My Case for Socionics

[Dalek Caan]

1st: I may not respond for awhile, since I'm leaving for a trip soon. just fyi.


So I don't think you really have to make it scientific to know it's real or prove its relatable to reality or anything like that.

I mean introvert/extrovert is pretty basic. One relates to the subjective internalized state of being and the other to an externally based and objective state of being. That people focus on the inner world more than the outer or outer more than the inner (or even have a life where they make good use of both) isn't something that needs to be studied. It just encapsulates two ways of being with the world. It's like the result of two opposing philosophical ideas. It's too simple to falsify or deny because it encapsulates the most basic ways of being.

From that you have to describe the different ways of internalizing or externalizing reality. Jung thought there were really only two dimensions to this, namely a rational and irrational dimension, which becomes intuition and sensing and thinking and feeling. At its most basic, this also encapsulates all philosophical notions of the world because it deals with all irrational and rational ways of being.

With the irrational, intuition involves all philosophical notions of abstracting reality, whereas sensing is all about the immediate and obvious or what comes to us naturally through our immediate sense of being. These things do not require reason or logic or any kind of structured idea or thought to exist. So they just do as our irrational relationship to reality. And they cover all philosophical notions of irrationality.

But we also can think about the world in terms of some kind of structure - be it a logical one based on rules and relationships or one based on its expedient nature or in terms of its impact on us or the feeling surrounding it. These are rational ways of relating with the world. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that some people naturally focus on the relationship with feeling and others on thought that's removed from feeling. Or some on both very well.

And so you get three dimensions with 8 cubic regions or domains (2^3 = 8) - Ti, Te, Fi, Fe, Ni, Ne, Si, Se. And it's not unreasonable to say that if someone is focused more on one of those domains of thought, that they couldn't also focus on the opposite in terms of I/E and rationality/irrationality as a balancing factor or complementary force to their mind. So a Te type might become TeSi or TeNi. Of course, this isn't necessary and you can have people that don't have a clear complementary domain of thought, but their ego would be hyper-focused on one of the 8 functions and it also doesn't take a genius to realize this would be a bit unstable for someone's ego. Jung described it as a form of neurosis that gets unconsciously described by it's opposite function. So someone say focused on internalized feeling is relating that by externalized thinking, whether they are aware or not. And becoming aware is supposed to be part of individuation.

So I don't think it's relevant to argue about whether or not this is relatable to reality. It's Occam's Razor simple to the point that it includes all ways of processing the world without needing context or without needing it to be any more complicated.




But I do know that reality is complicated and people can change types for various reasons or that due to the dual nature of these basic dimensions, that you can have neurotic people and more developed and mature and stable and individuated people. And that some people could spend so much time in their superego that they might lose a sense of identity and such. So I don't know if I agree with the relations so much in this theory and that could probably be better explained. But I don't think the underlying dimensions of I/E, N/S, F/T are flawed. Because it covers all possible ways of processing the world.

...any cogent thoughts about this?

[Sol]

people can change types for various reasons

It's harder than to study left-handed people to become as right-handed ones in adult age. If possibly, at all.
People can reduce types expression by developing weak functions and skills there. To change types is alike to change one disorder to another one.

[Singu]

Well I don't agree with Jung's definition of extroversion/introversion. Jung defined extroversion as "obtaining data from the outer world". And introversion as "letting the subjective factor judge perceptions". I would argue that there is no such thing as "pure" objective data that is untainted by one's own subjective factors, which Jung himself has pointed out.

But nonetheless, Jung's definition of "types" was that they were the kind of people who were merely too "one-sided" in their development. So he identified the "pure" Extroverted type for example, as someone who is too one-sided in his development of extroversion, who may do nothing but collect and gather data, but is quite confused about how he himself actually thinks about things. So he thought that to help such a confused and misguided person, one should help him see his opposite introverted, subjective side.

So if you say that there are these "types" that actually "exist" in a sense, then I'd think that you'd have missed the entire point of Jung's therapeutic view of the world. He never claimed that there are exactly these 8 or 16 types of people in the world, but rather people tend to become one-sided in their development of these tendencies.

[Dalek Caan]

It's harder than to study left-handed people to become as right-handed ones in adult age. If possibly, at all.
People can reduce types expression by developing weak functions and skills there. To change types is alike to change one disorder to another one.

...okay.

Well I don't agree with Jung's definition of extroversion/introversion. Jung defined extroversion as "obtaining data from the outer world". And introversion as "letting the subjective factor judge perceptions". I would argue that there is no such thing as "pure" objective data that is untainted by one's own subjective factors, which Jung himself has pointed out.

