How Important Is Happiness Really?

It is generally assumed that happiness is not only the abstract "aim of our existence," but also one of the main sources of motivation in people's decision making. People choose to do one thing or the other based on whether they think it will make them happy or not. Research has shown that we're not always that good at predicting what will make us happy.

My observation both of myself and others has led me to the conclusion that, while happiness is indeed important to people, they generally assume (often incorrectly) that it will follow as a by-product of other, more important pursuits, which can be summed up as "biological success." 

Biological success is a complex concept encompassing physical health, sexual attractiveness, social standing (status, recognition, influence), material well-being, security, and prospects for the future. These are the kinds of things that probably most affect the likelihood that one will pass on one's genes to future generations. What evolution prescribes is an often conflicted mixture of things that "feel right" on a personal level and things that will gain the approval of one's particular reference groups and provide one's offspring with better chances of enjoying a secure position in that society.

According to this evolutionary logic, it seems that as soon as "sufficient" success is achieved in one area, one's attention shifts to another area of greater perceived weakness. This might be one way of looking at why people gain weight after marriage, sacrifice a degree of physical fitness to own a car (especially in poorer countries), or give up hobbies and social lives to become workaholics. In many contexts, these are choices that increase biological success — as long as most of the people around them are making the same choices. The logic is similar to that of an arms race. 

There is also a minority subculture of people who seem to do the opposite — give up things that would win them broad social approval in order to maximize physical fitness, richness in their emotional lives, enjoyment from hobbies and non-monetary pursuits, etc. I sympathize with this subculture, but I think they enjoy, on average, less reproductive success (I don't have data). Even these people are highly subject to social influence; they simply band into communities that have a somewhat different value system, and proceed to do things that will earn them esteem within that community.

At any rate, it seems exceedingly rare to meet someone outside of the psychotherapist's office for whom maximizing happiness is the chief aim of his/her existence. Even for these people, I think unhappiness only really becomes a problem when it is seen as a cause of failure in other areas of life. 

My own experience in studying happiness has been eye-opening. When I began my practice of self-quantifying (tracking various aspects of my everyday life through an increasingly sophisticated rating system), it was to learn more about how I was living my physical life. It became clear to me that my emotional life had an effect on my physical life, so I began to track that as well. Then, I added components of my intellectual life. I figured I needed a composite score, so I created an algorithm that accurately reflected my feeling of well-being for that day based on all the separate aspects. I also commented on specific things that influenced my well-being over that day. 

While this exercise was initially begun to get control over my physical health and was later expanded as an engaging intellectual exercise, it has served to help me dedicate a bit more of my attention to maximizing my own happiness as opposed to pursuing other goals. In my case, this is a much-needed shift. Now I can see how my quality of life has slowly been improving as a result. (Or at least so it seems at the moment. Like chronic dieters, maybe I'll just abandon the entire process when something really bad happens, then resume tracking when the worst is already behind me.) The act of consciously observing something changes behavior. At the same time, I note that I consistently do things, or allow things to happen, that hurt my feeling of happiness. 

For instance, virtually every time I make a move between countries, I have a depressed sense of happiness for at least several days before and after the move due to the stress of finishing up last-minute business, packing, losing sleep, being packed together with unfamiliar people for many hours, and figuring out my life in the new location. Yet I continue to do this time after time, believing that the stress is worth it because of some other more important objective. 

As I become more and more aware of what exactly is affecting my level of happiness, I increasingly gain the ability to make choices about whether or not to submit myself to different things whose effects on my happiness are now well established. I also spend more time thinking about whether there is some way to "tweak" things so that the same stimulus won't have a negative effect. And I've begun to place more value on things that have clearly been shown to enhance happiness, treating them like food or medication that needs to be taken in certain amounts on a regular basis. 

Now, if I can only get other people to start taking their own happiness more seriously, then that will raise the prestige of this activity and I can use my expertise in pursuing happiness to achieve greater biological success...

Reexamining Socionics: Introduction

I'd now like to begin an ambitious and open-ended intellectual exercise — to critically reexamine the foundations of socionics and look for errors. I have a few ideas, but I honestly don't know where this is going to lead. It could be great, or it could be pathetic.

