Ex-ex-socionist?

A recent conversation with a Russian girl who's into socionics (the first such conversation in several years) made me aware of the possibility that I may have gone too far in my rejection of socionics. Since then I have been thinking about types a lot and trying to find the baby in all the bathwater I'd thrown out. It seems to make sense at this point in time to identify the subjectivity in my rejection of socionics, remove it, and see what's left.

Of course, my "adherence" to socionics was also highly subjective before that. I placed high expectations on socionics and believed I could use it to solve my personal issues. Disillusionment with this possibility along with an intellectual dismissal of the theory brought me to the anti-socionics position I've held for several years now.

The ups and downs of illusion

One of the things I think about a lot these days is separating actual events/facts from mental/emotional speculation around the subject. Elation and suffering come from mental speculation, not from facts.

Let's arbitrarily suppose that socionics' actual value is +5 ("potentially somewhat useful"). Yet there are different schools of socionics, most of which play up the value of socionics. Classical "Aushra" socionics, for instance, values socionics around +15 — way above its actual value at the present. Such was my fate that I learned about socionics from a school that played socionics up to +20 ("superpower" and "happiness through dualization"). On top of this I had my own private aspirations around socionics, which added an additional +20, making +40.

So here my mind has this +40 energy around a subject which only deserves +5. Over the years the illusion starts to erode: +35... +30... +25... +20... Eventually I consciously realize that the value of socionics is far below the +20 or +15 I'd assumed, and my personal aspirations around the subject were not to be realized. Those aspirations evaporated, and my assessment of socionics turned negative — to perhaps -5 ("a few key insights, but otherwise a waste of time"). But my mind overplayed this as well, putting perhaps another -10 onto that assessment. In a way, socionics had "hurt" me personally, or something like that.

This overshoot became clear to me in the aftermath of that conversation. I now feel ready to discard my negative mental position around the subject and take a fresh look. I think I'm able to treat socionics as the modest +5 it is, and leave it at that, without it having any importance for my self-identity.

The model above can be used to think about people's mental positions on a wide variety of subjects. As soon as an issue becomes "important" to us, we start playing it up and adding layers of mental speculation. If the subject becomes part of our self-identity, the layers can become exceptionally thick, like my +40 assessment versus the +5 that socionics actually merits.

How would I answer these questions today (8/22/2018)

What is socionics?
Socionics is an invented construct that divides people into types. It is not the "real truth" about people and how they function. Countless other constructs exist or could be created, and each illuminates its little section of reality. It's unlikely that any two constructs (typologies) have a 1-to-1 correspondence, and they don't need to.

When does socionics seem to "work?"
In my experience socionics seems to have the most explanatory value when applied to your immediate environment without trying to corroborate results with other socionists. You will be able to clearly type some percentage of your acquaintances (say, one-third), will have hypotheses for another third, and will be clueless about the last third. Among the one-third typed, everything will seem to fit neatly. Introducing other socionists into the picture to get their opinion will typically decrease, not increase clarity.

As a rule, roughly one-third of people will be easily typeable from the perspective of any one socionist. Furthermore, roughly one-third of all people will be broadly recognized by the community of socionists as being a certain type (the other two-thirds are out of luck and will have their types debated endlessly to their face and behind their back, which rubs some people the wrong way). These two sets of one-thirds overlap only partly. Each socionist will treat himself as being "somewhat typical" of his type, even if he belongs to the two-thirds whose types are unobvious to socionists at large. Thus, the clarity that one gains in one's immediate social environment can quickly become elusive. At least that's my experience.

What is socionic type about?
Type is part of the deep ego structure of an individual and seems to have some roots in physiology as well. It seems to only superficially describe temperament, which varies quite a bit among people of the same type. If socionics is about temperament, it doesn't do a very good job of it, and a better typology could be devised.

Socionic type can also be transcended to some degree, which is usually overlooked. Even deep ego structures can potentially be examined and disidentified with. The fact that somebody rubs you the wrong (or the right) way is probably a result of both ego structures and physiological factors:

Examples:
1) You very much like X, while they dislike X, which hurts your feelings (superficial ego structure).
2) You consider yourself an X person, and they don't have much respect for X people (deeper ego structure).
3) You need regular time alone to calm down and regenerate, and the other person responds to your withdrawal by trying to reengage you, sapping your energy (combination of habit and physiology)
4) You don't like someone's voice timbre, smell, etc. (mostly physiology)

The immediate cause of a positive or negative reaction to another person can probably never be explained by socionics. However, a pattern of reactions might be — to some degree...

So, I can't take any of the following statements seriously:
- "somebody said something that offended my X function"
- "I like her because her X complements my Y"

One of the pitfalls of socionics and all self-definitions is that they can be used to build up a fixed self-identity as an "X person." From a spiritual perspective this is not helpful and keeps one stuck in certain patterns. But this is a potential pitfall of any diagnosis or category. It's not an inherent shortcoming of socionics.

I realize I haven't answered the question. I don't really know what socionic type is. But sometimes it's there, and you just see it.

What about Model A? Functions? Information aspects?
I don't take it very seriously. These are interesting invented constructs, but I don't think they are a very good explanation of how the brain works and why interactions take on certain qualities.

What about the idea of information metabolism?
It's clear that the brain needs different types of experiences, states, and impressions to function well — in addition to the right food and other physiological inputs. It's also clear that different people often need different kinds of inputs. But I wouldn't say that Model A accurately describes these differences. Furthermore, the inputs are highly trainable. For instance, I've trained my brain to respond to hiking. Another person of the same type as me will not get the same kinds of impressions from the same hikes if they have not trained their brain the same way I have. Training trumps type.

What about intertype relationships?
I spent over 5 years in a relationship with an ILE (I am, presumably, an IEE) and was convinced she was my dual. During this period I created Socionics.us, wrote a few hundred articles and posts on socionics, was active on the16types.info, organized socionics meetups, and gave two talks at socionics conferences in Kiev. Hahahahaha, the irony.

Would I have enjoyed the same kind of relationship with any ILE? Of course not. The same goes for dual relations. It's all very individual. Perhaps only about 20% of relationship quality could potentially be explained by socionic types. That's not very much.

What are some of the confounding factors?
Intellect, pheremones, physical attractiveness, sensitivity levels, compatibility of deep ego complexes, etc. etc.

How is socionics useful?
Realizing that most of what happens between you and other people is automatic — beyond your control at this point in time. Realizing that things can work out with some people with little effort, and with others with a great deal of effort.

Would I go around typing people or talking about socionics?
Not at this time. Maybe in the future if I figure out how and why to do it.

Do I type people?
Today I sat down and made a chart of the types of some of the people I have interacted with over the past 7 years. It turns out I'd been registering types on a subconscious level during this time.

What significance do I assign to this chart?
Very little. But it's still interesting. Occasionally it reflects observable real-life relationships.

Do I have a type?
I guess. But I don't really care to prove it or disprove other versions. I don't even like talking about my self-identity these days because I don't take it seriously anymore. When talking to my Russian friend, I even refused to tell her what my type "used to be." I probably went overboard. The reason for that was to avoid any identification with a type. In fact, as soon as she stated her own type, I noticed that my perception of her shifted immediately, and I didn't like the feeling.

Do I prefer a certain type of women?
My preferences for physical and psychological traits are quite distinct at this point. Few of these preferences can be associated with socionic types. If the traits are present, I may become interested, and compatibility appears to be objectively higher, regardless of socionic type. I assume there are good psycho-physiological reasons for these preferences which are totally removed from my own type.

Do I favor dual relations?
I would say yes. Not long ago I finished a very nice 2.5-year relation with a dual (presumably, but who knows?). But some things were lacking. Would I have had a similar quality relationship with any dual? Of course not. My ideal relationship would be like my recent one with a few things added. But much of what made that such a good relationship was my own personal growth and improvements in my life circumstances. The relationship would not have been nearly as good 10 years ago.

Am I drawn to members of my own quadra?
To a slight degree, yes, but it's far from obvious. It's always something non-socionic that serves as the basis for friendship, such as a shared interest or pastime or some psycho-physiological commonality (mutual liking). I've never made friends with someone just because they were of a certain type or quadra. That never worked for me. The only same-quadra people I"ve made friends with were quite like me in terms of values, interests, and temperament — just like friends from other quadras.

