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.

Interesting Video about Jungian Types and Math Learning

A link to this TEDx presentation was recently posted by Jonathan in the comments of my "Fooled by Socionics" post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH9Zn7Glf3E

My critique of this video will be similar to what I've been saying about typology for a long time.

It's really interesting to hear about individual differences that affect learning, and I will be excited to hear more about this. On the surface it would seem that the research conducted supports Jungian typology. Students are divided into types, and far-reaching differences in learning processes are discovered.

What this proves is that whatever algorithm was used to divide the students into groups (types) was to some degree predictive of their behavior when learning math. What is not clear is:

• The relationship between the algorithm used and the theory of Jungian typology. In other words, what assumptions were made in producing the algorithm that do not necessarily directly derive from the theory?
  
  What I'm hinting at here is that the researchers' explanations of types may differ from those of other Jungian typologists, because the theory is basically unquantifiable. Different researchers might therefore end up with different divisions of schoolchildren with higher or lower predictive value.
  
  
• Is the algorithm used by the researchers actually the best possible one for the purposes of this study? In other words, is there another way of dividing up the children that would be even more predictive of their behavior when learning math?

Occasionally socionists in Ukraine and Russia produce similar kinds of studies which are often tantalizing, but always inconclusive. For typologists in general, the focus is to generate empirical support for the theory rather than the best possible predictive outcome. I don't have much respect for this approach anymore. Maybe it's okay for the early investigation stage of new hypotheses, but it's not okay for a mature theory.

What I mean is that if we have a method "A" that we suppose influences outcome "B," then what typologists always do is — "let's apply our A and see what B we get." They never focus on maximizing the outcome! That would be — "let's see what A will maximize B."

This is probably the single most important idea to take away from my recent posts about why I have left socionics behind. This is what science is all about, and typologists — some bluntly, others more subtly — resist it for whatever reason (laziness and boredom, overconfidence, lack of acceptance of such research among their reference group, lack of research funds, etc.).

Going back to the TEDx video, let's imagine the research was not to "see what this way of applying Jungian Typology can predict" but to "see what method we can find for grouping children into learning groups with the greatest predictive power."

They could even start off using their existing typological method just to get things going. Then, they would look at how these children responded to different math learning methods and environments. Then they would consider whether they might move some children from one group to another based on their observed behavior, or whether there were large enough differences within a single group to justify dividing it further. Then they would try to formulate the key characteristics separating one group from another. They would have to decide whether these characteristics were more discrete or continuous and at what threshold level a person might be switched from one group to another. Finally, they would work on developing the most effective method for dividing children into these learning groups.

At some point, they would have to deal with the problem of the 99 percentile and 1 percentile math students who learn so much faster or slower than the other people with their supposed learning style that it is simply impractical to leave them in the same group.

The method produced might be a 5-minute test instead of a hours-long talking session on the differences between types. Or it might be a brain scan or physiological test done while performing different tasks. Maybe the behavior of interest is so complex that, for now, the only way to confidently identify it is in the classroom, over a longer time span. This might even lead researchers to say — "let's just use our talking session on Jungian types plus the following additional tweaks."

At any rate, the method would be optimized for enhancing math learning and would not necessarily predict any of the other things that Jungian typology is supposed to predict. But it would be rock-solid and other researchers could take it and build upon it.

"Fooled" by Socionics

This long and rambling post was inspired by this comment from Consentingadult.

I have a suggestion: instead of criticizing Augusta (which in itself is perfectly valid), why don't you actually criticize one or more of your own writings? E.g. the ILE description in the article, where you said, amongst other things: 

"I have known ILEs who were heads of research institutes, NGOs, language teaching schools, and consulting companies. Many more held various positions in all kinds of organizations where they had a great deal of independence. The common feature of all engaged ILEs seems to be that they are working on some far-reaching personal project that has yet to come to full fruition."

I would like to know: what was wrong about this, how did you fool yourself to arrive at such insights that you now claim cannot be true or valid?

I'll get to criticism of types eventually. I was hoping to start with information aspects, then move to functions and Model A, then to types and intertype relations.