As explained in previous posts, this idea only came to me recently after a critical mass of disqualifying counter-examples to socionics theory had accumulated. Until then, I had kept the original theory intact in my mind, but had tacked on increasing numbers of "additional factors" that influenced interaction and relationships. The sum of these efforts is presented in my post on "My Personal Typology."

Just so you know, this whole way of writing about people and their interaction feels increasingly ridiculous to me. Feel free to laugh with me at the level of intellectualization coming through in the previous paragraph. So, I will try to break free of this mold (pun intended) over the next few posts. After all, that's part of why I've decided to put socionics behind me. 

---

So, what are the foundations of socionics? Turns out I listed them in 2007. We have information elements or "aspects of information," which are a kind of logical necessity once you state that different functions (I previously called them "IM elements," following Augusta's nomenclature) perceive different types of information about reality. Then you have Model A with its 8 different positions, or "functions" (yeah, the double meaning of "functions" can be confusing), and the 8 functions/IM elements that can occupy the different positions, each of which describes a way of perceiving information, and a kind of state of mind. That's three sets of highly interrelated concepts, the core of socionics theory. These concepts come with some assumptions that I hope to look at as well. And they combine together to form a system of 16 types that can be broken down into dichotomies, 16 intertype relations, quadras, etc.

Yes, I understand that not everyone sees socionics as being about this stuff. But that's their choice to disregard classical socionics and reframe the field in their own peculiar way. I "grew up" on Aushra Augustinavichiute's texts, so that's what socionics is to me. I encourage you to revisit my presentations/discussions of some of her foundational works. Unfortunately, I only got partway through my write-ups, but enough work was done that you can get a good taste of things.

Augusta also gives the best presentation of socionics, in my opinion. She explains why she introduces concepts and starts with broad premises. Subsequent authors either write in a blatantly non-explanatory style (e.g. "Socionics divides information processing into 8 different varieties...") or pass over the broader ideas superficially (e.g. "Information can be divided into 8 types..."). Some make new broad idea inventions of their own, but they seem too detached from reality. Skimming over some of Augusta's writing now, I am still impressed with the boldness and freshness of her intellect. Take this for example (source):

'Direct' interaction of bodies — or collisions — are a rare phenonemon. 'Catastrophes' in space are rare only because heavenly bodies interact "from afar," by means of fields. Living organisms also interact through fields. From an observer's viewpoint, an organism's field is the sum of all interrelations between one object and other objects. The individual psyche perceives this interaction as all manner of internal feelings.

Even if I no longer "do" socionics, this stuff is still pretty cool to think about. Or how about this for something to mull over (source):

The human brain, in reflecting external and internal reality, serves not only the individual himself, but society as well. To satisfy his own needs, a person needs to have an idea of the entire reality around him. People cooperate in serving the needs of society; individuals communicate to the community their impressions of only certain aspects of reality. The mechanism for this phenomenon, in our present understanding, is quite simple: various aspects of reality are reflected in the human brain with differing degrees of differentiation and awareness. Aspects that the individual only uses for himself are reflected in general, composite form and are remembered as images, experience, and skills. Other aspects, which the individual communicates information about to society, are perceived in well-differentiated form with an accuracy that allows the individual to relate information verbally.

I personally love these kinds of broad-stroke descriptions. "Well, that's because it's typically ," you might answer. But I can assure you that different IEEs or ILEs will have different reactions to these texts. Some will say, "duh," some will find them annoyingly vague, others will question their validity (which I may do later). Others will read through them several times and be unable to understand what the author's saying. It's this kind of variation in response that has led me to stop looking for the "needle in the haystack" that is the "essence of " and start interpreting things based on simpler proximate causes, or at least on personality traits with some kind of identifiable physiological basis. Or, actually, just not interpreting them at all if I'm not interested.

So, enough with the introduction.

Type Identification and Distance to Subject

Two posts back, I wrote:

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.

To follow up on this observation, here's a graphic portraying this "focusing, then blurring" effect as the person whose type is being identified becomes closer and closer to the socionist (typer).

One of the typical psychological effects of any typology is that once you place a person in "your" category (in the case of socionics this would be whichever types you consider favorable), you tend to open up more to that person. Conversely, if you have put someone in "not your" category (e.g. an unfavorable type), you tend to close up and distance yourself somewhat from the person. This effect is most evident among people at the first stage of views on typology, as illustrated in my previous post.

