Mar 30, 2010

Career Recommendations for Socionic Types: 2010

Socionics can be a powerful tool for making wise career choices and achieving professional self-realization. Here I've listed the best professions for young adults of different types given their particular functional strengths and weaknesses:

ILE: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
SEI: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
ESE: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
LII: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
EIE: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
LSI: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
SLE: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
IEI: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
SEE: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
ILI: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
LIE: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
ESI: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
LSE: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
EII: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
IEE: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor
SLI: farming, crafts and traditional skills, physical labor

Career preparation

  1. Stay out of debt at all cost.
  2. Consider college only if it costs you nothing and can provide opportunities to learn more about the areas of specialization listed for your type above.
  3. If you're paying for college and are in debt, you've almost certainly been tricked. Do a clear-headed cost/benefit analysis given the realities of 2010 (see below) and consider whether to continue studying law, business, or whatever it was the economy needed 10 years ago.
  4. Cultivate meaningful relationships in the real world. Put the Internet in its place, if necessary. Get to know your neighbors. Experiment cooperating with people in little, material things like cooking, gardening, sharing tools, etc.
  5. Decrease your energy consumption and lower your baseline expenses as necessary to ensure your continuing security and freedom.
  6. Find mentors and develop the professional skills needed for the careers listed for your type above.
Outlook for 2010 and beyond

Economic stimulus packages have helped the economy make a modest comeback, and 2010 should see a tentative economic recovery, despite lingering unemployment and a depressed housing market...

Blah blah blah. You've heard it all before. How about a different perspective that doesn't come from the mass media?

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

hahaha, exactly what I'm already doing. I would like to recommend adding to your list:

stock up on some preservable foods, so you can last a few years when major societal upheaval takes place. Sugar and coffee will be excellent commodities for paying doctors and dentists bills ;-)

Consentingadult.

Ричард said...

While we're at it shall we add, "live above sea level?" :)

Unknown said...

Those slides strike me as rather emotionally manipulative, and it's the same !!DISASTER!! premonition that I saw in that peak oil site you linked earlier that said the world should be a flaming wreck already.

Ричард said...

Anyone who predicts the downfall of a system will be seen as an alarmist by those in power and those who believe in the stability of the system. Sure, the author employs some dramatism, but I would do the same given the circumstances and the great gulf between what needs to be done and what actually is being done.

Pretty much any public scientist these days is an alarmist due to the overwhelming negative environmental and resource trends facing humanity, the scope of which simply escapes the majority of people.

Even the Hirsch Report, commissioned by the US Department of Energy came to conclusions frighteningly similar to those of Orlov and lifeaftertheoilcrash.net (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report )

From a factual standpoint, where are his errors? Peak Oil is a reality and has to happen at some point, most likely within the next 5-10 years if not 2-3 years ago. In addition, there is the hidden driver of efficiency of oil extraction, which has been slowly worsening for decades. It follows logically that Peak Oil will be more off a rapid drop-off than a slow decline. And, as described in the Hirsch Report, it follows from this that significant economic upheaval will result unless preparations are begun 20 years in advance.

But Peak Oil is just one of a number of collapse factors. Others are diminishing returns on additional investment, as described well in the slides. The relative cost of a higher education has been going up now for decades and is now absurd. Who would find it reasonable to spend 3 years working to pay off debt for one year of schooling? And yet that is the reality for a great many people.

All you need for education is teachers and necessary instruction materials, and yet we have developed a system with enormous associated costs: campuses, cafeterias, sports and cultural facilities, costly high-tech buildings, extensive landscaping, a huge administrative staff. This is all great stuff, but does it lead to a corresponding rise in economic output among college graduates? Having seen first-hand how college debt cripples young people and binds them to economic activities they have little real interest in, my conclusion is that unless you are getting a free ride, college is largely a waste of precious years, good for the institution but bad for the students.

Not only is higher education vastly overbuilt, but so is elementary education, healthcare, the penitentiary systems, American living arrangements, and other systems. It is obvious that what is needed is downsizing, but, as Orlov and collapse theorists just as Joseph Tainter observe, complex systems seem entirely unable to self-simplify by choice.

Putting two and two together, with rising indebtedness and diminishing returns across the table on one side and the objective external factor of Peak Oil on the other side, a collapse scenario seems to be the most probable outcome. Many societies have gone through it both in moern and ancient times. I prefer Orlov's perspective to lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, since he personally observed the fall-out after the collapse of the Soviet Union and recognizes that such a crisis may not actually be an entirely bad thing. For instance, during the Great Depression overall health improved (see http://www.physorg.com/news173371667.html ).

As I have stated in my post, the best way to prepare for a potential societal collapse is to increase self-sufficiency personally and as a local community, avoid debt, cultivate interdependent relationships, and develop skills that have value outside of the industrial-corporate economy.