If your question was not simply rhetorical (since I detect a bit of sarcasm), here is my response.

What's "wrong" about the ILE description

I described a subset of ILEs — those who are above-average, proactive, and highly engaged in the modern, growing economy. If I'd written something that described the under-average, reactive, and underengaged ILEs, or the subsistence farmer and hunter-gatherer ILEs equally as well as the more fortunate, modern ILEs, the resulting description would have been too abstract to "do any good."

One might argue that I've described the "greatest potential" that people of this type can attain to. I agree that that might be inspiring, and people want and need to be inspired. But it's not necessarily true that you can group people into 16 types and then expect that any of those people has the potential to achieve the level of success, fulfillment, or happiness of the most fortunate individuals of their type.

I described the ideal type, not the borderline, overly contradictory, or untypeable ILEs. This is a universal problem in socionics, and it comes from being unable to type all individuals in a population. If socionists can only type what they themselves can recognize, then they only describe the most recognizable types. Then other people will perpetuate the bias towards recognizable types and intertype relations.

I don't expect that socionics will ever overcome this problem because it is not sufficiently accurate to ever develop foolproof empirical tests. An "ILE" will always be "what I've defined as an ILE," and thus any description is as good as any other.

Why do I use the word "accurate?" Because I am convinced that no matter how you define and split the 16 types, the resulting intertype relations will not be close enough to those postulated by socionics to call the system "accurate." The reason socionics has a "lack of empiricism" problem is simply because it has an "accuracy" problem. If socionics were more accurate, the empirical data would be flowing in all around. For instance, the phenomenon of duality would be scrutinized and elucidated, and researchers would be studying it from multiple angles to learn more about how and why it happens.

The fact is, socionics duality as described by Augusta is a rare subset of dual relations, and when it happens between a man and a woman, there is a lot more going on that has nothing to do with socionics. And it doesn't necessarily happen just to duals. In my mind this is a fatal blow to the socionics model of the psyche, since duality was socionics' most powerful hypothesis.

How I managed to "fool myself" 

A bigger question to ask is, "how did Augusta manage to fool herself?" I'll speculate about this further down.

In my case, my initial insights were simple and promising enough that I continued my study of socionics. I had only really deeply processed a small number of my personal relationships, but my insights were promising enough that I was hopeful that socionics could be applied generally, and not just in these specific cases. Of course, I based my understanding on my experiences of the most easily recognizable types and relationships in my environment.

At the moment I wrote the ILE description, my arsenal of experience had grown from a handful to maybe a couple hundred people of different types. However, my deeply processed personal experiences relating to each of them lagged behind. Based on my experiences so far, I was willing to take the system on faith to a degree. When eventually forced to face major contradictions, I began to systematically consider the less easily definable types and relations that I had been discounting and give them an equal place in my mind alongside the recognizable ones. After a while, I concluded that socionics was not accurate enough as it should be, considering the large amount of mental storage space required to house it. Furthermore, the things it could tell a person (less than I used to think) were of little use to me at this stage of life. This process provided some new insights that I now feel obligated to share with my socionics audience.

Biases

When one begins to get into socionics, one recognizes only a tiny sliver of types and intertype relations — those that most obviously fit descriptions and can thus be interpreted thoroughly from a socionics perspective. These "obvious fits" then form the foundation of one's understanding of socionics, giving the person a bias from day one that they will be unable to correct until much later, if ever. If a socionics aficionado recognizes the limitations and inaccuracies of socionics from the outset due to a more methodical and less exciteable personality, you can be sure that they will never become socionics writers!

Socionics is, in a way, worse off than astrology. With astrology you at least know when a person was born, making disagreement on their astrological type impossible. Then you can read a description and say, "well, that doesn't fit!" In socionics, if a person doesn't match their type description, then you've probably mistyped them. Keep switching types until you find the "best fit!"