When someone's type is hazy — either because they are too close or too distant from the subject, a kind of mental discomfort might be felt. After all, they must have a type! I'm suggesting here that this can serve as an artificial barrier to experiencing close relationships with other people.

But this effect shouldn't be blown out of proportion. It happens with any sort of categorization, not just in typology. For instance, a woman who suddenly decides, "this man is not trustworthy" due to a single emotionally significant incident will naturally distance herself from the man in the same way that a socionics hobbyist might after deciding that someone belongs to an "unfavorable" type. And as long as the woman is trying to make up her mind as to whether the man is trustworthy or not (or any other important characteristic), she may keep interaction at a safe distance.

The questions I'd like to pose are:

1. How universal is this "type blurring at close distances?"

2. Are there other kinds of characterizations of people that don't blur at close distances — other than obvious physical characterizations? Or is this a uniform problem of perceiving other people?

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.

Physicality, Part 2

Developing Physicality, Part 2

I'll write an abbreviated version of what I originally intended to post, because otherwise I'll never get around to finishing this topic. 

Basically, the questions I have been trying to answer are, What is optimal health and well-being (let's call this "personal functioning"), and what is necessary to attain it? 

There are many aspects of personal functioning — for instance, physical health and robustness, relationship skills, mental sharpness, and emotional life. Science is uncovering more and more connections between these areas that in some ways are surprising and in others confirm our intuitions. Some of these areas are more basic than others; for instance, improving your physical health (e.g. nutrition and exercise) will improve mental functioning much more than vice versa, and emotions and human interaction are almost as basic as physical health. 

So, speaking of physical functioning, what types of, and how much, exercise is necessary to get the lion's share of the benefits, which extend into one's emotional, intellectual, and interpersonal life?

Here are some research findings that I have found particularly significant:

1. 30 minutes of aerobic exercise (brisk walking!) 3 times a week is enough to enjoy the substantial cognitive benefits it brings, which stem primarily from increased oxygen flow. Additional exercise brings decreasing cognitive returns. Hormones are also released during aerobic activity which serve to regulate mood and stabilize emotions. 

2. Strength exercises, particularly involving large muscle groups and when performed to failure, not only build muscle, but cause hormonal responses that are important to maintaining health and well-being: growth hormone, testosterone, and IGF-1. 

3. To get decent-to-optimal amounts of vitamin D, which affects numerous body systems, you need to spend a lot of time outside with your body exposed to the sun. Or take vitamin supplements. 

4. Fitness is best enhanced through short bursts of anaerobic (maximum effort) activity, or "interval training," rather than by sustained, monotonous aerobic activity.

So, someone who's really getting the lion's share of possible exercise benefits is going to be doing a fair bit of moving around on foot with occasional bursts of speed, doing varied light physical labor (or working out) with occasional bursts of intensity, and loafing around outside partly clothed. 

What kind of body does this lifestyle produce? A lean, muscular, highly functional body with great endurance — basically, a kind of all-purpose athlete. This is accessible to nearly all of us, and our biology suggests that this is how we're "supposed" to be. 

Of course, one can live a "normal" modern life without any of these things, but your brain will be operating below potential due to lower oxygen flow, and may tend to develop hormone deficiences, low vitamin D, etc. 

Furthermore, because of decreased physical development and body awareness, your attention might more easily become overfocused on your mental or emotional life — errands to run, information to consume, online interaction, your own or other people's problems, etc. My experience is that engaging the body more — effectively putting it back in its rightful place — makes it easier to see the relative importance of different activities and let go of "parasitic" ones. 

Of course, I'm speaking from the perspective of someone whose body has been chronically underused. Most of us are in this boat. Relatively few people in developed societies today overuse their body and underuse their minds and emotions, though this would have been a common problem in generations past. 

It seems there are two basic ways to incorporate the four above points into your lifestyle — the "left brain" way and the "right brain" way (these are my terms).

A "left brain" approach would be to put together an exercise regimen incorporating all of these elements at levels necessary to reap the benefits. If you don't get enough sun, you can always take vitamin D supplements. This route allows you to spend a minimal amount of time (as little as 2 hours a week, including walking), but requires a lot of willpower (a limited resource) and planning to carry out, because abrupt — rather than spontaneous or organic — shifts in activity will be necessary to keep to your particular exercise regimen. 

