16 ms·

Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

252 points by thinkafterbef 5y ago

gherkinnn 5y ago
> Red: dominant, driven, solution focused -> Powerpoint > Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous -> Word > Green: patient, considerate, nice -> Excel > Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal -> Outlook Interestingly enough, these colours map quite well to the Office suite of old.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  > Red: dominant, driven, solution focused -> Outlook, for the email-heavy executives. > Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous -> Excel, for the quants > Green: patient, considerate, nice -> Word, for those who like to cozy up with a book or write a short story > Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal -> PowerPoint, for those who want to make a Ted talk
  - gherkinnn 5y ago
    I just don't see the four programs that way. But that might just be the point. And that point is taken.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zhiQ 5y ago
Human minds demand coherent explanations and the book supplies it. The book supplies conjectures that “feel” right and the many readers, well, who have the time and skills to prove them. The soft science (of psychology) is hard and to generalize findings from a situation or controlled experiment environment will be fraught with errors.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
Fraudsters are outraged that someone out-fraudstered them and took money they thought was theirs.
CRConrad 5y ago
Two observations: 1) From the headline alone, I guessed this would be about the Macchiarini scandal at Karolinska. 2) I think this is the same guy who also wrote Omgiven av idioter ["Surrounded by Idiots"] (? though I could be misremembering). Which would be ironic, since he seems to be among the bigger ones himself.
poutrathor 5y ago
It spreads in France too I believe and it's the first time I heard it's a hoax.
- tgv 5y ago
  While reading the article, I couldn't shake the impression that the article itself had been made up, but it even has a goodreads page with a 16000 ratings.
kqr 5y ago
https://archive.is/VOzvt https://archive.is/VOzvt
s_dev 5y ago
Paywall Removed: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsoccermatics.medium.com%2Fhow-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsoccermatics.medium.co...
thatguyagain 5y ago
Most people I know made fun of this book from the very start. It was the book version of a clickbait article with obvious pseudoscience.
janandonly 5y ago
I use Scribe to get around the paywall: https://scribe.rip/how-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad https://scribe.rip/how-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-bigg... Follow up question: if you give bad investment advice (or any unlicensed financial advise at all) you can be prosecuted by on or the other government organisation. Why don't we do the same for bad food / health / psychology advise ?
cm2187 5y ago
Thought they were going to talk about psychoanalysis.
teekert 5y ago
I went through the Insights Discovery course [0], which sounds a lot like what tfa is discrediting. At work we still talk about the colors of people years after the course. After reading tfa I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness. The course recognizes a spectrum and everyone has aspects of all colors. Many people at my employer are primarily green or blue. During the courses it came out that they (the "introverts") do indeed want to say stuff during meetings but feel like they can't get in on the conversation. This was an eye opener to me, I just thought they didn't want to speak. I now try to pay more attention to these people. That's a win in my book. I also realized that there are people that like to think long before they talk, after a meeting you can revisit them later and they have nice insights which don't come up during a discussion (in contrast, I only have insights during discussions although I may often say things that aren't well thought through, I sometimes call it "thinking against others", typical yellow ;) ). Like with every framework/mantra/insight/label if you aren't dogmatic about it (looking at you, Agile!), it may provide some value as a model (and models are often incorrect in details and have exceptions, just be very aware of that). I don't really see a better way for someone like me (totally unaware of psychology as a scientific field) to use their insights other than through these simplified, wrong-perhaps-but-useful, frameworks. Edit: Honestly, to me as a molecular biologist, the whole field of psychology is a model for some neurological truth which is a model again for particle physicists which is a model again for mathematicians... Right (or am I using the wrong model ;) )? We all try to fit some labels on some complex continuum constantly. Sometimes it's pretty useful for our limited minds, and sometimes indeed it may lead us horribly astray. Is tfa an example of the latter? I'm not really convinced. [0]: https://www.insights.com/insights-discovery-accreditation https://www.insights.com/insights-discovery-accreditation
- Angostura 5y ago
  > I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness. And that's fine - but you might as well use astrology.
  - teekert 5y ago
    The difference being that these colors are based on character traits and questions being answered, not on the position of celestial bodies. And I'm saying they proved useful to me, I hope they proved useful to those I applied my insights to as well, I think so. Tfa also does not state the colors are complete bs, it mostly objects to the Thomas Erikson not being educated properly. It does not state any damage being done using his (over?) simplification, I mean I never heard a colleague say: "I'm sorry I trampled all over you in the meeting, I'm just red." Which seems to be what the author is warning for. I'm just wondering how the colors are scientifically wrong exactly, what hypotheses do they generated that have been proven to be wrong and damaging?
zibzab 5y ago
The book maybe is garbage, but it makes people think about others feelings and goals in meetings. This is already much more than an average person does walking into a social situation.
- krsdcbl 5y ago
  but if it leads them on to thinking about said feelings and goals in terms of dogmatic preconceptions, i doubt that it leads to much useful insight. Rather it will get used for easy dismissal of other peoples standing point or need to think too much about own behaviour, grounded on the illusion of understanding patterns that "make them" be like that.
- yxwvut 5y ago
  This is just the “religion might all be made up but it gives people comfort/morality so we shouldn’t look too closely” argument in another form. A useful lie eventual causes side effects (eg: in this case, causing managers to base career trajectories around bunk personality categories).
- arbitrage 5y ago
  You can start your meeting with an agenda and achieve the same effect. What you are describing is an institutional problem requiring an institutional solution: the people organising meetings need better training on what it is they're trying to accomplish. Update your meeting invites with an agenda. No agenda? No meeting. It's pretty straightforward, and you don't have to assign people into 16 or 81 pseudo categories to trick them into paying attention to a meeting that didn't need to happen in the first place.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  So do any other attempts to label and "systemize" people. Talk about Hogwarts Houses, or astrology. But we know the latter two are fiction, right? Right?
wwilim 5y ago
Anything that boils an entire branch of science down to something this simple is by definition a scam. The funniest part of the article was how Forbes lists this as a top ten must-read. And why wouldn't it, removing all nuance and operating on big words invented by an "expert" is peak C-level thinking. Finally, I feel obliged to point out that the four types described are essentially the Houses of Hogwarts with the colors switched around.
- dmingod666 5y ago
  Big 5 boils down to 5 words, not a scam..
  - dathinab 5y ago
    Bit 5 doesn't try to explain behaviour, but only classifies statistical differences in test results. It also boils down to a 5-dimensional vector not 5 categories of people. If we see each dimension in just 10 bins then that's still 100000 different categories.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Anything that boils an entire branch of science down to something this simple is by definition a scam. Well, is it? Is it not be definition "abstraction" rather than "scam"? A scam would involve to purposefully obfuscate the truth or outright lying. Creating simpler rules around something difficult in order to explain a lot is how a lot of science progresses. Wasn't that what Newton/Einstein or someone else did regarding physics, in order to explain how things work in our universe? Before that we had lots of difficult rules and exceptions, while they come up with something clean that could explain a lot of things instead.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    Right exactly. You could describe the bohr model of the atom as "boiling an entire branch of science down to something this simple" but it is still a useful tool in some contexts. Even if you want to argue that it is worthless and never useful for anything, it is still not a scam.
nradov 5y ago
And yet we still see fools in the US who actually believe that Myers-Briggs personality types like "INTJ" are somehow meaningful. It's hilarious.
- andybak 5y ago
  I think there's something interesting in Myers-Briggs. It's crude, flawed and inaccurate in many ways but your sniggering rubbed me up the wrong way.
  - arbitrage 5y ago
    Typical INTJ behaviour.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  It's not Meyer Briggs: > 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.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    But it is a similar kind of BS. No scientific basis as well.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      So i suppose there is "science" against it? I don't know the science surrounding it. But i took a test through work once and most seems to be correct. I don't think it would be "popular" in businesses if nothing would be correct. That's exactly what suprised me the first time, so I'm hesitant to call it bs. If there is another correlation it could be that the test was pretty positive for me. Perhaps it was the contrary for you? ( I'm just guessing and trying to find differences in experience here)
      - coliveira 5y ago
ShockedUnicorn 5y ago
As a swede. This is the first time I've seen this 4 colour system. I'm 30, so maybe it's more popular around younger people? I have seen things like "INTP-J" on friends profile. I think it's called 16 personalities. Me and my colleagues did that test, and the suggested one for me did not fit in with me at all, and most of us thought the results were bullshit. Why anyone would follow this to make work groups, or to exclude people in their life is mind boggling.
- mongol 5y ago
  Is not that INTP thing Myers-Briggs that is mentioned in the article?
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    It is. Myers-Briggs has four axes: I/E, N/S, T/F, P/J. There's also a whole sub-layer of dominant and auxiliary functions.
  - saba2008 5y ago
    Yes, it is.
- nemetroid 5y ago
  It was the best selling pocket book in Sweden in 2017 and 2018. 800 000 copies have been sold in Swedish. It was pretty difficult to miss.
  - Retric 5y ago
    That’s under 8% of the population buying the book or receiving it as a gift and some percentage of them reading it.
    - retrac 5y ago
      You say "under 8% of the population" having a copy of the book as if that doesn't make it almost as popular as the Bible.
kriro 5y ago