That's not what he described. Extroversion is a "focus" on the outer external world. It's always influenced by subjective factors, but it's still an external focus of energy. Nothing you've said here is a contradiction.

But nonetheless, Jung's definition of "types" was that they were the kind of people who were merely too "one-sided" in their development. So he identified the "pure" Extroverted type for example, as someone who is too one-sided in his development of extroversion, who may do nothing but collect and gather data, but is quite confused about how he himself actually thinks about things. So he thought that to help such a confused and misguided person, one should help him see his opposite introverted, subjective side.

It's not about collecting and gathering data, just a focus on the external world over the internal. But assuming that's what you meant, so?

So if you say that there are these "types" that actually "exist" in a sense, then I'd think that you'd have missed the entire point of Jung's therapeutic view of the world. He never claimed that there are exactly these 8 or 16 types of people in the world, but rather people tend to become one-sided in their development of these tendencies.

Not true. He developed it as a therapeutic tool, yes. But he based it on philosophy and in such a way to encapsulate extremities in human cognition. But he also acknowledged that healthier people had a more balanced psyche, a second complementary side that balanced their one-sidedness. So 8 types of extreme one-sidedness become 16 types of balance.

The only times he ever talked about people not having a type is when he talks about people developing "masks" to mask their personalities, almost like developing one's superego, but he also believed this led to many problems and was also unhealthy; it goes against core desires and instincts and makes people unfulfilled and miserable. And he says some people are not "differentiated" enough to have a type, but also implied this is a kind of devoid or empty existence because these people have no strong identifications with the world. They are easily swayed and changeable by the world around them. So this isn't really a good thing either.

[sbbds]

Any post quickly shutting down both Sol and Singu deserves my attention. I’ll read through your op in just a sec.

[Singu]

...It's literally what he said:

When, as the result of a reinforced objective determination, extraverted thinking is subordinated to objective data, it entirely loses itself, on the one hand, in the individual experience, and proceeds to amass an accumulation of undigested empirical material. The oppressive mass of more or less disconnected individual experiences [p. 434] produces a state of intellectual dissociation, which, on the other hand, usually demands a psychological compensation.
...
But, whenever thinking primarily depends not so much upon external facts as upon an accepted or second-hand idea, the very poverty of the idea provokes a compensation in the form of a still more impressive accumulation of facts, which assume a one-sided grouping in keeping with the relatively restricted and sterile point of view; whereupon many valuable and sensible aspects of things automatically go by the board. The vertiginous abundance of the socalled scientific literature of to-day owes a deplorably high percentage of its existence to this misorientation.

[sbbds]

@Dalek Caan It reminds me of this post by Adam Strange:

Well, I considered it. I’ve talked about this elsewhere on this forum, but I can repeat myself here.

As I understand it, Socionics is an attempt to understand human behavior in terms of isolated functions named Ti, Te, Fe, Fi, Se, Si, Ne, and Ni. This is a fairly successful approach to breaking down and modeling behavior.

One could look at a bunch of ants swarming over an area of ground, looking for food and avoiding enemies, and wonder if each ant has a model of the terrain, or if the behavior of the swarm is driven by simple rules.

Early robots were programmed to move a part from one place to another. This required that they have a map of the area in memory, and presumed that the thing that they were moving existed and could be grasped. But this model quickly ran into problems in the real world, where things are changing all the time.

Programmers were forced to take a different approach when faced with interacting with an unpredictable world. Instead of commanding the robot to go to point (x1,y1,z1) at time (t1), then close the actuators, and then move to point (x2, y2, z2) in time Δt when there might be no part at point (x1,y1,z1), it would be better to give the robot some method of sensing the environment, along with the ability to recognize a part and search for a moved part, the ability to decide on the importance or relevance to the task of the parts that it does find, and options for what to do when it does not find a part.

These abilities enable a robot to function in a world where not everything is where or what it expects it to be. You can break down the functions as subroutines of a larger program in the following manner:

1. Se: Sense the world, possibly by camera (sight), collision detection (touch), sounds (hearing), etc.

2. Si: Sense internal states, like battery charge (hunger), circuits working properly or not (pain), motor drives operating normally or in overcurrent sensing (comfort), light too bright or too dim so adjust system gains, etc.

3. Te: Identify the separate parts in the sensory data. Is a “part” detected, and is it separate from the background? Name the parts. Is this part relevant to the task or not?

