Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)
soccermatics.medium.com
soccermatics.medium.com
But something tells me that there could also be some positive effects from actually wondering about the behavior of others and how you treat them, even if it’s pigeonholing and preconceptions based on bogus research.
A bit like every single diet works (compared to no diet) because the fundamental thing is dieting in the sense that you think actively about diet.
As for this book: It’s a pretty useless book, but I can see how it’s appealing. I can’t see how it being unscientific makes it worse than 90% of similar books in the bookstore. This is a pop book you read on a plane. It’s not a scientific publication. If he claims it’s solid science that’s obviously bad, but I’m sure all the mindfulness and yoga books do too - and all of those are certainly not very scientific.
Almost every high level executive I met that's actually genuinely good with people, subscribes strongly and uses a personality model - whether it's the Disc model or four quadrants or whatever. The fact it has no scientific backing has no bearing in them "knowing its true" , but it also doesn't limit it being a useful if self fulfilling framework. And though we can accurately argue that system is stacked in what it rewards, these are leaders who genuinely do care and do well by their team. More than anything, it makes me introspect what does it mean for a model to "work", because I deeply believe that these models are pseudo scientific garbage, overly simplifying and random bs's confirmation of existing bias... But I've also had tons of personal anecdotal evidence they "work" or "help" - again, not just in self fulfilling or pegging into square hole way.
I would say my anectdata is completely opposite after working in an organization that based its management almost exclusively on disc. The model allowed managers to completely ignore the vast majority of people issues ("ah, those two have a D in their profile, of course they're gonna butt heads"). The managers who were actually good with people never relied on any pseudoscientific crutch to analyse, communicate or mediate conflict, and imo that's what made them _good with people_.
This part of the article resonated strongly with the issues I saw and how over reliance on personality models sabotaged the organization:
> A common mistake when problems occur within an organisation is to focus on the individuals that are involved in conflicts. In fact, since it is the context of a situation which decides how people act, the primary concern in addressing any conflict should lie in how the organisation works. Before an organisation consultant, brought in to resolve conflicts, looks at individuals she should look at the structure (Olofsson & Nilsson, 2015).
I personally did like the Enneagram personality types. It made me realize how I had a totally different way of looking at the world. It's probably a better model than Disc, because it does include healthy and unhealthy levels, which is always extremely important if you want to understand people in general.
I think management applying any kind of model in such a simplistic model is just setting them up for failure. The right kind of thinking would probably have been: "those two are butting heads; let's find out why". The reason for butting heads is not that they have a D in their profile, it's just a correlation.
I do not know how your friend did it exactly, but my main experience with people who are into astrology is different - they get told by the astrological models/dogma on how to think of people and combination of people.
"I cannot be with this person, he is a lion and I am [whatever]"
"Why are you together, your signs do not match each other"
In other words, they "help" by simplifying things. Avoiding thinking to make decisions. But in my experience that always hurt them in the long run. And it probably destroyed many relationships as people went with the simple astrological explanation, instead of a real analysis what went wrong. Or rather, it often went wrong, because of negative self fullfulling prophecy.
Instead I, like the OP's friend, think it's a rather interesting and deep system of symbols and archetypes. A set of lenses, if you want. Sometimes, looking at the reality through a certain lens yields interesting insights.
I surely agree to that.
But your lenses can also give you a distorted, faulty view of reality. And many people go with that, because it looks nicer.
I think this guy used some science to back his book up, but the book doesn't even need that.
The point is, people are different, and it's an important life skill to realize this because you accept people who are different from you much easier.
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Almost the only “scientific” reference that Erikson provides in his book is from a book written in 1928 called the Emotions of Normal People, by American psychologist William Moulton Marston. Moulton hypothesised that our behaviour is influenced by “psychonic energy” that is transferred through a web of nerve cells that he called “psychons”. The four personality types (yellow, green, blue and red) arise, Marston claims, as variations between different people in the structure of their psychonic network.
This “theory” is pure speculation on the part of Marston. There was no scientific evidence for psychons or psychonic energy in 1928 and there is none today. At the time of publication, the science of psychology was in its infancy and, like Hippocrates and Jung before him, he had created a theory without proper scientific grounding. Unlike Hippocrates and Jung though, Marston’s theory garnered little attention, and he left psychology. He later rose to fame though when he created the comic book hero Wonder Woman!
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It might be helpful to simplify life by bucketing people into 'personality types' but there doesn't seem to be any more scientific justification here than one would find in Astrology or Harry Potter Houses (anyway Astrology is a based on a much larger heap of unscientifically collected anecdotes).
I didn't even manage to take the book very seriously because it was so overly... arrogant in its presentation. "If you do X, you're red. Red people do Y, Z, U, V. Remember the times someone did W? Red person." Every statement presented as unquestionable fact, but none of them sourced (but anecdotes abound).
It's unfortunate that people (all of Sweden, apparently?) seem to have gotten carried away and based lives and decisions around what is evidently just the author's musings.
I doubt it, any benefit (if there are any) will be FAR outweighed by the negative effects.
It makes it way too easy to use the category as a excuse for bad behaviour.
It makes it way too easy for someone believing it to put themself in a category while they do not fit any category in turn causing a ton a psychological stress, especially for teenagers in the puberty which could even cause long term negative after effects.
It hinders a proper healthy society, because that requires people to work on themself instead of just excusing themself as being <color>.
It hinders proper psychological care, self finding, self reflection/introspection.
It messes with peoples life if applies at work.
...
However, it tends to be used as a theory of personality too, despite there being no science whatsoever to support it.
The idea of giving people a role that they can focus on, from an early age, has some advantages. Of course pigeonholing people has a wide range of disadvantages; everything is a trade-off.
We cherish technocrats and "philosopher-king" to rule us in the Supreme Court and high ranking agencies and military. In turn they're not expected to have relevant property to avoid temptation.
Truth is people like being ruled and being told where they fit, if this leads to some sort of purpose and stability. That's why such millennia old ideas prosper
Society will reach its peak when we fully adopt a graph-like conception of people’s roles, ideally with a high degree of mobility between the nodes. You can know where you fit without being told where you fit. Right now we’re in the uncanny valley of not wanting to tell anyone, but also acting like there’s nothing to be known.
