23 ms·
How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
- testuser454 7y agoThis (and the DiSC model) is a revamp of the four humors? red = choleric blue = melancholic green = phlemetic yellow = sanguine
- mstade 7y agoYes, it's even described in the book and used as a clever trick to suggest it's ancient wisdom.
- achow 7y agoCouldn't help but check that it is rated 4.6/5 (113 reviews) in Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Surrounded-Idiots-Behavior-Effectively-Communicate/dp/1250179947/ https://www.amazon.com/Surrounded-Idiots-Behavior-Effectivel... Excerpt from one of the top review.. The book really helps you to understand why 'blues' ask 100 questions, want to problem solve all the time, always ask for more information, and can be cold and distant instead of being emotional creatures. Yellows on the other hand are always day dreaming, coming up with broad ideas, trying to plan social gatherings and always seemingly have their 'head in the clouds' (this is totally me). Reds can seem really aggressive, very dominant, demanding, and short with those around you, and frankly they can't help it, and greens are very amiable. They agree to everything, but are often afraid to speak their mind. Looks like it is not only Sweden but other places as well. Seems like easily relatable and digestible like those on Sun Signs and Personality and hence a 'good seller', if not a best seller.
- netsharc 7y agoAKA confirmation bias: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-confirmation-bias-2795024 https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-confirmation-bias-279... Fascinating how it's the same thing "mediums" use to say there's some person speaking to them from beyond the grave, with a message for someone whose name begin with M...
- coliveira 7y agoThis is also very similar to the horoscope.
- ajscanlan 7y agoI believe that's the Barnum effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
- n4r9 7y agoThe UK mentalist Derren Brown has a brilliant example passage of this in his 2007 book "Tricks of the Mind". It was all about what you felt like as a child and your relationship to your parents. Very clever. I remember showing it to a friend at university who became extremely emotional and couldn't believe it wasn't tailored to them.
- dkdklk 7y ago> Looks like it is not only Sweden but other places as well. As an American it’s a little reassuring to know that despite some economic advantages, the Swedes are also just a bunch of easily impressionable idiots.
- martindbp 7y agoWhat economic advantages?
- rusk 7y agonot being ruled by a kleptocracy
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- type0 7y agoIt has to be true then, the book author did state that he was surrounded by such.
- qnsi 7y agoYeah, I dont understand the title. Does he think green people are idiots? Because I agree
- raverbashing 7y agoDoesn't look too different from most "self-help" books out there.
- oefrha 7y agoHah, this reminds me of zodiac signs, which every single non-scientist female friend of mine seems to take very seriously (not sure about male friends since this topic seems to never come up). No wonder it sells.
- atheistnsingle 7y agoI have no idea how many of my male friends are into this but as a man I check "don't believe in astrology" or similar in Ok Cupid as a search filter and 4 people out of how ever many thousands of people should be out there appear. It's super depressing.
- epx 7y agoAnd the zodiac signs are also divided in 4 groups (air, fire, earth, water) so it seems the idea of dividing people in 4 quadrants is pretty old.
- type0 7y agoWhat idiot-colors do you think it would corresponds to? fire - red water - blue earth - green air - yellow pretty sure it's "scientific"
- epx 7y agoI don't know, the only thing I remember is water ~= Pisces ~= melancholic ~= <some color>
- SuoDuanDao 7y agoI've seen an analysis of the phenomenon where the four elements correspond to 4 major neurotransmitters, with the traits associated with having a lot of one element being pretty close to having a lot of the corresponding neurotransmitter. Maybe there really is a potentially useful means of categorizing people there.
- flingo 7y agoHave you tried to be a scientist yourself and getting some numbers to test your hypothesis?
- achow 7y agoReally bizarre that I now only see 26 ratings in the Amazon page, as opposed to 113 that I saw earlier. https://www.amazon.com/Surrounded-Idiots-Behaviour-Understand-Understood/dp/1785042181/ https://www.amazon.com/Surrounded-Idiots-Behaviour-Understan... Anyone know what is happening? Is that the sudden burst of traffic from HN triggered some kind of Amazon's fake review analysis and they took down bunch of reviews?
- polynomial 7y agoI see 115.
- DonaldFisk 7y agoFor me, I get 117 ratings on amazon.co.uk and 26 ratings on amazon.com
- tim333 7y agoI get 117 on .co.uk and 115 on com. I think I'm logged in on both so maybe that's the thing. Going incognito its 117 and 26.
- RubberMullet 7y ago115 when logged in, 25 when logged out.
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agoThis seems strikingly similar to the "shape" nonsense being sold to managers as an explanation of explain team dynamics [1]. [1] https://www.delcor.com/resources/blog/project-management-personality-types https://www.delcor.com/resources/blog/project-management-per...
- umeshunni 7y agoAs a matter of fact I have done a very similar color-coded personality test at a corporate event. https://www.insights.com/us/products/insights-discovery/ https://www.insights.com/us/products/insights-discovery/ After the test, we were even given blocks to keep at our desks so that people who interact with us knew whether we were 'blue' or 'yellow' and adapt their reactions accordingly. I guess I should have just said I was an Aquarius or Capricorn or some such and it would have been just as scientifically accurate.
- rapnie 7y agoI also did this Insights Discovery with a bunch of colleagues. Two weeks beforehand we had to do an online multiple choice questionaire with about 20 questions. Based on this everyone received an elaborate report with their personality analyses. Strong points, weak points, etc. Very detailed. But I've got to say that everyone in our group - mostly rational devs - was positively surprised how accurate these analyses were.
- bitwize 7y ago> But I've got to say that everyone in our group - mostly rational devs - was positively surprised how accurate these analyses were. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
- rapnie 7y agoHa ha, good find, thanks! Sure there is a lot of generalization in these reports, but still I found their description of my personality type quite spot-on and recognizable, and hence useful to me. (And I don't believe in astrology and the whole supernatural shebang :) PS The whole follow-up with team communication, organization impact etc. was not for me.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago>"talk of colours from the infamous Myers-Briggs test, administered by less-respectable management consultants" // I think in the UK Myers-Briggs was fronted by "respectable" management consultants and was mainstream. Or perhaps no management consultants are respectable because they primarily seem to front the current fashionable pseudo-science?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- WAHa_06x36 7y agoGot it the second time.
