A Little Bit of Personality

Hey, it’s Justin!  So…this post has words in it.  It’s written with words.  I’m typing words right now, with the strange expectation that words can communicate thoughts and ideas.  It’s odd, and it hasn’t seemed to work very well so far.  Yet maybe, there’s a faint chance that typing a few more words might be able to communicate something to somebody.

A Little Bit of Personality is not Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  We say so right there in the intro video…and in lots of posts on here, posts with words.  We started there, as we’ve said before, because we were just having fun and we, like so many, presumed that MBTI was a reliable, scientific system.  Yet as we’ve said before, we gradually came to see more and more ways in which MBTI is inconsistent, in which it does not work, in which it encourages and even relies on stereotypes and superficial simplifications of people.  And what was worse, we started to see that many, many people apparently wanted those stereotypes and simplifications.

We started to see how much “personality typing” was used as a petty weapon in infantile campaigns to put down anyone whose mind worked differently.  We cringed more and more whenever we saw four-by-four grids that listed insultingly shallow sets of qualities for each of the sixteen types, and which portrayed some types as clearly better, smarter, more reliable, more successful, more creative, more visionary, more concrete, more compassionate, more practical, or simply of greater worth and value than the others.  Personality typing had become a shallow and subjective mudfight through which people tried to compensate for their own unresolved personal insecurities by putting down others who made them feel inadequate.  Apparently, there are a lot of second-graders online who are quite skilled at writing up passive-aggressive four-by-four grids.

So we went back to the beginning, because we knew there was so much good here!  We, like so many of you guys, had gotten excited about personality typing for a reason.  It was exciting to see how our minds worked, and how others’ minds did too.  It was so cool to try to figure out the personality types of fictional characters, or of historical figures or celebrities we liked.  But now that we had seen how personality typing had become such a putrid and subjective cesspool, we had to go back to the basics to figure out what was good and what was brain-damaging.

We’ve talked about this before, in several posts that use words.  We’ve described how a clarification of basic definitions is one of the first indispensable steps in any effort to replace subjectivity with objectivity.  We’ve talked about how we didn’t have to throw out the baby with the poisonous bathwater, and so we were able to use the brilliant original work done by Carl Jung and by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers (all of whom died long before the internet), without the simplified dangers of modern MBTI.  On aLBoP Phase 2, we go into far greater depth about our scientific process, how we were able to clarify definitions that made Cognitive Typing into a reliable and repeatable hard science, rather than a subjective and dubious soft-science.  But all those posts use words, words that invite you guys to see “Hey wait, this is different. This isn’t what I thought I already knew.”

A Little Bit of Personality is part of a larger endeavor, which we call our “Twenty-Five Year Plan,” a plan to simply help make life better for as many people as we can.  As I’m writing today, we’re a bit more than eleven years in, on the fourth of eight stages.  This is all stuff that’s explained in depth on the full Phase 2 site.  It’s really exciting to us, and though we did not initially expect to use Cognitive Typing or anything like it as a tool in this plan, aLBoP has become a powerful way for us to reach and help so many awesome people!  Yet originally, we didn’t plan to have Phase 2 be a separate website; we were just going to put all the information right here on one site, for all the internet to see.  We’re very glad now that we didn’t.

There is nothing secret on any of our sites, and all the information on all three of our sites (Phase 1 here, Phase 2 Intro, and full Phase 2) is all completely free of charge.  But we realized that we had to separate our content into multiple sites when we saw the bizarre and aggressively cruel reactions of so many people to even the comparatively basic concepts of Cognitive Typing.  I’m not referring to insightful and engaging questions; for instance, a lot of cool people have asked very good questions, like “How do you have a large enough sample size to make sure your conclusions are accurate?” “Why don’t you submit to scientific journals?” “What exactly is your experimental process?” etc.  Those sorts of thoughtful questions are the sort of thing that we’ve had to save for the later websites, because we realized that even the introductory information here on Phase 1 seems to be far too much for some people to read.  Too many words.

