Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I went through the Insights Discovery course [0], which sounds a lot like what tfa is discrediting. At work we still talk about the colors of people years after the course.

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 took what is probably the same all-day training course with my extended team at Microsoft about 10 years ago.

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.

My team also went through this at Microsoft, back around 2008-09. My team was firmly in the "this is bullshit" camp, but there were others who took it quite a bit more seriously. And then there were the "reds", which more often than not used it as defense/justification for their normal aggressive behaviors.

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.

People may also be concerned that there's a sinister purpose for the test, e.g., for screening.

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?

> Many people at my employer are primarily green or blue.

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 get where you’re coming from, sure you can’t project a human character onto 2 axes. But still this is all “to a degree”. I’ll never see my sweet silent coworker literally tear someone a new one in any context. Moreover, aren’t you just admitting that the colors are useful when remaining in a certain context? Sure, don’t take them home or to the gym but otherwise…

Well I think the problem with colors is they mean nothing well defined. It could somehow oppose extrovert and introvert for instance while Im extrovert with my close teammates but introvert with the traders yelling every second on the floor so what am I, am I even "something" personality wise, should I choose ?

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

> I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness.

And that's fine - but you might as well use astrology.

The difference being that these colors are based on character traits and questions being answered, not on the position of celestial bodies. And I'm saying they proved useful to me, I hope they proved useful to those I applied my insights to as well, I think so.

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?

> “these colors are based on character traits and questions being answered, not on the position of celestial bodies”

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.

But many many of the users of Astrology will also swear that the results have proved useful to them and those around them. It provides a space where users can think about their character traits and what is important to them. "Am I a typical Libra? Really?". That doesn't mean it has any scientific basis.

> you might as well use astrology.

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.

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