- alexanderchr 7y agoOriginal (in Swedish): https://www.vof.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Katz-Erikson-19-1.pdf https://www.vof.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Katz-Erikson-1...
- tenpies 7y agoIs it not the same for the current wave of anti-bias/discrimination/racism training? There is zero evidence that it has any effect. What few brave researchers have risked their careers exploring the effectiveness of the training have found that it does basically nothing. None of that stops companies from paying millions for it and good luck to the employee or executive that even dares suggest that perhaps there's better ways of tackling the problem/issue.
- vertex-four 7y agoThe problem is that the people suggesting the better ways are usually... promoting rather unpalatable ideas. Often either that there is no discrimination in the workplace ever and so we should stop talking about it, or that discrimination in the workplace is in fact normal and healthy. I'd love to see a way of creating healthy, non-discriminatory workplaces, especially in industries that are usually pretty terrible.
- weberc2 7y agoIs it unpalatable to ask questions about how much discrimination exists and against whom it is directed? The only “evidence” I’m aware of are implicit association tests and Goldin’s study of blind auditions, neither of which demonstrate discrimination. And asking this question often just gets me downvoted. If we are so certain that there is discrimination and tons of it, why is the real evidence treated as a closely guarded secret while we proudly circulate the debunked evidence? Please note that this is the opposite of “we should not talk about it”.
- bjourne 7y agoI think you are getting downvoted because the argument is exasperating. It's argument by ignorance: "I don't know therefore it isn't true." It is very easy to find ample evidence of discrimination documented in published peer-reviewed studies. E.g https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html "The results indicate large racial differences in callback rates to a phone line with a voice mailbox attached and a message recorded by someone of the appropriate race and gender. Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. This would suggest either employer prejudice or employer perception that race signals lower productivity." The other exasperating thing is at presenting evidence almost never work. The step after someone has presented evidence of discrimination is for the person who doesn't "believe in discrimination" to challenge the result. Either the result doesn't actually prove discrimination or the study is flawed in some way so you can't draw any conclusions.
- dgellow 7y ago> · Red: dominant, driven, solution focussed. > · Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous > · Green: patient, considerate, nice > · Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal Damn. I spent so much of my time and energy pushing back exactly on this bullshit when I was young. That's part of the curriculum of mandatory courses I had to take during an apprenticeship in Switzerland. Expensive and mandatory courses paid by students' employer, of course. But I didn't know that the "color model" was THAT popular. In french speaking countries, that's often presented as a package called PNL, aka "Programmation Neuro-linguistique" (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmation_neuro-linguistique https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmation_neuro-linguistiq...). Based on my experience, that kind of pseudo-science is super popular in corporate environment, and is really difficult to fight against.
- _def 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
- dgellow 7y agoThanks for sharing the English article. I decided to share the french version because it has way more details (it's a huge phenomenon here), but that's for sure more interesting if people can actually read the content :)
- wayoutthere 7y agoI think all of these "personality tests" are total BS -- while it's great to think you can tl;dr a person, in reality we're far more complicated than that. When you make assumptions about a person's "personality color" or Meyers-Briggs profile, you disempower them from making their own decisions. As adults mature, we all learn to be comfortable with a range of communication styles. This kind of pop psychology may be comforting and in some ways holds some element of truth, but the entire idea that a "personality" is fixed in any way dismisses the potential for growth that makes us all so human.
- mrkwse 7y agoI applied to Volvo when looking for graduate schemes in my final year of university and recall having to complete a personality test there. I'm not sure whether or not that particular test corresponded to the referenced 'method', however it was a series of very arbitrary statements that one had to either agree or disagree with. None of them seemed particularly useful for determining my aptitude as a software engineer or professionalism more generally. I can still recall this statement, verbatim, which I believe I stated I agreed with: "I greatly enjoy the saucy and slapstick humour of some television shows"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yakshaving_jgt 7y agoI'm guessing this was in Göteborg. I also worked on a team in Göteborg and was presented with this nonsense. I ended up telling the HR manager that this "method" is obviously pseudoscience and a waste of my time, and I ended up leaving the team.
- mrkwse 7y agoYou're right. Was an interesting sounding role and it didn't get my application discarded before a Skype interview, but I didn't get very far in the process and wonder how much bearing my love of slapstick had on their decision to pass on me.
- fullshark 7y agoThese types of things may not be science, but they are so popular and will always be popular because they are useful heuristics to make sense of the chaos of dealing with humans.
- maze-le 7y agoThey might be heuristics, but how can they ever be useful? They can neither be used in the analysis of a person nor are they predictive...
- fullshark 7y agoManagers like them as they try to make sense of how their reports behave and work together, people they know but not really. Sounds like some people like them as a way to make sense of issues with their personal relationships. People outside yourself make decisions that are frequently confusing, and people like this sort of categorization to make sense of them.
- Broken_Hippo 7y agoPeople liking something doesn't mean they are actually useful, though. Some folks like fake medicine because they feel like they are doing something useful - even when we can prove that no, "memory water" isn't curing your cold. People like horoscopes for your same reasons - because people are confusing and some sort of categorization is a way to make sense to them. It doesn't actually mean it is useful or even accurate in any way - it just means you are doing something. You could probably put the energy into managing the environment or better communication or coming to terms with "Other people are complicated".
- fullshark 7y agoSure but it's worth exploring why these are popular beyond simply writing it off as "people are dummies."
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- mongol 7y agoThat seems like an exaggregation. Certainly there must be larger "scientific bluffs"? Examples of articles in peer reviewed journals, relying on manipulated data or something.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SiempreViernes 7y agoTrue, climate change denialism is certainly a bigger deal, but it's not simply a case of a single guy making stuff up to make money.
- htfu 7y agoTrue, that's instead a case of many guys making stuff up to make money.
- surfsvammel 7y agoI got this book as a Christmas present from my mom. Then I ran into the same argument about pseudoscience that we have each year...