We wanted an engaging and active forum where we could talk back and forth with people, instead of only posting articles on a website, but it soon became clear that if we went ahead and put a forum here on Phase 1, open to the internet, then any potential discussion would be buried under arrogant assertions and bitter argument.  In fact, when we started a forum on Phase 2, it was astonishing how rapidly that happened, how quickly it became a toxic atmosphere where thoughtful, intelligent people grew ever more wary to post anything.  If we didn’t do something, our forum was going to become yet another place on the internet where the discourse was dominated by the bone-headedly obnoxious.

As I’m writing this, I have an online game open in the background, where one of my characters is happily crafting food for me.  But I usually play most games with the general chat channels turned off, because while there are a lot of sweet and helpful people in a lot of games, the general chat channels tend to get dominated by the least common denominator.  When we first started our Phase 2 forum, some people were convinced that it couldn’t possibly be any different from anywhere else on the internet, calling us naive for trying to create a place online where people could feel safe to freely share ideas, where the thoughtful majority didn’t have to remain silent or risk setting off the irrational blowhards.  Yet now, on the full Phase 2 site, we have an awesome and active realtime chat forum where everyone feels safe to think, to work through problems, to discuss ideas, to share their lives and make precious friendships.  I’m actually making them wait right now while I write this, but Calise and I thought that this little post was worth taking the time for.  Yet that forum would have been impossible if we hadn’t first created a safe place insulated from the wild, aggressively-asserted opinions and jaw-dropping simplifications on the internet.

We wanted to put all of it on one website, and perhaps we could have, were it not for the apparent fact that the current culture of the internet trains us not to read.  Trains us not to think.  Not to stop and digest.  Not to sit back and make sure we understand things before moving on.  And it certainly seems to train people to post comments before, you know, reading.  We wanted to do videos as well as posts, and we did make a few before moving them away to Phase 2.  We wanted to do podcasts, which are a ton of fun but we only do them for Phase 2.  This is not meant to be an advertisement for Phase 2 (especially because we are very, very, very behind on responding to Phase 2 invites, really sorry about that!), but rather a challenge to read what’s here on Phase 1.  If people can’t do that, then how could they possibly read more anyway?

It’s gotten to the point that I wasn’t sure I should even take the time to write this, because I wondered who would read it?  Not that we don’t have plenty of traffic, but I wondered how many people would do more than skim.  One of our closest friends, whom we met through aLBoP, told us that when he first stumbled across Phase 1, it was a real shock to him because he had to slow down to really understand it all.  He told us that he had grown accustomed to being able to skim most things online, that most articles were fairly simple ideas expressed in way too many words, so he’d gotten used to skimming.  But with aLBoP, he had to seriously re-adjust his expectations; he had to take time and think about the content.  Another of our friends, upon reading the first Super Simple Series post, said “That’s not simple at all!”  We’ve done our best, heh, and we hope that it really is pretty simple and straightforward, but it is also new stuff, not just the same old familiar repetition, so it can’t be simply skimmed.

A couple weeks ago, someone walked up to me and declared that I was an INFP.  I tried to be diplomatic and inviting, telling him that I’d be interested to hear what made him say so, and I asked what definitions of the letters he was using.  He seemed confused and a bit bothered by the question, and said he was just using MBTI.  I still don’t know what made him think that he could so confidently assert someone else’s type like that.  Of course, on aLBoP we do quite confidently assert the Cognitive Types of both real and fictional people, but we can only do so as a result of using concrete, clear definitions that leave no subjective wiggle-room.  There’s no uncertainty about whether someone is a Cognitive Introvert or Extravert; the definitions are very clear, they leave no room for fudging or gray areas, yet they are also not the same soft and elastic definitions of current MBTI.  We have said so, over and over, using words.  And yet we still get comments by people unilaterally asserting “Nope, you typed that character wrong,” based on definitions that we are not using, definitions we cannot use for reasons that we have explained repeatedly.