4. Ti: Does the identified part fit into an internally stored class of objects?

5. Fi: Assign a “value” to this part, with respect to the task at hand. Is this “part” something which should be moved or avoided? Is the part broken?

6. Fe: If there are other robots operating in the area, how should their actions be coordinated? What are the communication protocols? Which robots should take priority when both share a common assignment? How are priorities negotiated?

7. Ne: What alternate actions can be taken in any situation? If a part has been moved or cannot be found, what other actions are possible?

8. Ni: Given a list of possible alternate actions in any situation, which single action is best pursued under the present conditions?

From this simple list of functions, it is pretty easy to see how almost any behavior can be modeled. With a hierarchy of subroutines, you can model behavior of almost any complexity you wish.

For example:

The “ant” runs it’s six leg-motor subroutines and moves forward out of the nest, in search of food. It bumps into a blade of grass with its antennae and the leg subroutines stop, to be replaced in sequence by “back up” and “turn” and “go forward” again. When the ant’s sensors detect the chemical traces of a dead fly, separated from the many other chemicals it is continuously sensing, the motor subroutines are overridden to turn towards the antenna with the stronger signal. The ant eventually either comes to the dead fly, at which point it identifies it as something classified as food, grasps it (more motor subroutines) and returns to the nest, or if the fly has been moved, it keeps doing a semi-random search until it gets low on sugars. The ant can find its way back to the nest without knowing where the nest actually is, since it and every other ant left a pheromone trail as it left the nest (another subroutine running intermittently), so it only has to encounter one of these many trails and follow it to find its way back to the nest.

Basically, almost any behavior can be simulated with the above eight basic functions that are serving a master task-achieving program. You can build hierarchies of these task-achieving programs, with each one having the ability to override other task-achieving programs, depending on the situation. For example, I normally like to eat and need to excrete, but I don’t allow the sequence of motor controls which control these operations to activate at any time. The operational importance of these subroutines is continuously being adjusted by internal sensing (hunger, need to pee) and social propriety and situational opportunity and aren’t always under my intentional control.

Some individuals are going to have stronger arms, stronger legs, be taller or shorter, thinner or fatter, etc., than other individuals. So, too, will some of their basic functions be stronger or weaker than other individuals. This creates the “types”.

Personally, I’m not sure why some functions seem to go together (F & T, S & N), or why it happens that some functions inhibit others (Ti & Te), but there is probably a reason for this.

My guess is that this inhibitory effect exists because of the operational limitations (bandwidth) of the human brain as a heat-limited information processor. This is why you can see great detail in the center of your field of view with very slow updates, or sense coarse motion at the periphery of your visual field very quickly. The Information content of (fine_resolution)x(small_area)x(slow_updates) = Information content of (coarse_resolution)x(large_area)x(fast_updates).

It may not be possible to do Te "feature isolation and recognition" simultaneously with Ti "feature internal compare and classification". Both are extremely processor-intensive.

Anyway, that's my opinion of the "validity" of Socionics.

There are many other similar concepts attempting to describe and make sense of reality such as the fourfold universe theory (and 4x4=16).

https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/hi...-by-physicists

This gets into hypercubes which Bukalov, @thehotelambush and @ajsindri like to analyze.

[Dalek Caan]

...It's literally what he said:

Wow, you quoted him talking about Te when I'm talking generally about extroversion. If you got something relevant to criticize, please do, but I don't care about strict definitions anyway. And it feels like you're just trying to find fault at this point.

@sbbds


Sorry, but I have 15 minutes to leave for a plane, so I'll have to respond later.

[Tearsofaclown]

William James referred to Leibniz's rationalism and arguments for God as "superficiality incarnate". Socionics is another rationalist pipe dream that annoys empiricists.

"And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete."

James absolutely destroys these ideas in Principles of Psychology. He called it the psychologist fallacy. To simplify, when there are two people in a room there are really 6 people in a room. Each person as they see themself. Each person as they see the other. And each person as they actually are. Socionics claims to know all 6 people. It knows one at best.

The psychologist's fallacy is a fallacy that occurs when an observer assumes that his or her subjective experience reflects the true nature of an event. The fallacy was named by William James in the 19th century:

The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the ‘psychologist's fallacy’ par excellence.

[sbbds]

William James referred to Leibniz's rationalism and arguments for God as "superficiality incarnate". Socionics is another rationalist pipe dream that annoys empiricists.

"And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete."