Everything that can be automated will be automated

When I look at how technology and society are evolving, a few simple trends stand out.

Everything that can be automated will be automated. 

Everything that can be digitized is being digitized. 

The people who seem to be making the most money are those who are contributing to the increasing digitization and automation of things. A simple way to find business opportunities is simply to take note of things that could be better automated or digitized. Then find a team, do the marketing, create the product, etc.

There are still a million things left to digitize and automate as we transition to a data and algorithm controlled world. We’re not even close to halfway there yet.

Just look at government. Governance in the future could be reduced to a set of complex computer programs that gather and process data from millions of different sensors and data sources and produce decisions and systems that can then be reviewed by a committee of humans.

Virtually all human interaction with government can be digitized and automated. Even the bulk of law-enforcement and the penitentiary system. Taxation could be fully automated.

Thanks to automation, bureaucracy may soon become a thing of the past. Hundreds of thousands of government office workers will be free to pursue arts and crafts, gardening, and yoga (joke).

I think that digitization and automation can bring wonderful results in manufacturing, governance, logistics, education, and research. These activities engage newer, more analytical parts of the human brain.

What is less clear is how to deal with many risks to individual health and welfare that this trend brings with it on an emotional and physical level. To name a few:

• wrist/hand, eye/facial, and musculoskeletal problems and pain due to imperfect ergonomics and computer screen technology
• compulsive use of electronic devices, the Internet, and communications technology and technology related addictions
• social isolation and psychosocial problems related to replacing person-to-person interaction with online interaction
• sleep disturbances due to disruption of melatonin production and compulsive use of electronics 
• hormonal disturbances and negative changes in brain chemistry due to any of the above 

There have been many times in the past when a new technology, product, or system was forced upon people with little thought to their well-being. Perhaps the best example is the Industrial Revolution, which caused (forced) people to move to the cities and submit to many privations — extremely cramped living quarters, 14-15-hour work days, child labor, constant supervision, etc. Eventually, social conscience and humaneness were introduced into the system, and the most extreme ill effects were eliminated.

There are many more examples. Cigarettes now have filters, automobiles produce less harmful exhaust than they used to, convenient but nutrient-poor processed foods are now fortified with vitamins and minerals.

Damage is first made tolerable, then gradually reduced further in proportion to society’s degree of enlightenment.

There is an excellent TED talk called "The Long Reach of Reason" which illustrates how societies have progressively become more humane through the application of both ethics and reason — but with most of the credit going to reason.

Reason makes it clear that inhumane treatment, the infliction of unnecessary pain, and overexploitation of any important resource are ultimately counterproductive. But it often takes a while for reason to catch up with culture and technology.

The current global trend towards automation and digitization is also leading to forms of pain and exploitation that society is just beginning to recognize. People are still very much enamoured of computers and the Internet and are relatively blind to their negative side-effects and unsympathetic towards those who experience them. Others see the side-effects as a minor nuisance that people just need to learn to deal with.

I strongly disagree. To me, the way so many of us use our computers and Internet today can be likened to smoking filterless cigarettes, eating unfortified processed foods, or breathing unfiltered exhaust. Things could be so much better. It's mainly a question of product design.

Let’s exercise our imagination a bit. I don't think anyone would disagree that personal electronics should ideally:

• help people become more knowledgeable and more intellectually capable
• help them feel more connected (not just informationally, but emotionally) to others
• help them learn faster
• not fragment a person's focus or cause them to multi-task constantly
• not interfere with their ability and desire to move around and interact with their physical environment
• not cause them undue pain or distress
• not interfere with getting deep sleep 
• not disrupt their hormonal state or promote addictive behaviors or depression
• not inhibit their desire and ability to pursue romantic relationships

This may sound unrealistic, and some readers may deny the problem in the first place. Others will lay the responsibility for these things upon the user alone ("The Internet itself doesn't harm people; people's choice of how to use the Internet does." "It's not the job of tech companies or the government to force people to use their products in a certain way.").

Let's remember that people once worked 15-hour workdays, breathed poisonous air, and even sold their own children into slavery. In each case a host of logical arguments could have been produced to explain why things "had to be" that way and were unlikely to ever change. The truth is, things can be any way people decide they should be (if there are people left to decide).

As doctors and researchers increasingly document negative side-effects of the technology we use, and innovators come up with new technical solutions, I believe that more and more tools will become available for people to avoid potential detriments to their physical and emotional health by technology.

I can imagine:

• computer monitors that cause no more eye stress than reading a book
• screens that change as night comes on to not inhibit melatonin production and can be set to turn off and help you get away from your computer screens at a predetermined time
• connective technology that doesn't cause the subtle damage that current wireless technologies can (look up "sperm count and cell phone kept in pocket")
• software that is responsive to your psychological state and adapts the environment (interface) and suggests tasks that are most conducive to preserving a balanced state of mind
• software that stops you and asks you questions when it detects behaviors that go against your stated goals
• software that allows you to customize your virtual environment in order to avoid getting sucked in to things you don't want to do
• software that can be told to leave you alone unless X or Y happens (e.g. an important e-mail, etc.)
• Internet interfaces that, rather than always offering you more information that you might be interested in, limit this new information to only a bare minimum 
• fully customizable social media networks where you can choose the functionality you want and disable or minimize what you don't want (like Facebook's news feed and other features that prompt compulsive online social behaviors for those who are inclined to such problems)
• technology that distills what you want to know from social media networks, e-mail, news, etc. into audio so that you can keep track of what you're interested in on the go, without staring at a screen (as we know, people's visual channel is more powerful than audio and thus more potentially engaging and addictive)
• technology that allows you to respond to the above types of messages verbally and have it converted into text for the other person if necessary, all without looking at a screen

These ideas are tailored to the needs of self-employed creative professionals like me. People working in offices may have other needs as well. The basic idea is that technology should become almost fully customizable so that people can decide what they want to use it for and have it do just that.

What we currently have is computer and Internet technology that is still largely one-size-fits-all and contains very many potentially addicting elements. These elements seem to make good business sense for software and hardware makers, but they may ultimately prove counterproductive. Once a technology begins inhibiting its user's productivity and personal effectiveness, it has become counterproductive. The producer may continue to profit from the user's compulsive behaviors, but society as a whole suffers as users' productivity and general fitness declines.

If less addictive options become available and people start to choose them over the alternatives, producers will be forced to compete for the consumer segment that is opting out of traditional designs and interfaces. If people quit Facebook in significant numbers because of certain features or the lack thereof, it might make good business sense to embed the functionality that would persuade "deserters" to come back.

Obviously, the ideas I've suggested above will bring fresh new problems with them. People will become used to and dependent upon omniscient, omnipresent software that allows them to find out anything and connect with anyone at any moment. This could become a kind of "god" to people, eliciting a psychological and emotional attachment.

We already have this now to some degree, but only if you're in front of a screen. Getting rid of that limitation will allow people to be more physically active again without sacrificing interconnectedness. It could also allow software to penetrate our lives even more deeply.

One of the ways to overcome the social isolation that increasing Internet use often brings is to live in more compact settlements where people can get around on food and visit a variety of public spaces and interesting venues where they can interact with both like-minded people and strangers face to face.

Fortunately, this trend is already underway in overly suburbanized societies and is called "New Urbanism." The natural complement to an increasingly data-oriented society with high levels of computer and Internet use is an urban environment that facilitates face-to-face social interaction and physical exercise and play to the greatest degree possible. These should be default behaviors by design.

Personally, I look forward to technological advancements in computing and connectivity, provided they do not undermine proper human functioning. There is so much good that can come out of electronics and computing.

Digitization and automation could allow us to continually monitor and respond to ecological changes. Wars could become less and less likely because people feel emotionally connected to the whole world. People could become more rational and knowledgeable given their ability to access factual knowledge in a second or less. Long-standing “tragedies of the commons” could be overcome through computer-aided communications.

I also hope this will be a world of healthy, active, passionate, and socially integrated people.

