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Astrology and Us

redacted

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However you are predicting traits from a series of questions. The only difference is you get to choose whether you are correct or not. Based on many years of posting on the forums, it's quite apparent that most get it wrong initially.

Dude.

I'm totally on Jack's side here.

Would you think MBTI was valid if your type was determined by something random that has nothing to do with your personality?

Like, if the number of hairs on your head the day you are born has a remainder of 1 when divided by 16, you're an ENFP. Remainder 2, you're an ENTP. Remainder 3, you're an INFP. Remainder 4, you're an INTP...etc.

This is exactly what astrology is like.

Just because people "get it wrong initially" doesn't mean it's the same as astrology. That makes no sense at all.

The reason MBTI works is that it's based on observations about a person's tendencies. It makes inferences about behavioral tendencies from data about behavioral tendencies. It stays in its own realm.

Astrology takes some random unrelated shit and makes inferences about behavioral tendencies. It's not even close to the same idea. At all.

Am I missing something here? This is incredibly obvious.
 

Randomnity

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Am I missing something here? This is incredibly obvious.
The only problem is that it's only incredibly obvious to most people; and the few people who can't see it as immediately obvious won't (can't?) listen to logic anyway, so you're wasting your time.

As for me, I think unicorns bring children to their mother's womb, and your personality is determined by the colour of the unicorn's coat. No no, I don't want to hear any of your arguments, you clearly don't understand how it works. Spend a few years researching unicorns, then you'll understand (and if you don't, you just haven't studied enough, of course).
 

redacted

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The only problem is that it's only incredibly obvious to most people; and the few people who can't see it as immediately obvious won't (can't?) listen to logic anyway, so you're wasting your time.

As for me, I think unicorns bring children to their mother's womb, and your personality is determined by the colour of the unicorn's coat. No no, I don't want to hear any of your arguments, you clearly don't understand how it works. Spend a few years researching unicorns, then you'll understand (and if you don't, you just haven't studied enough, of course).

High five!
 

Mole

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The reason MBTI works is that it's based on observations about a person's tendencies. It makes inferences about behavioral tendencies from data about behavioral tendencies.

I haven't been able to find even one peer review journal in which this data has been published.
 

redacted

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I haven't been able to find even one peer review journal in which this data has been published.

Why do you care so much about other people's opinions?

If you actually tried to think about MBTI instead of trying to shoot it down in little loops of confirmation bias, maybe you'd be surprised.

Try to prove yourself wrong. Think of the best arguments you could possibly make if you took the opposite stance of your beliefs. Proving yourself right is easy.
 

entropie

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Like, if the number of hairs on your head the day you are born has a remainder of 1 when divided by 16, you're an ENFP. Remainder 2, you're an ENTP. Remainder 3, you're an INFP. Remainder 4, you're an INTP...etc.

haha :D . I was born bold, a fine leo that is ! -.-
 

Mole

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Why do you care so much about other people's opinions?

If you actually tried to think about MBTI instead of trying to shoot it down in little loops of confirmation bias, maybe you'd be surprised.

Try to prove yourself wrong. Think of the best arguments you could possibly make if you took the opposite stance of your beliefs. Proving yourself right is easy.

Look mate, you and all your conformist friends are claiming that MBTI is a valid and reliable personality test.

I have taken you at your word and sought for evidence of this in the peer reviewed literature.

And so far I have found no evidence.

If you have such evidence, now is the time to tell us the name and number of the journal, as well as the title of the article.

However finding no evidence myself, I looked back into the history of MBTI and found it is plagerised from the book, "Personality Types", by Carl Jung.

And reading the book I found no evidence whatsoever.

So I reasonably conclude that MBTI is taken on blind trust.

And it turns out MBTI is an article of belief in the New Age Movement.

Does any of this matter? Yes, because MBTI reifies the personality.

MBTI psychologically prepares us to be commodities in the consumer market.

MBTI is a well thought out and executed attack on human dignity.
 

Mole

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The magazine, "Cosmopolitan", has a Horoscope Special.

Buy it and find out what the Universe has in store for you in 2009!

And don't tell me I don't have your best interests at heart.
 

