Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with these personality tests is their belief in an atomic, immutable "personality" or identity. It doesn't exist. People change radically. The person I was at 5 is gone. He's effectively gone, forever. That's not a bad thing. It's to be celebrated.

One thing I like about Buddhism is that it dovetails well with my skeptical, nonreligious inclination. You're expected to find things out for yourself, not take your beliefs from on high. If you don't believe in reincarnation (I do, but it's not required) you can still meditate. You're still invited to participate. It doesn't matter if you believe in God or an afterlife.

One teaching of Buddhism, that I find to be very useful, is that most of what we call "me" is an illusion. It's inherently empty. To the extent that it exists, it's dependent on so many other conditions and relationships. People get into traps. "I'm just not a happy person." "I'm a neurotic mess." "I'm a programmer, so I could never be a good writer." Bullshit. People also inflict it on each other (crab mentality) by focusing on reputation and "track record"-- this illusion that observable state reflects inherent traits rather than an interaction between a person and external conditions-- rather than real capability.

People get deeply invested in, and limited by, these identities they build for themselves and each other that actually make no sense.

Ok, rant over.

More obvious, glaring problems with the Meyers-Briggs:

1. Score distributions along each axis are normal, not bimodal.

2. Scores are discretized to one-bit values along each axis.

3. Error bars are big enough that the combination of facts (1) and (2) results in very similar people getting very different scores, and poor test-retest reliability.

Though my personality has changed over the years, it has stayed similar in a lot of ways. The person I was at 5 has a great deal of overlap with the person I am now. And all versions of me who know about probability distributions would be unanimous in their mathematical disapproval of how the raw test scores from the Meyers-Briggs get reported and interpreted.

One solution to the problem you pose in your first paragraph is to identify the vector and not the position through testing. Perhaps a person's profile would be visualized with positions and error bars mapped across time. It would be impossible to perform such a test usefully on a five-year-old boy, but adults are more stable.

To me there seems to be just as many issues with any belief system relying heavily on suggestion and then asking you to "see for yourself". Isn't this just another form of magical thinking? Most especially if you're accepting a lot of unprovable esoteric beliefs along with your simple meditation practice.

If one were to read on this subject just as an outsider peeking in, what book would you advise?

It may actually be easier to do the (meditation) practice and see for yourself rather than looking for scholarly books. A number of the scholarly books are written by people who do not practice, and so there exist distortions to their words. Reading something like Tibetan Book of the Dead may not be terribly helpful if you are not also practicing too.

A good intro to this frame of mind (and also relevant, since the dude works at Google ;) ) is to watch this video of a talk by Chade-Meng Tan - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8fcqrNO7so

And then if that interests you, see if you get through this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc

First time I heard of "Search Inside of Yourself" -- the video is cool :-)

I like Daniel Ingram's approach. He has a strong focus on the essence, and bypasses a lot of Buddhist dogma that seems to get in the way for westerners.

http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki...

There's also a good book coming at the same subject from a more Western, scientific angle: The User Illusion by Tor Nørretranders. It comes to similar conclusions about the "self" as Buddhism.

A very good start is the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, but there are a lot of great books out there on these topics.

I think the best first book to read on Buddhism would just be The Heart of Understanding by Thich Nhat Hanh. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is really good, but I would read that next. It's much longer, and although parts of it are really insightful, there are also large sections that are repetitive or esoteric. It's also about ideas and practices that are important to Tibetan buddhism, but that aren't central to most other forms of buddhism.

I know it's a completely different arena, but how do you feel about Hesse's Siddhartha?

I haven't read it, but it seems cool.

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