Some Thoughts on Relationships and Socionics

The last 9 months have been very good for me. My life has been steadily getting better and better, and I think I understand enough about why the changes have been taking place to maintain them indefinitely. I'm referring to all sorts of changes relating to nutrition, exercise, sleep, hormones, and neurotransmitters, and also to relationships, social life, work, life strategy, and inner development.

Along the way, I have begun to think about socionics again at times. The first time was when I was pursuing a girl who seemed responsive and interested, but the interaction seemed chronically unstable and off-kilter. After a few frustrating weeks of this, I had the thought, "I wonder what socionics could say about this?" I'll admit that making a good guess at identifying her type (a LIE with a high degree of interpersonal sensitivity) brought some clarity and helped explain the imbalances in the interaction.

Since then I've occasionally (but not automatically) referred to socionics when thinking about other relationships. Experiences with other girls, however, have not exactly fit the socionics model. For instance, I had a fulfilling short-term relationship with an EIE ("quasi-identity"). Luckily, I no longer take socionics very seriously and do not let it influence my romantic choices before the fact. If I did, I might limit myself and fail to obtain experience that conflicts with the socionics model. I think I did this in the past.

Interestingly — as with any idea system — the people who engage in developing socionics are precisely those who take it very seriously... This introduces biases and ideological "overshoot" that the less interested may notice, but rarely take seriously enough to do anything about. Within socionics, as soon as people start to strongly doubt the model, they usually leave the community or become less active and just complain about the discrepancies in the background. Naturally, this is a more or less universal characteristic of schools of thought.

I now believe — as a kind of personal rule — that any relationship can or should be pursued if there is passionate interest. 100% interest and sincerity seems to be a much better predicter of having a really positive experience than socionic factors. However, this assumes that you have the maturity and wisdom to not overstep the natural bounds of the relationship and to not force it to be something that it cannot.

Some people (a lot of men) experience strong romantic interest on a daily or weekly basis. They have to find different rules and formulas for deciding how to pursue relationships and may not relate well to my ideas.

Another observation I've had is that a person may go through stages where they become more or less receptive to different kinds of interaction. For instance, when I am in a "socialite" stage focused mostly on my external social life — going out, meeting people, and doing things with others — the whole type thing can be more or less irrelevant. However, if I enter a more work-focused stage with a lot of focused solitary activity, my need for closer and more "high-quality" relationships increases.

I'm suggesting that in some circumstances a person can be perfectly happy without any dual relations or even any close tet-a-tet relationships. As a person's activities become more focused and idiosyncratic, the need for focused and idiosyncratic relationships seems to rise as well.

In the hunter-gatherer societies that produced modern homo sapiens, people experienced much tighter group relationships and less individualized tet-a-tet relationships. The idea of finding "soul mates" in such circumstances becomes largely irrelevant. I believe that a failure to understand or even think about the relationship structure of primitive societies has led to many of the erroneous ideas contained in socionics. As some readers may know, Augusta Augustinavichute believed humans were a pair-forming species and examined their relationships in a modern (actually, Soviet command economy) context only.

I've had the chance to mingle in a lot of different groups of late. Certainly, different groups have their different "feel," and socionic quadras is one way to look at it. However, some of us are used to feeling like outsiders in virtually every group we find ourselves. Thus, using comfort level as a way to identify quadras may lead to never finding one's own quadra because every group is uncomfortable — just to different degrees. For such people, the idea of quadras and their defining role in establishing the culture of a group can be pretty much irrelevant.

In a "socialite" period of life, you may flit from group to group with ease, but few of the groups are particularly well-established or display any set rules and "quadra flavor." As your life becomes more work-focused, you will probably find yourself spending time in more well-established groups. Obviously, the longer a group has existed and the more fixed its membership, the more rigid the culture of the group will be. I think there's much value in belonging to such a group(s) at some point in life.

I often return to the concept of "highly sensitive people" and observe how these people systematically do not fit into socionic type and relation models. They might as well be a different ype, and can be divided into extraverts (roughly 1/4 of HSPs) and introverts (roughly 3/4). Most are intuitive types, but there are also some introverted sensers among them.

I really strongly doubt that an HSP IEI's ideal match will be any kind of SLE, though many aspects of the relationship may be comfortable and convenient. But an HSP is subject to some kinds of feelings and experiences (states of sensitivity, solitude, loneliness, restriction of sensory stimulation, etc.) to a much greater degree than non-HSPs, and will need to find others who can relate to this "deeper" level. If an HSP lacks a deeper sensitivity-based connection with his partner, he may experience loneliness and even alienation.

I find that HSPs tend to have a mixture of intuitive and sensing qualities and often logical and ethical qualities that perhaps make it less important to have a partner who is at the opposite end of these axes (particularly intuition/sensing).

I'm not sure these axes are even a good way to think about relationship compatibility anymore. One of the reasons they enjoy popularity it because they give people them something to think about before the relationship has occurred. It can actually be akin to voyeurism. By thinking about your compatibility or incompatibility (or that of other people) with someone before a relationship has actually begun, you can 1) fantasize about a relationship that does not yet exist, 2) fantasize about other people's relationship (this is more of a female thing), and 3) justify your own inaction in pursuing someone you are attracted to.



I have a lot more to say on the subject of relationships and well-being, but it is all unrelated to socionics, so I will just abruptly end this post here.

Preview of My Changing Views on Personality and Relationships

(This post started out as a response to Jonathan's comment on my previous post, then grew to article length)

Part of why it may seem I'm going a little too far in turning away from socionics (I acknowledge that's possible) is that I haven't yet talked about the views that are taking the place of socionics in my mind. That's because I wanted to first do a methodical run-through of socionics before getting to my new perspectives, but it's going slow because I have almost no one to discuss it with these days. Hence this post, which is a kind of preview of my emerging ideas — "convictions," you might say — on phenomena previously described by socionics.

At this point, allowing myself to skip past some of the methodical stuff and cut to the chase will probably be useful to both me and my readers. Here are some of the main points in no particular order: 

1. Identifying people as "the same type" is useful only when they have significant obvious similarities. I'm done with sticking highly sensitive or highly intelligent/creative/refined/whatever individuals into the same type as people with a completely different background and sensitivity just because they share some esoteric "information preferences." If other people don't see obvious parallels between two people, then calling them the same type does more harm than good (this conviction comes from personal experience). 

2. This inevitably suggests a different set of types — either a similar number of types but with a much more uneven distribution, or a greater number of types. I personally don't care much anymore to name the types or create a consistent system such as socionics. However, identifying and describing the important common traits between two people I still find to be very worthwhile. 

3. The brain is not organized into socionic functions the way socionics suggests. The contents of our ongoing stream of conscious mental activity cannot be categorized by socionic function. In other words, the majority of the time, you will not be able to clearly relate what you're thinking about — or how you're thinking about it — to some socionic category. Rather than trying to force a socionics categorization, I'm more interested in just letting the information speak for itself and kind of self-categorize based on principles of pragmatism.

3.1. I would find it interesting to go through some of the music we once examined (back in 2007) using socionics terminology and allow different kinds of categories to emerge from that exercise. The questions I would start out with are, "what effect does this music have on the listener, and what does this music say about the composer's personality and state(s) of mind, and possibly the culture in which he/she grew up in?" Along the way we might discover that some music is just "better" than other, that level of sophistication is just as important a factor as the "states of mind" we were trying to describe using socionics functions, or that we come up with a number of states worth describing that does not equal 8.

3.1.1. I almost forgot to acknowledge, however, that Jung's and Augusta's idea of dividing up thought processes and basic traits into co-equal mental functions is a powerful and liberating idea that teaches one to see the other side of things and identify possible alternatives to nearly any approach to anything. That makes for a very useful mental tool, even if the details are not strictly correct. 

4. A result of point #3 is that interaction mostly does not occur on the basis of socionic functions. I believe that applying a general psychology/science perspective in examining specific cases brings one to different (simpler and better) conclusions than socionics about why people do or do not get along.

5.1. There is still something to functions and their impact on relationships. It's like they are bundles of values, but not actual mental processes or modules of information perception, processing, and output. 