A "right brain" approach would be to find ways to weave physical activity and time outdoors into your daily life, and then take advantage of moments when your body feels ready to do something aerobic, anaerobic, or intensely muscular. This route requires more time overall, but less willpower. It may also be more sustainable in the long run because its protocols are simpler and more intuitive. However, most people who pursue specific results are attracted to left-brain approaches, which seem more reliable and results-oriented. 

I personally have settled on a mostly right-brain approach, given my tendency to do things only when I feel like doing them. I spend a lot of time walking around and really enjoy running when I'm late. I do a few different kinds of athletic activities — mostly with other people — and am looking for more. Variety is crucial, unless you have found an activity you're truly passionate about. Physical activity is hardly time lost, even when I'm alone. I like to listen to interesting podcasts or language recordings, and when I have something stimulating to listen to, it's a great pleasure to go out for a long walk, putting in some sprints here and there when I feel ready for it. 

I've noticed that as I become more physically active, I tend to have more "physical" thoughts and impulses — for instance, to strain some set of muscles for no particular reason while standing around, to jump up and touch the ceiling, hang on a bar or tree branch, lift a heavy object in a particular way, try to perform an ordinary movement gracefully, etc. This is a good example of how, by turning one's attention to a particular set of problems or stimuli, one can develop one's brain and personality in a new direction. In addition, the further one goes down this path, the more pleasure one gets out of it. The endorphins seem to come easier and easier. 

P.S. I have not mentioned here many related subjects, such as the value of physical play, friendly competition, developing motor skills, flexibility, and communing with nature. Plus, I haven't even talked about nutrition. This post focuses exclusively on exercise. 

Developing Physicality

Socionics suggests that some types are innately more "physical" than others and are more in tune with their bodily sensations and physical interaction with the outside world. Other types tend not to register these things consciously and tend to lack physicality, focusing attention instead on verbal, emotional, or mental interaction with the world.

This is how I saw things myself, until I gradually came to a recognition of the importance of physicality and vitality in my life and realized that I must take responsibility for these things myself. My personal experiments and research have convinced me that all [basically healthy] people are designed to be athletes — regardless of personality type — and to lead a life that is much more physical than that of most modern urban dwellers. 

This subject is very broad, so I will break the post into two parts: personal history that readers will no doubt find as interesting as the information in part two, which will be about developing physicality and vitality in general. 

Part 1: adventures in health and physicality

Despite my [presumably] personality type-related inclination to neglect my physical needs, I have always been mildly physically gifted, with naturally good coordination and endurance and a good degree of trainability. While most guys seem to begin their physical decline right out of college, I had kept in the same reasonably good shape by periodically starting and giving up exercise regimens, by frequently walking in the woods, playing frisbee, and by developing my hiking and biking hobbies, which provided me with the connection to nature that I craved. 

Over the years, my attempted exercise regimens gradually evolved to something more and more appropriate to my actual needs and abilities. Things like resolving to go to the gym X times a week and perform there a certain set of exercises tended not to work for long. Trying to do a set of exercises at home on a Total Trainer was only slightly better. Taking a one-minute detour on the way home to do pull-ups worked better, and I kept that up for some months, but that was just a single exercise. More successful still was combining enjoyable activities; leave the apartment in the morning, walk or jog in the woods, sometimes taking a quick dip in the lake afterwards, and finish up at the exercise bars at a nearby school to do a set of 5 exercises. This allowed me to ease into the exercise part by first doing something intrinsically enjoyable and getting my body warmed up. Note that this worked much better when I lived 2 minutes from the forest as opposed to 5 minutes, leading me to formulate some of the principles I wrote about in Willpower as a Limited Resource.

Around 2007-2009 I began to take much more interest in diet and health and finally began to understand something about nutrition, which until then had seemed like a contradictory and structureless field. I got into what you might call "lightweight speed backpacking" and long-distance backpacking, which are essentially athletic activities. Again, the reason I pursued this was not to improve my fitness, but to experience nature on a deeper level. Keeping fit came to be almost synonymous with experiencing nature. But, as far as upper body was concerned, all I did was occasionally do strength exercises. I didn't really have intrinsically rewarding activities for the arms and torso.  

