The Anna Karenina Principle and MBTI type confusion

[sarasa_cat]

It is hard to explain my mixed feelings about MBTI ... I find it useful until I do not and there are so many ways in which it is not useful plus there is so much MBTI garbage littering the planet.

That said, something struck me earlier today -- The Anna Karenina Principle and how it applied (to some extent) to MBTI, and that became the seed for a 4500 word essay on Tumblr.

https://sarasa-cat.tumblr.com/post/183238307477/the-anna-karenina-principle-and-mbti-type

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Comments

Re: ...this is such a can of worms. Can. Of. Worms.

[thehungrycity]

I like your description of the tertiary and 4th functions as teenager and toddler respectively ;) It makes a lot of sense though, especially when considered in the context of their environment. I have started listening to some of the personality hacker podcast (specifically on the loops right now, because that is really speaking to me), and there is just so much to this theory. So many levels.

We used MBTI and the HBDI (http://www.hbdi.com/HBDI-book/c/) models when I was in the public service... mostly they were used as a way of learning more about yourself and the people you work with so that you can get along better, but I understand that sometimes they can be used to screen people in or out of certain professions, which is just all kinds of wrong.

Re: ...this is such a can of worms. Can. Of. Worms.

[sarasa_cat]

All kinds of wrong: Yeah. I need to find that podcast that interviewed people who were subjected to the Wrong(tm).

The personality hacker team makes a repeated point of saying "we are into these models *because* they support personal development" and "we like all sorts of models that can be used for personal development, but use them (pragmatically) ONLY to the extent they are useful" ... and I suspect their reasoning is very much in resistance to the Wrong(tm).

Mbti-notes.tumblr.com makes a point of stating exactly where they stand against the Wrong(tm).

The toddler and pre-teen observation is from the personality hacker crew. My one beef with their content is how their verbiage plays fast and loose with Jung's concepts but, as an inroad, it is a good place to start once one unpacks their own biases based on who they are.

MBTI-notes is very dense and difficult to grok because they often assume the reader has knowledge in psychology, Jung, and philosophy. It takes multiple reads to realize that they are often using terms in very technical, very precise ways but once that realization hits (and you understand the language), they are a wealth of information compiled from many sources respected in the mbti world, plus their own spin from via their experiences.