5.2. There is still something mysterious about why people who are so different can sometimes get along so well. What socionics has done, however, is to put complementary differences on a pedestal. For the most part, people hang out with people of similar personalities who — perhaps — differ from them in some more subtle (and perhaps simpler and physiologically definable) way than being "a completely different type." 

6. Duality as described by Augusta is basically equivalent to falling in love. Remove the love, and duality is more mundane a phenomenon and barely preferable — on average — to other relationships. In modern culture, we expect and even require love for long-term relationships and generally prefer any relationship with love to one without it, regardless of the intertype relationship. There are good reasons for this coming from the logic of biological success.

6.1. Love does not obey the "laws" of intertype relations, and the idealizations that people project onto objects of passion do not necessarily come from the person's supposed Super-Id (dualizing) functions. That is, if you listen closely to what people want to have in an ideal partner — not just their conscious preferences but their emotional reactions to different people — I think you see that the preferences are 1) indeed significant and generally there for good reason; 2) not reducible to an "ideal dual"; and that 3) some people are [much] more universally desirable than others, and again, not because people are stupid and don't know what will make them happy, but because there are [nearly] universally positive and negative traits, habits, and life circumstances of great signifance to human interaction to which socionics is blind (see point #8).

6.1.1. It could be true that dual relations are more often magical than others. However, the fact that they tend to be described as magical feeds a tendency to see duals any time there is magic. Furthermore, a "magical" dual might have more in common with a "magical ___ type" than with a non-magical dual. 

7. There do exist particularly potent combinations of people that socionics is unable to predict (because its model of the psyche is not just incomplete, but fundamentally incorrect). The cause of the potency is unknown to socionics but can be discovered on a case-by-case basis and then, perhaps, generalized into a set of patterns and general rules. I would speculate that these combinations are highly symbiotic on grounds that are more or less permanent (constitutional) rather than situational (e.g. your specific current needs complement the other person's). Such pairings are consistently able to elicit symmetrical positive emotions in each other. Why? I don't know, but I'm now quite confident it is not socionics.

7.1. People with more extreme traits may have different patterns of interpersonal compatibility than those with traits closer to the norm. In particular, they may experience incompatibility much more often and have greater unmet needs for understanding and connection. The causes of this are fairly straightforward and obvious and probably have little or nothing to do with socionics.

8. There are many very important universals that socionics is blind to. For instance, that some people are almost universally annoying while others are almost universally liked/admired. There are not 16 strategies of success, but rather just a handful, plus variations. People achieve success not only by relying on unique strengths, but also by developing universal qualities common to most varieties of success. Trying to follow a somewhat contrived and esoteric type-specific path to success seems to me generally less useful than working on improving the universals.

8.1. For the most part, our lives are dominated by universals — standard situations that would elicit similar reactions in most people. Socionics suggests the opposite.

8.1.1. However, there are definitely times when a person needs to focus on discovering and enhancing the individual and specific. Socionics can give some broad hints, but nothing more. So can other typologies. So can non-typological empirical psychology.

8.2. There are "better" and "worse" states to be in that are remarkably universal, but these states are hard to describe from a socionics perspective. "Type development" is a clumsy and unparsimonious way to describe it. Modern science now has a ton to say about what contributes to happiness and well-being, and research results don't obviously suggest a typological approach.

9. The territory that we each stake out in life and build our self-identities upon is mostly based on unconscious calculations of our probability of biological success in the various roles/niches we have tested or know of given our existing investments and available energy and resources. These roles are often continually changing as different actors come and go and resource allocation patterns (i.e. the economy) evolve, since these things affect our personal prospects. While there may be patterns in which personalities gravitate towards which kinds of roles, situational and non-typical factors are generally more important. Since our connections with people are to a large extent determined by these roles, the things that bring people together and create a bond are best described using non-socionic language because socionics plays a small part in it.

9.1. I think lasting interpersonal conflicts can be parsimoniously described as reflecting threats to self-identities, current roles, and biological success. If you are a sadist and want to cause people psychological pain, don't nerdily attack their hypothetical "point of least resistance"; instead, doubt their self-identity, jeopardize their current roles, and question their biological success. 

- - - - - - - -

That's a glimpse of where my ideas are taking me.

Back to Augusta...

An important question I ask myself is, if things really are as I have suggested here, how can Augusta and so many followers have thought for so long that the system worked? I think that a key to the longevity of many not-quite-true (I don't mean that perjoratively) idea systems is their complexity. The structure and sophistication of systems of thought often have the effect of aweing their adherents. If the ideas are complex and extensive, they may take a very long time to prove or disprove. I, for one, only feel confident in calling socionics "inaccurate" as of the past 6 months.

A long-lived idea system must also be at least reasonably accurate at some level — or impossible to disprove. The fact that thinkers have been identifying types of people for millenia suggests that there is some basis for this approach. It is also plainly evident that different combinations of people are more or less compatible, and that once-established relationships and attitudes toward each other often last for a long time. However, our limited consciousness seems incapable of understanding why this is the case without the help of science. One of Augusta's errors (and mine too) was overstating the role of permanent, constitutional differences in personality. Her model treats people as essentially unchanging actors and isn't well suited for describing short- and long-term development. This error, as well as its opposite — that everything is situational — are easy to make if you are unaware of the last 30 years of psychology research.

Augusta attempted to explain phenomena which are still clouded in mystery — namely love and interpersonal attachment/rejection patterns — and did a half-decent job at it. Good enough to make a lot of people excited about the discovery. Because there are so many types and varieties of intertype relations, a place could be found for any person in the universe revolving around any particular person. To find points where the system breaks down requires comparing overlapping universes to see how the predicted relationships and perceived personalities play out. Like I said, this can take a lot of time — years and years — as one tries tweaking typings and one's understanding of socionics to see if things can be made to fit after all. 

Why Socionics Is Awesome

Amidst all the angst of the socionics community and my own frequent critiques of socionics as a half-baked system not particularly conducive to scientific progress, I sometimes forget my own personal experience of socionics, which is that… socionics is awesome.

So, lest I be mistaken for another disgruntled ex-socionics junkie, let me lay out the ways in which socionics has been an extremely worthwhile and positive school for me.

1. Socionics can easily be used to improve quality of life. For over a year after learning about socionics (age 23), I experienced virtually no interpersonal distress for the first time in my conscious life. Granted, much of this was due to the fact that I was in a constant state of private intellectual discovery and thus was not as sensitive as usual to real or perceived negative interpersonal situations (disagreements and conflicts, loneliness, lack of acceptance, social awkwardness, etc.). But mostly I attribute it to the fact that I had begun applying a constructive, socionics-based approach to managing my emotional and social life, consisting of: 1) a recognition that my emotional state is less the product of my own making than the result of my social interactions; particularly 2) the quality and depth of my connections to people of various personality types; specifically 3) whether I am too emotionally connected to the wrong types or too distant from the right types; suggesting that 4) emotional life can be improved by reducing emotional investment in one set of people and increasing investment in another set.

At first this required a kind of willful restructuring of my interpersonal connections, but eventually it became second nature. This formula clearly works — if it is not too compounded by other issues. I consider it one of the most important life skills, right alongside things like learning to provide for yourself and manage money, avoiding addictions, and taking care of your physical health. Some people are raised with one or more of these skills and may never appreciate what it takes to acquire them through conscious effort. Like these other life skills, keeping your interpersonal life in order requires a certain amount of self-love. No one else is going to do it for you.

Over time my understanding of what kinds of people are "right" or "wrong" for some kind of emotional interdependency has grown to include a lot more than simply socionic type. But the foundation for this skill was laid by socionics.

Positive relationships, particularly intimate ones, impact one's life in a variety of ways. If you have an idea what you're looking for — even if it's as simplistic as "a dual relationship" — that probably increases the chances that you'll find it. I'll never know how much of my romantic success or failure has been due to socionics, but I consider myself quite fortunate considering where I was coming from and what I have experienced so far in life. It could have been a little bit better, but it could also have been far, far worse.