Changing times

Yes, this has been an absolutely normal way of thinking about psychological matters for eons, but the times are changing and this approach is losing popularity as science has more and more to say about things that people used to only be able to speculate about. More and more people are sensing this and jumping on the train of empirical psychology and neuroscience. This is one of the reasons socionics is, in my opinion, slowly dying out.

Speculation about Augusta

I am quite certain that if Augusta were born today, she would not create socionics. She would read everything currently available on individual differences and go into psychology research or neuroscience. But she grew up before most of the really interesting research started being done, and was stuck in the Soviet Union where there was a official slant on psychology that downplayed personality differences. Thanks in part to typology, personality differences are now taken for granted.

Augusta created a system that allowed for much more healthy psychological variability than was commonly accepted at the time, but she was quite absolutist in her views on the types. For instance, she published a paper explaining why ILE is the best type to run a scientific research institute, ignoring other significant factors other than type. It seemed that she was proposing a new way of staffing posts and organizing society that could be implemented within the Soviet system.

Obviously, the zeitgeist has changed dramatically since then, even in the former Soviet Union. As I understand from my interaction with the socionics community in Kiev, in the late 1980s Augusta's interests drifted to other areas, and she became a less and less active participant of the socionics community, while continuing to occasionally voice her views on the subject. I was also told that she was in a rather unhappy marriage with an LSE (she was ILE), which could have contributed to her idealization of duality.

Was Augusta "fooled" by her own ideas? I suppose you could say so. She would have had the same problems with confirmation bias that any later student of socionics would have, alleviated by the process of discussing ideas and hypotheses with a group of associates. They noticed some fascinating new patterns, broke new ground, and made some mistakes that are easier to recognize decades later.

Watering down socionics

If socionists were forced to type everyone and, particularly, to examine every single relationship among these people, and then to describe types and intertype relations using a strictly statistical method, I am certain that we would see a drastic watering-down of both type and relation descriptions.  Socionics would lose its "teeth."

However, the more watered-down one's views on a subject are, the less motivated one is to propogate one's views. This is why the people who have built up the experience to help water down socionics usually can't be bothered to do so. I personally view this as my duty to society, but my motivation is much weaker than it was to promulgate classical socionics, which engaged my need for recognition, connection with others, and mental discovery. Now, the inspiration is just not there. There's no "vision" to be found by picking apart someone else's somewhat erroneous theory to a dwindling and disinterested audience. In fact, the main reason I am writing this post is probably to avoid doing my taxes.

From a kind of esoteric psychology perspective, it may be good to keep socionics classical, albeit full of illusions. People come through the system, receive rigorous training that excites them and fills them with energy, and they move on to do other things. But it's already too late; socionics is dying a long, slow death. Successive generations of socionists are less and less inspired and inspiring, career momentum and entropy are taking over, and there is just too much new and exciting information on personality and human interaction coming from research that takes a fundamentally different (empirical) approach than socionics.

The Eroding "Essence" of Socionic Types and Relationships

Not only is it basically impossible to fully calibrate one socionist's typings with another's, but an isolated socionist's clarity about types and relationships is fully capable of eroding by itself. This post illustrates how that happens.

In recent years my view of the central importance of socionic factors (types and intertype relations) in personality and relationships has been steadily eroding under the weight of life experience. The graphic below illustrates this process. Many readers will probably be able to recognize their own position somewhere along this timeline:

Taken separately, each of the circles in the boxes above represents the area of overlap between individuals of a particular type or between relationships of a particular type (e.g. a number of samples of "identity relations"). This can be graphically depicted as follows:

The overlapping area can be called the "essence" of the type or relationship. As more and more outlying circles are added to the picture, or changes take place in our perception of individuals or relationship samples, the area of commonality between them tends to shrink.

An example of how this happens is having experience with more than one intimate dual relationship that seemed to have a very different "energy" to them due to considerable temperamental or other differences between the people of the same type.

An experience like this can lead one to begin looking at relationships through a different lens, which, in turn, can lead to a reevaluation of other relationships as well. Other relationships belonging to a single intertype relation which previously appeared more or less similar "in essence" may suddenly appear to be more divergent than before.

