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How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

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Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#251

Post by myhf »

lemagedurage wrote: post #50
INTPenis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBTI actually has 12 archetypes, hard to compare that with introvert and extrovert. I often reference being introverted but it's important to understand that it's a scale and everyone is somewhere on that scale. It's not binary. But it does help explain why I get tired from over exposure to strangers, but can go for hours in the company of family and close friends. And yeah I agree these things should only be used as…

MBTI has 16 archetypes, but they're all combinations of 4 letters / scales / dimensions, where 16personalities added one to that (assertive turbulent). I do believe it helped me find out about the differences of other people's internal worlds, but the journey did involve avoiding a lot of pitfalls and taking everything with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The 4th dimension is not orthogonal to the others, so maybe the true cardinality is closer to 12 than 16.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#252

Post by WAHa_06x36 »

fastball wrote: post #117
csours wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some/many Japanese believe that blood type determines a lot about your personality, and Americans believe in Myers-Briggs types, and I'm sure there are local equivalents everywhere else too, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I always thought of Myers-Briggs as being about identifying the things you are less comfortable with and learning to address them. It's about identification of tendencies, not blaming a Gremlin.

It is definitely 100% gremlin: https://digg.com/2015/myers-briggs-secret-history

Also, https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personali...

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#253

Post by nlstitch »

Miraste wrote: post #245
nlstitch wrote: post #145

Not to be the devils advocate here, but does the fact that there isnt any scientific proof proof it doesnt work? Not everything has to be tested and verified in a lab, right? Perhaps I am justifying myself though: I've had the DiSC traing THREE times now. Is it all just a lie? I was kinda hoping this article would show actual proof it doesnt work.

Tests like DiSC and Meyers-Briggs are hard to disprove because they make contradictory, non-falsifiable claims. This is part of what makes them appealing: there's something identifiable for everyone in most of the profiles, and stuff that doesn't fit is easy to dismiss. It's the same strategy that enables horoscopes and psychics. Don't feel bad for believing it--it's designed to be believable, rather than correct. If…

Thanks!

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#254

Post by WAHa_06x36 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #6

>"talk of colours from the infamous Myers-Briggs test, administered by less-respectable management consultants" // I think in the UK Myers-Briggs was fronted by "respectable" management consultants and was mainstream. Or perhaps no management consultants are respectable because they primarily seem to front the current fashionable pseudo-science?

Got it the second time.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#255

Post by AlanYx »

ncmncm wrote: post #165
fastball wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought of Myers-Briggs as being about identifying the things you are less comfortable with and learning to address them. It's about identification of tendencies, not blaming a Gremlin.

It has always struck me as odd when somebody insists Myers-Briggs has been "debunked". It asks a lot of questions about what amount to boundaries of your comfort zone. Of course as we age that zone changes, ideally, but sadly not always, by expanding. Naming various borders of your comfort zone is useful if you want to push them back. If M-B has a failing, it is that its advocates never seem to suggest that being dea…

"Debunked" is probably overstating it, but Myers-Briggs has been shown to have fairly significant statistical deficiencies and its predictive claims are largely pseudoscientific. It's not complete garbage, but there are personality trait models like Big Five and HEXACO that are more robust and have more research behind them, but even those are not as strong predictors as pop management literature makes them out to be.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#256

Post by NoodleIncident »

novok wrote: post #212
dgellow wrote: post #9

> · Red: dominant, driven, solution focussed. > · Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous > · Green: patient, considerate, nice > · Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal Damn. I spent so much of my time and energy pushing back exactly on this bullshit when I was young. That's part of the curriculum of mandatory courses I had to take during an apprenticeship in Switzerland. Expensive and mandatory courses paid by students…

Reminds me of the color themes of Magic the Gathering, replace yellow with white and add black. Red: Firey & high energy characters that act like that. Blue: Intelligent & 'meta'. Lots of 'wizards' with that kind of personality. Green: That might as well describe an Ent. Yellow/White: Nice extroverted people, with a dash of self-righteousness Black: Death and negativity.

This article has better short descriptions of the colors, and elaborates a lot on the traits each color can have, how they disagree, agree, can be combined, etc:

https://medium.com/s/story/the-mtg-color-wheel-c9700a7cf36d

White: Peace through order

Blue: Perfection through knowledge

Blue: Satisfaction through ruthlessness

Red: Freedom through action

Green: Harmony through acceptance

My favorite line in the article is probably that Green is the color of Chesterton's Fence; even though the field of software isn't very Green as a whole, you can still express conflicts and mindsets within that field using this color wheel. I'm definitely some combination of Green and Blue -- I want to see the ecosystem of kubernetes pods running smoothly, changes should have a really good justification, the only thing that matters is what does work, not what should work, etc.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#257

Post by Barrin92 »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #207

> The invocation of a personality Gremlin is one example of careless thinking. Am I supposed to accept this because it already makes sense, because Katz or Sumpter wrote it, because other people believe it, or because of research to back it up? I sympathize with all the so called foolish Swedes.

You're supposed to follow the argument in the article. The idea of invoking these colours as an explanatory tool is circular reasoning. You're taking a bunch of traits, call them blue, and then use that colour as an explanation for why you have the traits, when in fact you have just restated some behaviour using slightly different words.

it's like saying "the weather is bad because it rains". That's not an explanation for why the weather is bad, it's just the definition of what bad weather is.

When people are led to believe they have this or that trait because of some sort of colour schema they tend to believe that this classification is an explanation for their behaviour and has some sort of control or ontological meaning, which it has not. In reality, the behaviour is complex, dynamic, context-dependent and escapes easy classification. Which really should be obvious to anyone with a critical mind because human psychology is slightly more complicated than a test which has fewer colors than the power rangers.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#258

Post by Jamwinner »

vehementi wrote: post #115
dgellow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing the English article. I decided to share the french version because it has way more details (it's a huge phenomenon here), but that's for sure more interesting if people can actually read the content :)

NLP is or was also super popular in the "pick up artists" community

It was the loud minority, but damn were they smarmy.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#259

Post by erichocean »

watwut wrote: post #189
wayoutthere wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big part of it is that corporate HR types are trying to turn people into interchangeable cogs in the machine. But this ignores the richness of our experience -- even if the color model were both static and true, I'm willing to guess that the expression of those characteristics would vary widely from person to person. Better to just get to know people individually and talk to them about their desires, capabi…

> Better to just get to know people individually and talk to them about their desires, capabilities and needs. That does not scale. You cant do that reasonably with nuance with too many people. Moreover, someone who is on completely different position will never understand fully what programmer will talk about when talking about desires, capabilities and needs. This sort of thing needs to be discussed with more techn…

> That does not scale.

Maybe the problem is that we require businesses to scale in an anti-human way?

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#260

Post by RubberMullet »

achow wrote: post #138
achow wrote: post #2

Couldn'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…

Really bizarre that I now only see 26 ratings in the Amazon page, as opposed to 113 that I saw earlier. https://www.amazon.com/Surrounded-Idiots-Behaviour-Understan... Anyone know what is happening? Is that the sudden burst of traffic from HN triggered some kind of Amazon's fake review analysis and they took down bunch of reviews?

115 when logged in, 25 when logged out.
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