2. Socionics is a secret weapon. My own socionics schooling — which included ruminating over the writings of Augusta (other authors' writings seemed dull in comparison), large amounts of introspection, studying my reactions to people, observing them closely and trying to identify their types under the guidance of a skilled but imperfect teacher, over a hundred hours of poring over photographs trying to recognize personality traits in facial features and expressions, and eventually meeting other socionics aficionados — brought to my awareness many things that had previously been unconscious. At the time it felt like I was acquiring a secret weapon that made my responses to the outside world less blind or mechanistic than other people's. When I realize at what level most other people think about the people around them, using conventional descriptors such as "nice," "good," "dull," etc. and assuming the superiority of their own psychological makeup, I'm eternally grateful to have undertaken a serious study of people and relationships and to have a more objective understanding of why I experience different feelings towards people.

Socionics also makes it easier to recognize and take advantage of numerous "shortcuts." Having a feel for someone's type (or at least elements of their type) allows you to build beneficial relationships quicker than otherwise, particularly if you have accumulated a large body of experience dealing with people of different types. Knowing that there is someone you will be able to confide in and rely upon to some degree may encourage you to take that risk and move to a new location that you feel will be better for you. Or, you may more quickly realize when you are in a bad situation due to the types and prevailing culture of a group you have landed in. A knowledge of socionics provides a more sophisticated feel for how much and in what ways you may be able to rely on someone and, in turn, be useful to them. This can help in choosing employers, partners and assistants, hobby groups, and roommates, not to mention romantic partners.

The caveat is that spiritual and interpersonal choices work best when they are based foremost upon feelings, not mental concepts, so it is very important that you develop an understanding of socionics that is congruous with and highlights your actual emotional experience rather than letting ideas about what you "should be" experiencing according to some interpretation of socionics take precedence over your actual feelings. This one caveat basically encompasses all the potential negative side-effects experienced by so many socionics aficionados. This is a complex problem not at all unique to socionics, and I no longer blame socionics for it. When a school of fish changes direction, it could be said that only the lead fish — the one with the strongest internal compass relative to herd instinct — is following her "true instincts." For whatever reasons, the other fish choose to repeat her movements instead of trying to access their own internal compass — at least, until a greater stimulus (e.g. predator) comes along, temporarily overriding the imperative to "follow the fish in front of you." The issue of negative side-effects of socionics is actually a fundamental and intractable "internal compass vs. external suggestion" problem. It's probably best dealt with individually by strengthening the internal compass (as if it were that easy!) and distancing oneself from the source of suggestion, if necessary. But if a person is able to do this at all, they probably didn't have much of a problem to begin with! Suggestibility exists, and it serves a function for the individual and for society. If people were insusceptible to suggestion, there would be no person-to-person learning.

3. Socionics can trigger a cascade of new intellectual pursuits. Before socionics I had less than a layman's understanding of science and hadn't seriously grappled with its big ideas. I had developed a theologically centered worldview that was clearly at odds with reality and insulated me from scientific and philosophical thought. As imperfect a scientific theory as it is, socionics suggested to me a simple universal principle that gradually undid my entire worldview: all things have their causes. I realized that up till then I hadn't really concerned myself with the causes of things, but had gone around in mental circles trying hopelessly to live up to acquired religious ideals. At first I applied this cause-and-effect idea to the emotional and interpersonal sphere (see #1), but soon began examining everything in its light. I became fascinated by thinking about phenomena divorced of moral judgments and reflecting on the likely material causes of things, eventually formulating my interest as follows: I want to know what is, not what is supposed to be. Later I formulated: the rejection of faith as a guiding principle is the very foundation of science. There's no good reason to have to stop asking "why?" — at least inside yourself — when you reach things that you or anybody else would like to be true but actually have no compelling reason to believe.

Through socionics I became interested in psychology and got a minor in the field. A couple lectures into psychology, I realized that the foundation of modern psychology was evolution. So I began reading about evolutionary psychology to mine it for important ideas, and soon read Darwin's Origin of Species for background, gaining a great admiration for scrupulous rational thought. Then I did quite a lot more reading on evolution, biology, memetics, and the philosophy of science. I literally felt my mind expanding; I could think thoughts that just a few months before had been totally out of reach. Later I would learn to appreciate philosophy in general and read widely in esoteric spirituality. Once I began developing Socionics.us and Wikisocion, socionics became a springboard for learning more about art, music, and history. All this careful thought and reading greatly stimulated my intellectual life and contributed to me later becoming a writer.

Oddly enough, I've never met anyone who experienced anything quite like this as a result of learning about socionics. To many people it sounds as strange and counterintuitive as a waiter becoming a fighter pilot as a result of ballet lessons. Clearly, my particular intellectual response was determined by the mounting tension between my acquired religious worldview and my natural disposition. Nonetheless, I will never forget that it was socionics that opened the floodgates.

4. Socionics encourages and rewards braininess. Sure, there are plenty of people in socionics with personal problems; that's what brings most people to it in the first place. There's nothing shameful about that. Why would you ridicule scrawny or overweight people who go to the gym? But most people who get into socionics are also smart, and it can become a kind of social refuge for brainy people who lack community. It's okay to be smart in socionics, to speak (write) using nerdy terminology, to defy conventional wisdom and present your own wacky ideas to be shot down by others whom you can call names like "conservative" and "orthodox." Sure, there are some people who just pretend to be brainy (just as there are people at the gym who pretend to be buff), but at least the community culture rewards braininess due to the nature of the subject. When I first got in contact with the Ukrainian socionics community, particularly publishing or researching socionists rather than aficionados, it was the first place I had been where you could be as brainy as you wanted. All the communities I'd experienced before that — even my high-achiever high school and university — still had this attitude like, "Hey now, don't get too brainy on us here, hahaha." Through socionics, I've met some really intelligent people that I wouldn't have met otherwise. This has been really valuable to me. Since then, I've found a few other places where braininess is accepted and rewarded, but socionics was the first.

5. Socionics opens the door to higher levels of objectivity, helping to weed out typocentrism and other kinds of biases from one's worldview. It allows you to see, as William James says in Pragmatism, that each man's philosophy is merely a justification of his native disposition. We will likely continue to act in typocentric ways, but at least we can begin to remove biases from our conscious values and worldview, granting other people the possibility of living a legitimate and dignified life according to our own definitions, though we choose to live differently. A study of socionics clearly suggests that 1) there are different legitimate life strategies, each with its potential pitfalls, 2) no type-determined trait can be considered a defect in any sort of intellectually honest way (i.e. such a defect is in the eye of the beholder), and 3) many of the things that bug us in other people are outgrowths, or extreme expressions, of fairly typical and basically benign qualities, thus 4) the "defect," if any, is in the disbalance or misapplication of traits, not in the underlying traits themselves. From these thoughts it seems natural to conclude that 1) each set of traits has its place and its purpose, 2) your own traits may "feel" superior, but only in some abstract ideal sense, as natural selection has decided otherwise by not granting them to everybody.

For me, these realizations have encouraged me to look beyond what works only for me and people like me and look for formulas that are more universal. At some point, I realized that philosophical acceptance of other temperament-determined strategies could itself be considered an extreme viewpoint, given that rejection thereof is a far more common occurence. Most likely, I am in fact less philosophically accepting than much of my writing suggests, and militant promoters of a temperament-specific philosophy are actually not as militant as they appear. In certain situations, I might turn out to be more vehement than them. At any rate, thanks to socionics I am able to think about these things much more clearly, recognizing potential biases as they crop up in myself and others.

So, there you have it. Socionics is awesome! Despite the lack of empirical studies and other flaws, and despite all the caveats and pitfalls. Probably, after reading this article, you will have realized that each person's response to idea systems is highly individual.

Female Attractiveness Over Time

UPDATE Jan. 2013: If I had to redo the graph today, I would extend the peak of psychological qualities through to at least 30. This would probably produce a combined peak around age 24-27. It's hard to define "attractiveness" though. If you're in a bar or night club, men will judge based on mostly appearance alone. In a situation where you get to know people over a longer period of time, the woman's psychological characteristics will play a greater role in defining her attractiveness. So the 50:50 ratio in the weighting of these two traits is a kind of compromise. 