I'm not a psychologist but this sentence: """Modern evidence-based methods in behavioural science adopt the ground principle that people’s behavior mainly depend on context.""" doesn't have any source to back it up and is opposed to what I have read about the introvert/extrovert divide which seems to be more genetic than context dependent for example. And those are character traits that directly shape behavior (I'd rather read a book when low on energy vs. go to a party). Maybe someone can clarify this for me. The fact that the author uses "shy" and "outgoing" also doesn't instill much faith in me. The next section even mentions the big five but I don't think these traits are "mainly dependent on context". I'm a bit confused. Nevertheless, an interesting story/find. The color system seems so obviously ridiculous that it amazes me how popular it got. Lesson learned. People like categories and simple explanations. Coincidentally, that's also one of the main sources of (unintentional) bias.
- sampo 5y ago
  > """Modern evidence-based methods in behavioural science adopt the ground principle that people’s behavior mainly depend on context.""" Adopting ground principles doesn't sound very evidence-based to begin with.
  - yxwvut 5y ago
    The ground principle here is one of flexibility: that your model of behavior should allow for context dependence, not that it need be entirely context driven. As an analogy, consider a ground principle that your statistical model shouldn’t assume normal distributions or equal variance.
- nialse 5y ago
  A main pilar of behavioral psychology is that the previously learnt behavior is activated in a certain context, the antecedent. The presence (or absence) of consequences following the behavior affects the probability of such a behavior occurring again a smiliar context. This operant conditioning has been shown extensively in behavioristic research by Skinner and beyond. Genes can be thought of as learnt behavior in an organism accumulating over time. This behavior is also activated in certain contexts. Thus the sentence does not necessarily separate environmental influence from genetic influence although it is easy to interpret it as such.
Numberwang 5y ago
funOtter 5y ago
I'm not sure which this article claims to be the bluff: the author or the DiSC assessment? ... It seems to be attacking both.
- jorams 5y ago
  It's saying the DiSC assessment has no scientific basis, and the author is wrong for claiming it does.
maratc 5y ago
I've lost the thought around this part: > For example, consider a person who says, “now I understand why I have such negative thoughts, can’t get to sleep, and have difficulty getting going…I’ve got depression.” This person might believe that the explanation of her symptoms is depression, but in fact, the diagnosis of depression is just a categorisation of exactly these symptoms. The diagnosis of depression usually revolves around changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain. It is an issue as real as diabetes is. To explain my point further, consider the following: > For example, consider a person who says, “now I understand why I have such frequent urination, increased thirst and increased appetite. I’ve got diabetes.” This person might believe that the explanation of her symptoms is diabetes, but in fact, the diagnosis of diabetes is just a categorisation of exactly these symptoms. There is no diabetes Gremlin, either. All this not to say that the accusations of fraud are either based or baseless. EDIT: I know we can't test (blood etc.) for depression — yet. There's still a question of whether "it's all in your head" or "your biology is a bit off". See also [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopsychiatry_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopsychiatry_controversy
- andi999 5y ago
  Totally weird, also if the article were true, it would suggest going out, trying to think positively were effective treatments of depression (which they are at most for light cases)
- Sharlin 5y ago
  No no no no. The diagnosis of depression absolutely does not revolve around "changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain", except insofar as "functioning of the brain" equals the symptoms reported by the patient! There are no known physical or chemical tests for depression. Even if we have some vague theories about "chemical imbalance in the brain", for the most part the neurological or biochemical mechanisms of depression are a mystery.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    What irks me about this is every human experience is reflected in "changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain". But that's about as useful as saying that a car breaks down due to mechanical changes. It's not wrong, but it's pretty useless.
daneel_w 5y ago
I know the title of the book as it was for a brief period on the receiving end of some ridicule (rather than praise), though I hadn't heard about its "colorized" idea until I read this article. As I remember it the book made at most a bit of "noise" in media, more so than being a wave of revelation, and my gut feeling as a Swede is that most people bought the book out of the sensationalist and entertaining promise. I don't think I've ever come across a person here in Sweden expressing or applying the presented ideology in any way.
- Levitz 5y ago
  >I know the title of the book as it was for a brief period on the receiving end of some ridicule (rather than praise), though I hadn't heard about its "colorized" idea until I read this article. Maybe the whole idea about selling books based on assuming things depending on which color people are ringed someone's bells at the marketing department.
halpert 5y ago
I read some of this article. I have never heard about the color system in question. If it’s really a fraudulent system, it should be easy to say “The system claims thing X, here is evidence X is false.” Instead, this article is filled with anecdotes and what seems like random conjecture on what personality “really” is. This is not a convincing argument.
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  Surely if a book claims people can be split into 4 colour types it should be the book that should provide the proof?
  - halpert 5y ago
    This article is claiming the author is a fraud. They should provide proof of that claim, just as the author should provide proof of his claims. I didn’t read the book, but I did read this article and the evidence of fraud is lacking.
    - goto11 5y ago
      You should look into the concept of "burden of proof". If someone claims a model is based on scientific evidence, then obviously it is the claimant who has to provide this alleged scientific evidence. You can't prove a negative, so it does not make sense to require others to prove this alleged evidence does not exist.
      - halpert 5y ago
        Again, I haven’t read the book or know anything about the author. All I know is that this article is asserting the author of the book is a fraud. That is a positive statement, and insufficient evidence has been provided from my reading.
        goto11 5y ago
        He is a fraud because the alleged scientific evidence does not exist.
ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
I thought the text about personality colors sounded familiar. @dang This same article was discussed on HN almost two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530 I think the title could use a (2020) tag.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  From the epilogue, >Since this article was published in spring 2019... So 2019
hermannj314 5y ago
I struggle often with this somewhat arbitrary desire for everything to be data-driven and backed by science. People hope, pray, follow best practices, listen to advice on the internet and yet, every now and then we are reminded that only fools do these things. Really intelligent people only listen to science and do things backed by science and lots of data. How does anyone accomplish anything if every step they take has to be double blind studied before it even crosses their mind? Maybe for my own sanity, while humanity marches towards becoming Vulcan, I'll continuing accepting a few heuristics, fables, and Grandma's chicken noodle soup.
- rubidium 5y ago
  “ Really intelligent people only listen to science and do things backed by science and lots of data.” You know _no one_ smarter than you who follows a deity?
  - hermannj314 5y ago
    I did not mean for my post to come across in such a way. But yes - people I know, smarter than me, that believe in a deity, returned quite a few rows when I queried.
  - janto 5y ago
    I think it was meant with a bit of sarcasm?
- ModernMech 5y ago
  I used to be the way you describe, and I found it left me without any convictions. I used to think that was okay, because I reasoned with myself that convictions are irrational if not backed by data. Then I got older and realized how easy it is to frame and manipulate data and “facts” to achieve any desired result on the part of the person disseminating the facts. I realized that having some base convictions was a way to defend against people using data in unscrupulous ways, to convince me of things I didn’t want to believe. So now I do both. I have some points of view that I can’t defend with data and science and peer review studies. They are grounded in my own observations of the world and how they make me feel. I won’t let anyone tell me what my lying eyes see, that’s for me to determine. But for what I can’t see I try to follow data where I can. Does this mean I may be living under some incorrect convictions? Sure! But it’s far better than floating like a leaf in the wind, blowing wherever someone spouting some “data” would want to take me. Irrationality is okay because the world and humans are irrational. You can’t operate in a pure mentat/vulcan mode under such conditions.
alkonaut 5y ago
The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you think of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative especially if the categories don’t even offer any behavioral insight. But something tells me that there could also be some positive effects from actually wondering about the behavior of others and how you treat them, even if it’s pigeonholing and preconceptions based on bogus research. A bit like every single diet works (compared to no diet) because the fundamental thing is dieting in the sense that you think actively about diet. As for this book: It’s a pretty useless book, but I can see how it’s appealing. I can’t see how it being unscientific makes it worse than 90% of similar books in the bookstore. This is a pop book you read on a plane. It’s not a scientific publication. If he claims it’s solid science that’s obviously bad, but I’m sure all the mindfulness and yoga books do too - and all of those are certainly not very scientific.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Mindfulness and meditation especially, /are/ supported by scientific findings. I don't know about yoga, but it's basically stretching and that's generally good for you.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    Sure I didn’t mean to imply that those fields in particular are all bogus, but rather that every new book on the subject has to bring a new angle and also often plays a bit fast and loose with scientific rigor. You’ll see books on why you should do yoga while juggling eggplants or mindfulness through playing quake and it might be some times a bit semi-scientific.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Fair point, yeah the novelties are just there for marketing and intrigue purpose, they probably don't do anything most of the time.
neom 5y 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." I didn't know Myers Briggs has a colour component, tangentially: crazy to me how often I see a "Myers Briggs Score" on resumes these days, especially in Korea. I was under the impression most people didn't take it very seriously, at least not seriously enough to put on a resume.