But my comment was that people have such a "need for being ruled" that we repurpose ideas with clear autocratic root for our democracy.
The other cognitive heuristic that applies here is that of projecting n independent dimensions onto one or two, at best. Like in this case, the latter often comes with exactly two elements in each dimension yielding a 2⨯2 matrix.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_sy... (admittedly a pigeonholing of mental processes by itself)
Obviously, yoga is a movement practice and thus, one could write a very practical book about the muscles, ligaments, and tendons, how to foam roll and massage to enhance yoga, how yoga has scientifically proven health benefits, etc.
Similarly for mindfulness, you look at Joseph Goldstein's book Insight Meditation, and it's mostly a combination of stories from his life as a Buddhist in Asia, alongside his learnings from Buddhist teachings. Nowhere does he claim it's scientific nor does he attempt to use pseudoscience. He stays in his lane and the book is a great one.
So, friend, I'd say don't besmirch two very ancient and healthy habits which have aided millions of people, especially when you give zero pieces of evidence while seemingly not actually knowing those fields.
> Maybe the only positive thing that can be said about Erikson’s theory is that it might help some people realise that not everyone thinks the same way they do. Psychologists call this “theory of mind”, an ability to change perspective, which usually develops in early childhood. In other words, Erikson’s book might help someone with the empathetic and intellectual level of a five-year-old.
Which sounds about right to me (though I find the last sentence to be a bit overly dismissive).
On top of that, TFA has many good points about the damage that can be done when this system is imposed from above and used to explain away problems. Imagine if there was a shitshow at work, and the post-mortem determined that it was because the tech lead was a Capriocorn and the engineering lead was an Aries.
You have no idea how close to reality this description is for my former workplace that based its management on the disc model.
"Oh, the product lead and some specialists are having conflicts? Surely it is because of those arbitrary letters they got on that pseudoscientific test, and not some structural issues in our organization"
I'm not suggesting a solution, as I don't have one, and would be extremely sceptical of any proposed solution. Doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize it. "Know thyself" etc.
Attach the label "antivax" or "conspiracist" to anyone and see what goes on in your mind.
(This is completely tangential to the main point, but...)
Every diet "works" because the underlying mechanism driving weight loss is eating less calories than your body uses throughout the day. And almost every diet makes people consume less calories than they normally do, at least at first. That's why every diet "works" at least in the short term.
Expect you don't because people do not fit into classes, especially not classes that simple (i.e. only 4).
It means you will behave annoying, toxic or otherwise unpleasant to people because you expect them to have traits/personalities they might _just don't have_.
In my experience any classification I know of is more hurtful for society then it's helpful and should be avoided.
Also in my experience they are quite often used in a slightly degradating way by people outside of that group which either don't understand or like that group or just want to make themself feel better by lifting themself over other people.
It just makes people excuse/explain away their and other peoples behaviour, instead of trying to work on themself, their relationships, interactions and/or environment.
It isn't harmless. It is sand in the gears. Especially when human mismeasures and biases need to be kept out of ML systems, baking bunk into systems results in lasting damage.
The problem is that "something good can come from lying to people" requires lying to people, and people believing the lie. If someone realizes that the whole thing is bunk, then the positive effect evaporates.
When people are trying to make sense of a situation it often helps to place it into a pre-existing narrative for guidance.
In many ways the amount of scientific rigor behind the narrative doesn't matter much. It's far more important for the narrative to guide people towards the behaviors which will have a positive outcome. People will inscribe themselves onto a character and then map The narrative onto their lives, If it's a good narrative (maybe turn the other cheek for example) The person will proceed with an action That is statistically most likely to result in a positive outcome.
I suspect this is how most religions came about, The sets of rules, narratives, and beliefs which resulted in relatively better outcomes propagated and flourished.
> Yoga is the mastery of the activities of the mind-field. Then the seer rests in its true nature.
Just wanted to clarify that a bit ..
There is also the story of Shiva being the first yogi, which one telling can be read here: https://isha.sadhguru.org/yoga/history-of-yoga/the-first-yog... .. you know, but these are of course stories, who knows how they originated.
Still, the yogis and holy men in India were considered to be like scientists today, studying the technology of the human beings, so these stories and things passed on are not just random findings but careful studying of the inner technologies on how we operate as humans.
You’ll see books on why you should do yoga while juggling eggplants or mindfulness through playing quake and it might be some times a bit semi-scientific.
They do get packaged into a lifestyle, but they also predate consumerism by thousands of years.
Evidence for this? Taking a break and relaxing your mind is beneficial, not sure why one form wouldn't substitute for another form.
> Of more than 3,000 scientific studies that were found in a comprehensive search of 17 relevant databases, only about 4% had randomised controlled trials (RCTs), which are designed to exclude the placebo effect.
So 4% accounted for placebo. How many accounted for the "taking a break is healthy" effect? You need to show that it is different than just taking a break! Any evidence of this?
You're the one claiming they're the same - where's your evidence that napping causes the effects identified as caused by meditation?
If you want to believe meditation is the same as napping, you're free to do so. As somebody with a great deal of experience in both meditation and napping, my experience is that they're completely different - meditation is not just quietly relaxing, in fact it can be extremely difficult.
Accounting for placebo is the minimum you should do, that doesn't mean that the rest of the study is well done.
> You're the one claiming they're the same - where's your evidence that napping causes the effects identified as caused by meditation?
You are the one coming with the extraordinary claim, that meditation does something fundamentally different.
> meditation is not just quietly relaxing, in fact it can be extremely difficult.
Right, meditation isn't even a defined concept, it is whatever you want it to be. In some practices it is strenuous as you say, in others it is just relaxing. Bundling all of that under a common name makes research around this topic even less trustworthy.
From your perspective, given you seem convinced that meditation is the same as a nap, sure. That itself seems to me like an absurd proposition.
At the end of the day, if you want to think that then that's fine. I think it's silly, like claiming that weightlifting and stretching are the same - and I doubt there are many studies comparing the two.
