung's made up theories about how the mind works.
The questions on the MBTI are supposed to correlate precisely to Jung's scales, but what if they don't? Language is awfully malleable. Do I prefer abstract or concrete? Give me a break. (Yes, I get it, abstract is N, concrete is S.) Would I rather stay home and read a book or go to the party? Can I have a book reading party at home? Can I bring a book to the party? Can I read a book about a party? What if I don't like books or parties?
The whole concept of dualism is pure philosophy.
This is a problem in psychology regardless of the type of test. If it's a person asking questions they might be able to detect if someone is skewing the answers
> The claim "you have one of 16 personality types" is not falsifiable. Why does it have to be one of those types?
You have 4 variables, X0 to X4, and a measure of each (let's say between -1 and 1). Then you divide this space in 2 regions per variable. That's how you get 16 (2 ^ 4) types. You might pick 3 regions per variable and have 81 types, harder to work with though)
> The questions on the MBTI are supposed to correlate precisely to Jung's scales
I agree with this, but when measuring something with lots of variables you always have a certain dimensionality reduction (and noise).
And of course it varies with age and situation, but you will be hard pressed to have a INFP as a football coach
But of course you know all that ;)
We define there to be those types when we're measuring - that's like saying the claim "an object has a temperature that's a number" is not falsifiable. We can test the same object multiple times with multiple thermometers and get the same results (while getting different results for different objects). That's the part that's falsifiable - test-retest reliability. If we have that then we can be confident that our measure measures something. (Then the next step is seeing whether the measure is useful by seeing if it correlates with other things).
[1] http://www.vox.com/2015/7/24/9023721/white-whiteness-race-id... [2] http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/22/6056835/white-black-soci... [3] http://www.vox.com/2014/10/31/7134247/whiteness-project
Another way to look at it is the following. I'm not a machine learning expert but I suppose MBTI is simply a way to cluster maximum correlation vectors into a compact representation. This representation happens to contain 4 bits of information (since there are 16 MBTI types).
However, I have learnt to separate facts from knowledge. Reading books about marketing will mostly give you facts without context but if you to talk to people who do marketing or try to raise a blog to several thousand subscribers, you will gain a lot of knowledge.
Doing a lot of things, in my experience will give you more perspective and experience than anything else and frankly, there is enough time in the world to do that.
I'm the same as you, once again back in the career change cycle.
There's really no corporation out there who wants a generalist unless you're the CEO perhaps, but you have to be an expert to get there.
I'm pretty sure generalists were just meant to be merchants / small business owners but those opportunities have dwindled away in our modern economy.
Not everyone struggles with this, though. Given that it isn't an evenly-distributed problem, there is possibly a pattern between those who do struggle with it.
In D&D, I'm a utility/crowd control generalist Elf Wizard.
In real life I never bothered to check. It's not like I'll get any free spell out of it.
(Okay that "some people" was actually me as kid.)
Never played DnD, but after reading the definitions, I and my friends found myself to be "chaotic neutral" :D
I've found almost no helpful science on personality categorization (Big 5 is minimally helpful), so until there is I find this a useful starting tool.
As a side note: The most misunderstood aspect of MBTI is that it's purely a system for categorizing high-level approach toward action and information in life. It's not what you must do, will do, can do, can't do, etc. It's only about certain aspects of outlook on life.
Suicide seems to be a good decision, then. Eh but wait, that's doing something with your life, then.
:p
If it's real - then he's a self loathing twat who doesn't know how to push his own boundaries. If he can do arts and do any job and essentially anything wants, all because of his look-at-me-I'm-an-ENTP qualities, then he's not obviously pushing his own boundaries and is only acting as a detriment to everybody. Do something to improve others' lives. Don't tell anybody you did it. It's difficult yet possible, time consuming yet financially awful, and gloriless yet commendable. Just do it, asshole. It'll make you feel good about yourself and what you do. Sheesh louise.....
If it's not real - learn to mark a clearer point.
I need a break from this site.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/101882.Calvin_Coolid...
It took a hard breakup, a motorcycle accident, getting fired and a long due out-of-continent vacation within a two month period of time to get me to realize it. And also a similarly angry person.
A year ago, I considered myself a completely useless pile of shit. Last week, for the first time, somebody called me their 'hero' for acting to help others using passion and persistence, rather than just talking about it. It's a strange and almost overwhelming thing to hear. If I'd settled, I wouldn't have been able to get to where I am now.
And again.. sorry if I sounded too harsh there. My gears get ground up pretty easily on this subject considering it's something that hits so close to home.
Best of luck. :)
Pro-tip: skip to the end of a long post to read the punchline and find out if it is real or not. (tldr: its not)
You probably clicked through to find some relevance to your own life (excuse the assumption - I did, at least). I'd imagine you got annoyed round about when you found out there was a book for sale, eroding any potential value the post may have had.
But did it? If his writing made you think, made you upset, made you question anything, it was 'interesting' in the HN sense and, to my mind, at least, stands alone as a clever piece of literature. Art, essentially.
Thing is, I agreed with the message very strongly. It's a message that I hold dear and it's something I try to live my life by on a day to day basis. But the reason this strikes anger in me is because the message he's pushing sells himself, his potential and many others like him incredibly short. It's a flat idea that could be so much more, but it's not. And it's used to sell a book. Fuck that.