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Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

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271–280 of 291 posts

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#271
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness. And that's fine - but you might as well use astrology.

The difference being that these colors are based on character traits and questions being answered, not on the position of celestial bodies. And I'm saying they proved useful to me, I hope they proved useful to those I applied my insights to as well, I think so. Tfa also does not state the colors are complete bs, it mostly objects to the Thomas Erikson not being educated properly. It does not state any damage being do…

But many many of the users of Astrology will also swear that the results have proved useful to them and those around them. It provides a space where users can think about their character traits and what is important to them. "Am I a typical Libra? Really?". That doesn't mean it has any scientific basis.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#272
Human minds demand coherent explanations and the book supplies it. The book supplies conjectures that “feel” right and the many readers, well, who have the time and skills to prove them. The soft science (of psychology) is hard and to generalize findings from a situation or controlled experiment environment will be fraught with errors.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#273
post #49

Scandinavian society gives a lot of airtime to "radical" intellectuals talking bullshit about things outside their field of expertise. Bjørn Lomborg was a hipster economist who denied man-made climate change and had an embarrassing amount of clout in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg

Lomborg never denied man-made climate change. Though he certainly was a controvercial Voice in the debate. The reason was however that he challenged key predictions and strongly critized the proposed solutions as being cost ineffective.

But it’s true that those who opposed him tried to paint his criticism as a if it had been denial because that’s a strawman that is easier to argue against.

If someone comes out saying “climate change is man made and unless we do something the Oriana going to boil away in 2 years, our only option is to start throwing ice cubes into the ocean!” Then it’s perfectly resonable to argue that the prediction is wrong, and that even if it was accurate the proposed solution isn’t cost effective and that better solutions exist, that doesn’t mean you are arguing against the main premis of manmade climate change.

Now the meat of the debate around Lomborg is really if his predictions stack up against the predictions he criticized.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#274
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people at my employer are primarily green or blue. They are not. They are like everyone, impatient and loving, violent and helpful, worried and self-assured. The article is very clear that what seems to matter is CONTEXT and we all can understand it. I'll explain patiently to my kid something I'd literally tear a new one for a senior colleague. So no your colleagues don't have personality colors, but the organ…

I get where you’re coming from, sure you can’t project a human character onto 2 axes. But still this is all “to a degree”. I’ll never see my sweet silent coworker literally tear someone a new one in any context. Moreover, aren’t you just admitting that the colors are useful when remaining in a certain context? Sure, don’t take them home or to the gym but otherwise…

Well I think the problem with colors is they mean nothing well defined. It could somehow oppose extrovert and introvert for instance while Im extrovert with my close teammates but introvert with the traders yelling every second on the floor so what am I, am I even "something" personality wise, should I choose ?

I'm just worried we build little boxes and then assume we cant learn to speak publicly, explain things clearly, take the point of view of a client, resist clearly negative proposals under the pretense we're color blue instead of color purple :s

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#275
post #137

I have yet to read the whole article, but I got too excited when I got to these parts[0] and had to write a quick comment first. This concept as described reminded me immediately of a book I read as a teenager, called Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_Kingdom It is about the country being broken up into four sectors based on the four humors: red, green, yellow, and blue. Scannin…

> clients were considering leaving their partners because, “I can’t possibly live with a yellow person”...'; I remember hearing similar comments from Japanese friends once they learned their boyfriend/girlfriend's blood group. (Personality tests based on blood groups are huge there).

Its just confirmation bias in relationships. If a person really wanted to stay with their SO, they would be saying “omg, our personalities are so incompatible on paper, but we’re just so great together despite that”

But since they want to leave and can’t find a good reason or don’t feel that they can stand by whatever reasoning they have, it becomes “We have to break up because you’re yellow and I’m red” rather than: “we have to break up because I’m shallow and your body doesn’t look like it did when we met” or “we have to break up because after you got fired you haven’t been able to spend as much money on me”. Etc.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yoga means many things. There are systems that are developed over hundreds, if not thousands of years, which are systematically designed to elevate certain things in the practicioner, it's just not stretching, but can contain many very specific movements and breath techniques that open up certain channels in the body that would be hard to work with otherwise. Just wanted to clarify that a bit ..

