Quote Originally Posted by TJay View Post
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.
yes, i think these are valid criticisms. a difference i have here is related to the bolded: what you describe in these paragraphs i see as a problem related more to some people's application of socionics, not so much of socionics theory itself. i see these things as being distinct, though often conflated. i don't think using/studying/applying socionics must necessarily lead to the kinds of conclusions some people make - using the theory in the way that you are describing (i.e. overly strict, unrealistic categorizations.) but it often does happen this way - and as you noted, not just with socionics, but other typologies as well. socionics is a (unique) theory and it has the limitations of one (whether it's a "good" theory or not is up for debate), and it's when people ignore/forget this that this kind of stuff happens.