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On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word.
by js8 6y ago
On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word. It's pseudoscientific mysticism, in the spirit of Pythagoreans or Jordan B. Peterson. As long as we all understand this, good.
- preordained 6y agoSpoken like a blue mage ;)
- Garlef 6y agoThe reason why it seems so appealing might be some kind of barnum effect [0] - the effect that makes horoscopes work: There's a lot of tiny bits of concepts that might resonate with someone (or rather resonate with the learned cultural stereotypes carried by this person) and so one buys into the whole package, disregarding the parts that don't pattern match. This idea is also applied at a larger scale by Susan Blackmore in her definition of a `memeplex` [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex (Sidenote: I think a lot of the current cultural clashes in the western world can be interpreted as two big memeplexes fighting each other, having each developed strategies to be incommensurable [2] to the other side.) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard
- belly_joe 6y agoI think this is basically correct, and that the comparison to the way memeplexes (lol memeplices?)construct worldviews is a good point that goes unnoticed in a great deal of political discussion. Almost every ideology is anchored to the real world by some element of truth. Regarding the OP taxonomy, it makes me wonder if there's a way to aggregate these taxonomies to see if extracting the relevant principal components (that do map to the real world) from the subjective noise is possible. One could imagine testing the Barnum effect in this way, writing a large number of these personality descriptions and seeing if real personality traits can emerge by having individuals rank which Barnum profiles best describe them.
- pegasus 6y agoYeah, "explains" is rather strong, but "pseudoscientific mysticism" is straight-up harsh. It's an inevitably subjective way to organize the world of human behavior and motivation. Like colors themselves, which reside just as much in our internal perception of the world as they do in objective physical processes.
- gitrog 6y agoI think "pseudoscientific mysticism" is just in response to the fact that many people don't see it as being subjective, but rather objectively measurable/common sense/blatantly obvious.
- bambax 6y agoThe author says as much at the end, and also underlines that the area where it helped him a lot was in writing fiction, which inevitably deals with stereotypes. This isn't a system to describe the human psyche as one how society likes to think about it.
- notkaiho 6y agoYet people heartily continue to believe in Peterson :D
- swebs 6y agoWhat did he say that was false?
- notkaiho 6y agoI don't want to derail the discussion with irrelevant material, but to suggest that eating a beef-only diet cures autoimmune disorders is utterly unsupported by medical science, for one.
- swebs 6y agoWell he has a PHD in clinical psychology, not nutrition. I think people like the OP throw these jabs at him purely because they're angry he spoke out against the Canadian pronoun law, rather than any complaints about the validity of his research itself.
- notkaiho 6y agoNope, not the reason I said it but nice assumption.
- swebs 6y agoWell until someone develops mind-reading technology, that's the most likely explanation someone reading your comment would have.
- Loughla 6y agoOr, alternate option, you can take it at face value in that he claimed a meat only diet helped him, using his public persona to push an agenda that is completely unsupported by science.
- m12k 6y agoI approach this the same way I approach concepts like karma and reincarnation. Are they literally true, physical forces, laws or similar acting on the world? No, of course not. Are they useful metaphors to try to model and discuss tendencies and emergent phenomena arising from patterns in human behavior? Yes, often, if used with the right disclaimers and caveats.
- stared 6y agoIt is one of my favorite stimuli in psychometrics and the philosophy of science. I already sent it to quite a few people, as a long-read remark on the applicability of models. Of course, as long as you read it at the meta-level, comparing with other tools (scientific, pseudo-scientific), for example: Four Temperaments, MBTI, Big Five, Western Zodiac, Chinese Zodiac, etc. While many predictions are bogus (e.g. month of birth and relationship comparability, vide https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/howyourraceaffectsthemessagesyouget.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/howyourraceaff...) they capture various traits of character people consider important. The difference between science and pseudo-science is much more smooth than most scientists would like to admit. While MBTI is not up to academics standards, it is highly correlated with Big Five, trait by trait (still, AFAIR there is reason to use it in the place of Big Five). Plus, there is too much Jungian interpretation for MBTI, which is not up to current scientific standards. Still, I defended MBTI (in a dating context, e.g. as a self-identification) more times than I care to admit (for some insights, this https://www.16personalities.com/ https://www.16personalities.com/ is decent). There is also a corollary that psychology is still in its infancy, much like biology before the discovery of bacteria, viri, or DNA. ... In mathematics, there is a concept of a basis - more or less, directions, or orientation. We can express the same thing is a few different ways. Some bases are better (unit length, dimensions are orthogonal (uncorrelated)), but otherwise there is a lot of room here. In this case, Colors of Mana are one basis. Just because it is an impromptu psychological explanation, does not mean it does not work. Yet: - Some explanations or interpolations may not be valid. - It is likely that we can find a more refined way. All in all, I would love to make people2vec, where we embed various psychological trains as vectors, as see which other parameters (scientific or not) we can reproduce. All in all, even IQ can be considered a personality trait (as it is correlated with other traits of personality, it is not a separate entity) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2014/04/21/how-does-iq-relate-to-personality/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2014/04/...
- michaelbuddy 6y agoJordan Peterson? So are you saying now that having a PhD in Clinical Psychology makes you a pseudo-scientist? Hundreds of scholarly papers cited thousands of times. But it's pseudo-science. Psychology might not be an exact science but it IS a genuine scholarship meant to understand human behavior. Feel free to make your case based on "I just don't like him" though, I'm sure it will be very interesting and will include the "R" word.