In comparison to male sexual attractiveness, female attractiveness over time is easier to model and exhibits less variation. This is probably because the biological constraints on reproduction for women are greater than for men in light of their far greater energy investment in offspring. Again, this model is an oversimplification, but I think female attractiveness over time can be effectively modeled based on 2 rather than 3 (for males) factors:

1. Physical qualities: sexual maturity and fertility, physical maturity, health and fitness level, probability of surviving childbirth and critical years of childrearing
2. Psychological qualities: confidence, flirtatiousness, independence, ability to manage complex family relationships and responsibilities

Part of the second set of qualities could be separated into a third category, but this would reduce the comparative weight of physical qualities, which are important enough to deserve half the weight of the overall attractiveness index.

In contrast to men, a woman's physical attractiveness goes through ups and downs as she becomes pregnant, gives birth, recovers, and is once more physiologically ready to give birth. Likewise, her psychological attractiveness goes through swings as she becomes correspondingly more or less flirtatious. One can imagine such "wiggles" on the graphs below instead of smooth curves.

A woman's graph of attractiveness over her lifetime depends in part upon decisions such as when and how many children to have. A woman who has many children successively may in effect "squander" her attractiveness more quickly than one who has just one or two, because of the greater physical toll of having multiple children close together. Also, a woman who begins having children later can enjoy more years of peak attractiveness than one who starts early. However, by having children when the body is most equipped to have them, the woman who starts early might do better at preserving her health in the long run.

In terms of difficulty of childbirth, risk of death during childbirth, and the physiological toll of having offspring, I believe Homo Sapiens takes first or near first place among the Animal Kingdom, with our unusually large-headed offspring, long gestation, and lengthy period of breastfeeding. This heightens the importance of physiological fitness and in effects skews the attractiveness curve of a woman towards her early childbearing years when she has the most strength and has not yet put her body through the ordeal of childbearing. In other species the age of the female may be less important as long as she is fertile.

One might suppose that a woman would become entirely sexually unattractive upon reaching menopause, since she can no longer reproduce. However, at least in modern societies, this is clearly not the case. As reproduction becomes a more and more of a secondary "goal" of intimacy (thanks to medical advances, contraception, and a host of related phenomena), post-menopause women become comparatively more and more attractive than they were before. Also, as populations age, there are fewer and fewer young women to focus sexual energy on, and older women and their sexuality have become increasingly "normal."

There are many individual variations in the graph below depending on individual factors such as how quickly and completely a woman's body recovers from childbirth, however, the graph below seems to be fairly accurate for women in modern societies in general.

It is rare for a woman's peak overall attractiveness to extend beyond age 30. This might occur if she has a very youthful appearance and matured late as an individual, with complexes or lack of experience at age 20-25 finally giving way to spontaneity and flirtatiousness by age 30. In primitive societies peak attractiveness might come as early as age 18. Not too long ago this was the average age of first pregnancies in many traditional societies.

Once again, as in the previous post, we find that sexually attractive psychological qualities are expressed in approximately the degree to which a woman senses she is attractive to the opposite sex. Are these qualities a cause or an effect? Probably a bit of both. With physical attractiveness comes confidence, but with age may also come greater freedom to be oneself, greater spontaneity, etc. These qualities may enable a woman to remain attractive to potential mates well into middle and even old age, even though her peak attractiveness was still somewhere back around age 25.

Male Attractiveness Over Time

UPDATE Jan. 2013: All three graphs are somewhat optimistic in assuming that a man more or less has his life together. If this is not the case (early weight acquisition, bad attitudes, poor career prospects, etc.), the peak could come as early as 25.

I am also dissatisfied with the idea of "attractiveness" in the first place. Attractiveness for a short-term relationship, longer-term, or marriage? It's also not that practical to readers other than giving some older guys hope:) It's more practical to realize that there are things you can do to increase your individual attractiveness, and to try to do them.

I've attempted to model male attractiveness over time by looking at how 3 sets of qualities and their sum evolve over a person's life. Naturally, this model is somewhat arbitrary, but it seems to fit my observations well. The basis of this model is:

• observation of countless actual men and their attractiveness to the opposite sex
• research and reflection on the evolutionary basis of qualities feeding into attractiveness

I've divided qualities determining male attractiveness into 3 groups:

1. Physical qualities: sexual maturity and potency, physical maturity, health and fitness level, probability of surviving through critical years of childraising
2. Psychological qualities: self-confidence, charm, mental sharpness
3. Ability to support a family materially: income, financial independence, social status and standing, capacity for work, ability to focus on productive activity

"Attractiveness" shall be defined as the sum of these three qualities.

Instead of comparing different people to each other, I've chosen to look at an individual male's level of attractiveness over his lifespan. To do this, the number 100 shall represent a person's peak level of a given set of qualities.

At some point in life a man will reach his physical peak, psychological peak, and peak ability to support a family — often at different moments. Generally, the physical peak comes first, followed by a psychological peak and later a peak in his ability to work for and feed others. Obviously this differs from person to person, but there are some general patterns.

In the first example we'll look at a man who enjoys professional success and good health and takes good care of himself. Here's the graph generated:

As you can see, this person reaches peak attractiveness at 40-45 years of age and enjoys a 15-year-long "hump" from 35 to 50 years of age.

It's possible to imagine a "rich celebrity" version of the above with a peak of wealth, fame, and ability to provide for a family as late as age 70. Presumably, such a meteoric rise in wealth would also powerfully affect the person's confidence level (psychological qualities), leading to a later peak in those as well. This would delay the period of peak attractiveness to 55 years in this model, with a broad hump from age 45 to 70. At age 80 the man would be just as attractive as at age 25 despite a substantial loss in physical strength and sex drive. Here's the graph for that:

Next we look at someone who doesn't take care of himself and/or has health problems and thus has an earlier peak in physical attractiveness. This might affect psychological attractiveness as well, as confidence may be on the decline from an earlier age, and mental sharpness might be affected. We'll assume also that this man has a relatively "aimless" career whose success depends not so much on building upon what has come before, but the person's energy level and ability to jump into new jobs. This implies an earlier peak in ability to provide for others. On the whole, such a man "burns out" more quickly than the previous cases and reaches peak attractiveness at 30-35. Here's the graph for that:

The above graph might also be close to the typical pattern for men in subsistence economies where surviving and thriving depends in a much greater measure on physical strength and health, and yet the physical conditions of life may take a greater physical toll. In such a situation a man's peak ability to provide for others might come a bit earlier than in the graph above — say, at age 30-35. This would shift the man's hump of overall attractivess to 25-40 years of age, which seems to fit with my experiences of traditional subsistence cultures.

In complex societies with developed economies a man's peak attractiveness generally comes later in life since it takes more time to acquire the experience and skills to be effective in a complex system. In general, the more successful a man, the later in life his peak occurs. This holds true in societies of any degree of complexity.

In summary, we've looked at 4 different situations with broad peaks in overall sexual attractiveness occurring at different times — 35-50, 45-70, 25-45, and 25-40 years of age.

Comment

As I reread this post I noticed that on each of the 3 graphs peak attractiveness was reached at the same time as the person's peak psychological attractiveness. This was inadvertent and led me to consider whether psychological qualities might not be an independent factor, but basically derived from physical qualities and material success. Perhaps a man's attractive psychological qualities rise and fall in complete sync with his overall attractiveness and depend almost entirely on his internal gauge of how desirable he is as a mate? Something to think about.

Additional publicity
One of my graphs was discussed at a more popular blog. The comments there may be of some interest. And here's another blogpost that will make older guys feel good about their prospects but really only applies to successful guys. 

How Life Circumstances Influence Perception of Socionics

Now that I've criticized socionics in several blog posts, I will present a new perspective that may begin to reconcile different viewpoints on the accuracy of socionics*.

* When I write "socionics," I am referring to intertype relations — the core and purpose of socionics theory.

How acutely a person experiences socionics depends on their current life circumstances. You may go through phases where socionics seems to hold little sway over you, and phases where socionics seems to imprison you or dictate how you feel and what you are able to accomplish.

Here are the kinds of things that influence your sensitivity to intertype relations:

• How well-adapted you are in general at this stage in life. How stable your work and close relationships are.
• How much freedom you have to choose and regulate relationships and activities.
• Whether you are spending more time one-on-one with people or in groups.
• How much variety is built into your lifestyle.