keewee7 5y ago
Scandinavian society gives a lot of airtime to "radical" intellectuals talking bullshit about things outside their field of expertise. Bjørn Lomborg was a hipster economist who denied man-made climate change and had an embarrassing amount of clout in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg
- sputr 5y ago
  As non-scandinavian ... may it have something to do with the strong left/progressive lean of the population? I say this because one of the biggest problems of every single group or organization that I've seen built around progressive/left/liberal ideas is the tendency to believe in the "everyone has a right to be heard/speak" which leads to everything being dominated by the loudest individuals who are almost always full of BS. Honestly, I've identified this tendency as the #1 reason why such groups do so poorly in politics, except in situations where the values are just a PR front for a more traditional power structure.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    I don't have an educated answer for your question so I won't offer one. But I think it is making it more confusing that you conflate left, liberal, and progressive. They have some overlap and shared meanings but are also different things. The "everyone has a right to be heard" thing you mention is specifically a liberal value. Others may or may not subscribe to it to varying degrees but in my view it is core only to that one. Scandanavia is pretty firmly liberal from what I can see. I mean just the other day here there was a good conversation about how the entire wealth of norway is based on nonrenewable resource extraction. Not really anything leftist about that.
- boublepop 5y ago
  Lomborg never denied man-made climate change. Though he certainly was a controvercial Voice in the debate. The reason was however that he challenged key predictions and strongly critized the proposed solutions as being cost ineffective. But it’s true that those who opposed him tried to paint his criticism as a if it had been denial because that’s a strawman that is easier to argue against. If someone comes out saying “climate change is man made and unless we do something the Oriana going to boil away in 2 years, our only option is to start throwing ice cubes into the ocean!” Then it’s perfectly resonable to argue that the prediction is wrong, and that even if it was accurate the proposed solution isn’t cost effective and that better solutions exist, that doesn’t mean you are arguing against the main premis of manmade climate change. Now the meat of the debate around Lomborg is really if his predictions stack up against the predictions he criticized.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
drakonka 5y ago
I have yet to read the whole article, but I got too excited when I got to these parts[0] and had to write a quick comment first. This concept as described reminded me immediately of a book I read as a teenager, called Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_Kingdom It is about the country being broken up into four sectors based on the four humors: red, green, yellow, and blue. Scanning through some descriptions of Surrounded by Idiots, the similarities are uncanny. I thought the whole four-humors thing and its derivatives have been definitively debunked for a very long time, how did this book not get laughed out of the gates? [0] Parts that made me pause: 'Around the same time, qualified psychologists began reporting how clients were considering leaving their partners because, “I can’t possibly live with a yellow person”...'; '...they had been tested at the Human Resources department only to be told they needed to move to another team because their “colour combination”...'; '...A teenage girl comes home and tells her mother, with an air of resignation, “mum, I’m a green.” She had been tested by her school counsellor...'
- sersi 5y ago
  > clients were considering leaving their partners because, “I can’t possibly live with a yellow person”...'; I remember hearing similar comments from Japanese friends once they learned their boyfriend/girlfriend's blood group. (Personality tests based on blood groups are huge there).
  - boublepop 5y ago
    Its just confirmation bias in relationships. If a person really wanted to stay with their SO, they would be saying “omg, our personalities are so incompatible on paper, but we’re just so great together despite that” But since they want to leave and can’t find a good reason or don’t feel that they can stand by whatever reasoning they have, it becomes “We have to break up because you’re yellow and I’m red” rather than: “we have to break up because I’m shallow and your body doesn’t look like it did when we met” or “we have to break up because after you got fired you haven’t been able to spend as much money on me”. Etc.
fabatka 5y ago
People love to categorize/label themselves and others (belonging to a group, provides easy answers to complicated questions, etc.). So most will be glad to do so when given a chance.
dathinab 5y ago
> Red: dominant, driven, solution focussed. > Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous > Green: patient, considerate, nice > Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal If that's the definition it's a catastrophe. A lot of entries listed are skills you can (and do) learn for specific situations, and which just some people do to some degree apply to all parts of their live. But someone applying "patient" to all their live doesn't mean they also will apply it when it matter, nor does it mean a normally "impartient" person can't (potentially already has) learn to be patient when it matters. Generally all of "solution focussed", "analytic", "careful", "meticulous", "patient", "considerate", "nice", "verbal" are all skills you can learn and learn to apply in all contexts (through for some people it's harder it's still possible, through different people need to approach it in different ways). I also have meet all kind of "creative" people, so linking that together with other personality traits seem absurd. "driven" is in my experience more related to unhealthy stress, potentially anxiety disorders "extroverted" depends a lot on the definition what it is supposed to mean, through in this context it probably means outgoing, outspoken, etc. or similar, in which case in which case it's still bs as this kind of behaviour is often highly contextual.
- iiv 5y ago
  Yes, that is the definition (I am Swedish and I've endured many people asking me my "colour".) It's absurd, isn't it? Especially using so many emotive words.
wombatmobile 5y ago
Ways to categorize other people's personalities, such as Myers-Briggs, Swedish Colors, The Zodiac, McCarthyism, devils advocacy, racial profiling, Stockholm Syndrome, and hero worship have always been popular. Why? Because people need ways to feel like they understand and can predict other people's behavior. Why? I don't know. It's just something I've observed. Would you agree, and if so, why do you think that is?
- tm-guimaraes 5y ago
  >Why? Because people need ways to feel like they understand and can predict other people's behavior. > Would you agree Yes > if so, why do you think that is? Because society. Literally. You need to "predict" behaviors around you, it's only natural, every animal checks for threats. The moment you live in a society, you have to live with lots of other humans, so you inevitably develop lots of heuristics to deal with them. From a stranger passing on a street, to your coworker. Predicting behavior is the basis of society, it's the reason traffic rules sort of work, why we can even have such a thing as laws.
- jiggunjer 5y ago
  I've never cared for those theoretical models, I prefer using empirical models when it comes to humans.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    > Because society. Literally. You need to "predict" behaviours around you, But the models aren't valid e.g. astrology. Does that matter? It seems not really! Many folks still swear by astrology. How can that work? In mainstream science, a bad heuristic is useless and fades to oblivion or ridicule. But society is not science. When people use astrology or racism or any other inaccurate heuristic to anchor their beliefs, they create for themselves a role in society, and relationships with their community that are self-fulfilling. Think everyone is out to get you? Treat them that way, and they'll think you're weird - someone to be avoided and not trusted. Think tall people are attractive and short people are ugly? That makes you much more likely to partner with a tall person. Think everyone deserves a smile first thing in the morning? People are going to smile back, and seek you out at the water cooler. Think everyone deserves to be heard? People are going to talk to you. Think black people, or brown people, or pink people, or white people, or tan people, or purple people are not worth listening to? You're going to miss out on their stories, food, culture, friendship, companionship and wisdom. Society is a laboratory. It's also a mirror.
jollybean 5y ago
It's pop culture psychology and 'people type rumouring' - the oldest game in the book, backed by 'Science' and a bit of capitalism to hustle books. This isn't surprising.
heikkilevanto 5y ago
Would anything in this discussion, or in the original article, change much if it was about astrology instead of personality types?
janto 5y ago
> He started by placing Freud and Jung as the grounders of modern psychology, a distinction that even a someone who has studied a four-week course in the area will know is incorrect. The subject has developed greatly since the time of Freud, Jung and comic book author, Marston. The author's resistance against Freud and Jung's contributions is... myopic?
- arbitrage 5y ago
  The importance of Freud and Jung to applicable psychology in the modern era is vastly overblown.
  - janto 5y ago
    Only if you disregard the importance of belief, meaning, individuation, dialog and their influence on other psychologists.
  - randomNumber7 5y ago
    Before freud they would cut around in the brains of mentally ill. Even though a lot happend in psychology it kind of started with him.
- randomNumber7 5y ago
  Putting freud in the same category as a comic author hurts. Article is bs, as is the color system
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
I blame Harry Potter and Hogwarts Houses. Incidentally, they are four as well.
chmod775 5y ago
People need an individually unique entire human brain working nonstop to figure out how they themselves are going to respond, act, and believe. You really think you can narrow that down to four colors?
hereme888 5y ago
One thing we do know from the longest running human studies in history, is that, over a lifetime, people's personalities change so much that in their old age they are oftentimes nothing like what they were when they were younger.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  Of course, hormone levels change, and they influence behavior in a scientifically proven way.
- nabla9 5y ago
  Some personality traits change, some are stable. Typically selfconfidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability increases with age. Generally personality changes fast up to 30 year of age and then change slows down. Conscientiousness often increases whole lifetime. Extroversion seems to be relatively stable.
citizenpaul 5y ago
I knew this guy was a hot load the second my boss at my first help desk job insisted that we take this test and "learn" from it.
Digory 5y ago
Also: any “love languages” and Enneagram numbers. It’s really astounding how much these frauds impact relationships and organizations.
- davidhalter 5y ago
  Hmm, I found the Enneagram tremendously helpful. Why do you dislike it? I guess people can abuse it really easily, but I feel like it helped me to realize who I am in this world.
  - Digory 5y ago
