MBTI is bullshit, and we all know it.
"Perception involves all the ways of becoming aware of things, people, happenings, or ideas. Judgment involves all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived. If people differ systematically in what they perceive and in how they reach conclusions, then it is only reasonable for them to differ correspondingly in their interests, reactions, values, motivations, and skills."
“Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).”
-This is a benal platitude. Where exactly is the separation between inner & outer worlds? Is my inner dialogue, responding to internal and external stimuli the internal world? (most of which is unknown to the conscience mind and directly out of its control. We don’t control how electrons move through sodium channels for example and can not exist without emotional interpretation and previous experience conditioning). Individuals differ in perception because of the differences in interests, reaction, values, motivations and vice versa. We exist in a bio-feedback loop with the world, with our perceptions of it, and with our; experiences, interests, reactions, values, motivations, and skills. The system of perception is, in and of itself, partitioned because this is the way in which we think.
There are things we perceive that we do not register/remember/ponder that effect and change our interests....etc. This is the effect of advertisement, to alter behavior/perception. They spend money because it works and yet when I read overly scientific MBTI-esque personality bullshit I never see it weighed into the equation. “The individual answered so and so, but this is more reflective of conditioning from Taco Bell commercials than the individual being crititcal aware of their own awareness.” Which is the basic assumption of these sort of tests. How do we measure how much of the “individual” appears in the individuals answer and how much of it is due to Pavlovian-social condition. Never is this touched on outside the humanities/linguistics departments.
It seems to me that if humans are capable of both “extraversion” & “introversion” (whatever it is that those describe) then there is something to gain in practicing both. It’s increasing optionality, exponential v. linear. Freedom of choice would mean knowing when to choose to be which, based on unmovable axioms of self. One’s “sense of duty”, be it to truth, equality, God, development of self, or whatever other strange concept the human Ape typically/atypically can construct and follow. Because ultimately, they are intrinsically strange. What is chaos for the fly is home for the spider.
-All we are is internal world. Advanced enough science could stimulate neurons and create “artificial worlds” inside our heads in experiments that would be to us, equivocally real. Maybe there is room to debate between empirical and observably real but to the observer in the experiment the two would be the same. This touches on another great point, which I think the MBTI test neglects to account for, and that is that perception makes us all deeply self-centered. The world as you know it is happening in front of you, behind you, to the left and right of you. And it’s pretty much the same for all of us. The center of our own little universes, empirically alone. This basic human self-centeredness is rarely discussed. & More rarely is it considered in creating model of human behavior.
-This self-centered self, from which we are inseparable, makes the case for “stoicism” and “respect.” Let me begin with respect. This is the strongest tool we have against our default setting of being grossly self-centered. Respect means to “look again.” To check our blind certainty; to take the things we are most certain, bracket what we think we know, and try to find ways to disprove our position. The point of respect is not to look again and find all the cases in which you are correct, which is called confirmatory bias, but to find all the ways in which you are deluded. For it is a common pattern in my life that the things I am absolutely certain about, turn out to be completely and utterly childish and wrong. It’s not that they are childish, it’s that they are my default setting. Confirmatory bias isn’t an intrinsic penetrative human trait, it’s a consequence of not having classical respect. A symptom with a cure that has less to do with capacity to think than it does with the choice of what and how to think.
This lends credibility to stoicism, not that it ever had to. Thales of Miletus did more than plenty to test the credibility of this philosophy. I say that the noble traits of respect & stoicism go hand in hand. A stoic is someone aware of this self-centeredness and the accompanying hubris. They are aware of the possible unknown unknowns. A stoic would be described by this MBTI as an introvert but that does no justice to the actual belief system. The introversion is a consequence of a more rigorous understanding of the exterior world (as observed by the observer, inseparable from experience and self). Plus stoic, as introvert, can choose when to disband his belief in quiet reflection and know when to act and be extroverted. This is what it means to act honorably (honor v. virtue) and it is in the irony (dissonance between virtue & honor) of this disbandment that is the source of honor of the choice.
Classical man understood this irony as the source of a beautiful life. Classical man feared an inglorious death while the modern man fears death. The willingness to sacrifice is what’s sacred. All while soaked in cool calm irony. To kill your opponent was the give them a glorious death, wouldn’t letting them die peacefully with no glory, feeble and insane with age, be the greater punishment? But it was having a stake in the game. To either be glorified or become glorified. Hammurabi’s code, section “liability.” They governed in such a way that everyone had something to lose in acting (in what they perceived to be) an unethical way.
David Foster Wallace, in “Signifying Rappers”, comments that “though rhyme’s absence today doesn’t guarantee ‘good serious poetry’ its irony-free presence, today, ensures Hallmark-caliber doggerel.”
Just as these modern tests lack any contradictions, or structuring such that irony would be possible, they ensure nothing more than doggerel.
more to follow...(because I hate this fucking test)
-Prophet$