Anonymous

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I've never been able to find much (ok, anything) supporting MBTI either, actually. It seems to be more of a hypothesis that's never been tested well than any sort of theory.

As for astrology, it'd be a joke to even call that a hypothesis. Spirituality, I guess.
 

redacted

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Look mate, you and all your conformist friends are claiming that MBTI is a valid and reliable personality test.

Aha! Emotion.

Anyway, please don't lump me in with those "conformists". I could call you a conformist skeptic.

Listen, "peer reviews" and yadda yadda don't mean anything to me, since I know the MBTI as written by Myers and Briggs is full of shit. But there are good pieces there that can be brought together cohesively. It's not about predicting behaviors or whatever, its about describing behaviors. (I've made this argument to you before, but you seem not to have listened.)

The words Thinking, Feeling, Sensing, Intuition, Introversion, Extroversion, Perceiving, and Judging are just categories like any other. I'll use a metaphor -- you could label each animal you see with its exact species name, or you can group some together and call them dogs, or make larger groups called canines, or larger groups called mammals, or larger groups called animals, etc. Same idea with modes of cognition. You could label each different mode of cognition (you need 6 billion labels) or you can group some parts of cognition together (Thinking, Feeling, Sensing, Intuition), or you can make larger groupings (Perceiving, Judging), or you can just say Cognition (the sum of Perceiving and Judging), etc.

It's nice sometimes to use larger groupings, because it just takes less time. If you need to go into more detail than the words allow, well, use more specific words. You don't have to use cognitive functions for everything.

You can talk about people that tend to favor certain functions the same way you can talk about people that tend to favor anything.

They're just words, man.
 

Mole

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I've never been able to find much (ok, anything) supporting MBTI either, actually. It seems to be more of a hypothesis that's never been tested well than any sort of theory.

As for astrology, it'd be a joke to even call that a hypothesis. Spirituality, I guess.

What I find fascinating about astrology is its age and that it seems to be the precursor to so many religions.

For instance the twelve signs of the zodiac are reflected in the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ.

And the zodiac is reflected in religion after religion. So it looks like astrology is the prototype religion.

And why not, almost all of us feel the numinous as we look up into the night sky. And the Sun God rises every day.

So astrology speaks to our deepest hopes and fears - what a shame it has degenerated into a confidence trick to sell women's magazines.

But it is the separation of our hopes and fears from our thinking mind that is the real shame.

It is this separation of thought and emotion that leaves us alienated from ourselves and each other.

And it is this separation that is so dispiriting; that is so unenlivening; that is so depressing.

While it is the marriage of thought and emotion that is enlivening; that leads to poetry and joie de vie.
 

Mole

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They're just words, man.

It looks like we agree.

I agree they are just words but I am adding that they are words that do not connect to reality.

So what is the purpose of repeating words that do not connect to reality?

It is exactly the same purpose as repeating the words, "OOm, pa, pa", over and over again. The repetition of anything, including words, induces a trance where the cognitive faculties go to sleep and the imaginative faculties come alive.

This can be for a good purpose or a bad purpose.

And it seems to me to keep repeating the jargon of MBTI over and over again is, in the main, for a bad purpose.

And that purpose is to reify the personality into a commodity for the consumer market.
 

redacted

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I agree they are just words but I am adding that they are words that do not connect to reality.

So what is a term that applies to reality, then?

"Cognition" is out, because it's the same type of thing. So is "consciousness". So are "free will", "intention", "good", "bad", "happy", "sad", "pain", etc. etc.

All words are metaphors. All words are subjective. You're making a slippery slope of an argument.
 

nightning

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The only problem is that it's only incredibly obvious to most people; and the few people who can't see it as immediately obvious won't (can't?) listen to logic anyway, so you're wasting your time.

As for me, I think unicorns bring children to their mother's womb, and your personality is determined by the colour of the unicorn's coat. No no, I don't want to hear any of your arguments, you clearly don't understand how it works. Spend a few years researching unicorns, then you'll understand (and if you don't, you just haven't studied enough, of course).
I like them unicorns. I'm not sure which one carried me into this world... but I always have a buckskin unicorn by my side. Nice and spunky just like my personality. :yes:

There's no need to make things complicated. I don't care whether there's an explanation for everything that goes on in the world. It's silly to even think we can ever explain everything. It's okay to make things up so long as what's made up remains inside an isolated box. It's another thing to take an assumption as truth and make conjectures out of it.