James absolutely destroys these ideas in Principles of Psychology. He called it the psychologist fallacy. To simplify, when there are two people in a room there are really 6 people in a room. Each person as they see themself. Each person as they see the other. And each person as they actually are. Socionics claims to know all 6 people. It knows one at best.

Well. It claims a person’s sociotype is who they actually are. And Super-Ego is related to societal expectations... so that would influence the other two “people” in this case, i.e. how one sees themselves and possibly how others see them.

[Tearsofaclown]

Well. It claims a person’s sociotype is who they actually are. And Super-Ego is related to societal expectations... so that would influence the other two “people” in this case, i.e. how one sees themselves and possibly how others see them.

Well James is an empiricist to the extent that a person's own experience matters. Nobody knows what it is like to be any other human being besides themself. They are speaking of something they have no experience of. Like if Mohammed or someone has a religious experience. A revelation. That is his experience and nobody else's. Experiences can't be hand me downs.

Nagel picked this topic up later with "What is it like to be a bat?" We can study bats as much as we want but never know what it is like to actually be one.

[Dalek Caan]

@Dalek Caan It reminds me of this post by Adam Strange:

That makes a lot of practical sense.

William James referred to Leibniz's rationalism and arguments for God as "superficiality incarnate". Socionics is another rationalist pipe dream that annoys empiricists.

"And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete."

James absolutely destroys these ideas in Principles of Psychology. He called it the psychologist fallacy. To simplify, when there are two people in a room there are really 6 people in a room. Each person as they see themself. Each person as they see the other. And each person as they actually are. Socionics claims to know all 6 people. It knows one at best.

The psychologist's fallacy is a fallacy that occurs when an observer assumes that his or her subjective experience reflects the true nature of an event. The fallacy was named by William James in the 19th century:

The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the ‘psychologist's fallacy’ par excellence.

Well...I don't know if I understand what you mean by rationalism, but I got out of that that you're saying reality is complex and messy and relative and not perfect like the logic of the functions. And I agree with you, but Socionics is also built of off Jung, which saw differentiation and individuation as a lifelong process.

For example
1. Each person as they see themself.
2. Each person as they see the other.
3. And each person as they actually are.

Part of Jung's types involves differentiation, a process of 1 and 2. And through enough of 1 and 2, you get closer to 3, more or less. Requires a lot of self-awareness and an ability to put yourself in the shoes of another. Of course, people put on masks (build up their superego) and that just makes the process more complex and harder because they can lie to themselves and other people. And some people have one-sided egos with no creative function or they aren't differentiated enough to have a type. And you may change type as you learn more about yourself and others because it's not a clear cut thing and reality is messy. But Jung is the backbone of Socionics (and it really should be required reading before people get into socionics imo), so I don't really think Socionics is rationalist. Though a lot of people do seem to treat it that way...

Well James is an empiricist to the extent that a person's own experience matters. Nobody knows what it is like to be any other human being besides themself. They are speaking of something they have no experience of. Like if Mohammed or someone has a religious experience. A revelation. That is his experience and nobody else's. Experiences can't be hand me downs.

Nagel picked this topic up later with "What is it like to be a bat?" We can study bats as much as we want but never know what it is like to actually be one.

...I dunno. It's true that I will never truly know what it's like to be a bat, but with enough imagination and thought I can probably come to understand it in some way without needing to. For example, I've struggled to understand Si, and my mother is actually pretty SiFe and I'm very NiTe when it comes to this theory; and a lot of our misunderstandings come from the fact that we see and value almost completely different things. We've both had to kind of adjust to each other and we still can get on each other's nerves over things that pop up out of nowhere because ...well...we don't really understand the other.

But I've actually put enough thought into this shit that it actually does help me frame an understanding of her psyche and mine and why we clash for almost silly things at times. I mean, I bought tickets for her for some event that is like a fashion event for Christmas decorations and stuff and there was a lot of Si about the feelings and stuff that people felt from it all; now I felt REALLY awkward doing that cause I don't feel excitement or anything over how decorations and lights and colors make me feel because I don't and I had to pretend that I did to fit in, but she loved it and honestly it's through Jung and socionics that I realized she'd love this. Otherwise, I probably would have been clueless and bought her something I would like that she wouldn't.
Actually it's kind of funny because the one thing I did like about the event was the room that was inspired by Edward Scissor-hands and the endless snow it created when he was banished from the town, heh. It had a kind of dark and ominous foreboding tone to it, a bit more personal and deeper than an aesthetic appeal that everyone was there for.