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Thread: I'm a non believer

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    Default I'm a non believer

    Being the INTP guy that I am, I just wanted to state that the field of socionics is frankly a waste of time. Perhaps I simply know too little about it- quite possibly as I had never heard the name before today. I am familiar with the Myers-Briggs type which this does seem related too.

    I have nothing but respect for this sites author- he really is a bright guy- but Socionics is only one step above astrology.

    My goal in starting this thread is not to convince anyone here they are wrong, only to start a discussion.

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    Please don't associate socionics with astrology now, astrology is not science, it's pop mythical crap. Socionics is science. We're not saying your personality has to do with the alignment of the planets and just pure make crap up, we say it has to do with your genes, and your fundamental way of metabolising the energy that comes in.

    How about this: Brushing socionics aside, do differences in personality exist? For normal people? Say theres a problem X, one group always seems to attack it from one of the sides, the other group attacks it from a completely different angle, and another group thinks the other groups are misunderstanding the problem itself.

    How about our stereotypes in American society? What about the 'shy girl' or the 'party animal'. The 'nerd' or the 'football player'. Why do these people seem to have personalities that can be very different from each other? Why do some people get along horribly no matter how hard they try and others have no problems with it?

    Warning: Unless you know for sure your type and other people's type, do not even look at the intertype relations

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    Good we agree that Astology is crap!

    I would argue that personality has to do with your genes and the enviroment you're in. I'm not sure what "your fundamental way of metabolising the energy that comes in" means but it does sound like mythical crap

    Do different personalities exist? Yes.
    Are there 16 basic personalities? No.

    The shy girl and the party animal many times are the same person depending on the circustances. Even your test warns people not to think of their work personality but instead their real one. I notice I behave differently depending on the people I'm with and the situation. Do we go on to figure out our work Socionics type, our dating type, our driving type? Then you add in the conscience and unconsciene type and whether your a stong I or weak E before long you have 6 billion presonality types. I just don't see the use.

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    Default I am a believer

    Being the INFP guy that I am I just wanted to state that Socionics is currently a hodge podge mixture of a new age psychoreligion, social parlour geme and just a bit of hard science. Socionics sells duality relations like the latest Harlequin novel, many type descriptions read like a horoscope column and much of what passes as research in Socionics is little more than empty speculation.

    And yet I am quite convinced that the types are "real", not just social constructions created by the tests but also permanent differences in the way our brains work. And eventually many aspects of socionics will prove an invaluable tool to mainstream psychologists, matchmakers, marriage counselors, HR managers, casting directors, psychohistorians: you name it. But we are not in the business of setting up "a Church of Socionics" and a few Doubting Thomases could provide a healthy dose of skepticism: I for one do occasionally find myself rather too convinced by my beliefs and fail to see the conflicting evidence until pointed out to me. It should do no harm to hang around and check for new posts, there will be some pretty interesting stuff coming up soon...

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    Quote Originally Posted by abburdlen
    Good we agree that Astology is crap!

    I would argue that personality has to do with your genes and the enviroment you're in. I'm not sure what "your fundamental way of metabolising the energy that comes in" means but it does sound like mythical crap

    Do different personalities exist? Yes.
    Are there 16 basic personalities? No.

    The shy girl and the party animal many times are the same person depending on the circustances. Even your test warns people not to think of their work personality but instead their real one. I notice I behave differently depending on the people I'm with and the situation. Do we go on to figure out our work Socionics type, our dating type, our driving type? Then you add in the conscience and unconsciene type and whether your a stong I or weak E before long you have 6 billion presonality types. I just don't see the use.
    Yes I realize "your fundamental way of metabolising the energy that comes in" sounds mythical and stupid. I'm the first one to throw out a theory when I see fundamental flaws in it. I'm a big skeptic myself. What I meant was, it's based on The Theory of Informational Metabolism by a Polish psychiatrist who actually did work with patients. Who saw people day after day and found simularities and differences between them. Jung did the same thing. So did Oldham. Several psychoanalysists who saw patients every day came to the conclusion that people are fundamentally different in the way they think. This is not taking things out of the sky, it's assumed based on chemical and physical processes inside of your brain and the differences between them. IE using your left or right brain more, using your frontal or parietal lobe more, there have been studies doing research on their correlation with personality aspects.
    There are several good uses for socionics. A. Understanding yourself and accepting your traits as your own, preventing neurosis from trying to change your personality for others or society. B. Recognizing other people do not think and value them same way you do, that if you have differences, it doesn't mean one is wrong and one is right, they simply see different problems or try to fix them in different ways.
    and so on.
    can anyone help here?