I haven't been able to find even one peer review journal in which this data has been published.
Hmmmm the only psychology peer review article published on the MBTI is a comparison between it and the five factor model by McCrae. Of course McCrae is probably the promoter when it comes to FFM, whether that affected his interpretations I do not know. Essentially he concluded FFM is a better system than MBTI in that it's based upon "real life" categories using factor analysis of lexicon descriptors of personality traits in different languages where as MBTI groupings are "made up" using unfalsifiable theories of cognitive functions.

My pet peeve with FFM is that it's descriptive alright... but that's all it does. It has very little use when it comes to predicting human behaviour. But then again, that's the whole idea behind personality psychology. It's always been shadowed by behavioral psych... that the situation will always play a stronger role in determining behavior than personality will. It also doesn't help that we cannot really understand the human psyche. In fact to mention "psyche" is to go beyond the realm of experimental psych. MBTI may be flawed, but at least it's a place to start. Does it matter whether unicorns truly control personality within the black box of our minds? I don't think it does when we do not have the tools to expose this black box. Perhaps later when science is more sophisticated we might be able to correct the error. But for now... I only care to have a working model.

Look mate, you and all your conformist friends are claiming that MBTI is a valid and reliable personality test.
MBTI has never been "validated"... not in the sense of addressing face validity. However it's extremely reliable. Test-retest reliability for MBTI is closer to 80%? That's as good as, if not better, than many other "accepted" personality measures around. People are generally classified in to a particular type... it's just that we cannot be sure what exactly these "types" are suppose to refer to. It could be along some randomly selected arbitrary dimensions... but if people find these divisions useful, I think that by itself has some value.

Does any of this matter? Yes, because MBTI reifies the personality.

MBTI psychologically prepares us to be commodities in the consumer market.

MBTI is a well thought out and executed attack on human dignity.
Heh! Then you turn anything commercial... of course the marketers will use it to brain wash the consumers. Did Myers and Briggs intended to turn it into a big business? I doubt that was their intentions from the start. No... I suspect it was just a interesting little model that seems to fit into patterns they noticed in people.

It's like how scientific research gets twisted around by the media... Our left brain is our logical side and our right brain is our artistic side... research trends taken too far. But the media doesn't care... because the idea sells... right brain thinking, right brain drawing... the public gets duped into thinking it's truth. It's not... merely the current incomplete model.

What I find fascinating about astrology is its age and that it seems to be the precursor to so many religions.

For instance the twelve signs of the zodiac are reflected in the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ.

And the zodiac is reflected in religion after religion. So it looks like astrology is the prototype religion.

And why not, almost all of us feel the numinous as we look up into the night sky. And the Sun God rises every day.

So astrology speaks to our deepest hopes and fears - what a shame it has degenerated into a confidence trick to sell women's magazines.

But it is the separation of our hopes and fears from our thinking mind that is the real shame.

It is this separation of thought and emotion that leaves us alienated from ourselves and each other.

And it is this separation that is so dispiriting; that is so unenlivening; that is so depressing.

While it is the marriage of thought and emotion that is enlivening; that leads to poetry and joie de vie.
I don't mind astrology if they only seek to describe patterns in the sky. As I said, I rather enjoy mythological stories. However the idea of the sky dictating our lives... like god overseeing the world is a little too much to accept. My believe is in free will.

If astrology was presented different... as part of religion from ancient times carried forward, I wouldn't mind studying it. But from the way it's currently depicted? No, the thought crushes me.
 

Mole

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So what is a term that applies to reality, then?

"Cognition" is out, because it's the same type of thing. So is "consciousness". So are "free will", "intention", "good", "bad", "happy", "sad", "pain", etc. etc.

All words are metaphors. All words are subjective. You're making a slippery slope of an argument.

You are right. Language is largely metaphoric. So it behooves us to understand what a metaphor is, and what are the limitations of a metaphor.