This goes back to the idea that as one studies a subject and begins to think in new categories, one mentally puts things together in new groupings, bringing some phenomena closer together and others further apart — in one's mind. Later, as the subject of study loses its influence on mental processes, the person may find that previously grouped phenomena are drifting apart in his mind and that there is no longer any compelling reason to place them together in the same category. That is the process I've described here.

As the overlap shrinks from explaining a hefty share of personality or interaction to being a kind of "hidden essence" that requires increasing perceptiveness and training to perceive, eventually you have to ask: at what point is the commonality too small to be worth making a big deal about? 

Why this Blog is Now Called "The [Ex-]Socionist"

A major shift in my views on personality and relationships has been gathering steam over the past 6 months, with several years of prehistory coming before that. I am preparing a special article on the subject, but will lay out the main points and factors here.

Basically, what has changed is that I've gone from generally viewing personality and especially relationships within a socionics framework, with caveats, to viewing things from an entirely non-socionics perspective, with occasional mental exercises such as, "is there anything typically socionic about this situation?"

Compared to where I was coming from 8-11 years ago, this is a spectacular shift. But it has come on so gradually — except for the last part — that it's been barely noticeable. Earlier this year, I was still pretty sure I was interested in completing some socionics projects, such as making an online test and perhaps putting together some compilation of essays. But now I am almost certain that my work in socionics is done for good.

That said, my Socionics.us website will be preserved in its current entirety and moved to a sub-section of another of my websites, TryUkraine.com.

Problems with socionics

What made me stick with socionics up till earlier this year was the conviction that, despite an increasing number of caveats, the "core" of relationships was still determined by socionics. This conviction was based mostly upon my experience of a set of very meaningful relationships in my own life, which I attempted to extrapolate — carefully — to those of other people. This summer and fall, I realized that I could have been wrong about one of those key relationships. I had always typed this friend as SLI despite her self-typings of alternately IEE and ILE. Then a friend got to know this person as well and disagreed strongly with my SLI typing (which already didn't matter as much to me anymore). As I looked at things through his eyes and saw a fairly convincing case for another type, I could feel it was time to leave socionics behind.

If she was indeed ILE, then it was ridiculous that I had had my major "dualization" experience with her — upon which I had based my understanding and descriptions of the process that have helped other people looking for the same thing in their lives. If she was indeed SLI, then it was ridiculous that I was the only person out of a fairly diverse group who could see it. Either way, the situation was entirely ridiculous and discredited socionics.

Shortly before this, I had finished rereading Richard Feynmans book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! While reading, I had asked myself wryly, "what would Feynman have thought of socionics?" Feynman wasn't particularly perceptive when it came to psychology, but he had a very good B.S. meter. In one of his stories, he recalls his participation in a philosophical debate where the concept of an "essential object" was put forth, but none of the participants could produce a definition of what an "essential object" was, and so it could not be decided whether X was an "essential object" or not (read this short summary of Feynman's attitudes on philosophy). I couldn't help chuckling about this, since it is so reminiscent of socionics terminology (what does "inner statics of objects" mean? is X an example of extraverted or introverted logic? etc. etc.).

Granted, Feynman's attitudes on philosophy were no doubt rather extreme and misguided, since out of the mental exercise of philosophizing sometimes — occasionally — come ideas that flower into scientific fact and theory. However, there is no doubt that Feynman would have thrown socionics in the garbage heap of undefinable philosobabble after 3 or 4 questions posed to even the very brightest of socionists.

At the time I read this book, Feynman's invisible voice resonated powerfully with me. One of the reasons for this is that I had spent many months preceding it absorbed in modern research about the body and brain. The things science has taught us about ourselves over the past decade are truly amazing, and we are on the cusp of learning even greater things about where we come from, how we differ, and how our common neurophysiology operates.

Contrast that to the scientific output of socionics (none, basically). The main texts and premises were laid out in the 70s and early 80s and since then have been discussed to no end in a distinctly philosophical vein, with each socionist making tentative, non-confirmable, and non-transferrable conclusions based on personal experience alone. The "practical application" vector of socionics is following down the exact same path of Myers-Briggs Typology (whose influence, I believe, is already waning): personal counselling, forays into organizational management, courses for those who want to learn the typology, and of course numerous self-help books that all say roughly the same thing (and some splinter groups who mean slightly different things with the same terminology).