The "worst" possible situation is when you are poorly adapted, have few friends, unstable work, are stuck with whoever you live and work with and are unable to maintain personal boundaries and spiritual hygiene, belong to no groups, and live a lifestyle with little variety. In these life circumstances socionic relations are likely to be experienced very acutely, with many or most intertype relations producing distress. The range of acceptably compatible people narrows to a very small group that is able to reach you through your chronic stress and defensive position.

The "best" possible situation is when you are well adapted, have several close friends and confidants, a stable work situation, freedom to choose and adjust your partnerships and activities to suit your tastes, belong to groups where you participate in interesting and enjoyable group interaction, and have variety built into your lifestyle such that you are engaging the mind, body, and emotions in a number of different ways on a regular basis. In these life circumstances socionic relations may seem to hold little sway over you, and virtually everyone seems compatible in some way or another. The range of people you are able to connect with meaningfully expands, and your openness and sense of security makes it easy to brush off slight manifestations of incompatibility that you might otherwise be sensitive to.

But beyond the influence of life circumstances, it seems that some inherent and developed personality traits can make a person more or less susceptible to socionics. For instance, a typical extravert (in the popular sense) may find that while they personally don't sense incompatibility with other people, for some reason others often react negatively to them and say they are "pushy," "overbearing," "too talkative," etc. Typical extraverts may generally feel untouched by socionics, while occasionally experiencing periods of intense loneliness when they feel that everyone dislikes them and they have no true friends (or for other reasons). Typical introverts (in the popular sense) may generally feel highly susceptible to intertype relations and only able to tolerate a narrow range of highly compatible people. Occasionally some of these introverts may experience states where they can open up and briefly abandon their sensitivity.

Furthermore, one can develop attitudes that affect how acutely socionics is felt. I'm not sure "develop" is the right word, because I think even this type of development is largely outside of conscious control. For instance, if one comes to believe things like — 1) one's own perception is innately limited and prone to error, 2) all people contain some amount of wisdom to be learned from, or 3) all people experience the same basic things and can thus be empathized with — then a greater openness can be felt towards other people, softening the effects of socionics. Likewise, beliefs such as — 1) I know the truth, 2) it is my duty to bring the truth to other people, 3) some people are good and others bad, or 4) some people are innately defective — will tend to make one's experience of intertype relationships more acute than otherwise.

Some life circumstances allow a person to escape the "necessity" of duality (or let's just say, "fulfilling intimate relationships"). The formula I have discovered for this is:

• a vastly simplified lifestyle that allows you to keep your mind uncluttered
• a high degree of freedom and elective solitude
• large amounts of group interaction
• frequent new acquaintances with the option of getting to know people quickly and thoroughly

This is the lifestyle of the wandering philosopher, the spiritual teacher, the long-distance hiker or skilled solo traveler. Those in this position get to experience the best of people (their life experiences, accumulated knowledge, hopes and dreams) while avoiding the worst (finding ways to cooperate in day-to-day living). Living this way, you may develop a kind of "love of mankind"; instead of emotionally latching on to particular individuals you know well, you experience positive feelings for everyone you meet and for the world in general. In this state duality and deep intimacy may lose their importance because you are regularly connecting deeply with many different people. This is the lifestyle of Jesus (assuming the New Testament is accurate), the Dalai Lama, Ghandi, and some long-distance travelers I've met. I think some types are more predisposed to develop this way.

(I encourage readers to think about if there are other types of lifestyles that produce similar effects but work for different kinds of people.)

To summarize, sensitivity to intertype relations as described by socionics is highly influenced by how healthy your life circumstances are at the moment, how sensitive you are physiologically and psychologically, what attitudes you have developed, and whether you are traveling.

Socionics and Friendships Between Couples

If finding friendship with one other person is hard, try finding friendship between two couples. What does is take? Each member of both couples must find at least one friend among the other couple in such a way that all members are included. If any one person is left out of friendship, the couples are not entirely friends.

In the best case scenario, all four people are friends with all other three. This is rare, but happens. However, even this arrangement is fragile. A shift in the life circumstances of any of the four people can upset the balance and change the character of the friendship. The probability of such a shift happening in any given year is substantially higher than that of a shift happening among a single couple (a relatively high probability to begin with.

For instance, if a single individual has a 20% chance of a major shift in circumstances in a given year, then a couple has a 36% chance that one or more will experience a shift, and a set of two couples -- 59%. This is just to illustrate why close friendships between two couples are less stable than between two people.

What intertype relations might be more favorable for such a friendship? Among any four people, there is a dizzying variety of possible combinations of intertype relations. And yet, some tend to be more common than others.

It's easiest to recognize friendships between two dual couples. In my experience, it seems relatively common to have:

• dual couples
• activator couples
• semi-duality couples
• extinguishment couples

(where the relationship is defined by the intertype relation between any two individuals of the same sex)

A relationship between two couples may become unstable if there is cause for attraction between any two members of the opposite sex. Therefore, identity relations between couples are rarer than duality, and mirror rarer than activator. Identity friends typically have to keep their spouses out of the friendship to avoid sparking jealousy and concealed sexual competition between the two males or two females.

Since I have a lot of activator friends, I frequently encounter the "activator couple" scenario. Do couple friendships form in all cases? Only in about a third at most. It seems that most such friendships are saboteuged by rejection between "mirrors." In other words, an IEE and LSE may be close friends and may want to include the spouses in the friendship, but either the SLI spouse rejects the LSE or the EII spouse rejects the IEE.

There seems to be no surefire way of predicting rejection. It seems particularly common for the dual spouse to perceive the activator friend as a competitor for influence on the spouse. The more time the two spend together, the less time the dual gets with his or her spouse.

So, you can see how difficult it is for even an activator couple friendship to materialize. The likelihood of rejection between two opposite sex "mirrors" is quite high.

Paradoxically, more socionically distant relations between couples may be "safer" in the sense that the same sex friend of your spouse is less likely to be perceived as a direct competitor to you. However, such relationships will also likely not develop the same degree of closeness and trust.

Non-dual couples

As soon as we introduce non-dual couples, things get more complex since the likelihood of imbalance between the intertype relations of one member of a couple and the other member rises.

For instance, a LIE-ILI (mirror) couple (male member listed first for consistency) may become friends with a ESI-LIE couple (dual). In this scenario, two people get a dual relation out of the friendship, one gets an activation relation, and one gets "just" a mirror relation. It's easy to see that here the relationship will hinge mostly upon the ESI, who is "needed" by everyone else. Probably, the other three will only be able to talk amongst themselves, but when the ESI comes around, varied activities will become both possible and fun. It's typically hard to have extended fun with identity partners, mirror partners, kindred partners, etc.

The ideal friends for a LIE-ILI couple might be a ESI-SEE couple, but what are the odds of finding one? Likewise, the ideal friends for a LSI-SEE couple might be an EIE-ILI couple, but I would the odds of two such couples finding each other would be very low indeed.

Generally, it seems that the less socionically favorable the intertype relation between a couple, the more difficult it is to maintain friendships with other couples.

Other factors

To avoid sociono-centricism, it should be noted that the less favorable AND stable a couple's relationship is in general (not just in socionic terms), the greater difficulty they will have maintaining friendships with other couples. This applies to duals with an instable relationship just as much as to non-duals with a stable relationship. Can duals have an instable relationship? Of course. (Nonetheless, dual relations appear to be more common than others.)

Furthermore, in practice friendship is based not so much on socionics ("we just feel good around each other -- that's why we're friends") as upon shared interests and history ("we enjoy doing X together, we've been through a lot together, we have a lot to talk about"). Socionic factors certainly influence the likelihood that two people will become and remain friends, but it is far from a 100% determiner.

Looking at interests may help to explain the frequent "mirror rejection" pattern mentioned above. When two activators become friends, they most certainly share some interests and commonalities in values. These shared interests and values won't extend to all areas of life, but they're definitely enough to justify spending time together doing something of mutual interest and talking about life. However, what you share in common with an activator may not be what they share in common with their dual.