The problem is in the assertiveness, the astounding certainty with which people treat their own points of view as objective fact.  There’s nothing wrong with asking questions, with re-examining and re-questioning over and over, with constantly re-checking and revisiting even the things that seem the most well established.  Sometimes you might find a mistake, like the time on the Phase 2 Typing Library, when I accidentally put ESTP(ep) Usain Bolt on the library pages for two different Cognitive Types because his picture had somehow got copied over into the wrong folder.  Just this morning, someone pointed out a typo where I had said “our” when I meant “or.”  And we get so many sweet comments where people ask questions rather than assert opinions as fact.  “Why did you type Gandalf as an F instead of a T?” shows a mind that wants to think, to understand, to hear feedback and decide whether or not it makes sense.  Yet when someone flippantly comments “No, Gandalf is INTJ like me,” then that shows such a closed unwillingness to question or examine one’s own point of view.  No wonder current politics are such a nasty echo-chamber.

So when people assertively tell us “I’m an ENTJ,” “I’m a Ne dom,” etc, it makes us wonder if they’ve really read much of anything before commenting.  We do not use the simplistic “dom” system because it turned out to be tremendously subjective, with apparent “dominance” depending far too much on potentially cherry-picked factors that are all too easily used to weigh the result toward a preferred conclusion.  As someone once said to us, and as we’ve quoted before, “Personality typing is just horoscopes for people who think they’re too smart for horoscopes.”  In other words, it’s all subjective fluff that can be applied equally well to anyone, of any type, as long as people are eager to adolescently define themselves in a way that parodies the real work of finding oneself.

But then, as soon as we mention that, we get sincere comments telling us that astrology is real too.  Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not; personally, I have seen many, many reasons to believe it is not accurate or reliable in any fashion, while I have not yet seen anything to suggest the contrary, so far.  Yet I have to wonder: what makes someone feel equipped to say that astrology definitively does work, or does not?  As soon as we start treating our own personal experiences as universal truths, as soon as we start treating our own opinions as objective facts, and as soon as we make the incredibly self-centered error of saying “I have no experience of such-and-such, therefore it’s crap,” then we shut off our ability to think, to learn, to approach anything in any sort of rational manner.  That quote about personality typing being mere horoscopes in disguise, displays its own form of narrow and lazy thinking, by asserting that all “personality typing” is this way, painting life with such a broad brush.  It’s this sort of simplistic thinking that leads to racism, sexism, or any other form of prejudice, that says “I’ve seen dumb religions, therefore all religions are dumb,” “I’ve known vile men, therefore all men are vile,” “I only hang around with dishonest people…and I am one myself…therefore nobody is honest,” etc.  It’s a lazy and anecdotal simplification of the complexities of people’s lives, hearts, and hopes.  It’s mean.

But just because the internet trains us to make everything simplistic and skimmable, just because the current online culture trains us to view our own personal opinions as objective fact, that doesn’t make it our fault.  We can learn to see outside our own points of view.  We can learn to recognize the powerful lenses of emotion, pain, and desire which skew and distort how we see every experience that happens to us.  We can explore just how not objective we are, and then learn to grow past that subjective isolation.

This is why Calise and I have had to de-prioritize Phase 1 for a long time, though.  We’ve been working feverishly, constantly, but most of it has not been here on Phase 1.  We did put eight months of work into The People of Stranger Things post, we put so much thought and feeling into it, so much care and planning, for a total of more than fifty thousand words.  There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but it has produced hardly any results.  How can we justify prioritizing the addition of more information here on Phase 1, when people repeatedly show us how little they’ve read of what we’ve already written?