Meanwhile, a very large portion of mental energy in the socionics community is devoted to analyzing the community itself, which I view as a dangerous intellectual trap: such analysis appears promising, but ultimately is a waste of time and energy and actually stems not from the truth-seeking instinct, but from the "I'm right and everybody else is wrong" self-assertion reflex. It shouldn't be engaged in too much to avoid self-poisoning. A few years back I was gifted perhaps the fattest book on socionics ever written (in Russian, of course), titled, The Smile of the Cheshire Cat, or the Possible and the Impossible in Socionics, which was basically a study of how socionists think about socionics, and whether their views were substantiated or unsubstantiated, in the author's opinion. I wonder how many people got through this book.

I have been acquainted with the socionics community long enough (12 years) to see how people's socionics "careers" have taken shape. I have to admit that I would not want to be in their shoes. Those that are still with it seem (to me) to be at an intellectual dead-end, trying to continue extracting some kind of revenue and recognition from what they have invested their entire adult lives for, and still doing the same things they were doing 10 years ago with little discernable progress. And it's not as if you can easily "switch careers" from socionics to some other field — say, stand-up comedy or business management. Those socionists that have left seem (to me) to have wasted years of energy doing... what? It's hard to pinpoint any concrete benefits from "doing socionics," unless it directly enabled positive relationships or tangible personal growth. In contrast, in more practical fields you can learn something, apply it immediately, and experience the benefits or lack thereof. Most or all of the benefit of socionics, in my opinion, comes from a few broadly useful realizations about people and their interactions that one tends to pick up very early in the game.

I also used to think that socionics would take hold in the West or East and develop basically along the same lines as in the former USSR. I no longer think this is the case. It is now very clear to me that modern psychology and neuroscience are developing along a very different path than socionics, and there will be little or no convergence. The scientific research coming out now is exciting and promising enough that it is capturing people's attention and imagination, and they are becoming less and less prone to take interest in more theoretical, less research-friendly perspectives such as socionics. The further neuroscience progresses, the weaker pre-neuroscience theoretical approaches like personality typologies become.

Also, I see no hint that psychology is discovering the kinds of discrete categories of people that socionics talks about, or that research on human interaction is tending to see things in an "information metabolism" perspective. Rather, we're seeing more and more research into hormones, attraction, relationship building, genetic difference vs. similarity, concrete predictors of relationship success, etc. And individual differences are almost always proving to be points on a continuum rather than lightswitch-type categories (either on or off). At least for the moment, science is definitely not moving towards socionics. My nose for trends tells me that the future is not with abstract or philosophical approaches to psychology (e.g. typology), but with our rapidly advancing understanding of the actual physical processes that shape the nervous system and human behavior.

On top of this, as I considered the types of other people close to me, I realized that, in many cases, I was no longer sure of their types. Rather than thinking that this was a temporary moment of reevaluation, I have come to see this as typical. When people are psychologically closer than a certain point, "contradictions" in their personalities become more and more apparent, making their types harder to identify. I see this is a big problem; it really shouldn't be this way if socionics is indeed accurate.

On a final note, my research into physiology, health, and lifestyle has led me to see many traits increasingly on a "better/healthier — worse/unhealthier" scale rather than in an "all traits are created equal" vein, which was partly inspired by socionics and partly due to my own egalitarianism. "Weak T" or "weak sensing," for instance, really is probably best seen as a weakness, and not as "the flipside of your strengths," as I would have emphasized in the past. Improve nutrition and lifestyle, and many of these weaknesses can go away, at least in part. It's often not the best approach to assume — as socionics suggests — that such weaknesses can only be compensated for through other people (e.g. complementary types), though there is merit in that idea.

That covers most of what I wanted to say. I will write more on these subjects later, and this blog will continue to live on.