Starting in 2009-2011, I began to be aware of mild, but nagging, health issues: problems getting enough sleep, digestive issues, frequent colds, and often struggling with the blues and compulsion-like behavior. These gradually increased or remained steady for several years, though I noted that they seemed to go away during backpacking trips, leading me to believe that they had to do with aspects of my city lifestyle. 

Then, in March 2012, I passed out and could have died of carbon monoxide poisoning after a long shower as a result of a faulty gas water heater installed in the kitchen of the apartment I was renting. I eventually came to, feeling absolutely horrible, and was barely able to crawl around to find my phone and call friends and ask them to bring an ambulance with them. I was lucky and did not develop any long-term neurophysiological sequelae, which often plague victims of acute CO poisoning. 

I was extremely alarmed by this incident and began recording all the physical and emotional complaints I had after that to better discern whether my quality of life was affected by the accident. I felt I had to take better care of myself and not let something like this happen again. The CO poisoning wasn't my fault, but on that day and the preceding one I had eaten very little and at first had thought my collapse was from low blood sugar. The symptoms and my subsequent research, however, confirmed it was indeed CO. A bit later, I found a house cleaner and cook who made my life a lot easier. Eventually I concluded that it wasn't healthy for me to be living alone (for the first time in many, many years), and I moved into a room in a shared apartment and immediately recognized the subtle emotional-physical benefits — as long as there is not too much tension among house residents. 

I found this exercise of writing down how I felt very useful for focusing my attention on this side of life, and developed it further during my next visit to Ukraine. First, for a month I wrote down everything I ate, my sleep times, and how I felt that day. Then I created a sleep spreadsheet where I applied a formula for calculating my sleep deficit. (I'm a real numbers geek, so I'll give it to you: 8.5 hrs. is my observed ideal sleep duration, and 0.8 is the coefficient by which I multiply yesterday's accumulated sleep deficit before adding to it today's deficit or proficit. This means that if I sleep on average 8 hrs. a night, then I will on average feel like I'm missing about 2.5 hrs. of sleep due to the accumulation of deficits. This is not always entirely true, but it's usually a good approximation). Along with sleep times I recorded my level of alertness on a scale of 1 to 5 to see how it correlated with my supposed sleep deficit.

I liked the idea of rating aspects of life, because it meant that I paid attention to them during the course of the day. I often translate quality of life questionnaires for use in healthcare in Ukraine, so I am used to the idea of rating these kinds of things. So I started adding other aspects of life that clearly contributed to my overall wellbeing, and had them average up to produce a quality of life index for each day. 

At first these were purely physiological indicators such as alertness and presence of physical complaints (illness, pain), but soon I added psychosocial indicators such as "speech apparatus" (ease of speech and communication; voice tembre), "acceptance" (how accepted by others and free to be myself I felt), and general emotional state. These were clearly very much intertwined with health and wellbeing. Later I also added a couple intellectual indicators: "flow state" (how much of the time I was in an engrossed, pleasurable flow state) and "breadth of awareness." I realized that neglecting my personal work activities (writing and site development) for weeks or months on end had been having a subtle harmful effect on my ego and self-confidence, so I added "professional development" to the mix of indicators. In the end, I've got a set of 12-13 indicators that approximate many areas of life that actually determine how I feel — about myself and life as well as physically. In addition, I began writing notes next to the number regarding significant factors that had influenced the individual ratings that day.

Turns out I am hardly unique in this sort of quantitative approach to improving well-being. There is a whole movement that espouses these methods, called "The Quantified Self." 

I found this practice to be a massive leap forward from typical records that people keep when they have some self-development goal, which usually involves contriving a goal that you think will make your life better and writing down your results for the day. 95% of the time, the results are not what you planned, and efforts are abandoned within weeks. I sigh when I see people start up a new "watch me lose weight" or "watch me get fit" self-delusion blog that will almost inevitably contain no more than 3-5 posts. This time, rather than deciding what should make my life better, my approach necessitated from the beginning that I observe my own body and see what was happening to it, with no implicit goal in mind. And yet each of us has the same organismic goal: to increase quality of life — happiness. Finding out more about what brings you happiness causes you to do better at seeking those things out and integrating them into your life. 

