3 ms·

I have a friend who's tremendously into astrology. After years of arguments etc I had a moment of enlightment when I realized she practically uses it more as de

I have a friend who's tremendously into astrology. After years of arguments etc I had a moment of enlightment when I realized she practically uses it more as descriptive model rather than predictive source of truth. I. E. She used classifications for personal shorthand on how she thinks about people. From that perspective, there's a sense where a summarizing framework is beneficial. Almost every high level executive I met that's actually genuinely good with people, subscribes strongly and uses a personality model - whether it's the Disc model or four quadrants or whatever. The fact it has no scientific backing has no bearing in them "knowing its true" , but it also doesn't limit it being a useful if self fulfilling framework. And though we can accurately argue that system is stacked in what it rewards, these are leaders who genuinely do care and do well by their team. More than anything, it makes me introspect what does it mean for a model to "work", because I deeply believe that these models are pseudo scientific garbage, overly simplifying and random bs's confirmation of existing bias... But I've also had tons of personal anecdotal evidence they "work" or "help" - again, not just in self fulfilling or pegging into square hole way.

hutzlibu 5y ago
"She used classifications for personal shorthand on how she thinks about people." I do not know how your friend did it exactly, but my main experience with people who are into astrology is different - they get told by the astrological models/dogma on how to think of people and combination of people. "I cannot be with this person, he is a lion and I am [whatever]" "Why are you together, your signs do not match each other" In other words, they "help" by simplifying things. Avoiding thinking to make decisions. But in my experience that always hurt them in the long run. And it probably destroyed many relationships as people went with the simple astrological explanation, instead of a real analysis what went wrong. Or rather, it often went wrong, because of negative self fullfulling prophecy.
- blue1 5y ago
  Years ago I studied astrology quite a lot. I've never been too interested in the divinatory side, and the pop-level generalizations such as those you cited are not even worth commenting. Instead I, like the OP's friend, think it's a rather interesting and deep system of symbols and archetypes. A set of lenses, if you want. Sometimes, looking at the reality through a certain lens yields interesting insights.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "Sometimes, looking at the reality through a certain lens yields interesting insights. " I surely agree to that. But your lenses can also give you a distorted, faulty view of reality. And many people go with that, because it looks nicer.
  - splistud 5y ago
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Oh I agree, that's been vast majority of my experience too. That's why I was surprised when I paid attention and realized my friend would meet somebody and observe and classify them as a "taurus with a bit of gemini" (or whatever) regardless if what their actual birth sign is. It transformed it into a observational classification system! To her, calling somebody Capricorn is like somebody else observing "this person looks like INTJ" or "Intuitive on disc model" or whatever. It was fascinating :)
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    So what you're saying is basically that astrology kind of works, but it works best if you don't know exactly when (and where) people are born... Heh.
peakaboo 5y ago
People have different personality types and they can be grouped into categories just like anything else. I think this guy used some science to back his book up, but the book doesn't even need that. The point is, people are different, and it's an important life skill to realize this because you accept people who are different from you much easier.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  That is also my takeaway from the book - people work differently, and being aware of that can make you more effective at communication. I didn't even manage to take the book very seriously because it was so overly... arrogant in its presentation. "If you do X, you're red. Red people do Y, Z, U, V. Remember the times someone did W? Red person." Every statement presented as unquestionable fact, but none of them sourced (but anecdotes abound). It's unfortunate that people (all of Sweden, apparently?) seem to have gotten carried away and based lives and decisions around what is evidently just the author's musings.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  The article notes: --- Almost the only “scientific” reference that Erikson provides in his book is from a book written in 1928 called the Emotions of Normal People, by American psychologist William Moulton Marston. Moulton hypothesised that our behaviour is influenced by “psychonic energy” that is transferred through a web of nerve cells that he called “psychons”. The four personality types (yellow, green, blue and red) arise, Marston claims, as variations between different people in the structure of their psychonic network. This “theory” is pure speculation on the part of Marston. There was no scientific evidence for psychons or psychonic energy in 1928 and there is none today. At the time of publication, the science of psychology was in its infancy and, like Hippocrates and Jung before him, he had created a theory without proper scientific grounding. Unlike Hippocrates and Jung though, Marston’s theory garnered little attention, and he left psychology. He later rose to fame though when he created the comic book hero Wonder Woman! --- It might be helpful to simplify life by bucketing people into 'personality types' but there doesn't seem to be any more scientific justification here than one would find in Astrology or Harry Potter Houses (anyway Astrology is a based on a much larger heap of unscientifically collected anecdotes).
dantyti 5y ago
> Almost every high level executive I met that's actually genuinely good with people, subscribes strongly and uses a personality model - whether it's the Disc model or four quadrants or whatever. I would say my anectdata is completely opposite after working in an organization that based its management almost exclusively on disc. The model allowed managers to completely ignore the vast majority of people issues ("ah, those two have a D in their profile, of course they're gonna butt heads"). The managers who were actually good with people never relied on any pseudoscientific crutch to analyse, communicate or mediate conflict, and imo that's what made them _good with people_. This part of the article resonated strongly with the issues I saw and how over reliance on personality models sabotaged the organization: > A common mistake when problems occur within an organisation is to focus on the individuals that are involved in conflicts. In fact, since it is the context of a situation which decides how people act, the primary concern in addressing any conflict should lie in how the organisation works. Before an organisation consultant, brought in to resolve conflicts, looks at individuals she should look at the structure (Olofsson & Nilsson, 2015).
- davidhalter 5y ago
  These models helped me to realize that people are extremely different in what they need & want. This is what most people probably should learn from these. I personally did like the Enneagram personality types. It made me realize how I had a totally different way of looking at the world. It's probably a better model than Disc, because it does include healthy and unhealthy levels, which is always extremely important if you want to understand people in general. I think management applying any kind of model in such a simplistic model is just setting them up for failure. The right kind of thinking would probably have been: "those two are butting heads; let's find out why". The reason for butting heads is not that they have a D in their profile, it's just a correlation.
wisty 5y ago
Correlation is not causation. Someone who is interested in being good with people is likely to look for a model, but maybe it's their motivation (rather than the model) that makes them good with people.