- andrelaszlo 7y agoI gave it as a Christmas gift two years ago. Picked it up because of the funny title, saw that it was backed up by "science" according to the back cover and bought it... just apologized for the crappy gift to my brother in law. We were all confused by the colors. I had a little bit of all colors. My mom used to be red but is now more of the other colors... it really is pretty useless. I still enjoy taking "personality tests" but I try not fooling myself into thinking that MBTI, Strengths Finder, or DiSC says much more about myself than a horoscope would. If anything it might tell me a little bit about how I perceive myself, but that's not how it's sold. Thanks to VoF for their work!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- porknubbins 7y agoIt was a little distressing to me to realize believing in pseudoscience (for anyone not a scientist, doctor, engineer etc) has very little negative affect, and lots of people seem to be much happier begin in a deluded state than rigorously searching for truth.
- surfsvammel 7y agoI don’t think that’s true though it sure seems like it. Pseudoscience is very seldom harmless. There is often someone making money off of someone else in the background, and in other cases it’s just plain health risks (for example Chiropractors killing a young girl by injecting her with turmeric or a naprapath taking a cancer patients money for snake oil for something that could be spent on proper healthcare). I can’t think of a single harmless pseudoscience.
- itronitron 7y agoThey could have saved people a lot of time by just marking down the dominant color of each person's aura instead of making them complete a questionnaire.
- jessermeyer 7y agoI am more analytic than most of my friends. If you want to label that as "Blue" or "7" or "J", "Conscientiousness" or "Engineer", that's one way to represent the general classification. And it's useful, especially when used as some kind of mirror for reflection. Whether it's useful in sum across a population to answer specific questions like "Will this specific group of people work well together" is highly suspect. The categories just are not resolute enough, and people are more like clouds than clocks. Categories, while a necessary first step to understanding, ultimately become a trap if that's all you understand people as.
- feintruled 7y ago> Categories, while a necessary first step to understanding, ultimately become a trap if that's all you understand people as. And perhaps a trap for yourself too, if you find yourself saying things like "I could never do something like that, I'm a blue!"
- jessermeyer 7y agoSome guitarists never learn to play beyond the scales they first learned.
- jariel 7y agoEven Myers-Briggs is considered to be very problematic. I think the only personality elements fairly well backed by Science are the 'big 5': Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience. It's fundamentally scary that any advanced nation would be taken in by any of this.
- temptemptemp111 7y agoYa it is called climate change. Swedes are some of the most brainwashed people in the world. Having lived there I realized how they all had such identical opinions... Not a coincidence!
- lemagedurage 7y agoHow come dividing personality into introverted and extroverted (1 dimension) is generally accepted, but dividing personality into more dimensions (disc has 2, mbti has 4, big five has 5, etc), people tend to feel uneasy (e. g. "I am more than just this")? All traps aside (confirmation bias, overdoing it), I do believe these categorizations do make sense as a way to learn about behavior, especially for the general public. That people misinterpret the meaning of the results is obviously bad, but it doesn't invalidate the theory.
- INTPenis 7y agoMBTI actually has 12 archetypes, hard to compare that with introvert and extrovert. I often reference being introverted but it's important to understand that it's a scale and everyone is somewhere on that scale. It's not binary. But it does help explain why I get tired from over exposure to strangers, but can go for hours in the company of family and close friends. And yeah I agree these things should only be used as guides or aides. I still feel my life changed when I first read my MBTI description. It was spooky, like someone had read my mind. But how does that help me? It mostly doesn't. What has helped me the most daily is knowing my limits, that I have a social battery and letting myself recharge that. And completely irrelevant to this topic my biggest aide was to understand how my stomach controlled my temper. It sounds so cliché but regular complete meals and sleep has helped me more than any psychologist.
- lemagedurage 7y agoMBTI has 16 archetypes, but they're all combinations of 4 letters / scales / dimensions, where 16personalities added one to that (assertive <-> turbulent). I do believe it helped me find out about the differences of other people's internal worlds, but the journey did involve avoiding a lot of pitfalls and taking everything with a healthy dose of skepticism.
- myhf 7y agoThe 4th dimension is not orthogonal to the others, so maybe the true cardinality is closer to 12 than 16.
- tomp 7y ago> Unfortunately, the theory behind this book, and the various follow-ups, is no more than pseudoscientific nonsense. And Erikson appears to lack even basic knowledge of psychology or behavioural science. This seems to happen often. Are there any non-pseudoscientific psychology theories? AFAIK only IQ and (possibly) the "Big Five" personality traits. Short list of (likely) "failed" (pop-)psychological theories: - stereotype threat [1] - implicit bias - specifically refers to unconscious prejudice that exist independently of any explicit / conscious bias; however, measurements of implicit bias do not predict biased behavior [2] and therefore implicit bias training is likely completely useless [3] (this is not to say that explicit bias doesn't exist or that bigots don't try to conceal their bigotry) - power posing, the idea that putting your body in a "power" position (a pose that projects confidence) alters your hormonal levels - even the original author no longer believes [4] that this effect is real (although I personally still think that "power poses" can have an effect on other people and how they perceive you) - growth mindset, the belief that you can learn and improve (which I personally think is probably better than the reverse), doesn't actually result [5] in better educational outcomes (but can result in millions of dollars wasted [6]). The original researcher since came up with [7] a convenient concept of "false" growth mindset - "saying you have growth mindset when you don't really have it" - but critics rightfully counter with (from the Wikipedia link above): > "If your effect is so fragile that it can only be reproduced [under strictly controlled conditions], then why do you think it can be reproduced by schoolteachers?" and > to claim that your performance in a cognitive task is entirely dictated by how hard you try and is nothing to do with raw candle-power flies in the face of more than 100 years of intelligence research". - Stanford Prison Experiment [8] (where participants were knowingly acting out their roles and which was never successfully replicated) - Milgram Experiment (which, although somewhat replicated, was recently criticized [9] that few participants actually believed the experiment was real - a potential issue with any replication attempts as well) Hope I didn't mess up any links. This is based only on my completely amateur research of online sources, I'm more than happy to be pointed in the opposite direction! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Criticism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_stereotype#Statement_by_Original_Authors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_stereotype#Statement_... [3] https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psychological-test-to-fight-racism/ https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_posing#Replication_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_posing#Replication_failu... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism [6] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180522114523.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180522114523.h... [7] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-praise-became-a-consolation-prize/510845/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-pr... [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Criticism_and_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Cri... [9] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-shocking-truth-of-the-notorious-milgram-obedience-experiments https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-shocking-truth-of-...
