Quote Originally Posted by gilligan87
Socionics has, in our context, been reduced from a personality theory to something on the level of a philosophical idealization of different ways that the brain can function. "My friend is a scientist, and loves to do empirical research and crunch numbers," says one person. A socionist responds "That has nothing to do with type. This person may be an SEI, for all we know."

My problem with socionics is that it isn't tied to anything. It doesn't predict ANYTHING if not behavior. I think it's been reduced, in our case, to VI and some very, very specific and, IMO, minor details about a person's personality that, in reality, have a minimal effect on how they interact with people. What exactly IS it that we are predicting if it's not sets of behavioral characteristics? It seems to be that the actual behaviors that are, indeed, connected to type are so narrow in their spectrum that there is little, if any, predictive power in Socionics any more. So what ARE we measuring?
It's impossible to predict behavior because people don't make decisions alone. There are always people who are responding similarly to environmental conditions and they will work together to reach a common solution in which each individual plays the role they feel most suited to. Therefore one can only predict the behavior of another person if they are facing similar problems and are working together to solve them, although even then only the direction of the behavior can be ascertained and rarely its specific form.

Socionics is an incomplete personal tool for studying relationships. Although it has no objective value, it is better than its alternatives. The problem isn't necessarily with socionics itself, but in the fact that its founder and torch bearer is dead. The problem is further complicated by her apparent emotional tie to belief that Einstein was her type, blinding her to his true nature. Even if she had not failed to perceive the crosstype phenomenon, the fact would still remain that the discipline is without a leader. Fields that are leaderless seldom produce further leaps forward in understanding. (just look at the Jungian movement's stagnation and infighting, and until the 1990s, physics)