> Right, meditation isn't even a defined concept
It's many concepts under one umbrella. Meditation is just maintaining focus on one thing, to the exclusion of all else. It can be your breath, your internal emotional state, or even nothing (as per zazen meditation).
As the old saying goes, you can't reason somebody out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, so unless you have an actual logical argument or evidence for them being the same thing, then there's little point debating it.
Occam's razor. If people benefit from sitting and thinking about just one thing then the simplest explanation is that the benefit is that they aren't stressing around about their normal life. If there is some special effect above that then it would need strong evidence comparing it to just sitting down and not stressing about things.
You're also jumping around in your position - first it's "meditation is sleep" now it's "meditation is time you're not stressing". Sleep does more than just allow you to escape stress. The latter is more like comparing meditation to escapist entertainment.
The simple explanation for mindfulness' effect is it allows you to better observe and understand your own mental processes. If you try to spend 10 minutes focussing on your breath, you train yourself to notice when your attention slips away. This is useful in regular life, but it also allows you to see what your attention is slipping towards - whether that's a stressor, or an unprocessed emotion, or some nonsense that you keep thinking about but can let go of once you recognise it. There's a strong benefit to living more actively in the present, as opposed to being trapped in your worries and imagination.
> You're also jumping around in your position - first it's "meditation is sleep" now it's "meditation is time you're not stressing".
I wasn't the one who said meditation is a nap. Stop arguing that point. I do however doubt that there is anything special about meditation. And the process of taking a nap has a lot of similar parts to taking a break or meditating, I'd want evidence that those aren't just the same source. (although a nap also would add the sleeping part)
Edit:
> The simple explanation for mindfulness' effect is it allows you to better observe and understand your own mental processes.
But there is no evidence this actually helps. It helps some people take a break from their worries as you say, I understand that part can help them, but to all the people who can destress without some religious practice like this then I don't see why they would benefit from it. Just sit, don't think about things that worry you and relax. Why wouldn't that get the benefits of meditation? You say meditation also helps in other ways, but I see no evidence that those effects exists. Religions and their practices tend to get a large following who wants the things to be true, I see no reason to believe in those though.
You can be skeptical all you want, but rejecting practices purely because they started out with religious explanations is just as irrational as accepting them because of those same reasons. Many medicines are based on natural substances that were initially based on traditional and herbal remedies and I'm sure they were originally given religious explanations - religion was basically the stopgap explanation for anything we didn't understand back in ancient history.
And for what it's worth, I'm a radical materialist.
Another benefit is increased awareness. You become more aware of your thought patterns and the emotions they trigger. This way you can become less reactive. You have space to not follow the initial impulse that comes up.
The article. The article told you that:
“Maybe the only positive thing that can be said about Erikson’s theory is that it might help some people realise that not everyone thinks the same way they do. Psychologists call this “theory of mind”, an ability to change perspective, which usually develops in early childhood.”
But then it continues with this glorious TL;DR:
”In other words, Erikson’s book might help someone with the empathetic and intellectual level of a five-year-old.”
Yes, that was a very nice worded academic insult. Which makes the later sentence a bit hypocrite:
"When faced with challenges to his work, Erikson claims that we are attempting to make out that his readers are idiots. Nothing could be further from the truth"
Of course a psychologist is not using the loaded word "idiot" anymore. They still scientifically describe it and use more nuances. And in this case explains, how the poor readers were fooled by the big publisher. Ah those poor idio.. I mean, structurally mentally challenged persons.
That makes everything else all the more poignant; Erikson apparently saw the author of the article as their *strongest likely supporter* which says so, so much about their degree of self delusion. The person that says Erikson is totally wrong and causing harm is seemingly about the only actual scientist Erikson knows... and Erikson continues to push their theory anyway.
My point though is that this person lied, publicly, about being endorsed by the author of the article. You don't usually do that unless you have absolutely positively no other options that will increase your credibility. But sure, maybe psychologists have credibility while behavioral scientist is the equivalent of being a "brand influencer".
I’m ready to agree with the author of the article here but his conclusion isn’t exactly more scientific than the book he’s writing about.
> Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous
> Green: patient, considerate, nice
> Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal
If that's the definition it's a catastrophe.
A lot of entries listed are skills you can (and do) learn for specific situations, and which just some people do to some degree apply to all parts of their live. But someone applying "patient" to all their live doesn't mean they also will apply it when it matter, nor does it mean a normally "impartient" person can't (potentially already has) learn to be patient when it matters.
Generally all of "solution focussed", "analytic", "careful", "meticulous", "patient", "considerate", "nice", "verbal" are all skills you can learn and learn to apply in all contexts (through for some people it's harder it's still possible, through different people need to approach it in different ways).
I also have meet all kind of "creative" people, so linking that together with other personality traits seem absurd.
"driven" is in my experience more related to unhealthy stress, potentially anxiety disorders
"extroverted" depends a lot on the definition what it is supposed to mean, through in this context it probably means outgoing, outspoken, etc. or similar, in which case in which case it's still bs as this kind of behaviour is often highly contextual.
I have seen things like "INTP-J" on friends profile. I think it's called 16 personalities.
Me and my colleagues did that test, and the suggested one for me did not fit in with me at all, and most of us thought the results were bullshit. Why anyone would follow this to make work groups, or to exclude people in their life is mind boggling.
[1] Mostly. MB and more recent variants can be useful for reinforcing that different people have different worldviews and tendencies. There's also some evidence that different groups, such as different professions (like programmers), do tend to test differently as a population and that has certain implications when they're creating products for a different population (like the general public) that tends to test differently.
Doesn’t that imply it isn’t all bullshit?
The actual science, such as it is, is also rooted into Jungian psychology which doesn't really have a lot of actual science behind it.
I do agree that cutting someone out of your life solely due to a personality test is putting the cart before the horse, regardless of how scientifically rigorous it is.
Well, two of the MBTI types have a strong correlation (defined typically as >0.5, in the MBTI case around 0.7 in both cases, IIRC) with two of the Big 5 traits. But that’s...not so great a reason to lean on MBTI.
