Personas and Other Psychoccultism

jaylatta.net

4 points1970-01-012 comments

People are messily fractal, individual, and won't sort neatly into boxes. Dealing with them requires individual attention.

Arbitrary categories are so much simpler, they haven't got the fuzzy edges and hard points sticking out at odd angles. So much easier to look at the world that way.

When the bitter reality bites, when the individuals insist on being quirky humans rather than their neat entries in the Book of Breed Standards; we can always blame the Wreckers, the Reactionaries, and the Kulaks.

There is also a more dire consequence as both scientists and developers are eager to develop these silly quantitative "dossiers" on people. Like here (unfortunately not OA) they have four sliders: extrovert-introvert, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, and judging-perceiving, none of which are probably based on anything sustainable:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10715...

Having said that, I do not deny the usefulness of "personas" for prototyping and developing "digital humans", NPCs, or whatever (i.e., not real people nor their "digital twins").

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