When I went to Crimea for over a month, I decided to finally get serious and see some doctors and take some tests to address "everything that had ever bothered me in the past 10+ years." A lot of online research was also involved. I read about nutrition, vitamins and minerals, psychosocial factors, mood, stress, and fitness. Before that, I had read the well-researched and fascinating book The Four-Hour Body and had read about the Mediterranean diet, the Paleo diet, and the benefits of sprinting-like exercise and "evolutionary fitness" (listen to interview here). After some research, I began to suspect my diet was deficient in some vitamins and minerals and began to correct those by adding a variety of nuts and different foods. Turns out deficiencies tend to cause apathy and depression in addition to physiological problems, but the symptoms are often vague and can easily be confused with other things. (My hunch about the deficiencies turned out to be correct). 

While in Crimea I would go to the beach every day with my friend, going down a 170 m. high cliffside via a cement staircase. Soon we started running down and walking back up the stairs as fast as possible. Needless to say, we also swam in the Black Sea, each of us developing his own kind of bathing routine that started with just going 5 meters out in the water, taking a dip and thinking, "what do I do now?" and eventually evolved into (in my case) a 15-30 minute swim up and down the beach using different swimming strokes and enjoying the views of the beach and cliffs and the increasingly cold early-autumn water. I also spent a lot of the time minimally dressed, my skin exposed to the fresh air and sun, both on the way to the beach and back and around the house and yard. A pull-up bar is welded into the balcony, so I also did chin-ups whenever passing by, inventing stranger and stranger ways of doing them to involve more muscles. After about a week of this, I experienced a new jolt of alertness that would override any sleep deficit I had, i.e. thanks to some kind of hormone injection I was now getting from my rigorous daily physical activity. 

Then, in the midst of this idyllia, I received a large translation assignment. Over the course of the week that I was preoccupied with it, I observed — through my rating system — how my quality of life plummeted in almost every way. I had no idea this type of stress could have such a powerful disruptive effect on everything. This led me to read and reflect about stress response and what kinds of stress the body is or is not designed to handle well, due to our evolutionary past. I realized I needed to watch out for and steer away from potential negative stressors. I also managed to work out a routine that helped me deal with potentially stressful computer assignments. The solution was to inject physical stimuli and pleasure by taking breaks and doing something physical every 20 minutes, which I'll talk about more in Part 2. 

I had to give up my intense beach-swim-sprint-shirtless living routine when I left again for Georgia, but after a week of chaos I've managed to settle into a new one that's just as good except for the shirtless part (Georgians are more conservative). On the weekends I'm usually backpacking, and during the weekdays I meet a good friend every evening to go bouldering at an indoor rock-climbing place, where there are also a few workout machines and bars. We often follow this with a visit to a restaurant or bar for relaxing conversation. I also have started playing ultimate frisbee twice a week with another group of people, and other physical, but non-strenuous activities are also part of the physicality menu. Key here is that all these activities are pleasurable, playful, require skill development, and involve other people and socializing. 

I can say that at age 35 I am the fittest I have ever been in terms of both strength and endurance, and that I see physical development as an essential part of life of the same degree of importance as intellectual and social development. 

In Part 2 I will write about why all this is necessary,
and what it does for you (cascading effects and so on).

Highly Sensitive People and Socionics

last edit: 31 Oct 2012 (theta brain state)

Introduction 

I recently learned of a trait commonly termed "Highly Sensitive Person," or HSP. This is a trait I have long wondered about in myself and others and have called different names at different times (e.g. self-awareness, introspectiveness, sensitivity, etc.). I used to loosely associate it with ectomorphy; I think I was identifying a kind of ectomorphic variety of high sensitivity and ignoring other varieties. Since then I've noticed HSP traits in people of different somatotypes.

After investigating the subject, I'm convinced that it is a very influential personality trait that has important ramifications for intertype relations and personal development. So influential is the trait that HSPs may be practically untypeable socionically, having a set of traits that appears to conflict with or override typical type traits.

Further information online

In addition to the Wikipedia article, there is some really good information available in research articles on Elaine Aron's site, as well as large amounts of personal accounts and feel-good sites on the subject online. Lots of podcasts and interviews on the subject can also be found.