    The basis for the numbers are really no different than the color-codings here, and the analysis of why they all tend to be circular reasoning. "I act like a red because I'm a red" is similar to "I act like an Enneagram 4 because I'm a 4." It might be useful for introspection ("I identify with feelings this model gives to 'reds' or a '4w3' "), but it's not a scientific or testable prediction about the way people act in the world.
    - davidhalter 5y ago
      I agree. Circular reasoning along with self-fulfilling prophecies are definitely an issue. I still like it for introspection and realizing that other people have different "mind structures", whatever they might be. > it's not a scientific or testable prediction about the way people act in the world. The problem is that there is probably no scientific or testable prediction about the complexity of humans. Psychology itself seems not very scientific, so people rely on their intuition (as they should) to understand other people. However that leads to the problem of "X also wants Y, because I want Y", which from my experience is just not true at all. Humans have very different interests and goals. So these models creep up to account for that.
johnchristopher 5y ago
Eneagrams are making a comeback at my place.
INTPenis 5y ago
In their hunt for simple answers to complex questions people often forget that they are far too complex to be defined by 16 types of 4 colours. That said though, MBTI did help me figure out a lot about myself. Discovering MBTI back in 2009 was definitely life changing for me and I've kept it in the back of my head since then, mostly to improve myself and rarely applied to others. I've been in one amazing relationship with an MBTI type that is supposed to match with mine, and one awful relationship with a type that does not match with mine. So it's not supposed to be followed blindly but it can help you out in life.
- moss2 5y ago
  Thank you, INTPenis, for your insight.
- wackro 5y ago
  After a quick search it seems like the idea of 'matching types' was removed from the most popular MBTI testing site (I swear it used to say in the romantic relationships section), and different sources seem to have different opinions on which types match. My own experience is that there is definitely some value to the idea, so my question to you is, is it a legit part of the MBTI 'theory', and is there a canonical listing of compatible types? Browsing random blogs/reddit sets my pseudoscience sensors off. A fellow INTP.
  - INTPenis 5y ago
    It used to be listed, I mean there have been hundreds of sites about MBTI so who knows where but the last time I saw the romantic matching of types was just 2 years ago on a relatively recent Swedish testing website. But yeah I mean I'm not a scholar, I was just able to identify with what I read about INTP and it was eerily accurate when I first read it. But people change. I have a friend who tested as INTP back in the 90s, their first test, then took another test in the 2000s and was a different type. So you grow and you try to improve yourself. Being heavily introverted is a curse and a blessing sometimes.
coldtea 5y ago
>Before we define personality, it is useful to explain what it isn’t. Consider a friend who does something bad and then says, “I did it because my personality led me to do it”. In making this argument, our friend is essentially claiming that their personality is like a Gremlin in their head who steers their behaviour, telling them what to do. In reality, of course, the Gremlin doesn’t exist and we don’t usually accept this argument as an excuse for bad behaviour. Instead of invoking Gremlins, the most reasonable and widely accepted definition of personality is behaviour of an individual which is relatively constant over time and doesn’t depend on context (Perugni et al, 2016). Personality isn’t a thing, like a Gremlin, it is simply a pattern of repeatable behaviour. Using this definition, the Gremlin argument becomes circular: if someone claims that their personality made them do something, we can simply counter, “Well, yes, that is the definition of personality. All you are telling me is that you behaved in the way you did because you behaved the way you did.” The invocation of a personality Gremlin is one example of careless thinking. This "explanation" or "argument" is worse empirically and theoritically than what it criticizes...
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> The “Big Five” didn’t come from a theory but through statistical analysis of thousands of personality questionnaires consisting of hundreds of questions. These reveal five properties that are relatively constant over time: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. How these Big Five "properties" where derived is that people thought there was some pattern to questionnaires about behaviour and they ran a PCA on it. They noticed that PCA tended to bring up five principal components, so they interpreted them as five dominant personality traits that are shared by all humans. This is not very good statistics: they basically used PCA to identify latent variables. But PCA cannot find latent variables. There is some criticism of this, but very rarely because "The Big Five" is basically accepted truth by the psychological community nowadays. In 20 years from now they'll probably debunk it and then hold up some other "model" of "human personality" and then the cycle will repeat. Here's one critical paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19946599/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19946599/ Whence I quote: Consider, for instance, the personality literature, where people have discovered that executing a PCA of large numbers of personality subtest scores, and selecting components by the usual selection criteria, often returns five principal components. What is the interpretation of these components? They are “biologically based psychological tendencies,”; and as such are endowed with causal forces (McCrae et al., 2000, p. 173). This interpretation cannot be justified solely on the basis of a PCA, if only because PCA is a formative model and not a reflective one (Bollen & Lennox, 1991; Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & Van Heerden, 2003).
- thewarrior 5y ago
  Interesting. Isn’t IQ also based on PCA. So would similar criticisms apply to IQ. “ PCA is a formative model and not a reflective one”. Can’t understand this.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
    It's a way to say that PCA can transform data but not explain it.
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
The "Head of People" at my previous employer in Sweden pushed this garbage. She made us spend an entire day — it was mandatory — "learning" about the four colour-coded groups in this pseudoscience. It's worrying that employers can essentially mandate religion in the workplace like this.
- greggman3 5y ago
  Yes, it sucks. I interviewed at a company that started the process with 600 word personality test. I left after the interview and didn't follow up. I didn't want to work at a place with such a process.
ess3 5y ago
I think this sort of stuff can be useful as an icebreaker into a constructive discussion on how we’re different but taking it at face value is a big problem with pigeon holing and what not.
idiocrat 5y ago
Waiting for a book "Surrounded by Idiots -- how to use Swedish Legal System to Jail Unwanted Journalists, while the World is Watching, and Get Away With It. A Practical Guide".
brabel 5y ago
I see a lot of so-called software experts fall into the exact same category as the author of that book... believing themselves to be experts just because they worked in the field for a while, despite having no scientific training, or any relevant training for that matter, no serious studies backing up whatever they promote, nothing except for a lot of gut feeling and on-the-job "hands-on knowledge", exactly as the author of this book who believed himself to be an expert in communication and psychology despite lacking even a basic understanding of that. We should apply the same kind of scrutinization when it comes to the software industry IMO. Just because you wrote code for a few years and managed a team later, doesn't mean anything you learned is applicable to anyone else. Imagine doctors going around experimenting on people and "learning hands-on" what works and what doesn't. Or even electricians or plumbers... yet, here we are, and I feel like it's exactly what we're doing with software development.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  Doctors are essentially useless after graduating medical school and only reach professional proficiency after running the gauntlet of years of intense hands-on medical residency training (where there are more mistakes made than is generally polite to admit). Ask a doctor about this, literally any doctor.
  - brabel 5y ago
    But how many doctors skip med school and just go straight to get hands-on experience?
platz 5y ago
Better than meyers-briggs - How the ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Color Wheel Explains Humanity: https://humanparts.medium.com/the-mtg-color-wheel-c9700a7cf36d https://humanparts.medium.com/the-mtg-color-wheel-c9700a7cf3...
drallison 5y ago
This article is a hatchet job by a self-declared "skeptic" intended to convince the reader that a popular Swedish book about personality types, Surrounded by Idiots, is without scientific basis or value. The language of the article, independent of the content, conveys the negative message. These days we are immersed is a sea of falsehoods and half-truths. Storytelling and lyrical metaphoric depictions of reality have been replaced by downright lies and malicious intent. Opinion articles which violate rhetorical rules and utilize deceptive and fallacious argumentation are not a good resource to mine for facts. We are "Surrounded by Idiots", individuals whose weltanshanguung embraces fantastical concepts supported by pseudoscientific argumentation and assertions without evidence. Much of the richness of human culture is captured by wrong ideas and conceptions. Consider creation myths, fables with morals, religions, moral systems, astrology, political systems, cold fusion, Meyers-Briggs personality tests, and so forth. Finding a balance between the factual, the fictional and the speculative is difficult. Words, facts, and expression do matter. The title, for example, states that Swedes were "fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time" is wrong. There is no evidence that people were "fooled", the book and theory are not a "bluff", and there is no partial ordering of bluffs so "biggest" is hard to identify.
musesum 5y ago
On a program called 20/20, John Stossel punked Astrology. He asked adult night school students to provide their birthday, gave them an astrology chart, and asked them how relevant it was. Many said the description was uncanny in its accuracy. Except it wasn't their chart ... it was for Jeffrey Dahmer. I couldn't find the episode to cite. Maybe some of the students were upset?
Foobar8568 5y ago
This crap reminds me of the left/right brain non-sense.
zppln 5y ago
I remember some colleagues at work labeling me as a blue person a few years ago. I didn't pay much attention to it, as it came from the types of people you'd expect taking this kind of bait. I think the interesting thing here is how stuff like this spread through society. Or, parts of middle class society that is. We appear to have a large number of HR people, middle management and ambitious LinkedIn men who spend their time with things like this rather than doing actually useful work. Kind of like the class of useless people sent off on that space ship in HGTTG.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
webinvest 5y ago
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsoccermatics.medium.com%2Fhow-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsoccermatics.medium.co...