- pimmen 7y agoI'm Swedish and yes, it was almost insufferable when this book was the hotness during the past two years, but this is hardly "one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time". It's not even the worst one that got mainstream in Sweden. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity[1] is far more stupid and God knows how much money has been wasted on shielding people from electromagnetic fields by local governments. Hell, just the fact that this has been debated and taken seriously by politicians and government officials is astounding to me. It's a sad reflection on the state of physics literacy in my country. So, stupid? Yes. One of the worst pseudo-scientific scandals ever to have swept over Sweden? Not even remotely close. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...
- fastball 7y agoI think it is less "physics literacy" and more a complete lack of teaching and using critical thinking / reasoning. For whatever reason, the West in general (and maybe the world) seems to be spending less and less time on critical thinking and more time on picking a side and then running with it. I have no idea if this is true or just a feeling I have, but if I was a betting man and it is, I would blame media and short attention spans.
- briandear 7y agoI’m curious if it is possible we are being fooled by other scientific hoaxes at this very moment but yet don’t even realize it.
- ncmncm 7y agoOf course we are. As Josh Billings is usually quoted these days, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." We are so sure of things that are not true that we don't bother to check.
- oefrha 7y agoI skimmed the entire article and am still confused about how this guy managed to persuade the media and “large parts of the Swedish population” that he’s a behavioral scientist. I mean, especially for laypeople, the first question you should ask when someone claims to be an expert in a certain science is “does s/he have a Ph.D.?”. This guy did not disclose his academic background, which no Ph.D. holder would ever hide, and his best claim to authority appears to be “in an interview with Filter I referred to a psychologist who supported my claim [to be a behavioural scientist]”, which is truly bizarre (and false btw). Additionally, this guy debuted as a crime novel author ffs (according to Google-translated version of his Swedish Wikipedia page[1]). What a joke. (Granted, there’s a small percentage of frauds among Ph.D. holders. Meanwhile, the percentage of frauds among self-proclaimed non-Ph.D. experts is likely close to 100%.) [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fsv.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThomas_Erikson_(ledarskapscoach) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...
- breck 7y agoThe PhD is a fraternity. I think the only thing a PhD makes you an expert in is "PhD-ing". Don't get me wrong. I think having a PhD is a signal that you are very intelligent, I respect, work with and love people with PhDs (I disrespect the system). But if you believe this: > Meanwhile, the percentage of frauds among self-proclaimed non-Ph.D. experts is likely close to 100% then I would say the percentage of frauds among PhD experts is 99%. No one knows anything. Perhaps non-PhDs are better than PhDs at remembering that. PhD's don't tell you how expert someone is at something. Unless the task at hand is making PDFs. People with PhDs are all great at that. If you look at the track record of "Psychology PhDs" in the past 100 years, I wouldn't be surprised if this fellow has done better work than more than half of them. Purely by chance, knowing nothing about his book. I trust experience and open data more than academic credentials. I would not be surprised if in 50 years we have a much more scientific method of doing science than the current PhD system.
- oefrha 7y agoOutside a small percentage of fraudsters, having a Ph.D. in a subject is hard proof that one has devoted thousands of hours into said subject and has treaded a more or less established path, with at least a modicum of quality assurance from field experts. That doesn't automatically make someone an expert (depending on the definition of course), but it does indicate one can have a serious conversation on said subject with said individual. It also depends on the institution of course: I would place high confidence on someone with a Ph.D. from Princeton Physics, and less on someone with a Ph.D. from a no-name school/department. With alternative scientists (I've seen many even when I was only a Ph.D. candidate -- some like to email an entire department at a time) there's simply no quality assurance whatsoever. You may review their work, but 99% of the time it's nonsense, so you probably don't want to waste time on the next one. And that's when you're qualified to review their work; when you're not, it only makes sense to assume it's nonsense, unless their work is endorsed by multiple field experts (without conflict of interest, which can be a murky issue in certain fields). So, you're welcome to propose better noise filters, but I maintain that having a Ph.D. or not is the first question to ask when anyone is trying to sell you a scientific theory you're not qualified to evaluate. Obligatory mention of The Crackpot Index. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
- scoutt 7y ago> the question remains as why so many people bought the book I tend to think that people like very simple answers to complex questions. Full spectrum of personality traits back-and-forth? The answer is four colors. Perhaps the fact of just being able to understand any given answer makes people feel smart. I deduct it this way, since the author defends himself by claiming skeptics "are attempting to make out that his readers are idiots".
- abvdasker 7y agoOne feature of these personality taxonomies is that inevitably in the set of different categories designed to be of equal human value or worth, one or two categories are always discernably worse than the others.
- username90 7y agoThe only scientific personality scale, Big5, was not designed that way. It is pretty easy to figure out that workers with high conscientiousness and low neuroticism are preferable. Which makes sense, we didn't evolve to be corporate drones so not all personalities are equally fit for the role.
- fredrik-j 7y agoAs a swede this is a bit embarrassing to me. I have a few friends who's bought into this completely, and of course bought the book. All without even a hint of critical thinking. It is hard to tell your friends they've been conned. I can understand it to some extent. Here's someone, who claims he is a behavioral expert and scientist, and who offers a seemingly plausible simple method to understand yourself and other people, and how to use that method to efficiently interact and work with others. Who wouldn't want that? Unfortunately the books are still sold. I've considered printing stickers that warns about the nonsense and sneak it on to copies in book stores. How else can we stop the proliferation of this junk?
- yhoiseth 7y ago> Unfortunately the books are still sold. I've considered printing stickers that warns about the nonsense and sneak it on to copies in book stores. Great idea! We should do that for Why We Sleep, too: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
- OJFord 7y agoThe article starts by stating fairly that the book's author is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and UC Berkeley. The article author's homepage says: > I'm an independent researcher with background in Economics, Mathematics, and Cognitive Science. Since I don't have any prior knowledge of the area, I'm sure either of them could convince me of their argument. So I'm inclined to believe the published Berkeley professor over the unaffiliated independent reviewer. (Or perhaps the auto-bio is being too modest?)
- DiffEq 7y agoCredentials play no role in this fight. There are plenty of examples of credentialed people fabricating and lying. The author documents the lies pretty soundly.