Having said that though some words do refer directly to reality. You might start with the Periodic Table and move through an actual table and onto the Sun.

Children learn language by first associating words with real things. As they mature they learn that words can describe relationships. And finally they move onto metaphors which are comparisons of relationships.

So metaphors are a fair way from words and real things.

The difficulty is, I think, is that words can refer to real things and also be metaphoric.

And of course a comparison is not a real thing.

And just as an electron is a wave and a particle, so words describe things and comparisons.

And look I have nothing against the suspension of disbelief whether it's Creationism or MBTI.

But it seems silly to me to call Creationism, science, just as it is to call MBTI a personality test.

And I know everyone here wants to get on without dissent so I wonder why I bother. Except I know this is the way cults operate - they offer social acceptance and belonging if you leave your brain at the door.

In the temple of MBTI there is a big box of brains just inside the front door.

I rest my case.
 

Mole

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Did Myers and Briggs intended to turn it into a big business? I doubt that was their intentions from the start. No... I suspect it was just a interesting little model that seems to fit into patterns they noticed in people.

I understand Mrs Briggs and her daughter, Mrs Myers, plagerised MBTI from Jung's, "Personality Types", for the purpose of inducting women into the war machine.

MBTI was not plagerised for a disinterested purpose. It was plagerised for the purpose of war fighting.

And war being inhuman, it is necessary to dehumanise those who fight by first reifying them.

And so, after the war is over, it lends itself to reifying the personality as a commodity for the consumer market.

MBTI reified the personality first for war fighting and now for commerce.

In both cases it reifies.
 

entropie

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So they probably came from ENTP: "the disobedient mocker in the troop, the generals need to shoot" to ENTP: "The seeker of truth and grand scientist"

gone a long way :D
 

"?"

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Dude.

I'm totally on Jack's side here.

Would you think MBTI was valid if your type was determined by something random that has nothing to do with your personality?

Like, if the number of hairs on your head the day you are born has a remainder of 1 when divided by 16, you're an ENFP. Remainder 2, you're an ENTP. Remainder 3, you're an INFP. Remainder 4, you're an INTP...etc.

This is exactly what astrology is like.

Just because people "get it wrong initially" doesn't mean it's the same as astrology. That makes no sense at all.

The reason MBTI works is that it's based on observations about a person's tendencies. It makes inferences about behavioral tendencies from data about behavioral tendencies. It stays in its own realm.

Astrology takes some random unrelated shit and makes inferences about behavioral tendencies. It's not even close to the same idea. At all.

Am I missing something here? This is incredibly obvious.
Dissonance you gave nothing but your personal opinion the same as Jack and Xander have been doing. What you don't say is how anyone can scoff at astrology when it was key to Jung deriving type, and MBTI followed suit? Now that's obvious. Don't you people read about this subject?
 

entropie

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Dissonance you gave nothing but your personal opinion the same as Jack and Xander have been doing. What you don't say is how anyone can scoff at astrology when it was key to Jung deriving type, and MBTI followed suit? Now that's obvious. Don't you people read about this subject?

I dont. Most of the time I use my empathy with people to get a wide spread
idea of why someone would have choosen a function system like that.

Maybe that is something you are both missing in your equations, Intuition.
 

nightning

ish red no longer *sad*
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I understand Mrs Briggs and her daughter, Mrs Myers, plagerised MBTI from Jung's, "Personality Types", for the purpose of inducting women into the war machine.

MBTI was not plagerised for a disinterested purpose. It was plagerised for the purpose of war fighting.

And war being inhuman, it is necessary to dehumanise those who fight by first reifying them.

And so, after the war is over, it lends itself to reifying the personality as a commodity for the consumer market.

MBTI reified the personality first for war fighting and now for commerce.

In both cases it reifies.
I didn't know you buy into the historical propaganda... Oh wait... where you the one to mention it in the first place? Forgive my lapse in memory.

History is the past... should we let the past dictate our present decisions? It seems unwise. Regardless of its intended purpose, I think we should evaluate MBTI as to whether it's useful or not... for our use in understanding and predicting behavior. I feel it has merits.

Oh and what are your thoughts on the comparison of MBTI with other personality measures like FFM?
 
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