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    They say in Socionics, that socionics type INTp is the Critic. They say that this type has a talent to see flaws in theorys and to point them out.
    Semiotical process

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    I know The MBTI and Socions are not the same thing but. please read ]this article

    "Several studies have shown that when retested, even after intervals as short as five weeks, as many as 50 percent will be classified into a different type."

    And to taiwan, I'll read up on Informational Metabolism.

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    I did not mean non-believer as you may have thought I meant it, I am not on a religious or philosophical mission. Calling me new-age is probablly the worst insult I can think of...

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    Quote Originally Posted by male21
    They say in Socionics, that socionics type INTp is the Critic. They say that this type has a talent to see flaws in theorys and to point them out.
    Isn't that like we Libras don't belive in astrology

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    Quote Originally Posted by abburdlen
    I know The MBTI and Socions are not the same thing but. please read ]this article

    "Several studies have shown that when retested, even after intervals as short as five weeks, as many as 50 percent will be classified into a different type."

    And to taiwan, I'll read up on Informational Metabolism.
    Do you know the statistics on taking the SAT? They say never to go back and change your answers, as more times than not you'll change a right answer to a wrong one than vice versa. People seem to do something weird when they take a test twice.

    I would suggest there definately is a problem with typing, but not with the static types. It's hard to answer as you can answer with what you imagine to be or with what you want to be instead of what you are.

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    Quote Originally Posted by metaiwan
    I would suggest there definately is a problem with typing, but not with the static types. It's hard to answer as you can answer with what you imagine to be or with what you want to be instead of what you are.
    That might be the heart of my problem with this. What is the difference between what you are and what you think you are?

    I'm just a behaviorist. You are what you do.

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    Quote Originally Posted by metaiwan
    I did not mean non-believer as you may have thought I meant it, I am not on a religious or philosophical mission. Calling me new-age is probablly the worst insult I can think of...
    Me?

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    It's just I don't like being dismissed as having new-age beliefs without having them examined first. If I do have new age beliefs, shoot me in the face, because I hate that mystical hippy crap with the dancing and the astrology and the whatever else. Now back to what we were saying.

    Question: WHY are you are behaviorist? What makes you have that opinion? Why would some people be inclined to think that way and not others?

    Now I would say that you are inclined to act certain ways. For instance, and introvert will eventually need to get alone to process information, while an extravert will have to go out and communicate with the outside world.

    Also, socionics theory says that each type has a hidden agenda and weakest spot, and these can be different. speaking about this spot is something you will NOT do and can't LEARN to do. do you think that all behavior can be learned and copied or we are inclined to certain behavior from the start?

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    I apoligize if you took my cristisms personally. I do not now nor have I ever thought you were a flaky person. Quite the opposite, you seem to be a quite rational person. If you hadn't been involved in this I would have dismissed it out of hand but here we are...

    Why am I a behaviorist? From my limited understanding of psychology it seems to be the most accurate method of predicting behavior. For me a science requires repeatable experiments and introspection doesn't lend itself well to experimentation.

    I agree that people are different from each other. We each have different values, strengths and weaknesses. Watching my own children grow I suspect much behavior is not learned. But how does it follow from that that there are 16 basic types of personalities.

    Part of the problem is I don't know enough specifics to make a coherant case. Before proceeding I will do further reading of Socionics

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    To metaiwan
    Sorry, apparantely I double posted again, if you have the patience I'd be grateful to see the evidence of my folly removed - and should I be foolish enough to repeat my mistake: do not hesitate.