For instance: in the 90's less than 10% (but more than 5%) of British people were going to university. But that has profound effects on the population.
Aka more than 25% of 18-20 year where in collage in the UK.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/909409/religious-identif...
There's also a whole sub-layer of dominant and auxiliary functions.
Missing fads is a feature, not a bug.
I think that the book is a typical case of "You have a complex problem and my snake oil provides an easy solution"
The funniest part of the article was how Forbes lists this as a top ten must-read. And why wouldn't it, removing all nuance and operating on big words invented by an "expert" is peak C-level thinking.
Finally, I feel obliged to point out that the four types described are essentially the Houses of Hogwarts with the colors switched around.
Well, is it? Is it not be definition "abstraction" rather than "scam"? A scam would involve to purposefully obfuscate the truth or outright lying.
Creating simpler rules around something difficult in order to explain a lot is how a lot of science progresses. Wasn't that what Newton/Einstein or someone else did regarding physics, in order to explain how things work in our universe? Before that we had lots of difficult rules and exceptions, while they come up with something clean that could explain a lot of things instead.
It also boils down to a 5-dimensional vector not 5 categories of people.
If we see each dimension in just 10 bins then that's still 100000 different categories.
People hope, pray, follow best practices, listen to advice on the internet and yet, every now and then we are reminded that only fools do these things. Really intelligent people only listen to science and do things backed by science and lots of data.
How does anyone accomplish anything if every step they take has to be double blind studied before it even crosses their mind?
Maybe for my own sanity, while humanity marches towards becoming Vulcan, I'll continuing accepting a few heuristics, fables, and Grandma's chicken noodle soup.
> How does anyone accomplish anything if every step they take has to be double blind studied before it even crosses their mind?
First, it doesn't have to be double-blinded before it can "cross your mind". There are lots of solid theories that are worth taking into consideration, however if you are writing a book promoting a theory which you claim has a scientific basis it is helpful to at least some evidence that it is true.
Nothing wrong with enjoying grandma's chicken noodle soup. I'm sure it's beneficial - but don't sell it as a cure for cancer.
Then I got older and realized how easy it is to frame and manipulate data and “facts” to achieve any desired result on the part of the person disseminating the facts. I realized that having some base convictions was a way to defend against people using data in unscrupulous ways, to convince me of things I didn’t want to believe.
So now I do both. I have some points of view that I can’t defend with data and science and peer review studies. They are grounded in my own observations of the world and how they make me feel. I won’t let anyone tell me what my lying eyes see, that’s for me to determine. But for what I can’t see I try to follow data where I can.
Does this mean I may be living under some incorrect convictions? Sure! But it’s far better than floating like a leaf in the wind, blowing wherever someone spouting some “data” would want to take me.
Irrationality is okay because the world and humans are irrational. You can’t operate in a pure mentat/vulcan mode under such conditions.
I don't need a textbook to tell me objects fall downwards, I've been collecting that data since I was born.
I do like it when people point out which part of their advice is supported by established science, and which is not. Both can be useful.
Incidentally I’ve also found this to be true for politics. You will get a much better understanding of politics by reading historical texts about the 20th century than by following the day-to-day oscillations of the political machine from any news source. Actually, the latter negatively impacts your understanding.
I've seen statements of this sort very frequently - ie. that the "behaviorally modern" human evolved tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I'm curious what the backing of such claims are. It seems profoundly unintuitive to me that human behavior would remain evolutionarily unchanged over tens to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution/founder effects, especially when you consider widespread evolution of various other traits like lactose tolerance in the past ~5,000 years.
But that's not really the crux of this particular issue, it was pseudoscience not "not science". I.e. it was masquerading as being more scientifically founded than it was instead of just a book of this guy's personal understandings.
Science actually has a narrow focus. It only deals with things that are observable, reproducible, predictable and falsifiable. Since Gödel, science even proved itself as incomplete. The best doctors will always say that if something makes you feel better, by all means do it, even if it is not backed by science.
It is not the same as going against science. This can be bad, because science is really good at what it does, thanks in part to its narrow focus. For example, eat all chicken soup you want if it makes you feel better, but if you want your cancer to go away, it is not a good idea to ignore the treatments that science has come up with. The best doctors will tell you that too.
> Since Gödel, science even proved itself as incomplete. The best doctors will always say that if something makes you feel better, by all means do it, even if it is not backed by science.
Gödel proved mathematics to be inconsistent. This has much greater implications than just proving scientific inquiry to be insufficient. Science relies on the senses for its reliability and is grounded in the physical world. Mathematics has no such bounds.
Given a "complete" formal (scientific!) understanding of the physical world, we still wouldn't know everything, there will always be systems that intersect with it that inform our world, but can't be understood using our rules. No matter how many formal systems we define to wrap our collective brain around the world, there will always be more things to understand.
That's the significance of Gödel.
He proved that "it" cannot prove its own consistency. (Where it can express Peano arithmetic.)
But "it" is not the whole of mathematics. There are "weak" systems that can prove their own consistency. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-verifying_theories )
What actually irritates me is how so many people ended up believing in it.
Just the idea that you can classify peoples personality in 4 categories, sounds _for me_ as obviously stupid.
Or the grouping of the attributes associated with the colors, just doesn't at all fit the reality I observe.
Like I know more introverted, less-verbal creative people then I know extroverted creative people.
Similar I have meet analytic, but not careful people.
Or dominate, considerate, nice people.
Heck I have meet people which where both patient and driven, depending on context.
...
So whether it is hard science or ghosts and Grandma’s noodle soup, it is always a belief at the core. One of those is a more detailed model and quite useful at making some predictions, that’s all.
Those assumptions describe fundamental traits of a system which humans are ill-equipped to live not having a model of; some (many?) people believe advances in science support one of them (e.g., material monism).
You know _no one_ smarter than you who follows a deity?
But yes - people I know, smarter than me, that believe in a deity, returned quite a few rows when I queried.
Where is the frigging data ? Where is the scientific process ??
Don't choose a color personality and then exclude team mates based on their "opposed" colors, I beg you. You can like fables, but we can't regress that low.
