Quote Originally Posted by mu4 View Post
I think so too, which is why I criticized him for it. It's not that the point he makes is wrong, it's that his actions are not scientific as he seems to be promoting but rather his actions are rooted in ethics and sentiment.

Socionics may be useless(subjective evaluation) to some on this forum, but it is often quite meaningful still to these individuals.

Socionics because it is rooted in personality, identity, and social designation is in the same domain of questions that humans grip with using philosophy, psychology, religion, art.

The same questions, "Who am I? What is one's place in the world? How can one be happy." are muddle thru in these topics. Somes answers obscure while others reveal and it is hard to determine which answer in which study is right.

Socionics is not a science, and one should not pretend it has scientific validity, but it also isn't a cult, astrology or magic either. The explanatory mechanisms are in line with cognitive science (brain, information processing, information preference) and the descriptions are psychological (Jung). There is no secret knowledge known to just a few or special techniques hidden behind a onerous paywall or indoctrination. This is as open a study as exists operating in a voluntary community.

Science also cannot produce satisfactory answers for many of the questions man asks and even if it could in time, human lives are short and we cannot wait.

I'm not going to go deeply into this because people have said this far better than I, I will leave some links.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm

I might have been a bit harsh on him out of frustration but you don't have to rely on only science to live your life, you also don't have to evaluate everything on the basis of some measure of useful/uselessness. It would be immeasurably more banal and stunted world without the subjective and inter-subjective facets of our world, sometimes beautiful and sometimes monstrous.

Well said. I think that socionics is very useful for addressing our need to understand our consciousness in real time, something which draws in the people that may eventually come to criticize it.

I think the criticism comes because while people experience life subjectively, socionics claims some sort of objectivity of the subjective life. This should be entirely open to criticism, although I think it should be done civilly. It really wouldn't be a big deal if typing was done for purely understanding oneself, but I have found many people using it to aggressively(and hastily) type people based from limited information because they strongly believe in the premise of pure types. I for one believe that one ought to have the freedom to relate to any subjective descriptions one can relate to. Why? For one, it's my subjective experience and no one else's. Two, because if I'm not honest with my experiences, I can't correctly identify my type, if it exists at all. If I can identify with descriptions that cross a few types and quadra, it makes me quite skeptical that there are such things as pure types. In fact it seems more like something you have to force yourself into than actually exists.

Its really quite annoying and irritating to see what happens to people on these types of forums. Basically, someone comes from the outside, says a few things about themselves and people jump to conclusions about their type. You end up with statements such as "you like nature and must be some Si type". What it does seem to be is a very social phenomenon, where people form little hierarchies based on stereotypes. They often type themselves and others without any sort of standard and many of these people are obsessed with who is really what pure type, almost to the point of paranoia, as seen by the number of MBTI INFJ videos that go on and on about all the INFPs that mistype as INFJs. They are often very condescending, elitist, and not at all objective.

Now I'm concerned with truth, whether it is about myself or the objective nature of the universe, but I can be a real fuck off too. I don't mean to criticize people's beliefs for the sake of it, but to understand what is and what isn't.

While its true the each person's brains has an innate cognitive structure(it must be true), it does not follow that Jung correctly identified what those cognitive structures are. I think he did give us a very good starting point though.

***edit: I think the people on typology forums tend to be more open minded than average and cool people, which is why I like to hang around.