    I am not too fond of that New-Age dancing either, for some reason I seem to keep pumping into Hare Krishna recruiters on a regular basis, I know INFPs are supposed to be some kind of wannabe hippies but it just does not do anything for me.

    Still on socionics, I think it could kind of work like that everybody does have free will but in a sense some kind of behaviour just comes naturally whereas other styles may demand a lot of effort and feel horribly stressful. In a sense humans are animals and not all that different from all the other apes. Perhaps Socionics is like an attempt to descripe our natural insticts, what kind of pleasure/pain feedback loops have evolved to predispose us to behaviours which might have lead to higher reproductive succes during our evolutionary history, or whatever, at least it is fun to speculate and debate.

    The thing about Socionics is that I feel like I can never quite be sure about anything: even when I feel highly confident I have typed someone accurately others may well have reached a totally different conclusion: for example on the thread on relations of benefit we ended up typing Madonna: ESTP, INTP or something else? Join the discussion.

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    Indeed, one's confidence in their knowledge in such a subject leads one astray, as one comes to the conclusion through not a standard, objective list, but through a far more subjective thought pattern, but of course the accuaracy of one's conclusion is equal to the accuaracy one's knowledge, but with Socionics, these conclusions also force one to subjectively reason using this knowledge, thus further construing the data one has previously recieved. But, of course, the knowledge one has of Socionics is not based on a scientific bases, or at least, the information presented to us in English has yet to be accompanied with studies to prove these conjectures, thus the complexity of reasoning with subjective data plagues this subject, and all other subjects which may have their reason founded on such thought patterns.

    Although, what we do to get around this complexity, for better or for worse, is to assume the legitimacy of the data, and if our assumptions are incorrect, than so will our reasoning, but what can one do but reason this way?

    Sorry, I appologize if I rambled a bit, and my thoughts came out a bit muddled, but I think I got my point accross. Stating the obvious is harder than it looks.

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    I am just not sure how much real progress the Russians have made in Socionics. It seem to me that there are many different schools os Socionics with often conflicting opinions. Even the basic issue of typing people correctly seems to be still as disputed as it perpetually is in MBTI. There is plenty of data available but how much of it can be taken at face value? Do any of the theories have any predictive value?

    It could well be that Socionics is not going to make much progress untill hard science catches up with the wild claims of the eastern mystics of "the Church of Socionika" and we can actually see real evidense on how personality types and differences in the function of human nervous system correlate.

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    Okay I admit it.
    While I still consider myself a non-believer (but I don't value belief much at all in anything) I move myself out of the highly skeptical classication to skeptical/curious. Some of the descriptions here hit just a bit too close to home.

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    But right now though, I believe, beyond that which we are have theoretical, or perhaps hypothetical, knowledge of in an uncontrolled enviornment, we cannot know the practical application of the socionic model to the individual, especially with all the variances within the system. Such a system is too hard to mesh out and filter out the extraneous from the essential, due to it's introspective nature. All conclusion must be treated as highly tentative, and therefore inapplicable to firmly modeling the behaviour of another. Only through neurobiology will we be able to accuarately model, if it can only be done with extremely esoteric knowledge not readily available, human behaviour to a large extent.

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    "They say in Socionics, that socionics type INTp is the Critic. They say that this type has a talent to see flaws in theorys and to point them out."

    don't be alarmed, all russian socionics forums have at least one INTp trying to prove that Socionics is false.

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    Quote Originally Posted by abburdlen
    Quote Originally Posted by metaiwan
    I would suggest there definately is a problem with typing, but not with the static types. It's hard to answer as you can answer with what you imagine to be or with what you want to be instead of what you are.
    That might be the heart of my problem with this. What is the difference between what you are and what you think you are?

    I'm just a behaviorist. You are what you do.
    So if I think I am an eight foot giant, would I be able to place the ball inside the basket like Jordan?