252 points by thinkafterbef 5y ago

> Red: dominant, driven, solution focused -> Powerpoint > Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous -> Word > Green: patient, considerate, nice -> Excel > Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal -> Outlook Interestingly enough, these colours map quite well to the Office suite of old.

thehappypm 5y ago
> Red: dominant, driven, solution focused -> Outlook, for the email-heavy executives. > Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous -> Excel, for the quants > Green: patient, considerate, nice -> Word, for those who like to cozy up with a book or write a short story > Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal -> PowerPoint, for those who want to make a Ted talk
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  I just don't see the four programs that way. But that might just be the point. And that point is taken.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

zhiQ 5y ago

Human minds demand coherent explanations and the book supplies it. The book supplies conjectures that “feel” right and the many readers, well, who have the time and skills to prove them. The soft science (of psychology) is hard and to generalize findings from a situation or controlled experiment environment will be fraught with errors.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

Fraudsters are outraged that someone out-fraudstered them and took money they thought was theirs.

CRConrad 5y ago

Two observations: 1) From the headline alone, I guessed this would be about the Macchiarini scandal at Karolinska. 2) I think this is the same guy who also wrote Omgiven av idioter ["Surrounded by Idiots"] (? though I could be misremembering). Which would be ironic, since he seems to be among the bigger ones himself.

poutrathor 5y ago

It spreads in France too I believe and it's the first time I heard it's a hoax.

tgv 5y ago
While reading the article, I couldn't shake the impression that the article itself had been made up, but it even has a goodreads page with a 16000 ratings.

kqr 5y ago

https://archive.is/VOzvt https://archive.is/VOzvt

s_dev 5y ago

Paywall Removed: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsoccermatics.medium.com%2Fhow-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsoccermatics.medium.co...

thatguyagain 5y ago

Most people I know made fun of this book from the very start. It was the book version of a clickbait article with obvious pseudoscience.

janandonly 5y ago

I use Scribe to get around the paywall: https://scribe.rip/how-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad https://scribe.rip/how-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-bigg... Follow up question: if you give bad investment advice (or any unlicensed financial advise at all) you can be prosecuted by on or the other government organisation. Why don't we do the same for bad food / health / psychology advise ?

cm2187 5y ago

Thought they were going to talk about psychoanalysis.

teekert 5y ago

I went through the Insights Discovery course [0], which sounds a lot like what tfa is discrediting. At work we still talk about the colors of people years after the course. After reading tfa I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness. The course recognizes a spectrum and everyone has aspects of all colors. Many people at my employer are primarily green or blue. During the courses it came out that they (the "introverts") do indeed want to say stuff during meetings but feel like they can't get in on the conversation. This was an eye opener to me, I just thought they didn't want to speak. I now try to pay more attention to these people. That's a win in my book. I also realized that there are people that like to think long before they talk, after a meeting you can revisit them later and they have nice insights which don't come up during a discussion (in contrast, I only have insights during discussions although I may often say things that aren't well thought through, I sometimes call it "thinking against others", typical yellow ;) ). Like with every framework/mantra/insight/label if you aren't dogmatic about it (looking at you, Agile!), it may provide some value as a model (and models are often incorrect in details and have exceptions, just be very aware of that). I don't really see a better way for someone like me (totally unaware of psychology as a scientific field) to use their insights other than through these simplified, wrong-perhaps-but-useful, frameworks. Edit: Honestly, to me as a molecular biologist, the whole field of psychology is a model for some neurological truth which is a model again for particle physicists which is a model again for mathematicians... Right (or am I using the wrong model ;) )? We all try to fit some labels on some complex continuum constantly. Sometimes it's pretty useful for our limited minds, and sometimes indeed it may lead us horribly astray. Is tfa an example of the latter? I'm not really convinced. [0]: https://www.insights.com/insights-discovery-accreditation https://www.insights.com/insights-discovery-accreditation

Angostura 5y ago
> I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness. And that's fine - but you might as well use astrology.
- teekert 5y ago
  The difference being that these colors are based on character traits and questions being answered, not on the position of celestial bodies. And I'm saying they proved useful to me, I hope they proved useful to those I applied my insights to as well, I think so. Tfa also does not state the colors are complete bs, it mostly objects to the Thomas Erikson not being educated properly. It does not state any damage being done using his (over?) simplification, I mean I never heard a colleague say: "I'm sorry I trampled all over you in the meeting, I'm just red." Which seems to be what the author is warning for. I'm just wondering how the colors are scientifically wrong exactly, what hypotheses do they generated that have been proven to be wrong and damaging?

zibzab 5y ago

The book maybe is garbage, but it makes people think about others feelings and goals in meetings. This is already much more than an average person does walking into a social situation.

krsdcbl 5y ago
but if it leads them on to thinking about said feelings and goals in terms of dogmatic preconceptions, i doubt that it leads to much useful insight. Rather it will get used for easy dismissal of other peoples standing point or need to think too much about own behaviour, grounded on the illusion of understanding patterns that "make them" be like that.
yxwvut 5y ago
This is just the “religion might all be made up but it gives people comfort/morality so we shouldn’t look too closely” argument in another form. A useful lie eventual causes side effects (eg: in this case, causing managers to base career trajectories around bunk personality categories).
arbitrage 5y ago
You can start your meeting with an agenda and achieve the same effect. What you are describing is an institutional problem requiring an institutional solution: the people organising meetings need better training on what it is they're trying to accomplish. Update your meeting invites with an agenda. No agenda? No meeting. It's pretty straightforward, and you don't have to assign people into 16 or 81 pseudo categories to trick them into paying attention to a meeting that didn't need to happen in the first place.
WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
So do any other attempts to label and "systemize" people. Talk about Hogwarts Houses, or astrology. But we know the latter two are fiction, right? Right?

wwilim 5y ago

Anything that boils an entire branch of science down to something this simple is by definition a scam. The funniest part of the article was how Forbes lists this as a top ten must-read. And why wouldn't it, removing all nuance and operating on big words invented by an "expert" is peak C-level thinking. Finally, I feel obliged to point out that the four types described are essentially the Houses of Hogwarts with the colors switched around.

dmingod666 5y ago
Big 5 boils down to 5 words, not a scam..
- dathinab 5y ago
  Bit 5 doesn't try to explain behaviour, but only classifies statistical differences in test results. It also boils down to a 5-dimensional vector not 5 categories of people. If we see each dimension in just 10 bins then that's still 100000 different categories.
capableweb 5y ago
> Anything that boils an entire branch of science down to something this simple is by definition a scam. Well, is it? Is it not be definition "abstraction" rather than "scam"? A scam would involve to purposefully obfuscate the truth or outright lying. Creating simpler rules around something difficult in order to explain a lot is how a lot of science progresses. Wasn't that what Newton/Einstein or someone else did regarding physics, in order to explain how things work in our universe? Before that we had lots of difficult rules and exceptions, while they come up with something clean that could explain a lot of things instead.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  Right exactly. You could describe the bohr model of the atom as "boiling an entire branch of science down to something this simple" but it is still a useful tool in some contexts. Even if you want to argue that it is worthless and never useful for anything, it is still not a scam.

nradov 5y ago

And yet we still see fools in the US who actually believe that Myers-Briggs personality types like "INTJ" are somehow meaningful. It's hilarious.

andybak 5y ago
I think there's something interesting in Myers-Briggs. It's crude, flawed and inaccurate in many ways but your sniggering rubbed me up the wrong way.
- arbitrage 5y ago
  Typical INTJ behaviour.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
It's not Meyer Briggs: > 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.
- coliveira 5y ago
  But it is a similar kind of BS. No scientific basis as well.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    So i suppose there is "science" against it? I don't know the science surrounding it. But i took a test through work once and most seems to be correct. I don't think it would be "popular" in businesses if nothing would be correct. That's exactly what suprised me the first time, so I'm hesitant to call it bs. If there is another correlation it could be that the test was pretty positive for me. Perhaps it was the contrary for you? ( I'm just guessing and trying to find differences in experience here)
    - coliveira 5y ago

ShockedUnicorn 5y ago

As a swede. This is the first time I've seen this 4 colour system. I'm 30, so maybe it's more popular around younger people? I have seen things like "INTP-J" on friends profile. I think it's called 16 personalities. Me and my colleagues did that test, and the suggested one for me did not fit in with me at all, and most of us thought the results were bullshit. Why anyone would follow this to make work groups, or to exclude people in their life is mind boggling.

mongol 5y ago
Is not that INTP thing Myers-Briggs that is mentioned in the article?
- jdmichal 5y ago
  It is. Myers-Briggs has four axes: I/E, N/S, T/F, P/J. There's also a whole sub-layer of dominant and auxiliary functions.
- saba2008 5y ago
  Yes, it is.
nemetroid 5y ago
It was the best selling pocket book in Sweden in 2017 and 2018. 800 000 copies have been sold in Swedish. It was pretty difficult to miss.
- Retric 5y ago
  That’s under 8% of the population buying the book or receiving it as a gift and some percentage of them reading it.
  - retrac 5y ago
    You say "under 8% of the population" having a copy of the book as if that doesn't make it almost as popular as the Bible.

