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: edited AGAIN

[sarasa_cat]

Not all of it will ring true. <--- key observation.

There is a damn good reason why: there are many different combinations of how healthy-vs-destructive and aware-vs-unaware thinking will occur within one's cognitive function wheelhouse. Also, environmental factors and a wide variety of other personal factors will play in.

Individuality will always cause variation. The question is how strong the correlation is, assuming there exists a method for measuring correlation (something Dario Nardi looked into and, for whatever it was worth, he did find extremely high correlation in EEG brain patterns between people of the same type when performing a variety of activities in a lab, and close to random noise across all people regardless of type, which says a lot ... but his study was very preliminary, and used a small sample size but lots of EEG data per subject. Waiting for more replication, I guess?)

As for specific examples that different writers (or podcasts) give of phenomenon like Ni-Ti looping or Se grips can suffer from stereotyping either because they are trying to make their content easier to understand (!!!) or because they don't have a deep grasp and are just repeating what they have read. The idea is to understand the MECHANISM and then see if you have **repeating** behavior that fits into the pattern of that mechanism.

For instance, I appear to be close to biochemically immune from having unhealthy relationships with alcohol or recreational drugs. Yet, this is an example of Se grip behavior that many books and bloggers will give: someone in an Se grip getting completely fucked on drugs or alcohol. But the point is that *that* is a specific form of highly destructive Se behavior and Se grip could just as easily manifest as "putting way too much mental energy (almost to the form of exclusivity) into a highly regimented diet and gym routine" such that hours of one's life are taken over by Supreme Health(tm) iron pumping, triathloning, and precision caloric/macro-nutriant/micro-nutriant intake. Hehe. Is that Se grip or actualfax training for an upcoming performance in the olympics? You see what I mean?

The problem with so many of these fast and easy examples is that they skip over the theory and just go straight to ... stereotypes.