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Comment by bargainbot3k | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I actually read just about all of this. It’s amusing to me because the language used to express banal ideas is so over the top but the subject matter borders on pseudoscience. “Cultish academia”? Not sure. I’m still trying to determine if this is an elaborate troll.

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My thoughts are similar. I don’t think it’s a troll, this type of thing is very common.

You don’t have to engage or understand a topic if you can intellectualize it and create “theories” about it.

It’s like when you read blog posts on dating filled with game theory and statistics.

I would have liked to see the author try to spend a year or more trying to earnestly adopt an opposing worldview. Not to try to model another worldview from within their own, but to know what it’s like to be another way.

That would have been more interesting.

it’s the work of criticism, which often seeks to reframe an entire topic or institution by questioning assumptions girding legitimacy and asserting systemic contradictions.

just as valid an approach as immersion into the domain in discussion.

tbh indulgence in both practices is pretty revealing and eye opening for the earnest

I agree. To me it's trying to promote nonsense as scientific truth by using great words.

> the subject matter borders on pseudoscience

The subject matter being "fundamental worldviews"? How is that pseudoscience?

The "Big Five personality traits" is apparently scientific and meaningful, while the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is pseudoscientific nonsense that people used post to their Myspace.

Ironically this is exactly what the article points out in the trait that primarily sees frameworks as the result of power struggles as opposed to a meaningful progression to the truth.

I suppose out of any two things, one is closer to the truth than the other. Take any two giant piles of crap, and you can order them in a way that suggests they're part of progress.

The two correlate pretty well, in the end, it's just one fewer dimension. MBTI's problems are in large part how it was conceived and how it's presented, being rooted in Jungian psychology and being presented as a firm binary when each axis more or less has a bell curve distribution, making it inconsistent from test to test. But the underlying categorisation and test methodology isn't very far off, even if it's by accident, and I think people only hear about the problems and throw out the baby with the bathwater.

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