kriro 5y ago

I'm not a psychologist but this sentence: """Modern evidence-based methods in behavioural science adopt the ground principle that people’s behavior mainly depend on context.""" doesn't have any source to back it up and is opposed to what I have read about the introvert/extrovert divide which seems to be more genetic than context dependent for example. And those are character traits that directly shape behavior (I'd rather read a book when low on energy vs. go to a party). Maybe someone can clarify this for me. The fact that the author uses "shy" and "outgoing" also doesn't instill much faith in me. The next section even mentions the big five but I don't think these traits are "mainly dependent on context". I'm a bit confused. Nevertheless, an interesting story/find. The color system seems so obviously ridiculous that it amazes me how popular it got. Lesson learned. People like categories and simple explanations. Coincidentally, that's also one of the main sources of (unintentional) bias.

sampo 5y ago
> """Modern evidence-based methods in behavioural science adopt the ground principle that people’s behavior mainly depend on context.""" Adopting ground principles doesn't sound very evidence-based to begin with.
- yxwvut 5y ago
  The ground principle here is one of flexibility: that your model of behavior should allow for context dependence, not that it need be entirely context driven. As an analogy, consider a ground principle that your statistical model shouldn’t assume normal distributions or equal variance.
nialse 5y ago
A main pilar of behavioral psychology is that the previously learnt behavior is activated in a certain context, the antecedent. The presence (or absence) of consequences following the behavior affects the probability of such a behavior occurring again a smiliar context. This operant conditioning has been shown extensively in behavioristic research by Skinner and beyond. Genes can be thought of as learnt behavior in an organism accumulating over time. This behavior is also activated in certain contexts. Thus the sentence does not necessarily separate environmental influence from genetic influence although it is easy to interpret it as such.

Numberwang 5y ago

funOtter 5y ago

I'm not sure which this article claims to be the bluff: the author or the DiSC assessment? ... It seems to be attacking both.

jorams 5y ago
It's saying the DiSC assessment has no scientific basis, and the author is wrong for claiming it does.

maratc 5y ago

I've lost the thought around this part: > For example, consider a person who says, “now I understand why I have such negative thoughts, can’t get to sleep, and have difficulty getting going…I’ve got depression.” This person might believe that the explanation of her symptoms is depression, but in fact, the diagnosis of depression is just a categorisation of exactly these symptoms. The diagnosis of depression usually revolves around changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain. It is an issue as real as diabetes is. To explain my point further, consider the following: > For example, consider a person who says, “now I understand why I have such frequent urination, increased thirst and increased appetite. I’ve got diabetes.” This person might believe that the explanation of her symptoms is diabetes, but in fact, the diagnosis of diabetes is just a categorisation of exactly these symptoms. There is no diabetes Gremlin, either. All this not to say that the accusations of fraud are either based or baseless. EDIT: I know we can't test (blood etc.) for depression — yet. There's still a question of whether "it's all in your head" or "your biology is a bit off". See also [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopsychiatry_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopsychiatry_controversy

andi999 5y ago
Totally weird, also if the article were true, it would suggest going out, trying to think positively were effective treatments of depression (which they are at most for light cases)
Sharlin 5y ago
No no no no. The diagnosis of depression absolutely does not revolve around "changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain", except insofar as "functioning of the brain" equals the symptoms reported by the patient! There are no known physical or chemical tests for depression. Even if we have some vague theories about "chemical imbalance in the brain", for the most part the neurological or biochemical mechanisms of depression are a mystery.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  What irks me about this is every human experience is reflected in "changes in body chemistry and the functioning of the brain". But that's about as useful as saying that a car breaks down due to mechanical changes. It's not wrong, but it's pretty useless.

daneel_w 5y ago

I know the title of the book as it was for a brief period on the receiving end of some ridicule (rather than praise), though I hadn't heard about its "colorized" idea until I read this article. As I remember it the book made at most a bit of "noise" in media, more so than being a wave of revelation, and my gut feeling as a Swede is that most people bought the book out of the sensationalist and entertaining promise. I don't think I've ever come across a person here in Sweden expressing or applying the presented ideology in any way.

Levitz 5y ago
>I know the title of the book as it was for a brief period on the receiving end of some ridicule (rather than praise), though I hadn't heard about its "colorized" idea until I read this article. Maybe the whole idea about selling books based on assuming things depending on which color people are ringed someone's bells at the marketing department.

halpert 5y ago

I read some of this article. I have never heard about the color system in question. If it’s really a fraudulent system, it should be easy to say “The system claims thing X, here is evidence X is false.” Instead, this article is filled with anecdotes and what seems like random conjecture on what personality “really” is. This is not a convincing argument.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago
Surely if a book claims people can be split into 4 colour types it should be the book that should provide the proof?
- halpert 5y ago
  This article is claiming the author is a fraud. They should provide proof of that claim, just as the author should provide proof of his claims. I didn’t read the book, but I did read this article and the evidence of fraud is lacking.
  - goto11 5y ago
    You should look into the concept of "burden of proof". If someone claims a model is based on scientific evidence, then obviously it is the claimant who has to provide this alleged scientific evidence. You can't prove a negative, so it does not make sense to require others to prove this alleged evidence does not exist.
    - halpert 5y ago
      Again, I haven’t read the book or know anything about the author. All I know is that this article is asserting the author of the book is a fraud. That is a positive statement, and insufficient evidence has been provided from my reading.
      - goto11 5y ago
        He is a fraud because the alleged scientific evidence does not exist.

ravel-bar-foo 5y ago

I thought the text about personality colors sounded familiar. @dang This same article was discussed on HN almost two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530 I think the title could use a (2020) tag.

boomboomsubban 5y ago
From the epilogue, >Since this article was published in spring 2019... So 2019

hermannj314 5y ago

I struggle often with this somewhat arbitrary desire for everything to be data-driven and backed by science. People hope, pray, follow best practices, listen to advice on the internet and yet, every now and then we are reminded that only fools do these things. Really intelligent people only listen to science and do things backed by science and lots of data. How does anyone accomplish anything if every step they take has to be double blind studied before it even crosses their mind? Maybe for my own sanity, while humanity marches towards becoming Vulcan, I'll continuing accepting a few heuristics, fables, and Grandma's chicken noodle soup.

rubidium 5y ago
“ Really intelligent people only listen to science and do things backed by science and lots of data.” You know _no one_ smarter than you who follows a deity?
- hermannj314 5y ago
  I did not mean for my post to come across in such a way. But yes - people I know, smarter than me, that believe in a deity, returned quite a few rows when I queried.
- janto 5y ago
  I think it was meant with a bit of sarcasm?
ModernMech 5y ago
I used to be the way you describe, and I found it left me without any convictions. I used to think that was okay, because I reasoned with myself that convictions are irrational if not backed by data. Then I got older and realized how easy it is to frame and manipulate data and “facts” to achieve any desired result on the part of the person disseminating the facts. I realized that having some base convictions was a way to defend against people using data in unscrupulous ways, to convince me of things I didn’t want to believe. So now I do both. I have some points of view that I can’t defend with data and science and peer review studies. They are grounded in my own observations of the world and how they make me feel. I won’t let anyone tell me what my lying eyes see, that’s for me to determine. But for what I can’t see I try to follow data where I can. Does this mean I may be living under some incorrect convictions? Sure! But it’s far better than floating like a leaf in the wind, blowing wherever someone spouting some “data” would want to take me. Irrationality is okay because the world and humans are irrational. You can’t operate in a pure mentat/vulcan mode under such conditions.

alkonaut 5y ago

The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you think of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative especially if the categories don’t even offer any behavioral insight. But something tells me that there could also be some positive effects from actually wondering about the behavior of others and how you treat them, even if it’s pigeonholing and preconceptions based on bogus research. A bit like every single diet works (compared to no diet) because the fundamental thing is dieting in the sense that you think actively about diet. As for this book: It’s a pretty useless book, but I can see how it’s appealing. I can’t see how it being unscientific makes it worse than 90% of similar books in the bookstore. This is a pop book you read on a plane. It’s not a scientific publication. If he claims it’s solid science that’s obviously bad, but I’m sure all the mindfulness and yoga books do too - and all of those are certainly not very scientific.

beaconstudios 5y ago
Mindfulness and meditation especially, /are/ supported by scientific findings. I don't know about yoga, but it's basically stretching and that's generally good for you.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  Sure I didn’t mean to imply that those fields in particular are all bogus, but rather that every new book on the subject has to bring a new angle and also often plays a bit fast and loose with scientific rigor. You’ll see books on why you should do yoga while juggling eggplants or mindfulness through playing quake and it might be some times a bit semi-scientific.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Fair point, yeah the novelties are just there for marketing and intrigue purpose, they probably don't do anything most of the time.

neom 5y 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." I didn't know Myers Briggs has a colour component, tangentially: crazy to me how often I see a "Myers Briggs Score" on resumes these days, especially in Korea. I was under the impression most people didn't take it very seriously, at least not seriously enough to put on a resume.