- riversflow 7y agoAs suggested by sister comment, consider the content of the well-cited review instead of being blinded by credentials. >or perhaps the auto-bio is being too modest? Human beings are perfectly capable of autodidactism.
- croon 7y agoProvocative title. More accurate, but less surprising would be "A significant portion of a population were fooled by a charlatan offering simple answers to complex questions". That wouldn't be as salacious though. But I'm very happen with what VoF did. The book has still been a huge annoyance for years though, and I've seen personally workplace accomodations based on its idiocy. But if I'm allowed to generalize a bit myself, I would say that it's not more people than are swayed daily by political facebook memes or fake internet "news" publications with superficially professional design, regardless of nation. Critical thinking is hard, and takes a lot of time to process, and we're continuously hit with increasingly more information that it's impossible to deal with. I hope that people smarter than me can create tools and models to make it easier.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y ago> I hope that people smarter than me can create tools and models to make it easier. On a happy note, people smarter than you may make even worse mistakes.
- croon 7y agoI thank you for the effort, but I'm not sure that makes me feel better :)
- NPMaxwell 7y ago"Some professionals recognised talk of colours from the infamous Myers-Briggs test, administered by less-respectable management consultants. It built on the mystical ideas of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, active at the start of the 20th century, whose theories are now mostly of historical interest. The theory of Myers-Briggs was not something modern psychologists took seriously. Since the test had been developed quite some time ago it had been the subject of extensive research and the results had revealed serious flaws." The Myers-Briggs corporate product is an interesting confirmation of 20th Century scientific method. With standard methodologies, reviewed and published by standard peer review processes, Myers-Briggs was shown to be useless before 1990. So science seems to work well. Nonetheless, the last time a company I worked for paid (and spent on employee time) for Myers-Briggs testing was 2017. Science works well, but corporate purchasing of consulting does not have such a good track record.
- 40four 7y agoI had never heard of this book, or color system before, but it makes me think of my time working in car sales. Our senior sales managers trained us to identify personalities, and they used similar groupings. There were four 'buckets' and they are very close to this color system. They are dominant driver, complacent, ego driven, and analytical. The idea is to, as quickly as possible, identify the customer's type, and adapt your sales approach to that. You learn to use a communication style for each bucket. Different types of questions to ask, different speed/ energy, different body language. I was a terrible salesperson, but I watched the managers and top salespeople use this approach with much success. They would match their style of communication with the customer's, in an attempt to earn their favor and make them feel more comfortable. The hypothesis is this increases the likelihood of closing the sale. I understand these buckets (colors) aren't scientific, and it sounds like some folks in Sweden might have taken it too far or been misled. But the article says "Erikson has repeatedly claimed that the benefit of his colour approach is that it helps us understand ourselves and others and, as a result, improves our communication and reduces conflicts." So I'm not sure that the idea of learning different ways people communicate, and in turn, how you yourself can communicate in different ways is a 'fraud'. To be fair, I haven't read the book so I don't know how or what ideas are presented. I think the 4 buckets/colors can just be a loose 'framework'. As long as you understand it's not the end all - be all of personality. In fact it's not really 'personality' at all. It's just a quick and dirty way of grouping common characteristics of people. Maybe it's not useful in all situations, but for some applications (like sales), there is certainly value in communicating with people in a way that is compatible with their style. In the case of car sales, it's very tangible value, a larger paycheck :)
- adminu 7y agoI think one issue with the colour approach is, that multiple dimensions of character traits are thrown into one pot (one colour) even though, they might be independent traits. Also, saying, someone is one/two/three colours is quite an all or nothing approach, that does not reflect reality, as character traits are non-binary (see for example the scientifically more grounded “Big Five”). Over all, when a good salesman closes a deal, with the knowledge of this approach that you have been taught, it does not say, that the approach works. A good salesman uses common sense and experience in talking with people and of course adapts to the customer, but that does not mean, that he uses this special theory. (Maybe, you did perform bad, because you used the theory ) I would say, if we did a study with a control group, one group has been taught the theory, you have been taught, and the control group is not (but maybe, we tell them, take notice of the other person and try to adapt to their character), and if we notice, that the theory trained salesmen actually perform better, then we can say this framework is of any use. We still don’t know, of course, if not a different form of training could outperform this framework. Until then, it is just anecdotal evidence.
- fastball 7y agoI have a problem with the article author's implication that someone without credentials (read: university degree) isn't a scientist, or at least is a lesser scientist. A scientist is someone who employs the scientific method. That's it. Thomas Erikson does not seem to qualify from what I can tell (he's just winging it), but he absolutely does not need to have a doctorate (or even a bachelors) in order to be a "behavioral scientist" - he just needs to be using the scientific method when testing the claims he makes in his book or elsewhere. No, your poodle does not have just as much right to call themselves a scientist, as a poodle is literally incapable of ever using the scientific method. You don't need an extensive "scientific background" in order for your first book to be perfectly scientific.
- coliveira 7y agoTo be a scientist is not enough to use the scientific method in isolation. Because modern science is much bigger than anyone can understand as an individual, it is an imperative requirement that you also articulate your findings to the scientific community as a way to prove/disprove your personal conclusions. In other words, the requirement for proper use of the scientific method in a modern society can only been accomplished through the scientific community. Now, you could in theory do this without a PhD, but your chances are minimal of even being able to start the discussion, so if you're really willing to do science the first meta-step is to prove yourself going through a PhD program.
- fastball 7y agoUsing the scientific method in isolation is enough to be a scientist. If I: 1. form a falsifiable hypothesis based on observation 2. come up with (reproducible) experiments in an attempt to confirm and (more importantly) falsify my hypothesis 3. accurately measure and analyze my experimental results 4. modify or throw out hypotheses where necessary 5. rinse repeat I am a scientist. If I then make prescriptive statements / claims to people based on this science, it is of course imperative that I share my scientific methodology with whoever I am making these claims to. But I can do science on a desert island all alone. but your chances are minimal of even being able to start the discussion, Could you expand on this a bit? I'm not sure I understand the point you are making here. Furthermore, getting a PhD does not "prove" you can do proper science, even in scientific disciplines, as has been made clear by the reproducibility crisis in academia.