Anonymous said...

I don't have a problem with the Peak Oil and I'm seriously considering it to be a potential issue, but...

The Peak Oil community seems a little cultish.

I mean, they (Peak Oilers) seem to see Peak Oil as a predicted singular disastrous event that will happen with absolute certainty.

The aftermath of which seems to be described by the community as a little too positive for my liking. I haven't seen much about mass starvation or wars. All the talk is about how the human world will become more natural, environmentally friendly and people in general will be nicer. Or how conveniently all the large powerful organisations and businesses will fall.

Again, I’m not saying these people are wrong about Peak Oil, but some of them are coming off a little naive.

Ричард said...

Well, I won't try to defend the Peak Oil community because I am not familiar with it. I am pretty sure Peak Oil theorists recognize the potential for violence and famine, particularly in the U.S., which is dismally prepared for such a process.

I think painting it in a positive light is psychologically important for people to not lose all hope. And it's natural for the greens to claim that the changes will validate their own philosophy. Such farsighted, gentle types typically have subdued aggressivity, so maybe they are underestimating the degree of aggressivity in society...

Anonymous said...

@Rick: living above sea level has been taken care off: my GF owns a house on a hill on the island of Ibiza ;-)

But I'm not afraid of climate change: oil will have run out as a fuel long before that. Just yesterday I read that the price of gasoline is almost at the same level as it's all time peak price in 2008.

CA

Anonymous said...

"Such farsighted, gentle types typically have subdued aggressivity, so maybe they are underestimating the degree of aggressivity in society..."

But to ignore the high levels of aggressiveness in society pretty much means ignoring a large chunk of human history, almost every high school history lesson and recent international news reports.

Also I don't believe farsightedness, subdued aggressiveness and a gentle nature have much to with it. From what I've heard from multiple sources is these traits are very common in the military elite. And by military elite I mean decision makers(Generals etc.).

Ричард said...

Fair enough. That was simply a hypothesis on my part.

For those who remain unconvinced that Peak Oil is real or is a problem, read about the recent U.S. Department of Energy report:

http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/03/25/washington-considers-a-decline-of-world-oil-production-as-of-2011/

Peak Oil optimists think that new energy will rise in use to meet the demand that oil can no longer meet, and that higher oil prices will increase fuel efficiency. This is undoubtedly true to some degree.

However, it may be impossible or too costly to modify existing infrastructure in time to switch to new fuels and lifestyles. Think about it -- for you to switch to a newfangled electric car, you've got to make a huge initial investment that will pay off many years from now. If you are unable to make this investment, then you are stuck with simply using your gasoline car less and less.

This type of initial investment problem holds true for all infrastructure changes required to deal with Peak Oil effects -- fundamental changes in urban development, building maintenance, agriculture, transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure, etc. If changes are undertaken while oil is still cheap and abundant and available as fuel to power the changes, then there is a chance of shifting to a post-oil economy relatively smoothly.

This requires a "guiding hand" operating in the national economy, however, since prices alone in a market economy do not seem to be able to produce the required changes far enough in advance to allow for a smooth transition. In other words, action must be taken before rising costs force you to take action. This applies both at the national scale and the personal scale.

Since this is not being done in the U.S. and elsewhere (although some other countries seem more aware of the problem and are much closer to a solution), what seems more likely is that rising energy costs, a faltering economy, and nearly universal indebtedness will make it too expensive to undertake large-scale projects when they are "suddenly" needed.

People will be reduced to somehow making due with the existing infrastructure, which soon becomes a liability because practically everything that is efficient in an oil-based economy is inefficient in a post-oil economy.

So people will stop heating and air-conditioning their homes, will convert urban and suburban land to agriculture, will stop driving cars, and will be essentially stranded in their neighborhoods without work (because the economy has tanked and the existing low-paying jobs require a commute).

And that is in the optimistic scenario that the banks somehow forget that they owe a mortgage on the home and have other outstanding debts.

This is a classic risk management problem, as they say. What is the probability of all this actually happening? 80%? 50%? 10%? Even if it is a mere 10%, the devastating magnitude of this risk would seem to justify taking measures to avoid this scenario.

At any rate, impending doom or no, the trends are shifting to the following:

- organic local agriculture
- fewer cars on the roads
- alternative energy
- decline in new suburban development
- denser urban development

So, if people want to stay ahead of the curve, the way to go is to extrapolate where these trends are taking us and plan accordingly.

Anonymous said...

we have become overly complex and systematized. to the point that we hardly know how to do anything ourselves. and, the expectations placed on workers, coupled with how priorities are a moving target and the need to multitask, people generally do not do good work out there. usually you have to remind people to do their work by being some sort of gadfly. the other option is to get yourself an advocate or case manager, that way things really get done.