keewee7 5y ago

Scandinavian society gives a lot of airtime to "radical" intellectuals talking bullshit about things outside their field of expertise. Bjørn Lomborg was a hipster economist who denied man-made climate change and had an embarrassing amount of clout in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg

sputr 5y ago
As non-scandinavian ... may it have something to do with the strong left/progressive lean of the population? I say this because one of the biggest problems of every single group or organization that I've seen built around progressive/left/liberal ideas is the tendency to believe in the "everyone has a right to be heard/speak" which leads to everything being dominated by the loudest individuals who are almost always full of BS. Honestly, I've identified this tendency as the #1 reason why such groups do so poorly in politics, except in situations where the values are just a PR front for a more traditional power structure.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  I don't have an educated answer for your question so I won't offer one. But I think it is making it more confusing that you conflate left, liberal, and progressive. They have some overlap and shared meanings but are also different things. The "everyone has a right to be heard" thing you mention is specifically a liberal value. Others may or may not subscribe to it to varying degrees but in my view it is core only to that one. Scandanavia is pretty firmly liberal from what I can see. I mean just the other day here there was a good conversation about how the entire wealth of norway is based on nonrenewable resource extraction. Not really anything leftist about that.
boublepop 5y ago
Lomborg never denied man-made climate change. Though he certainly was a controvercial Voice in the debate. The reason was however that he challenged key predictions and strongly critized the proposed solutions as being cost ineffective. But it’s true that those who opposed him tried to paint his criticism as a if it had been denial because that’s a strawman that is easier to argue against. If someone comes out saying “climate change is man made and unless we do something the Oriana going to boil away in 2 years, our only option is to start throwing ice cubes into the ocean!” Then it’s perfectly resonable to argue that the prediction is wrong, and that even if it was accurate the proposed solution isn’t cost effective and that better solutions exist, that doesn’t mean you are arguing against the main premis of manmade climate change. Now the meat of the debate around Lomborg is really if his predictions stack up against the predictions he criticized.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

drakonka 5y ago

I have yet to read the whole article, but I got too excited when I got to these parts[0] and had to write a quick comment first. This concept as described reminded me immediately of a book I read as a teenager, called Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_Kingdom It is about the country being broken up into four sectors based on the four humors: red, green, yellow, and blue. Scanning through some descriptions of Surrounded by Idiots, the similarities are uncanny. I thought the whole four-humors thing and its derivatives have been definitively debunked for a very long time, how did this book not get laughed out of the gates? [0] Parts that made me pause: 'Around the same time, qualified psychologists began reporting how clients were considering leaving their partners because, “I can’t possibly live with a yellow person”...'; '...they had been tested at the Human Resources department only to be told they needed to move to another team because their “colour combination”...'; '...A teenage girl comes home and tells her mother, with an air of resignation, “mum, I’m a green.” She had been tested by her school counsellor...'

sersi 5y ago
> clients were considering leaving their partners because, “I can’t possibly live with a yellow person”...'; I remember hearing similar comments from Japanese friends once they learned their boyfriend/girlfriend's blood group. (Personality tests based on blood groups are huge there).
- boublepop 5y ago
  Its just confirmation bias in relationships. If a person really wanted to stay with their SO, they would be saying “omg, our personalities are so incompatible on paper, but we’re just so great together despite that” But since they want to leave and can’t find a good reason or don’t feel that they can stand by whatever reasoning they have, it becomes “We have to break up because you’re yellow and I’m red” rather than: “we have to break up because I’m shallow and your body doesn’t look like it did when we met” or “we have to break up because after you got fired you haven’t been able to spend as much money on me”. Etc.

fabatka 5y ago

People love to categorize/label themselves and others (belonging to a group, provides easy answers to complicated questions, etc.). So most will be glad to do so when given a chance.

dathinab 5y ago

> Red: dominant, driven, solution focussed. > Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous > Green: patient, considerate, nice > Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal If that's the definition it's a catastrophe. A lot of entries listed are skills you can (and do) learn for specific situations, and which just some people do to some degree apply to all parts of their live. But someone applying "patient" to all their live doesn't mean they also will apply it when it matter, nor does it mean a normally "impartient" person can't (potentially already has) learn to be patient when it matters. Generally all of "solution focussed", "analytic", "careful", "meticulous", "patient", "considerate", "nice", "verbal" are all skills you can learn and learn to apply in all contexts (through for some people it's harder it's still possible, through different people need to approach it in different ways). I also have meet all kind of "creative" people, so linking that together with other personality traits seem absurd. "driven" is in my experience more related to unhealthy stress, potentially anxiety disorders "extroverted" depends a lot on the definition what it is supposed to mean, through in this context it probably means outgoing, outspoken, etc. or similar, in which case in which case it's still bs as this kind of behaviour is often highly contextual.

iiv 5y ago
Yes, that is the definition (I am Swedish and I've endured many people asking me my "colour".) It's absurd, isn't it? Especially using so many emotive words.

wombatmobile 5y ago

Ways to categorize other people's personalities, such as Myers-Briggs, Swedish Colors, The Zodiac, McCarthyism, devils advocacy, racial profiling, Stockholm Syndrome, and hero worship have always been popular. Why? Because people need ways to feel like they understand and can predict other people's behavior. Why? I don't know. It's just something I've observed. Would you agree, and if so, why do you think that is?

tm-guimaraes 5y ago
>Why? Because people need ways to feel like they understand and can predict other people's behavior. > Would you agree Yes > if so, why do you think that is? Because society. Literally. You need to "predict" behaviors around you, it's only natural, every animal checks for threats. The moment you live in a society, you have to live with lots of other humans, so you inevitably develop lots of heuristics to deal with them. From a stranger passing on a street, to your coworker. Predicting behavior is the basis of society, it's the reason traffic rules sort of work, why we can even have such a thing as laws.
jiggunjer 5y ago
I've never cared for those theoretical models, I prefer using empirical models when it comes to humans.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > Because society. Literally. You need to "predict" behaviours around you, But the models aren't valid e.g. astrology. Does that matter? It seems not really! Many folks still swear by astrology. How can that work? In mainstream science, a bad heuristic is useless and fades to oblivion or ridicule. But society is not science. When people use astrology or racism or any other inaccurate heuristic to anchor their beliefs, they create for themselves a role in society, and relationships with their community that are self-fulfilling. Think everyone is out to get you? Treat them that way, and they'll think you're weird - someone to be avoided and not trusted. Think tall people are attractive and short people are ugly? That makes you much more likely to partner with a tall person. Think everyone deserves a smile first thing in the morning? People are going to smile back, and seek you out at the water cooler. Think everyone deserves to be heard? People are going to talk to you. Think black people, or brown people, or pink people, or white people, or tan people, or purple people are not worth listening to? You're going to miss out on their stories, food, culture, friendship, companionship and wisdom. Society is a laboratory. It's also a mirror.

jollybean 5y ago

It's pop culture psychology and 'people type rumouring' - the oldest game in the book, backed by 'Science' and a bit of capitalism to hustle books. This isn't surprising.

heikkilevanto 5y ago

Would anything in this discussion, or in the original article, change much if it was about astrology instead of personality types?

janto 5y ago

> He started by placing Freud and Jung as the grounders of modern psychology, a distinction that even a someone who has studied a four-week course in the area will know is incorrect. The subject has developed greatly since the time of Freud, Jung and comic book author, Marston. The author's resistance against Freud and Jung's contributions is... myopic?

arbitrage 5y ago
The importance of Freud and Jung to applicable psychology in the modern era is vastly overblown.
- janto 5y ago
  Only if you disregard the importance of belief, meaning, individuation, dialog and their influence on other psychologists.
- randomNumber7 5y ago
  Before freud they would cut around in the brains of mentally ill. Even though a lot happend in psychology it kind of started with him.
randomNumber7 5y ago
Putting freud in the same category as a comic author hurts. Article is bs, as is the color system

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

I blame Harry Potter and Hogwarts Houses. Incidentally, they are four as well.

chmod775 5y ago

People need an individually unique entire human brain working nonstop to figure out how they themselves are going to respond, act, and believe. You really think you can narrow that down to four colors?

hereme888 5y ago

One thing we do know from the longest running human studies in history, is that, over a lifetime, people's personalities change so much that in their old age they are oftentimes nothing like what they were when they were younger.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
Of course, hormone levels change, and they influence behavior in a scientifically proven way.
nabla9 5y ago
Some personality traits change, some are stable. Typically selfconfidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability increases with age. Generally personality changes fast up to 30 year of age and then change slows down. Conscientiousness often increases whole lifetime. Extroversion seems to be relatively stable.

citizenpaul 5y ago

I knew this guy was a hot load the second my boss at my first help desk job insisted that we take this test and "learn" from it.

