Ask HN: Can we get a good theory of categorical personality types? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can we get a good theory of categorical personality types?

Look at the types of fundamental particles. There's no nice symmetric number of types of fundamental particles (like a prime power, or a highly composite number such as 72). Types that occur in the universe are usually a nasty number. All existing theories of personality types either come in nice prime powers (2, 4, 16) or they're continuous models (which are not useful for fixing yourself; someone in the Big Five whose dominantly agreeable or dominantly open to experience doesn't get a differently designed therapy from someone who is dominantly disagreeable or dominantly closed to experience).

Is anybody else interested in designing a categorical personality theory that can be used to fix yourself or am I just a fool? If you are, I need you to get in contact with me. I need all the help I can get.

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No, because human personalities don’t fit neatly into boxes and because we currently know very little about our own psychology. And putting people into boxes can be very destructive.

Even something like introversion/extraversion, which we have strong evidence and measures for, is a continuous scale rather than a binary, with most people landing somewhere near the middle.

Most personality measurement systems (such as the MBTI) are pseudoscience; and we know this because the same person will not reliably get consistent results when testing again a few weeks after an initial test.

Sure, if we knew a lot more about psychology than we currently do, you could probably come up with a way to place a person’s personality in a continuous N-dimensional space, where N > 1000... but what good would that do you?

But anyway, that’s not the part of your message that’s most interesting. What about you do you think needs “fixing”; and how would such a theory help you?

> What about you do you think needs “fixing”; and how would such a theory help you?

My mind broke. And yes, it's my mind and not a neuropsychiatric problem. What happened is that my mind had a segmentation fault and now I'm trapped in the same psychological space that elsagate videos exist (search youtube to get an idea of what I'm talking about) in. As a consequence of this I have strange paraphilias that I cannot get rid of.

No existing method of therapy works.

And don't say I'm trolling just because this is outside your quotidian experience. Remember that you inquired into the matter and I am giving you the whole truth.

Why do you think that’s a “personality” issue? And why do you feel compelled to “fix” it yourself instead of seeing a therapist?

Personality type is kind of like God's OS that he gave you. You don't approach a problem in an Amiga the same way you would approach a problem in Mac OS 9.

I don't know any therapy that is appropriate for this. CBT is for depression and anxiety and I don't have THOSE problems.

Psychology is far more than just personality. And CBT is effective for many issues besides depression and anxiety. I’d still suggest speaking with a therapist.

Okay I will take your advice!

Personality psychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology

There are a number of studies which identify a set of features and then search for clusters / 'categories' with various methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_discriminant_analysis

> LDA is also closely related to principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis in that they both look for linear combinations of variables which best explain the data.[4] LDA explicitly attempts to model the difference between the classes of data. PCA on the other hand does not take into account any difference in class, and factor analysis builds the feature combinations based on differences rather than similarities. Discriminant analysis is also different from factor analysis in that it is not an interdependence technique: a distinction between independent variables and dependent variables (also called criterion variables) must be made.

...

> Is anybody else interested in designing a categorical personality theory that can be used to fix yourself

How helpful is personality theory in developing a clinical model for behavior change?

"Because I need to treat my robot"

Futurama's <i>All My Robots</i>

This looks like a good idea.

The identification of fundamental particles is based on scientific evidence: physicists created this theory to explain their observations of the physical world. The current theory can be tested, and disproved if it doesn't hold up. (Previous theories of fundamental particles have been replaced as new facts have been discovered.)

What scientific facts are there to suggest that there are discrete "personality types"?

Umm... the DSM-V has psychopath and narcissist. Those are two distinct categories of personality.

So which one is more parsimonious: there are two discrete personality types (narcissist and psychopath) and everyone else is ill-defined, or everyone exists in a discrete personality type?

"...the DSM-V has psychopath and narcissist. Those are two distinct categories of personality."

Those are personality disorders.

Maybe they're personality types and we're being too politically correct, unwilling to admit that some type are actually bad.

That would be at odds with the book you drew your conclusion from.

The DSM-V pretends they're personality disorders instead of personality types...because they want to be politically correct. But the truth is that they're personality types because they're always ego-syntonic. If they were disorders they would be ego-dystonic.

DSM-5: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of _Mental Disorders_, 5th Edition.

They are personality disorders; trying to insert some kind of bias against political correctness isn't going to change that, nor does it support anything you're trying to say.

"If they were disorders they would be ego-dystonic."

I'm not sure you understand the concepts of disorders, or you're on some conspiracy trip; either way I'm not interested in debating someones opinion versus current scientific understanding.

> the DSM-V has psychopath

Please could you link to the DSM V section for psychopath?

"Antisocial personality disorder" is a polylexical synonym for psychopath.

Fermions: 8 * 3 * 2 (or perhaps 8 * 4 *2)

(note: the quarks need to be counted 3 times because each color is different)

(note: I like to count the L and R particles as different)

(note: antiparticles don't count)

Force Bosons: 1 + (2^2-1) + (3^2-1) + something for gravitons when we confirm them

Higgs Boson: 1

Looks like a nice symmetric scheme for me.

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