    We agree that you are what you do. But your psychological type isn't who you are. It is a factor that effects who you are, whether you like it or not.

    An artist has to know the materials he is working with in order to enjoy maximum freedom in self-expression. A person has likewise to know the factors that limit his free will, in order to overcome them (or use them to his advantage).

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    But how does one know the difference between what they BELIEVE their psychological type is and what they ARE?

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    Quote Originally Posted by MysticSonic
    But how does one know the difference between what they BELIEVE their psychological type is and what they ARE?
    Because good tests ask not what you think you are, but how you usually behave in certain situations. Actions speak louder than words.

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    Quote Originally Posted by LK
    "
    don't be alarmed, all russian socionics forums have at least one INTp trying to prove that Socionics is false.
    Heck, it may not even be good enough to be false.

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    also the more questions there are, the more accurate the test. a person may answer some individual questions incorrectly. but overall patterns will emerge. it's a numbers game.

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    Quote Originally Posted by abburdlen
    Quote Originally Posted by LK
    "
    don't be alarmed, all russian socionics forums have at least one INTp trying to prove that Socionics is false.
    Heck, it may not even be good enough to be false.
    well, why than is your behavior so typical of the INTp (the Critic) type description? Actions speak louder than words my dear.

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    Socionics is just a Theory. Every Theory has elements of truth and elements that are false. Hopefully we'll have a better theory to explain functional types. But for now Socionics is the closest thing to truth that we have. Every Theory is a sublimation of the next.

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    abburdlen, if you are going to use a quote, make sure it is in context. things make more sense in context. see my sig.
    zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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    "An expression, which stands for a known thing, is a sign, and never a symbol. A symbol is alive only so long as it is “pregnant” with meaning. Once the meaning has been born out of it - the expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better then the symbol - it becomes a conventional sign for associations that are more completely or better known elsewhere. (Or it retains only a historical significance)

    Any psychic product, if it is the best possible expression at the moment for a fact as yet unknown or only relatively known, may be regarded as a symbol, provided that we accept it as the expression for something that is only divined, and not yet clearly conscious.

    Since every scientific theory contains a hypothesis, and is therefore an anticipatory description of something still essentially unknown, it is a symbol." - C. G. Jung

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    don't be alarmed, all russian socionics forums have at least one INTp trying to prove that Socionics is false.
    So, am I the only INTp trying to prove Socionics true?
    Binary or dichotomous systems, although regulated by a principle, are among the most artificial arrangements that have ever been invented. -- William Swainson, A Treatise on the Geography and Classification of Animals (1835)

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    as far as I know Cone...count it as a blessing
    zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cone
    don't be alarmed, all russian socionics forums have at least one INTp trying to prove that Socionics is false.
    So, am I the only INTp trying to prove Socionics true?
    You are an INTp with an accented Activational Social Introverted Feeling. That's why you are able to restrain your inner critic. Just a hypothesis.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cone
    don't be alarmed, all russian socionics forums have at least one INTp trying to prove that Socionics is false.
    So, am I the only INTp trying to prove Socionics true?
    Cone,
    My observations:

    INTPs can be a lot like INTJs in some ways. I think your interest in Socionics is due to your age. Both INTJs and INTPs seem to start building "systems" of empirical knowledge that stays with them their entire life. Mine was computers, and a few years ago became socionics, too. I think (according to Socionics) INTPs tend to have these systems of people and pesonality watching, making them abborhent(sp) to Socionics since it seems to generalize too much and will probably conflict with their preestablished systems which they use to predict behavior. I suppose both INTJs and INTPs would not accept Socionics if it conflicted with their built up systems of knowledge...although(pure conjecture) I think INTJs may be more willing to accept Socionics even if they are older due to the attractiveness of the big - element of information metabolism. This is just my guess...you act just like an INTP yet accept Socionics to the degree that I do...drawing a line between information metabolism and personality...

    What do you think?

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    INTPs can be a lot like INTJs in some ways
    a saving grace for intps

    sarcasm intended

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