Digory 5y ago

Also: any “love languages” and Enneagram numbers. It’s really astounding how much these frauds impact relationships and organizations.

davidhalter 5y ago
Hmm, I found the Enneagram tremendously helpful. Why do you dislike it? I guess people can abuse it really easily, but I feel like it helped me to realize who I am in this world.
- Digory 5y ago
  The basis for the numbers are really no different than the color-codings here, and the analysis of why they all tend to be circular reasoning. "I act like a red because I'm a red" is similar to "I act like an Enneagram 4 because I'm a 4." It might be useful for introspection ("I identify with feelings this model gives to 'reds' or a '4w3' "), but it's not a scientific or testable prediction about the way people act in the world.
  - davidhalter 5y ago
    I agree. Circular reasoning along with self-fulfilling prophecies are definitely an issue. I still like it for introspection and realizing that other people have different "mind structures", whatever they might be. > it's not a scientific or testable prediction about the way people act in the world. The problem is that there is probably no scientific or testable prediction about the complexity of humans. Psychology itself seems not very scientific, so people rely on their intuition (as they should) to understand other people. However that leads to the problem of "X also wants Y, because I want Y", which from my experience is just not true at all. Humans have very different interests and goals. So these models creep up to account for that.

johnchristopher 5y ago

Eneagrams are making a comeback at my place.

INTPenis 5y ago

In their hunt for simple answers to complex questions people often forget that they are far too complex to be defined by 16 types of 4 colours. That said though, MBTI did help me figure out a lot about myself. Discovering MBTI back in 2009 was definitely life changing for me and I've kept it in the back of my head since then, mostly to improve myself and rarely applied to others. I've been in one amazing relationship with an MBTI type that is supposed to match with mine, and one awful relationship with a type that does not match with mine. So it's not supposed to be followed blindly but it can help you out in life.

moss2 5y ago
Thank you, INTPenis, for your insight.
wackro 5y ago
After a quick search it seems like the idea of 'matching types' was removed from the most popular MBTI testing site (I swear it used to say in the romantic relationships section), and different sources seem to have different opinions on which types match. My own experience is that there is definitely some value to the idea, so my question to you is, is it a legit part of the MBTI 'theory', and is there a canonical listing of compatible types? Browsing random blogs/reddit sets my pseudoscience sensors off. A fellow INTP.
- INTPenis 5y ago
  It used to be listed, I mean there have been hundreds of sites about MBTI so who knows where but the last time I saw the romantic matching of types was just 2 years ago on a relatively recent Swedish testing website. But yeah I mean I'm not a scholar, I was just able to identify with what I read about INTP and it was eerily accurate when I first read it. But people change. I have a friend who tested as INTP back in the 90s, their first test, then took another test in the 2000s and was a different type. So you grow and you try to improve yourself. Being heavily introverted is a curse and a blessing sometimes.

coldtea 5y ago

>Before we define personality, it is useful to explain what it isn’t. Consider a friend who does something bad and then says, “I did it because my personality led me to do it”. In making this argument, our friend is essentially claiming that their personality is like a Gremlin in their head who steers their behaviour, telling them what to do. In reality, of course, the Gremlin doesn’t exist and we don’t usually accept this argument as an excuse for bad behaviour. Instead of invoking Gremlins, the most reasonable and widely accepted definition of personality is behaviour of an individual which is relatively constant over time and doesn’t depend on context (Perugni et al, 2016). Personality isn’t a thing, like a Gremlin, it is simply a pattern of repeatable behaviour. Using this definition, the Gremlin argument becomes circular: if someone claims that their personality made them do something, we can simply counter, “Well, yes, that is the definition of personality. All you are telling me is that you behaved in the way you did because you behaved the way you did.” The invocation of a personality Gremlin is one example of careless thinking. This "explanation" or "argument" is worse empirically and theoritically than what it criticizes...

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> The “Big Five” didn’t come from a theory but through statistical analysis of thousands of personality questionnaires consisting of hundreds of questions. These reveal five properties that are relatively constant over time: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. How these Big Five "properties" where derived is that people thought there was some pattern to questionnaires about behaviour and they ran a PCA on it. They noticed that PCA tended to bring up five principal components, so they interpreted them as five dominant personality traits that are shared by all humans. This is not very good statistics: they basically used PCA to identify latent variables. But PCA cannot find latent variables. There is some criticism of this, but very rarely because "The Big Five" is basically accepted truth by the psychological community nowadays. In 20 years from now they'll probably debunk it and then hold up some other "model" of "human personality" and then the cycle will repeat. Here's one critical paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19946599/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19946599/ Whence I quote: Consider, for instance, the personality literature, where people have discovered that executing a PCA of large numbers of personality subtest scores, and selecting components by the usual selection criteria, often returns five principal components. What is the interpretation of these components? They are “biologically based psychological tendencies,”; and as such are endowed with causal forces (McCrae et al., 2000, p. 173). This interpretation cannot be justified solely on the basis of a PCA, if only because PCA is a formative model and not a reflective one (Bollen & Lennox, 1991; Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & Van Heerden, 2003).

thewarrior 5y ago
Interesting. Isn’t IQ also based on PCA. So would similar criticisms apply to IQ. “ PCA is a formative model and not a reflective one”. Can’t understand this.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  It's a way to say that PCA can transform data but not explain it.

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago

The "Head of People" at my previous employer in Sweden pushed this garbage. She made us spend an entire day — it was mandatory — "learning" about the four colour-coded groups in this pseudoscience. It's worrying that employers can essentially mandate religion in the workplace like this.

greggman3 5y ago
Yes, it sucks. I interviewed at a company that started the process with 600 word personality test. I left after the interview and didn't follow up. I didn't want to work at a place with such a process.

ess3 5y ago

I think this sort of stuff can be useful as an icebreaker into a constructive discussion on how we’re different but taking it at face value is a big problem with pigeon holing and what not.

idiocrat 5y ago

Waiting for a book "Surrounded by Idiots -- how to use Swedish Legal System to Jail Unwanted Journalists, while the World is Watching, and Get Away With It. A Practical Guide".

brabel 5y ago

I see a lot of so-called software experts fall into the exact same category as the author of that book... believing themselves to be experts just because they worked in the field for a while, despite having no scientific training, or any relevant training for that matter, no serious studies backing up whatever they promote, nothing except for a lot of gut feeling and on-the-job "hands-on knowledge", exactly as the author of this book who believed himself to be an expert in communication and psychology despite lacking even a basic understanding of that. We should apply the same kind of scrutinization when it comes to the software industry IMO. Just because you wrote code for a few years and managed a team later, doesn't mean anything you learned is applicable to anyone else. Imagine doctors going around experimenting on people and "learning hands-on" what works and what doesn't. Or even electricians or plumbers... yet, here we are, and I feel like it's exactly what we're doing with software development.

ahelwer 5y ago
Doctors are essentially useless after graduating medical school and only reach professional proficiency after running the gauntlet of years of intense hands-on medical residency training (where there are more mistakes made than is generally polite to admit). Ask a doctor about this, literally any doctor.
- brabel 5y ago
  But how many doctors skip med school and just go straight to get hands-on experience?

platz 5y ago

Better than meyers-briggs - How the ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Color Wheel Explains Humanity: https://humanparts.medium.com/the-mtg-color-wheel-c9700a7cf36d https://humanparts.medium.com/the-mtg-color-wheel-c9700a7cf3...

drallison 5y ago

This article is a hatchet job by a self-declared "skeptic" intended to convince the reader that a popular Swedish book about personality types, Surrounded by Idiots, is without scientific basis or value. The language of the article, independent of the content, conveys the negative message. These days we are immersed is a sea of falsehoods and half-truths. Storytelling and lyrical metaphoric depictions of reality have been replaced by downright lies and malicious intent. Opinion articles which violate rhetorical rules and utilize deceptive and fallacious argumentation are not a good resource to mine for facts. We are "Surrounded by Idiots", individuals whose weltanshanguung embraces fantastical concepts supported by pseudoscientific argumentation and assertions without evidence. Much of the richness of human culture is captured by wrong ideas and conceptions. Consider creation myths, fables with morals, religions, moral systems, astrology, political systems, cold fusion, Meyers-Briggs personality tests, and so forth. Finding a balance between the factual, the fictional and the speculative is difficult. Words, facts, and expression do matter. The title, for example, states that Swedes were "fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time" is wrong. There is no evidence that people were "fooled", the book and theory are not a "bluff", and there is no partial ordering of bluffs so "biggest" is hard to identify.

musesum 5y ago

On a program called 20/20, John Stossel punked Astrology. He asked adult night school students to provide their birthday, gave them an astrology chart, and asked them how relevant it was. Many said the description was uncanny in its accuracy. Except it wasn't their chart ... it was for Jeffrey Dahmer. I couldn't find the episode to cite. Maybe some of the students were upset?

Foobar8568 5y ago

This crap reminds me of the left/right brain non-sense.

zppln 5y ago

I remember some colleagues at work labeling me as a blue person a few years ago. I didn't pay much attention to it, as it came from the types of people you'd expect taking this kind of bait. I think the interesting thing here is how stuff like this spread through society. Or, parts of middle class society that is. We appear to have a large number of HR people, middle management and ambitious LinkedIn men who spend their time with things like this rather than doing actually useful work. Kind of like the class of useless people sent off on that space ship in HGTTG.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

webinvest 5y ago

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsoccermatics.medium.com%2Fhow-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsoccermatics.medium.co...