I was referring to the most common Western-familiar forms of yoga. I'm not sure what "channels" would refer to materially - I'm of the opinion that effective techniques were discovered by trial and error and then religious explanations were applied to them, but there's nothing supernatural going on.

Well, I dont know either, I've practiced kundalini yoga for a long time, and read about the subject also, in many of the lineages there are stories of the original founder of some of the different types of yogas have received the information directly as some sort of "downloads", like from a higher place of existence or being, not just through trial and error.

There is also the story of Shiva being the first yogi, which one telling can be read here: https://isha.sadhguru.org/yoga/history-of-yoga/the-first-yog... .. you know, but these are of course stories, who knows how they originated.

Still, the yogis and holy men in India were considered to be like scientists today, studying the technology of the human beings, so these stories and things passed on are not just random findings but careful studying of the inner technologies on how we operate as humans.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#277
post #205

I see a lot of so-called software experts fall into the exact same category as the author of that book... believing themselves to be experts just because they worked in the field for a while, despite having no scientific training, or any relevant training for that matter, no serious studies backing up whatever they promote, nothing except for a lot of gut feeling and on-the-job "hands-on knowledge", exactly as the au…

Doctors are essentially useless after graduating medical school and only reach professional proficiency after running the gauntlet of years of intense hands-on medical residency training (where there are more mistakes made than is generally polite to admit). Ask a doctor about this, literally any doctor.

But how many doctors skip med school and just go straight to get hands-on experience?

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#278
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I found the Enneagram tremendously helpful. Why do you dislike it? I guess people can abuse it really easily, but I feel like it helped me to realize who I am in this world.

The basis for the numbers are really no different than the color-codings here, and the analysis of why they all tend to be circular reasoning. "I act like a red because I'm a red" is similar to "I act like an Enneagram 4 because I'm a 4." It might be useful for introspection ("I identify with feelings this model gives to 'reds' or a '4w3' "), but it's not a scientific or testable prediction about the way people act i…

I agree. Circular reasoning along with self-fulfilling prophecies are definitely an issue. I still like it for introspection and realizing that other people have different "mind structures", whatever they might be.

> it's not a scientific or testable prediction about the way people act in the world.

The problem is that there is probably no scientific or testable prediction about the complexity of humans. Psychology itself seems not very scientific, so people rely on their intuition (as they should) to understand other people. However that leads to the problem of "X also wants Y, because I want Y", which from my experience is just not true at all. Humans have very different interests and goals. So these models creep up to account for that.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#279
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The INTP thing is MBTI type, and although it's widely derided, it's pretty strongly correlated with the much more respectable Big Five personality traits[0]. It's not 100% bullshit, since knowing it tells you a little bit about how someone will act. I do agree that cutting someone out of your life solely due to a personality test is putting the cart before the horse, regardless of how scientifically rigorous it is. […

Nope, still bullshit. It's not science to make up a bunch of stuff and look for confirmation after. (Hence there are no "in defense of" articles.)

Whether it's bullshit depends on what you mean by bullshit, and I think it's less useful to argue about ambiguous definitions than to more clearly state a position. Knowing MBTI lets you make guesses about someone's personality that are a lot better than chance, as opposed to knowing their star sign or blood type.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#280
post #12

I'm not a psychologist but this sentence: """Modern evidence-based methods in behavioural science adopt the ground principle that people’s behavior mainly depend on context.""" doesn't have any source to back it up and is opposed to what I have read about the introvert/extrovert divide which seems to be more genetic than context dependent for example. And those are character traits that directly shape behavior (I'd r…

Interestingly enough this exact phrase resonated with my personal experience deeply. I always found these personality categorization quite lacking. The most obvious one was introversion/extroversion. I'm a pretty introverted person in larger groups of unfamiliar people, but very extroverted in small intimate groups. Similar, but less obvious, situations and contrasts exist for basically all ostensibly opposite personality traits. The extro/introverted one also seems quite common (think people saying "I'm reserved at first but open up..."). So that context matters seems very intuitive to me.
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