The point is that the author claims the model is scientific, but it isn't.
How these Big Five "properties" where derived is that people thought there was some pattern to questionnaires about behaviour and they ran a PCA on it. They noticed that PCA tended to bring up five principal components, so they interpreted them as five dominant personality traits that are shared by all humans.
This is not very good statistics: they basically used PCA to identify latent variables. But PCA cannot find latent variables. There is some criticism of this, but very rarely because "The Big Five" is basically accepted truth by the psychological community nowadays. In 20 years from now they'll probably debunk it and then hold up some other "model" of "human personality" and then the cycle will repeat.
Here's one critical paper:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19946599/
Whence I quote:
Consider, for instance, the personality literature, where people have discovered that executing a PCA of large numbers of personality subtest scores, and selecting components by the usual selection criteria, often returns five principal components. What is the interpretation of these components? They are “biologically based psychological tendencies,”; and as such are endowed with causal forces (McCrae et al., 2000, p. 173). This interpretation cannot be justified solely on the basis of a PCA, if only because PCA is a formative model and not a reflective one (Bollen & Lennox, 1991; Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & Van Heerden, 2003).
“ PCA is a formative model and not a reflective one”. Can’t understand this.
After reading tfa I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness. The course recognizes a spectrum and everyone has aspects of all colors. Many people at my employer are primarily green or blue. During the courses it came out that they (the "introverts") do indeed want to say stuff during meetings but feel like they can't get in on the conversation. This was an eye opener to me, I just thought they didn't want to speak. I now try to pay more attention to these people. That's a win in my book. I also realized that there are people that like to think long before they talk, after a meeting you can revisit them later and they have nice insights which don't come up during a discussion (in contrast, I only have insights during discussions although I may often say things that aren't well thought through, I sometimes call it "thinking against others", typical yellow ;) ).
Like with every framework/mantra/insight/label if you aren't dogmatic about it (looking at you, Agile!), it may provide some value as a model (and models are often incorrect in details and have exceptions, just be very aware of that). I don't really see a better way for someone like me (totally unaware of psychology as a scientific field) to use their insights other than through these simplified, wrong-perhaps-but-useful, frameworks.
Edit: Honestly, to me as a molecular biologist, the whole field of psychology is a model for some neurological truth which is a model again for particle physicists which is a model again for mathematicians... Right (or am I using the wrong model ;) )? We all try to fit some labels on some complex continuum constantly. Sometimes it's pretty useful for our limited minds, and sometimes indeed it may lead us horribly astray. Is tfa an example of the latter? I'm not really convinced.
[0]: https://www.insights.com/insights-discovery-accreditation
I had some deep qualms about this -- "this cannot possibly have any scientific basis, right? What is the point of this? How can anyone possibly assert that there are four basic kinds of personalities, that they respond consistently, or that they way they interact matches consistently?"
A colleague's view was something like -- okay, yes, stipulated it's bullshit. But what's important is that we managed to get 100 people into a room together to talk about how they like to work with each other. The "colors" are canned, not-quite-true insights that can jump start the conversation about how people like to work. We gave people some shared vocabulary, however limited, for talking to each other, and they then spent hours working with each other to discuss how their communication and work styles have strengths and weaknesses. So it was a good team bonding exercise because it felt like people would try to work together more afterwards.
I'm still a little torn about using a likely-false concept as a pretext for people to get together and connect with one another -- but there's plenty of this in human history.
Everyone received little foam color blocks; we were supposed to put our primary and secondary on our desks so that whenever people dropped by they would know what kind of person you are. We received binders with dozens of pages telling us who we were, how we think, what we cared about, what our barriers are, and so on.
It reminded me a bit of market segmentation studies -- a passing fad used to describe in a moment the nature of a population, but something that loses value and relevance over time.
I was skimming through a translation of Seneca, and in the opening dialog, the participants come to an agreement, along the lines of: "Just to get things straight, we're talking about the real stuff that the philosophers believe in, not the crap that the people believe in, right?" The subject matter had to do with death and the afterlife.
The thing that interests me is that someone's view on the purpose of the test might actually bias their answers and thus the results as well. So even if the test was valid in a controlled research or clinical setting, in a business setting it's a different test. Is intelligence a confounding variable?
They are not. They are like everyone, impatient and loving, violent and helpful, worried and self-assured. The article is very clear that what seems to matter is CONTEXT and we all can understand it.
I'll explain patiently to my kid something I'd literally tear a new one for a senior colleague.
So no your colleagues don't have personality colors, but the organization molds from them certain behaviors that are either helpful to navigate it or to tolerate it. I worked in both startups and giga bank, I can tell you I'm not the same person in both styles of companies...
I'm just worried we build little boxes and then assume we cant learn to speak publicly, explain things clearly, take the point of view of a client, resist clearly negative proposals under the pretense we're color blue instead of color purple :s
And that's fine - but you might as well use astrology.
Tfa also does not state the colors are complete bs, it mostly objects to the Thomas Erikson not being educated properly. It does not state any damage being done using his (over?) simplification, I mean I never heard a colleague say: "I'm sorry I trampled all over you in the meeting, I'm just red." Which seems to be what the author is warning for.
I'm just wondering how the colors are scientifically wrong exactly, what hypotheses do they generated that have been proven to be wrong and damaging?
When the questions aren’t based on any research, the results are not much sounder than using planetary positions as the input data.
One could devise a personality test where all the questions are long divisions with a short time limit. This would certainly be some kind of test of mental ability, but there wouldn’t be any basis to jump to conclusions: “This person failed all tests where the divider is larger than ten, which suggests that they’re afraid of tackling large problems.”
The color test is fundamentally based on this kind of “science” even if the proposed categories are well-meaning.
Re: damage done by the color test, the article did mention some anecdotes from Sweden like people being asked to switch teams at work “because we have too many green people”, etc.
Not only are these "tests" tantamount to astrology, the amount of bunk that goes into momentous decisions is underestimated. Ronald Reagan is reported to have consulted an astrologer about nearly every decision. That's dangerous. Accepting bunk is dangerous to your business.