hutzlibu 5y ago

"She used classifications for personal shorthand on how she thinks about people." I do not know how your friend did it exactly, but my main experience with people who are into astrology is different - they get told by the astrological models/dogma on how to think of people and combination of people. "I cannot be with this person, he is a lion and I am [whatever]" "Why are you together, your signs do not match each other" In other words, they "help" by simplifying things. Avoiding thinking to make decisions. But in my experience that always hurt them in the long run. And it probably destroyed many relationships as people went with the simple astrological explanation, instead of a real analysis what went wrong. Or rather, it often went wrong, because of negative self fullfulling prophecy.

blue1 5y ago
Years ago I studied astrology quite a lot. I've never been too interested in the divinatory side, and the pop-level generalizations such as those you cited are not even worth commenting. Instead I, like the OP's friend, think it's a rather interesting and deep system of symbols and archetypes. A set of lenses, if you want. Sometimes, looking at the reality through a certain lens yields interesting insights.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "Sometimes, looking at the reality through a certain lens yields interesting insights. " I surely agree to that. But your lenses can also give you a distorted, faulty view of reality. And many people go with that, because it looks nicer.
- splistud 5y ago
NikolaNovak 5y ago
Oh I agree, that's been vast majority of my experience too. That's why I was surprised when I paid attention and realized my friend would meet somebody and observe and classify them as a "taurus with a bit of gemini" (or whatever) regardless if what their actual birth sign is. It transformed it into a observational classification system! To her, calling somebody Capricorn is like somebody else observing "this person looks like INTJ" or "Intuitive on disc model" or whatever. It was fascinating :)
- CRConrad 5y ago
  So what you're saying is basically that astrology kind of works, but it works best if you don't know exactly when (and where) people are born... Heh.

peakaboo 5y ago

People have different personality types and they can be grouped into categories just like anything else. I think this guy used some science to back his book up, but the book doesn't even need that. The point is, people are different, and it's an important life skill to realize this because you accept people who are different from you much easier.

MauranKilom 5y ago
That is also my takeaway from the book - people work differently, and being aware of that can make you more effective at communication. I didn't even manage to take the book very seriously because it was so overly... arrogant in its presentation. "If you do X, you're red. Red people do Y, Z, U, V. Remember the times someone did W? Red person." Every statement presented as unquestionable fact, but none of them sourced (but anecdotes abound). It's unfortunate that people (all of Sweden, apparently?) seem to have gotten carried away and based lives and decisions around what is evidently just the author's musings.
bee_rider 5y ago
The article notes: --- Almost the only “scientific” reference that Erikson provides in his book is from a book written in 1928 called the Emotions of Normal People, by American psychologist William Moulton Marston. Moulton hypothesised that our behaviour is influenced by “psychonic energy” that is transferred through a web of nerve cells that he called “psychons”. The four personality types (yellow, green, blue and red) arise, Marston claims, as variations between different people in the structure of their psychonic network. This “theory” is pure speculation on the part of Marston. There was no scientific evidence for psychons or psychonic energy in 1928 and there is none today. At the time of publication, the science of psychology was in its infancy and, like Hippocrates and Jung before him, he had created a theory without proper scientific grounding. Unlike Hippocrates and Jung though, Marston’s theory garnered little attention, and he left psychology. He later rose to fame though when he created the comic book hero Wonder Woman! --- It might be helpful to simplify life by bucketing people into 'personality types' but there doesn't seem to be any more scientific justification here than one would find in Astrology or Harry Potter Houses (anyway Astrology is a based on a much larger heap of unscientifically collected anecdotes).

dantyti 5y ago

> Almost every high level executive I met that's actually genuinely good with people, subscribes strongly and uses a personality model - whether it's the Disc model or four quadrants or whatever. I would say my anectdata is completely opposite after working in an organization that based its management almost exclusively on disc. The model allowed managers to completely ignore the vast majority of people issues ("ah, those two have a D in their profile, of course they're gonna butt heads"). The managers who were actually good with people never relied on any pseudoscientific crutch to analyse, communicate or mediate conflict, and imo that's what made them _good with people_. This part of the article resonated strongly with the issues I saw and how over reliance on personality models sabotaged the organization: > A common mistake when problems occur within an organisation is to focus on the individuals that are involved in conflicts. In fact, since it is the context of a situation which decides how people act, the primary concern in addressing any conflict should lie in how the organisation works. Before an organisation consultant, brought in to resolve conflicts, looks at individuals she should look at the structure (Olofsson & Nilsson, 2015).

davidhalter 5y ago
These models helped me to realize that people are extremely different in what they need & want. This is what most people probably should learn from these. I personally did like the Enneagram personality types. It made me realize how I had a totally different way of looking at the world. It's probably a better model than Disc, because it does include healthy and unhealthy levels, which is always extremely important if you want to understand people in general. I think management applying any kind of model in such a simplistic model is just setting them up for failure. The right kind of thinking would probably have been: "those two are butting heads; let's find out why". The reason for butting heads is not that they have a D in their profile, it's just a correlation.

wisty 5y ago

Correlation is not causation. Someone who is interested in being good with people is likely to look for a model, but maybe it's their motivation (rather than the model) that makes them good with people.