One feature of these personality taxonomies is that inevitably in the set of different categories designed to be of equal human value or worth, one or two categories are always discernably worse than the others.
How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
51–60 of 340 posts
Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
#52As a swede this is a bit embarrassing to me. I have a few friends who's bought into this completely, and of course bought the book. All without even a hint of critical thinking. It is hard to tell your friends they've been conned.
I can understand it to some extent. Here's someone, who claims he is a behavioral expert and scientist, and who offers a seemingly plausible simple method to understand yourself and other people, and how to use that method to efficiently interact and work with others. Who wouldn't want that?
Unfortunately the books are still sold. I've considered printing stickers that warns about the nonsense and sneak it on to copies in book stores. How else can we stop the proliferation of this junk?
Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
#53These types of things may not be science, but they are so popular and will always be popular because they are useful heuristics to make sense of the chaos of dealing with humans.
Exactly. That's why questionable MBTI/socionics are useful to people and Big-5 is not. And either of them are not real, actual 6-σ science anyway.
Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
#54Provocative title. More accurate, but less surprising would be "A significant portion of a population were fooled by a charlatan offering simple answers to complex questions". That wouldn't be as salacious though.
But I'm very happen with what VoF did. The book has still been a huge annoyance for years though, and I've seen personally workplace accomodations based on its idiocy.
But if I'm allowed to generalize a bit myself, I would say that it's not more people than are swayed daily by political facebook memes or fake internet "news" publications with superficially professional design, regardless of nation.
Critical thinking is hard, and takes a lot of time to process, and we're continuously hit with increasingly more information that it's impossible to deal with. I hope that people smarter than me can create tools and models to make it easier.
Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
#55I got this book as a Christmas present from my mom. Then I ran into the same argument about pseudoscience that we have each year...
I gave it as a Christmas gift two years ago. Picked it up because of the funny title, saw that it was backed up by "science" according to the back cover and bought it... just apologized for the crappy gift to my brother in law. We were all confused by the colors. I had a little bit of all colors. My mom used to be red but is now more of the other colors... it really is pretty useless. I still enjoy taking "personalit…
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Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
#56Couldn't help but check that it is rated 4.6/5 (113 reviews) in Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Surrounded-Idiots-Behavior-Effectivel... Excerpt from one of the top review.. The book really helps you to understand why 'blues' ask 100 questions, want to problem solve all the time, always ask for more information, and can be cold and distant instead of being emotional creatures. Yellows on the other hand are always day…
Hah, this reminds me of zodiac signs, which every single non-scientist female friend of mine seems to take very seriously (not sure about male friends since this topic seems to never come up). No wonder it sells.
Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
#57"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."
The Myers-Briggs corporate product is an interesting confirmation of 20th Century scientific method. With standard methodologies, reviewed and published by standard peer review processes, Myers-Briggs was shown to be useless before 1990. So science seems to work well. Nonetheless, the last time a company I worked for paid (and spent on employee time) for Myers-Briggs testing was 2017. Science works well, but corporate purchasing of consulting does not have such a good track record.
Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
#58I am more analytic than most of my friends. If you want to label that as "Blue" or "7" or "J", "Conscientiousness" or "Engineer", that's one way to represent the general classification. And it's useful, especially when used as some kind of mirror for reflection. Whether it's useful in sum across a population to answer specific questions like "Will this specific group of people work well together" is highly suspect. T…
> Categories, while a necessary first step to understanding, ultimately become a trap if that's all you understand people as.
And perhaps a trap for yourself too, if you find yourself saying things like "I could never do something like that, I'm a blue!"
Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Looks like it is not only Sweden but other places as well. As an American it’s a little reassuring to know that despite some economic advantages, the Swedes are also just a bunch of easily impressionable idiots.
What economic advantages?
not being ruled by a kleptocracy
Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
They might be heuristics, but how can they ever be useful? They can neither be used in the analysis of a person nor are they predictive...
Managers like them as they try to make sense of how their reports behave and work together, people they know but not really. Sounds like some people like them as a way to make sense of issues with their personal relationships. People outside yourself make decisions that are frequently confusing, and people like this sort of categorization to make sense of them.
People liking something doesn't mean they are actually useful, though. Some folks like fake medicine because they feel like they are doing something useful - even when we can prove that no, "memory water" isn't curing your cold. People like horoscopes for your same reasons - because people are confusing and some sort of categorization is a way to make sense to them.
It doesn't actually mean it is useful or even accurate in any way - it just means you are doing something. You could probably put the energy into managing the environment or better communication or coming to terms with "Other people are complicated".