Reinin dichotomies

[Creepy-bg]

I know people love their Reinin dichotomies, but I think it's important for everybody (both new and those who were here at the time that should remember) to know what AWOL Russian socionics buddy Dmitri Lytov had to say on the matter back in the day. Now obviously his words are just the words of one guy on the internet but the truth of the matter here is that his understanding of socionics was much closer to the source, both personally and linguisiticaly (a native speaker of Russian and as a translator by profession quite proficient in English as well).

My own personal opinion (gathered from my 35 years life experience and watching the endless round and round discussions and debates on this stuff) is that while perhaps the the dichotomies occasionally describe the roughest of generalizations about the types, they are very very weak constructs. People IRL act contrary and inconsistant with respect to them more than enough to render them practically meaningless for typing, incites into thinking and IM, and whatever other purposes people come up with for them here. The Reinin dichotomies are one of the greatest engines of confirmation bias that I've ever observed in this community and I believe that their ability to sidetrack, confuse, and outright distort a socionics understanding infinitely outweighs any vague "incites" they may provide.

I'm posting this not as a appeal to authority or to spark any sort of discussion that I'll be taking part in (of course you're free to ramble on between each other about it). I'm just summoning from the depths of the forum the opinion of a genuinely solid socionics practitioner, which has been lost in time to the point of being practically non-existant for anybody who's joined within the last two to three years. It just so happens that his opinion very much agrees and backs up my own understanding and experience. Theoretically, hell maybe even mathematicly and logically, the Reinin dichotomies may seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread... but in reality they suck huge sweaty balls

In the words of Aushra Augusta herself, "Reinin's criteria are crap, it was a wrong hypothesis".


dichotomies of Reinin (06-25-2005)

All these Reinin's dichotomies are one great mistake. They have been obtained wrongly, and they cannot improve typing.
I avoided placing a special section about them in the English section of my site, but if you have automatic translators, you can read about them in the Russian section:
http://socioniko.narod.ru/ru/1.begin/reinin-priz.html

Statics and Dynamics in Quadras (04-28-2005)

It is sorry for me to say, but the criterion Static-Dynamic, as well as other so-called Reinin's criteria, is just one of myths of the early socionics.
At that time socionics was made by enthusiasts only, and many "discoveries" have been made just by the force of a quill, or by observation of very small statistics (10, 12, 15 people). In such conditions, people saw some "ghosts" which they perceived as reality and even invented some logical schemes to explain them.

Descriptions of these so-called Reinin's criteria are much contradictory. First and foremost, each of them contradicts to descriptions of particular types.

And finally, big statistics does not confirm but rather disapproves the existence of these reinin's criteria, including this one, Static-Dynamic.

...

As for static/dynamic in socionics, it does not work, whatever description is proposed Reinin himself did not propose any descriptions of his criteria, they were proposed by Aushra Augusta, but later in 1990 she said (verbatim): "Reinin's criteria are crap, it was a wrong hypothesis".

...

[implied]

My own personal opinion (gathered from my 35 years life experience and watching the endless round and round discussions and debates on this stuff) is that while perhaps the the dichotomies occasionally describe the roughest of generalizations about the types, they are very very weak constructs. People IRL act contrary and inconsistant with respect to them more than enough to render them practically meaningless for typing, incites into thinking and IM, and whatever other purposes people come up with for them here. The Reinin dichotomies are one of the greatest engines of confirmation bias that I've ever observed in this community and I believe that their ability to sidetrack, confuse, and outright distort a socionics understanding infinitely outweighs any vague "incites" they may provide.

i actually agree with you on a lot of this, in the sense that they tend to confuse/muddle things more often than not and are seemingly somewhat relied upon too heavily as a solid method of typing. fwiw i reininize as many types. my own opinion is that they're "pretty" albeit generally useless.

[marooned]

I don't like the reinin dichotomies because I don't know how to peg myself into one or the other of most of them. I find them unhelpful. I do think they have a value... I'm just not sure how significant of one that is.

[FDG]

I find some of them to be consistently useful, some others not to be particularly useful.

[redbaron]

Interesting!