- AzzieElbab 7y agothere is something about psychology that really invites all types of pseudoscience. In all honesty I cant tell whether what I've learned in introductory courses makes more or less sense than what is described as fraud in the article
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- bobloblaw45 7y agoThis sounds like the stupid pre-employment tests they make you take for lower level jobs. Which by the way, I've taken many. You just lie and pick the answers that don't make you sound like a grumpy introvert.
- Loughla 7y agoThis article is a hack piece, in my opinion. First, formal qualifications do not a scientist make. Second, using phrases like this, with zero real evidence to support them: >a distinction that even a someone who has studied a four-week course in the area will know is incorrect. Regardless of the validity of the 'color' theories, this is not journalism. It is opinion presented as fact. Full disclosure, I have never bought into colors theories, even though they are currently en vogue in my field. But we need scientific study, not more opinion nonsense.
- KirinDave 7y agoI still remember being at a company where we took an expensive (company funded) personality test to rate is in these four colors and place us. The director in charge of the team was concerned about our "Color Dynamics."
- deeteecee 7y agoHmm, I didn't read the article. Seems a little tacky considering the first word in the title is "swedes"
- fastball 7y agoHuh? It's about a book written by a Swede that was published in Swedish that gained popularity in Sweden.
- Zenst 7y agoIssue is and always will be that people are quick to cide with anything that promotes their narrative/World view as it is easier to be right than it is to be wrong and change your narrative/World view for many people. But in the realms of books, science does seem to be more accountable than religious books and yet both have their effects and sway upon people. Just that one is more open to being questioned and the other is not. Sad truth is, if you wrap bad science under another banner, you can get away with it more easily and less open to being questioned in a way that is accepted in debate.
- 45ure 7y agoIt is hard to figure out from this verbose article, whether it is just professional jealousy or a genuine need to debunk the theory of assigning colours to personality types, as described in the book titled Surrounded by idiots. The crux of the argument is that a professional psychologist, who is also a member Swedish Skeptics Society, is refuting the author's claim of being a 'behavioural scientist', yet he admits that it is a meaningless term and also legal in Sweden. Erikson e-mailed me (we both shared the same international agent, so we had met briefly once before) and asked whether, given my own profession as a psychologist and my position as a board member of the Swedish Skeptics Society, I would support his claim that he was a ‘behavioural scientist’. I declined to offer such support, despite the fact that from a legal point of view in Sweden, it is possible to call yourself a ‘behavioural scientist’ without any formal qualifications. He has just as much right as my poodle to call himself a behavioural scientist.
- Nursie 7y agoHe also points out that the theory has no evidence behind it, that it appears to be based on an older theory, also completely unevidenced, and that that older theory draws on discredited Jungian archetypes. To read this purely as an attack on someone's credentials out of jealousy is to have missed the meat of the criticism.
- 45ure 7y agoI stated quite clearly, that it is hard to work out the intention of the article. The professional psychologist in question seems to be spending an awful amount of energy dispelling a theory that has been already discredited. There is an unhealthy fixation on the circulation and sales of the book, throughout the article. It is now a futile exercise to convince the readership if it is drivel and providing the book with even more publicity. They will come to a realization of their own accord and banish the book to the kooky category.
- acqq 7y agoNo. It's clearly written: "Despite the use of colours, it turned out that the “Surrounded by …” books were not based on Myers-Brigg. Instead, they built on another personality theory, the so-called DiSC model. The most noteworthy outcome of a search through the academic literature on this model was that, despite the fact that the test had been around for fifty years, there was in principle no research on whether or not it worked." "According to Sune Gellberg, the owner of IPU, the organisation in Sweden which sell the DiSC test, no qualifications are required to carry out personality tests. “I don’t know what education our consultants have because it doesn’t matter”, he told us, “It is a computer program that does the personality analysis and gives the consultant a report which he can go through with the respondent.” Not even the representative for the test thinks that knowledge of psychology is important! Personality consultants have no education in test methodology and no knowledge of personality theory. They just feed in numbers to a computer and have no idea what the results mean or what their scientific value is. It is very possible that Erikson believes that the test has scientific grounds and, given his lack of education, it is very likely that he has no idea what it actually says. "
- nlstitch 7y agoNot to be the devils advocate here, but does the fact that there isnt any scientific proof proof it doesnt work? Not everything has to be tested and verified in a lab, right? Perhaps I am justifying myself though: I've had the DiSC traing THREE times now. Is it all just a lie? I was kinda hoping this article would show actual proof it doesnt work.
- Miraste 7y agoTests like DiSC and Meyers-Briggs are hard to disprove because they make contradictory, non-falsifiable claims. This is part of what makes them appealing: there's something identifiable for everyone in most of the profiles, and stuff that doesn't fit is easy to dismiss. It's the same strategy that enables horoscopes and psychics. Don't feel bad for believing it--it's designed to be believable, rather than correct. If you want a more in-depth breakdown of this and the other problems that make the test false but also hard to falsify, this [1] is a pretty good analysis. [1] https://medium.com/@ronsoak/a-warning-against-using-disc-myers-briggs-profiling-in-the-workplace-6e96e6eb1a81 https://medium.com/@ronsoak/a-warning-against-using-disc-mye...
- nlstitch 7y agoThanks!
- skizm 7y agoThis is literally the Hogwarts houses right down to the colors matching...
- makach 7y agooh this gem of a book, I remember I saw it at some managers desk, where there was no attempt to hide it or anything. I often wonder wtf he was thinking.
- ncmncm 7y agoIn parts of Bloomberg, as in apparently many other places, there is a cult around what Geoff Pullum calls "the nasty book", Elements of Style. It is similarly full of ignorant proclamations that serve mainly to make people insecure about their communication skills. Whenever I found one that didn't obviously belong to someone, I recycled it.
- smukherjee19 7y agoReading the article, the various comments and the linked "Why We Sleep" criticism, I feel really disillusioned. Honestly, there will always be people who write stuff they have no idea about, or write stuff that are factually wrong. But where does that leave me, and perhaps many other layman readers? I, as a layman in psychology/neuroscience/<insert field>, do not have the academic qualifications or the time to go through and understand the latest/greatest scientific literature of the respective fields, nor am I equipped with the necessary "instincts" to tell the doubtful or suspicious claims apart. Most of the time, all I want is condensed information which is well, from the scientific literature, yet put in one place in a way that laymen in the fields have access to the subject. And to me atleast, books are the best way. But then I find the books I thought were right and did not doubt, had factual errors, or were written by someone who has a possibility of not knowing what they are saying... This is sad. So let me ask the community: what heuristics do you employ when trying to decide whether you can trust a book on what it says or not? Especially if it's not your field of expertise?