We love our Personalized Typing service, we love seeing people’s faces and hearing about their lives, we love connecting with them, and it’s a great way to find thoughtful, good, decent people.  And yet, over and over, it’s an uphill battle to remind people who order typings that we are not MBTI, that we do not use those definitions, as we’ve said so many times in so many posts.  Whenever we send out a typing, we always caution people that if they look up their Cognitive Type online, then they are going to find things that are very different, and likely demeaning and limiting.  And yet we still get replies of people saying “No I can’t be this type, because here’s what MBTI says about it, and that’s not me.”  The Cognitive Orientation Guidebooks, which we package with each typing, spend a fair amount of time explaining and reiterating precisely how each Cognitive Type is different from the popular stereotypes. We really hoped words would get that across.

Yet we know what the internet culture is like, and we know that sometimes we all need to be reminded that it’s okay to slow down and process thoughts instead of living life through reactions.  Sometimes I find it intriguing to hop between news networks as they cover the same story, to see how differently each network portrays the very same events.  Which bits of video do they show, which do they edit out, and which do they repeat endlessly?  Which adjectives and adverbs do they use, to influence viewers’ conclusions?  What information do they focus on, what information do they downplay, and what information do they conveniently fail to mention entirely?  Like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, the same event and the same data can be interpreted in wildly different ways even when people have the most honest of intentions.  So when people are less honest, when people have an agenda, a worldview, an ideology or attitude that they want to push, how much more careful do we have to be before we draw any sort of confident conclusions?

It’s our hope that, by taking a few hours away from other work to write this, maybe this might help nudge aLBoP Phase 1 toward being a site where we can post more information, more Type Heroes, more character spotlights, and just more fun articles.  I’ve been wanting to do an article about Winston Churchill for years now, titled “How an ENFP Saved the World,” because he really did, and yes he was unequivocally an ENFP(ip), but how can I justify taking the time to write that, time I could be giving to other people, when so many readers here on Phase 1 won’t, well, read?  I worry that so many internet skimmers wouldn’t get past the title before firing off comments authoritatively declaring “He wasn’t ENFP!! He was [roll the dice and insert any number of different types here]!”  We owe Gwen and Phil 20 bucks, since someone did indeed leave a comment (one of the many that we decided to leave unapproved) assertively stating that, because Lord Shen has a grand vision, he is therefore INTJ.  Wow.  So that’s how we’re defining these complex variables of human thought and desire, now?  And so none of the other fifteen Cognitive approaches to life can have a grand vision?  Seriously?  Sorry Elon Musk, no ENFJ(ij) for you, you gotta be INTJ I guess.  The all-knowing internet decrees it thus.

We really hoped, and I still do hope, that by bringing the subject of Subtypes here to Phase 1, it would be a quick way to immediately show people “Hey look, see those two little letters in parentheses?  Then maybe, just perhaps, this is something a little bit different from what you’re already used to.”  We hoped that would help the Personalized Typing service more easily show people “Hey this isn’t just MBTI, see?  We’re giving you six letters, not just four.”  There are actually more than six letters, more than eight; it seems to be a magnificently reiterating fractal of complexity, with each new layer of sub-typing adding ever more clearly definable nuance to the intricacy of consciousness, but we figured that the basic idea of Subtypes was plenty enough for Phase 1 right now.  I worry that even by dangling that little hint of more information, it might lead people to leap to conclusions and simplifications.  Fair enough, but I also hope that this can encourage more of you to read a little more carefully, to ponder a little more than you already do, to consider, to question, to dig deep, to see outside your own point of view and become a voice for understanding instead of adding to the cacophonous chorus of cartoony, rigid simplifications.

TL;DR: aLBoP is not MBTI.  But more accurately, if you really want a “Too Long, Didn’t Read,” then why are you even here?  There are plenty of skimmable websites that will be more than happy to let you simplify people into shallow little subjective boxes.  This is not a blog, though it did start as one over on blogspot, but pretty quickly we realized how much aLBoP could help us find and help cool people, honest and thoughtful people, people who are willing to expend the labor of time and energy to earn what they learn.  That’s the sort of person we love to meet.  That’s the kind of person we love to learn from, exchange ideas with, and see how we can help them add to the world in their own way, in their own life.  That’s what we’re all about.