For instance, I am passionate about backpacking and the outdoors. A lot of my activator LSE friends have also somewhat enjoyed backpacking -- enough to make trips together generally worthwhile and fun. But what is the probability that someone who enjoys backpacking somewhat, but not passionately like I do, will choose a spouse that also enjoys it? Probably under 50% (the more passionate one is about something, the higher the likelihood they will choose a spouse that shares or sympathizes with the interest). And there you have one possible reason for rejection. The friend's spouse doesn't enjoy or understand backpacking, and is mistrustful of people who make it a central part of their life. Probably, if we were to dig deeper, we would find some other fundamental value differences underlying an interest or disinterest in backpacking that would make itself felt in other ways.

Each thing that just one of the friends is particularly passionate about is similarly prone to cause rejection or mistrust on the part of the other friend's spouse, who, more likely than not, does not sympathize much with the passion.

What seems to increase the likelihood of a compatible intercouple relationship is when both activation partners are equally passionate about their key shared interest/s. This means that it is likely that both have chosen spouses who are at least accepting of and somewhat interested in the area of passion. In this case, everyone can participate and experience enjoyment both from the activity and from the conversations that inevitably result.

But "equally passionate" is just another way of saying that the activator friends are more compatible than two friends who are unequally passionate about their shared interests. Many parameters of compatibility are not encompassed by socionics. Higher compatibility between friends increases the likelihood of compatibility between their spouses and between both couples. If you and your friend have built a friendship upon mediocre compatibility, it is less likely that your spouses can be included successfully in the relationship.

Leaving socionics behind for a moment, friendships between couples are more likely to form on the basis of a common interest or interests among all four members. Socionics becomes one of the limiting factors to the relationship and will tend to make itself felt during longer interaction sessions involving a greater variety of activities (for instance, not just talking about or doing the common interest/hobby, but also eating together, planning logistics, relaxing afterwards, etc.).

Even among two highly compatible couples (say, a complete quadra) differences will arise where one or two people dissent from the majority approach. Dissention can occur on the basis of irrationality-rationality ("I don't like how they don't warn us about what they're going to do"), on the basis of gender ("I'm tired of everything having to be so goal-oriented; why don't you and I take a walk around town together while the men do their thing?"), on the basis of sensitivity ("I just want to be alone for a while"), or any number of other things.

To sum things up, friendship between couples is more difficult and complex than dynamics between two people. Intertype relations between the two couples play a significant role in choice of intercouple friends, but there are a number of other important factors determining the possibility of friendship.

More Relationship Tips

Here is my response to a letter from a college-age LII asking for tips about how to find an ESE dual. I thought the topic might be interesting to other readers.

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Finding a particular type over the Internet is problematic unless you happen to be on a Russian language dating site that is based on socionics. On other sites expect that if you pick out 10 people you're interested in and think may be ESEs, only 2 of them will turn out to be ESE. Part of the difficulty is that everyone is trying to be positive and present qualities that others will find attractive, and it will be easy to mistake people's self-descriptions for possible ESEs.

My general advice is to not look for a particular type, but to focus on being yourself and doing things with sincerity and interest, and in general to follow standard advice for finding and developing new relationships. Put yourself in a position where a lot of new people will be crossing your path so that the odds are in your favor, and focus on expressing your personal qualities, talents, and interests so that a potentially compatible person will recognize you as such. Finding and keeping a dual is probably more about personal development than it is about knowing what to look for in others.

It's important to learn to take responsibility for your gender and type role when getting to know other people. In other words, to learn to do basic "man" things in the initial stages of the relationship, and to do the types of things that a dual type would be expecting. For instance, ESEs probably won't be expecting you to be super active in getting to know them initially. They'll enjoy the challenge of opening you up, discovering your interests and views, and involving you in stimulating and fun activities. At the same time, they'll be expecting you to be firm and confident and to express a clear interest in them in a manly sort of way.

3 Relationship Tools

In my opinion, there are three classes of things worth learning about in order to enjoy positive interpersonal relationships. Maybe I will add more over time as I discover them.

1. Individual psychological differences.
Example: Socionics
Innate individual differences are vast and can potentially take a lifetime of study to grasp, but it makes sense to at least familiarize oneself with a system of psychological types such as socionics. No concept of interpersonal relationships can be complete without an appreciation of personality and how it affects, even determines, our interactions.

2. Gender differences.
Example: John Gray's books (Men, Women, and Relationships; Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus)
Personality typologies tend not to describe gender differences at all, yet these psychological differences affect the dynamics of any inter-gender relationship regardless of the personality types involved. Gender differences are the easiest of the three categories to understand and apply because there are only two basic types to learn, and type identification is no problem!

3. Personal development.
Example: Stephen Covey's books (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and others)
Once we understand some or most of the deterministic factors affecting our relationships, it would be a mistake to stop there and decide that nothing can be done to influence interactions one way or another, since all is determined. There is still the art of life to learn. This is the realm of personal religion, mythology, or spirituality, which can never be replaced by science.

The examples I give are just samples of some of the routes available to learn about each particular category. As the most subjective of the three, "personal development" has the greatest number of possible routes. I find Stephen Covey's approach to be particularly comprehensive and understandable to the western mind, but one could just as easily find guidance for personal development in Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, neopaganism, the writings of Joseph Campbell, Osho, Krishnamurti, etc. etc.

As I've studied each of these three areas, I've been astonished at how they ignore the others or mention them only in passing. For instance, socionics has nothing to say about how the psychology of a female SLI differs from a male SLI, though the differences are hardly trivial in the context of "dualization." John Gray's otherwise excellent writings say next to nothing about the importance of choosing the right partner to begin with; he focuses only on living with the partner after the choice has been made. Likewise Stephen Covey, who talks about all the synergy and intimacy that he and his wife share, while ignoring the fact that he obviously made a very wise choice to begin with. If there were serious compatibility issues between him and his wife, all the "personal development" in the world would still not be able to produce the same results as with a more compatible partner.

In other words, existing knowledge in each of these three areas tends to have significant shortcomings. Taking only one class of knowledge as your ultimate guide on the subject of relationships can lead to naivete and disappointment when the tools don't always work -- for reasons you are unable to discern because you lack knowledge of other important aspects.

Guidelines for Finding Compatible Partners

Finding compatible partners is very easy. Really. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Find out what behavior styles are natural for you
2. Behave naturally
3. Wait and see who is drawn to you
4. Take your pick

By "natural," I mean behavior that neither causes nor results from internal discomfort. If you can tell jokes and make the crowd laugh in a relaxed frame of mind, then that is your natural behavior. If you can sit and listen quietly without feeling tense inside, then that is natural. If you feel uncomfortable and tense trying to seem interested/funny/conscientious/quiet/loud, etc. - you are behaving unnaturally. You cannot attract compatible partners in a state of tension.

Many people think they have to do something extraordinary to attract people. If acting "extraordinary" comes naturally to you, than this might be the case. However, it is untrue for everyone else. If natural behavior in a group for you usually involves sitting and doing nothing, or listening passively, believe me - there is a whole category of people who are attracted to this. Trying to be something else and creating tension inside yourself will turn off potential compatible partners who are unconsciously looking for the calm, receptive type. They are not looking for tense, unbalanced imitators.

Many people are too unsure of themselves and their prospects to wait long enough for the compatible partners to emerge out of the woodwork. They want to force things along and make things happen now - for fear that it might be their last chance. However, often the people who notice you first are not the ones who will ultimately prove to be compatible. Instead, they are the people who like the shape of your lips, or the design on your sweater, or some other random thing about you. As incompatible or semi-compatible people show interest in you, you will sense that they are unconsciously expecting a different behavior style than what is natural for you. If you cave in and try to give them that behavior, you will win the battle, but lose the war. The trouble will come later on in a relationship when you start dropping your act and behaving spontaneously.

But if you insist on acting naturally, these initial courters will soon lose interest and move on, and another set of people will gravitate towards you. These are the people who think it's cool that you left the party early because you were tired, or - on the contrary - stayed there till the last people left in order to make sure everyone was having a good time. These people have noticed and value your natural, internally relaxed behavior and see something promising in it for themselves. They'll give you clues like sitting or standing closer to you, leaning forward and mimicking your facial expressions when you talk to them, asking you questions you find perceptive, and doing other good things. If you've done a good job of being yourself, then you have almost surely found the people who are most compatible with you in the given circumstances.