"""Modern evidence-based methods in behavioural science adopt the ground principle that people’s behavior mainly depend on context."""
doesn't have any source to back it up and is opposed to what I have read about the introvert/extrovert divide which seems to be more genetic than context dependent for example. And those are character traits that directly shape behavior (I'd rather read a book when low on energy vs. go to a party). Maybe someone can clarify this for me. The fact that the author uses "shy" and "outgoing" also doesn't instill much faith in me. The next section even mentions the big five but I don't think these traits are "mainly dependent on context". I'm a bit confused.
Nevertheless, an interesting story/find. The color system seems so obviously ridiculous that it amazes me how popular it got. Lesson learned. People like categories and simple explanations. Coincidentally, that's also one of the main sources of (unintentional) bias.
Adopting ground principles doesn't sound very evidence-based to begin with.
I didn't know Myers Briggs has a colour component, tangentially: crazy to me how often I see a "Myers Briggs Score" on resumes these days, especially in Korea. I was under the impression most people didn't take it very seriously, at least not seriously enough to put on a resume.
Why? Because people need ways to feel like they understand and can predict other people's behavior.
Why? I don't know. It's just something I've observed.
Would you agree, and if so, why do you think that is?
> Would you agree
Yes
> if so, why do you think that is?
Because society. Literally. You need to "predict" behaviors around you, it's only natural, every animal checks for threats. The moment you live in a society, you have to live with lots of other humans, so you inevitably develop lots of heuristics to deal with them.
From a stranger passing on a street, to your coworker.
Predicting behavior is the basis of society, it's the reason traffic rules sort of work, why we can even have such a thing as laws.
But the models aren't valid e.g. astrology.
Does that matter?
It seems not really! Many folks still swear by astrology.
How can that work? In mainstream science, a bad heuristic is useless and fades to oblivion or ridicule.
But society is not science. When people use astrology or racism or any other inaccurate heuristic to anchor their beliefs, they create for themselves a role in society, and relationships with their community that are self-fulfilling.
Think everyone is out to get you? Treat them that way, and they'll think you're weird - someone to be avoided and not trusted.
Think tall people are attractive and short people are ugly? That makes you much more likely to partner with a tall person.
Think everyone deserves a smile first thing in the morning? People are going to smile back, and seek you out at the water cooler.
Think everyone deserves to be heard? People are going to talk to you.
Think black people, or brown people, or pink people, or white people, or tan people, or purple people are not worth listening to? You're going to miss out on their stories, food, culture, friendship, companionship and wisdom.
Society is a laboratory. It's also a mirror.
> Despite the use of colours, it turned out that the “Surrounded by …” books were not based on Myers-Brigg. Instead, they built on another personality theory, the so-called DiSC model.
I don't know the science surrounding it. But i took a test through work once and most seems to be correct.
I don't think it would be "popular" in businesses if nothing would be correct. That's exactly what suprised me the first time, so I'm hesitant to call it bs.
If there is another correlation it could be that the test was pretty positive for me. Perhaps it was the contrary for you? ( I'm just guessing and trying to find differences in experience here)
Weirdly enough, i actually got more than I bargained for.
So whatever the pseudoscience is. It was applicable and useful to me.
To check my statement mentioned before.
Bjørn Lomborg was a hipster economist who denied man-made climate change and had an embarrassing amount of clout in Denmark:
But it’s true that those who opposed him tried to paint his criticism as a if it had been denial because that’s a strawman that is easier to argue against.
If someone comes out saying “climate change is man made and unless we do something the Oriana going to boil away in 2 years, our only option is to start throwing ice cubes into the ocean!” Then it’s perfectly resonable to argue that the prediction is wrong, and that even if it was accurate the proposed solution isn’t cost effective and that better solutions exist, that doesn’t mean you are arguing against the main premis of manmade climate change.
Now the meat of the debate around Lomborg is really if his predictions stack up against the predictions he criticized.
I say this because one of the biggest problems of every single group or organization that I've seen built around progressive/left/liberal ideas is the tendency to believe in the "everyone has a right to be heard/speak" which leads to everything being dominated by the loudest individuals who are almost always full of BS.
Honestly, I've identified this tendency as the #1 reason why such groups do so poorly in politics, except in situations where the values are just a PR front for a more traditional power structure.
But I think it is making it more confusing that you conflate left, liberal, and progressive. They have some overlap and shared meanings but are also different things.
The "everyone has a right to be heard" thing you mention is specifically a liberal value. Others may or may not subscribe to it to varying degrees but in my view it is core only to that one.
Scandanavia is pretty firmly liberal from what I can see. I mean just the other day here there was a good conversation about how the entire wealth of norway is based on nonrenewable resource extraction. Not really anything leftist about that.
She made us spend an entire day — it was mandatory — "learning" about the four colour-coded groups in this pseudoscience.
It's worrying that employers can essentially mandate religion in the workplace like this.
This concept as described reminded me immediately of a book I read as a teenager, called Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_Kingdom
It is about the country being broken up into four sectors based on the four humors: red, green, yellow, and blue. Scanning through some descriptions of Surrounded by Idiots, the similarities are uncanny. I thought the whole four-humors thing and its derivatives have been definitively debunked for a very long time, how did this book not get laughed out of the gates?
[0] Parts that made me pause: 'Around the same time, qualified psychologists began reporting how clients were considering leaving their partners because, “I can’t possibly live with a yellow person”...'; '...they had been tested at the Human Resources department only to be told they needed to move to another team because their “colour combination”...'; '...A teenage girl comes home and tells her mother, with an air of resignation, “mum, I’m a green.” She had been tested by her school counsellor...'
I remember hearing similar comments from Japanese friends once they learned their boyfriend/girlfriend's blood group. (Personality tests based on blood groups are huge there).
But since they want to leave and can’t find a good reason or don’t feel that they can stand by whatever reasoning they have, it becomes “We have to break up because you’re yellow and I’m red” rather than: “we have to break up because I’m shallow and your body doesn’t look like it did when we met” or “we have to break up because after you got fired you haven’t been able to spend as much money on me”. Etc.