- ncmncm 7y agoIf it presents psychology as a well-understood and rigorous field, and the author as an authority, it's bunk. Nobody is an expert in psychology, and most of the foundational experiments in the field have been found not to be reproducible.
- smukherjee19 7y agoHm, I was not aware psychology results were not reproducible to this extent. Maybe better to take stuff with a pinch of salt everytime then. Thanks~
- jonex 7y agoNumber of citations per paragraph is a pretty good indicator in my experience. Typically this is high (close to 1) for good text books in psychology and low (1 per page or less) in bad ones. Citations isn't everything though, many authors misrepresent the content to fit the narrative and in some areas it's not as important. For instance in math, arguments can be made based on very few axioms and you can evaluate the correctness yourself. In general it helps to have a skeptical mindset, try to figure out the intent of the author by how they treat facts, do they present inconsistent arguments or gloss over relevant fallacies in the claims? Then their intent is probably more about presenting a good argument than correct representation of facts. Another thing to be watchful for is claims that "make sense" or are "obvious", it's easy to fall in the trap of ignoring conflicting evidence when the theory sounds good.
- pvaldes 7y agoAnother case of "something called Psychology was random and not real science in the end"? Cant help to remember this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm1dwB1U43A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm1dwB1U43A
- playing_colours 7y agoParaphrasing L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of Scientology: “If you want to get rich, you come up with a new psychological theory”.
- oxymoran 7y agoHas anyone stopped to look and see if any of his advice worked though? Pragmatic psuedoscience is more valuable than true science that can’t find a repeatable answer.
- JackFr 7y agoPsychologists annoyed that an outsider is edging in on their grift.
- Numberwang 7y agoAt Christmas a few years back on our annual gift exchange I think my family individually bought a total of 4 or 5 of that book. The title is perfect for a family Christmas gift.
- terapi 7y agoWhen I started my current work (Swedish software company) a few years ago, all new employees performed the “DISC” analysis (bought from a consultant firm). It was a fairly long questionnaire with situational questions and it was advised not to think too much about each question before answering. Stupid as it sounds. Anyway, we got our profiles and at the follow up session we went through the colors and everything else about the model. Some of my colleagues were skeptical, some more enthusiastic (“this explains so much”). I was somewhere in the middle. For sure I recognize some of the behaviors with my profile, on the other side I questioned the validity mainly due to the way the foundation to the profile what conducted (the questionnaire). I also read the book but got the feeling that it was more of entertainment than the session and profiling we did (in the book it’s a lot of “real life” examples etc). In work life we mostly used the “tool” to describe persons outside our organization. “The customers’ project manager in this project is very red”, would be something a sales rep could say at a hand of. They probably mean “He’s kind of a jerk but they pay so deal with it”. Although it was a pretty long time since I heard anyone use it. I also think that the article describes why the model is not sufficient even for describing people loosely. Lastly I think that the article headline is kind of over exaggerating. I mean, yes many read the book and might have use it to talk about themselves and/or other people. Some organizations went to far and tax money was wasted. But mostly it was consumed as most other books and people got entertained. I haven’t encountered anyone who preached the message and method, more like a conversation starter. The people who swallow the message fully is probably already converted to the next personality model fraud. Or too busy reading other truths on Facebook.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y ago> The invocation of a personality Gremlin is one example of careless thinking. Am I supposed to accept this because it already makes sense, because Katz or Sumpter wrote it, because other people believe it, or because of research to back it up? I sympathize with all the so called foolish Swedes.
- Barrin92 7y agoYou're supposed to follow the argument in the article. The idea of invoking these colours as an explanatory tool is circular reasoning. You're taking a bunch of traits, call them blue, and then use that colour as an explanation for why you have the traits, when in fact you have just restated some behaviour using slightly different words. it's like saying "the weather is bad because it rains". That's not an explanation for why the weather is bad, it's just the definition of what bad weather is. When people are led to believe they have this or that trait because of some sort of colour schema they tend to believe that this classification is an explanation for their behaviour and has some sort of control or ontological meaning, which it has not. In reality, the behaviour is complex, dynamic, context-dependent and escapes easy classification. Which really should be obvious to anyone with a critical mind because human psychology is slightly more complicated than a test which has fewer colors than the power rangers.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y ago> You're supposed to follow the argument in the article. Yes you certainly are. When I read the article I regretted not having read it already, and quickly revised all my ideas before anyone could see. My point is more about inevitable error.
- ptx 7y agoThe paragraph preceding your quote has the citation for their characterization of the concept of personality: Perugni, M., Costantini, G., Hughes, S., de Houwer, J. (2016). A functional perspective on personality. International Journal of Psychology, Vol. 51, №1, 33–39.
- legitster 7y agoAs someone with more than a fair bit of experience with DISC, I wanted to provide some pushback on the article a bit: > Erikson has repeatedly claimed that the benefit of his colour approach is that it helps us understand ourselves and others and, as a result, improves our communication and reduces conflicts. This is his argument as to why companies and organisations should adopt his approach. Since there is no scientific support for the four colours, there is naturally no support for this claim either. Bullshit. Just because there was no study published on it in Nature doesn't mean it doesn't have value or you should dismiss it completely! If I went around proclaiming the importance of Agile, you shouldn't just dismiss me because "there is no academic support". And to more of a point, it seems unfair to single this guy out of the sea of pop-psychology and business management books. > It is difficult to imagine a more unpleasant and unfair way of dealing with a problem than simply attributing it to the fact that the person in the centre of a conflict “is blue”. This seems to be a gross mis-characterization of the expected outcomes of the behavioral training. The outcome of them (at least the ones I've gone through) is to reframe work conflicts away from "this guy is stupid and should be fired" to "we have completely different ways of talking through problems". In that regards it's been super freaking helpful. I don't need an academic consensus that I feel warm and fuzzy afterwards. I strongly recommend this post from SlateStarCodex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/27/on-types-of-typologies/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/27/on-types-of-typologies... >The claim that MBTI gives you new information would be a bold scientific claim and would require bold scientific evidence. I don’t know to what degree the MBTI people make this claim, but I don’t think it’s necessary for me to enjoy the test and consider it useful. All it needs to do is condense the information you put into it in a way that makes it more relevant and digestible. >Five Factor and MBTI are trying to do fundamentally different things. Five Factor is trying to give us a mathematized, objectively correct version of personality useful for research purposes. MBTI is trying to separate people into little bins that put continuous personality space into discrete and easy-to-think-about terms suitable for human processing, and even very poorly drawn bins will do a pretty good job, just like European countries. 100%, DISC is just a construct, but it can still be a super useful and effective one. Even if it's a placebo, I don't need someone running up and knocking it out of my hand and telling me they did me a favor.