You can't prove a negative, so it does not make sense to require others to prove this alleged evidence does not exist.
Those two points above are what I walked away with as the claims along with as much proof as they could muster. Because they can't prove that there's not something that scientifically credits DiSC, but they can say that they did not find anything. As a bonus, they're also clearly intellectually honest in asserting that they could also not find anything discrediting DiSC. They also conveyed what they could not find regarding the author's education and experience. I'm not quite sure what more you are looking for here?
This is already much more than an average person does walking into a social situation.
What you are describing is an institutional problem requiring an institutional solution: the people organising meetings need better training on what it is they're trying to accomplish.
Update your meeting invites with an agenda. No agenda? No meeting. It's pretty straightforward, and you don't have to assign people into 16 or 81 pseudo categories to trick them into paying attention to a meeting that didn't need to happen in the first place.
Rather it will get used for easy dismissal of other peoples standing point or need to think too much about own behaviour, grounded on the illusion of understanding patterns that "make them" be like that.
@dang This same article was discussed on HN almost two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530
I think the title could use a (2020) tag.
>Since this article was published in spring 2019...
So 2019
We should apply the same kind of scrutinization when it comes to the software industry IMO. Just because you wrote code for a few years and managed a team later, doesn't mean anything you learned is applicable to anyone else. Imagine doctors going around experimenting on people and "learning hands-on" what works and what doesn't. Or even electricians or plumbers... yet, here we are, and I feel like it's exactly what we're doing with software development.
The author's resistance against Freud and Jung's contributions is... myopic?
How the ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Color Wheel Explains Humanity: https://humanparts.medium.com/the-mtg-color-wheel-c9700a7cf3...
Typically selfconfidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability increases with age.
Generally personality changes fast up to 30 year of age and then change slows down. Conscientiousness often increases whole lifetime. Extroversion seems to be relatively stable.
That said though, MBTI did help me figure out a lot about myself. Discovering MBTI back in 2009 was definitely life changing for me and I've kept it in the back of my head since then, mostly to improve myself and rarely applied to others.
I've been in one amazing relationship with an MBTI type that is supposed to match with mine, and one awful relationship with a type that does not match with mine.
So it's not supposed to be followed blindly but it can help you out in life.
My own experience is that there is definitely some value to the idea, so my question to you is, is it a legit part of the MBTI 'theory', and is there a canonical listing of compatible types? Browsing random blogs/reddit sets my pseudoscience sensors off.
A fellow INTP.
But yeah I mean I'm not a scholar, I was just able to identify with what I read about INTP and it was eerily accurate when I first read it.
But people change. I have a friend who tested as INTP back in the 90s, their first test, then took another test in the 2000s and was a different type.
So you grow and you try to improve yourself. Being heavily introverted is a curse and a blessing sometimes.
Maybe the whole idea about selling books based on assuming things depending on which color people are ringed someone's bells at the marketing department.
I think the interesting thing here is how stuff like this spread through society. Or, parts of middle class society that is. We appear to have a large number of HR people, middle management and ambitious LinkedIn men who spend their time with things like this rather than doing actually useful work. Kind of like the class of useless people sent off on that space ship in HGTTG.
1) From the headline alone, I guessed this would be about the Macchiarini scandal at Karolinska.
2) I think this is the same guy who also wrote Omgiven av idioter ["Surrounded by Idiots"] (? though I could be misremembering). Which would be ironic, since he seems to be among the bigger ones himself.
These days we are immersed is a sea of falsehoods and half-truths. Storytelling and lyrical metaphoric depictions of reality have been replaced by downright lies and malicious intent. Opinion articles which violate rhetorical rules and utilize deceptive and fallacious argumentation are not a good resource to mine for facts.
We are "Surrounded by Idiots", individuals whose weltanshanguung embraces fantastical concepts supported by pseudoscientific argumentation and assertions without evidence. Much of the richness of human culture is captured by wrong ideas and conceptions. Consider creation myths, fables with morals, religions, moral systems, astrology, political systems, cold fusion, Meyers-Briggs personality tests, and so forth. Finding a balance between the factual, the fictional and the speculative is difficult.
Words, facts, and expression do matter. The title, for example, states that Swedes were "fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time" is wrong. There is no evidence that people were "fooled", the book and theory are not a "bluff", and there is no partial ordering of bluffs so "biggest" is hard to identify.
I couldn't find the episode to cite. Maybe some of the students were upset?
> For example, consider a person who says, “now I understand why I have such negative thoughts, can’t get to sleep, and have difficulty getting going…I’ve got depression.” This person might believe that the explanation of her symptoms is depression, but in fact, the diagnosis of depression is just a categorisation of exactly these symptoms.
The diagnosis of depression usually revolves around changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain. It is an issue as real as diabetes is. To explain my point further, consider the following:
> For example, consider a person who says, “now I understand why I have such frequent urination, increased thirst and increased appetite. I’ve got diabetes.” This person might believe that the explanation of her symptoms is diabetes, but in fact, the diagnosis of diabetes is just a categorisation of exactly these symptoms. There is no diabetes Gremlin, either.
All this not to say that the accusations of fraud are either based or baseless.
EDIT: I know we can't test (blood etc.) for depression — yet. There's still a question of whether "it's all in your head" or "your biology is a bit off". See also [0].
The absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence.
It is true that so far, we don't have physical or chemical tests for depression. This doesn't prove that the chemistry or the brains or neurotransmitters are functioning the same way in depressed and non-depressed people, it just says the science still can't tell.
Saying that you have “depression” doesn’t give you an understanding of what’s causing it.
We have a baby with colic. What does that mean? It means the baby cries 3 hours per day for 3 days a week for at least 3 weeks with no other explanation. That’s it. It’s not something you can point to and say oh that explains it. That’s the cause. It literally just means there is no explanation.
Many psychiatrists--the quack ones--will use the language of "chemical imbalance" as a sort of "appeal to authority" fallacy. It should be obvious that this is a fallacy because:
A) at no point have they actually measured the patient's brain chemistry (and it's not obvious what it would even mean to do this? an imbalance where? compared to what?)