- kristianc 7y agoWhat you will guarantee is that if you ever agree to take one of these tests, you'll only ever be seen through that lens. It becomes self-fulfilling, and people see what they want to see. The people setting and commissioning the tests are somehow always a miraculous and perfect blend of all of the colours.
- franze 7y agoOh yeah, i high school our psychology teacher was applying such a colored cubes test to me. Then she read the results of the test to class. While having a laughing fit.
- air7 7y agoI hold the opposite view. I think this type of segmentation of people is (1)beneficial and (2)mostly harmless. (1) The sole reason for the feeling of "being surrounded by idiots" is lack of understanding of the other. If someone has different opinions/behaviors/moral values than I do, the easiest thing I could do is just label them "Idiot". Real understanding and empathy are just too hard. Actually, this also true when looking at one's own behaviour. We are mostly quick to judge and be angry at ourselves. Having a system such as this (even if it is pseudo-scientific) gives one pause in judgement. For example: John isn't an idiot or an asshole, he's just a Green. The implicit idea here is that John doesn't do it on purpose, he's part of a group. So I should be more accepting of him and I should learn to deal with Greens' quirks better. This neutral judgement (instead of the negative one) automatically side-steps the anger, elicits more empathy and accepts partial responsibility for the interactions. It also gives a feeling of increased understanding of "how the world works" which feels good (even if it's false). This also works when introspectively looking at one's own behaviour: Us Blues have a hard time doing X. I should be easier with myself. The actual underpinned theory is irrelevant (as so far as the aforementioned benefits are considered). It works just as well with "John's just a Gemini/INTP/Type 8". It's just the ability to attribute something to the person's actions I dislike other than stupidity or incompetence. (2) People love this stuff. Personality segmentation models are abundant and people love taking assessment quizzes. Astrology, Enneagram, Big-5, Myer&Briggs and many others. I'd venture off saying that most people don't take these things too seriously. Even the theories themselves recognize that human's personality can't really fit nicely in n boxes, so all of them have "extensions": You can be several colors, Astrology has "horizons", Ennegram has "wings", Big5 gives a running score to each trait, etc. Proponents of a system can easily utter something like "Mary's not a typical Aries, though". So while there are some people that might take it too far, I feel it's mostly used benignly. The fact that the theory behind some of these systems are anywhere between questionable to down right ludicrous is a pickle, though. But sometimes system benefit people even when the people don't understand the mechanism in which they do, or hold a wrong one. Therfor truth seeking shouldn't, in and of it self, be enough of a reason to tear down such a system. This idea was explored in an article posted here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037749
- 7y ago
- papreclip 7y agoPeople really yearn for systems like this, whether it's some weird color coding, myers-briggs, astrology... this definitely won't be the last one to go mainstream
- eitland 7y agoTo be fair, a some of the supposedly peer reviewed management science we learned in engineering wasn't too far away from this. Edit: And while I cannot say if it is right or wrong - it isn't like you can put this stuff into a particle accellerator and smash it and verify predictions - useful things can be extracted from it. One of the biggest ones might be that it gives everyone a common terminology to discuss such topics. I've said before that organizational psychology and management seemed like a huge waste of time when the young me looked at the subjects I was supposed to learn in engineering and yet sometimes feel like the most useful ones now that I look back on it. I mean: everything useful I nnow about programming from school I learned in the C and microprocessors course. Almost everything else I know aboit programming I learned either before or after my engineering degree.
- moretai 7y agoWhat if religions were just the self help theories that survived the erosion of time?
- somishere 7y agoGreat title.
- reggieband 7y agoI'm probably in the minority and I believe I am giving an unpopular opinion: this is pretty much gatekeeping. The tone of this article is acerbic. My cynicism says that this is someone who got a piece of paper after much effort and cost and they think that makes them something more than the author. They are upset that this book is being given more attention then work they deem to be more valuable. They aren't just fighting bad information with better information, they seem indignant anyone would listen to this man at all. I'm very glad that, in general, programming and computer science is a place where credentials matter significantly less than contributions. Sure, the programming language you wrote or the library you maintain may not be the best but no one listens to whiny academics demanding everyone bow down to them and disregard your work.
- outworlder 7y ago> I'm very glad that, in general, programming and computer science is a place where credentials matter significantly less than contributions. Sure, the programming language you wrote or the library you maintain may not be the best but no one listens to whiny academics demanding everyone bow down to them and disregard your work. Yes, and that works for all exact sciences. If you can somehow prove a formerly unproven mathematical conjecture, guess what, they will listen to you. You may even get prizes. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Since in psychology very few things can be "proven", studies are the next best things. But you cannot just spout nonsense and expect people who are actually experts in their fields to endorse you.
- thisrod 7y agoI bet that the next title in the series will be Surrounded by Fat People, and it will sell 100 million copies.
- smileypete 7y agoLate to this, but it reminds me of 'the rise of the idiots' from the 2006(!) series 'Nathan Barley' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhAr_UeroCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhAr_UeroCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg
- kovacs_x 7y agoI don't know the book, but judging by the title the author was apparently 110% correct! :D
- VectorLock 7y agoI enrolled in a management training course through work and the first thing they had us do was take a personality test and then they sent us a grading on the "personality color wheel" and it ruined the whole course for me. I'm digging deep to pull out useful nuggets of truth but any time it goes back to Myers-Briggs stuff my brain shuts down.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoThere is also something hilarious about the name of the book, in this context. It could only be better if it was "The Idiot's Guide To If You're Reading This You're An Idiot"