B) the doctor diagnosed the depression doing exactly what TFA did: matched a set of symptoms to a list.
One of the harshest criticisms of the DSM-V -- the latest version of this descriptive manual--is that it grossly expands the symptoms that qualify as depression (to include things like bereavement, for example).
The "chemical imbalance" theory was based on the success of SSRIs to treat depression. These are chemicals that inhibit the reuptake of serotonin, which results in overproduction of that neurotransmitter. "Ah, so depression is a lack of serotonin"
Counterfactual evidence is conveniently ignored. For example, the fact that antipsychotics, which block the reception of serotonin (and so are basically the opposite of SSRIs), are also powerful antidepressants!
It's also a nonsense theory to anyone with an undergraduate knowledge of neuroscience. There is no "happiness" neurotransmitter. Serotonin is simply an inhibitory neurotransmitter, which reduces the odds of a neuron 'firing'. Which neuron? Part of what network? Wait, what? In the immortal words of Paul Dirac "it's not even wrong."
In fact, most of the most promising new therapies for depression have nothing to do with serotonin: psylocibin (many orders of magnitude more effective than SSRIs), ketamine and transcranial magnetic stimulation are examples.
Of course, the mind is a side effect of physiology: there must be some biological explanation to depression. But that doesn't mean that it's the same explanation for everyone, or that it has anything to do with a "chemical imbalance" of one neurotransmitter vs another.
A. People saying "It's all in your head" and reducing depression to a non-biological condition (which is not very helpful at best), or
B. Doctors saying "Here, have a pill" and reducing depression to a biological condition?
I think that we still don't know, and maybe it's a bit of both, or maybe neither. But TLA seems to go with the first group, hence my comment.
But yes, of course it's biological. What an intellectually honest psychiatrist would say is something like "look, you're not doing well. Here are some things we can try to shift the playing field a bit. We don't know exactly how they work or why, but we know they do work, somewhat. Want to try? Here's the side effects: "
That would be intellectually honest. Saying "you have A (single, diagnosed) disease, caused by "a chemical imbalance", and the root cause of that disease is treated by this medicine" is dishonest.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t biological processes at work, but we don’t understand them enough to diagnose depression at that level. We aren’t even really sure why most depression treatments work.
Contrast that to diabetes. You don’t get diagnosed with diabetes because you have increased thirst and urination. You are diagnosed with diabetes because your fasting blood sugar level was too high.
And the treatments are any number of relatively well understood methods of regulating your blood sugar.
SSRIs and SNRIs and many others all seem to have a theory behind them, based on biology.
> Why boosting brain communication can help alleviate symptoms of depression, however, is unclear, she says.
> “We know to some extent what [these drugs are] doing, but we don’t necessarily know why this works for depression or anxiety,” says Edwards.
> Antidepressants quickly increase concentrations of these neurotransmitters shortly after someone starts taking the medication, says Christin Drake, a clinical psychiatrist at NYU Langone Health. But patients generally don’t start to feel the benefits for several weeks. The reason for this lag time, and what’s happening during this gap, is not clear.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/how-antidepressants-...
Part of the reason you can tell that we don't really know very much at all about the mechanism of action is that individual patients often have to take a little grand tour of the available medications before they find one that even works on them. Why does this SSRI work for Patient Bob and that SNRI doesn't? Nobody really knows, it's just informed guesswork.
Depression can’t easily be measured by any chemical test, existing chemical treatments aren’t effective, and CBT (talking to someone) is similarly effective to chemicals. The chemicals we do have don’t just treat depression, they treat a whole bunch of things (anxiety, OCD, etc) and come with a whole bunch of whacky side effects, which suggests they aren’t particularly well-targeted. They also sometimes make young people want to kill themselves, which is maybe not the best side effect for a depressed person to experience.
Tldr: “depression is just a chemical imbalance” is basically a meme, and I haven’t seen any evidence that it is anything more than pseudoscience. Just looking at the condition and it’s place in society is almost enough to disprove the “just a chemical imbalance” thought. Even the DSM V has no chemical criteria for diagnosing depression: https://floridabhcenter.cbcs.usf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021...
The alternative depression meme is "it's all in your head", which is about as useful as telling a diabetes patient "it's all in your pancreas". I still struggle to understand which of the two memes is closer to truth.
The underlying reasons for those symptoms may involve chemical imbalances, but those aren't established or tested for. They don't take a CSF sample or do an MRI for a diagnosis.
I have never heard of anyone getting a depression diagnosis based on changes in their body chemistry or the functioning of the brain.
It's always set after a talk about feelings, situation, emotions and "what's going on ?".
Exceptions are from articles dealing with electrical shock therapies that regularly hit the front page.
This makes it hard to get out (vicious cycle). Thats why even a psychologist will use medicaments when treating someone with a serious depression.
This "explanation" or "argument" is worse empirically and theoritically than what it criticizes...
> Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous -> Word
> Green: patient, considerate, nice -> Excel
> Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal -> Outlook
Interestingly enough, these colours map quite well to the Office suite of old.
> Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous -> Excel, for the quants
> Green: patient, considerate, nice -> Word, for those who like to cozy up with a book or write a short story
> Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal -> PowerPoint, for those who want to make a Ted talk
It’s really astounding how much these frauds impact relationships and organizations.
It might be useful for introspection ("I identify with feelings this model gives to 'reds' or a '4w3' "), but it's not a scientific or testable prediction about the way people act in the world.
> it's not a scientific or testable prediction about the way people act in the world.
The problem is that there is probably no scientific or testable prediction about the complexity of humans. Psychology itself seems not very scientific, so people rely on their intuition (as they should) to understand other people. However that leads to the problem of "X also wants Y, because I want Y", which from my experience is just not true at all. Humans have very different interests and goals. So these models creep up to account for that.
Incidentally, they are four as well.
Follow up question: if you give bad investment advice (or any unlicensed financial advise at all) you can be prosecuted by on or the other government organisation. Why don't we do the same for bad food / health / psychology advise ?
This isn't surprising.