Distribution

According to studies, 15-20% of the population is HSP, and the numbers are evenly distributed among men and women and hetero- and homosexuals. The numbers are about the same for different nationalities, though different cultures may be more (e.g. Japan) or less (e.g. U.S.) accepting of the trait. Of particular interest is that the trait is also observed in animal species.

Psychological and physiological aspects

It is speculated that roughly 50% of psychologists' clients are HSPs. HSPs are more sensitive to childhood experience and display more maladaptive behavior with suboptimal upbringing and more well-adapted behavior with optimal upbringing relative to non-HSP children.

HSPs appear to be more prone to certain mental and physical conditions, such as neuroses, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, etc. Their brains appear to spend more time in theta state — typically, a drowsy or meditative state — which may indicate more reflection/"recharging" and deeper processing of impressions received during their daily activities.

I would estimate that 30-50% of socionics aficionados are HSPs and that these are many of the same HSPs that are likely to end up in counsellors' offices.

HSP and Asperger's Syndrome

Both of these groups have their online "fans" and often resemble pop-psychology. I've seen lists of famous people who supposedly had that or the other trait, and there was quite a bit of overlap... My personal opinion is that many psychological conditions are overdiagnosed. I myself have been wrongly labled as "high-functioning autistic" by at least two non-specialists who only saw me in certain settings. Of course, this did nothing to improve our interaction... While many AS and HSP online hobbyists seem confused about which diagnosis to give themselves, this article makes a good attempt at separating the two.

Difficulties with the HSP construct

Upon learning about HSPs, a lightbulb flashes on in your mind and many things begin to make sense. Then, once you start identifying sensitivity levels in different people, you realize that each HSP has a different variety of sensitivity, making it hard to generalize. Things that you would tend to attribute to sensitivity in yourself are absent in other HSPs, and vice versa. The search for an overarching, fundamental HSP trait runs into the needle-in-the-haystack problem that plagues socionics and other personality characterizations.

The exact nature of high sensitivity is not yet entirely clear (e.g. "processing sensory data much more deeply and thoroughly"), but there are some interesting lines of research that suggest that the trait can be pinned down physiologically and/or through behavioral testing. That is much better than personality questionnaires which are subject to biases and misinterpretation.

A problem with practical application of the HSP construct is that it has no well-developed counter-category with a potentially positive image — e.g. "low sensitivity person, or LSP." People only read about HSPs and may incorrectly self-identify with it because it seems to suggest creativity or intelligence or provide justification for problems they may have experienced. HSPs, on the other hand, are probably unlikely to wrongly identify themselves as non-HSPs.

Highly Sensitive People and Personality Type

In terms of the MBTI, introverted intuiters were most likely to be HSP, followed by extroverted intuiters and lastly by introverted sensers. Most HSPs are MBTI introverts, and extroverted sensers were not found among the admittedly small sample group studied (I believe under 30). Keeping in mind MBTI type skews relative to socionics, I would expect the trait to be more evenly distributed among the socionics types. For instance, I think I have known at least two SLE HSPs and at least one LSI, two LSEs, a few ESEs, two ESIs, and probably at least one SEE, not to mention many intuiters and SEIs and SLIs.

One can take the approach of examining the trait in isolation from socionics types, or in the context of types. The second approach might help one to identify the uniquely HSP-specific characteristics that are always present regardless of the type, but the risk is becoming too conceptual about the trait. The first approach often leads people to inject too many of their own individual qualities and experiences into the trait.

Effects of sensitivity on socionic type

High sensitivity seems to have a huge effect on personality. In my experience, the HSPs I know are all psychologists in a way and are particularly sensitive to other people's emotional lives and internal experience. They are all at least a bit brooding and are introspective and focused on processing their personal experiences. This is true whether their type is IEI or SLE, EII or LSE.

Such is the sensitivity of HSPs that an HSP LSE may be far more interested and thoughtful about things like perception, trauma, and overcoming internal obstacles than a non-HSP EII (this is coming from my personal experience). Non-HSP LSEs may listen to discussions of these topics with interest, but they have relatively little to say about them or their comments lack depth.

HSP SLEs, LSIs, ESIs, LSEs, etc. tend to lack the callousness that is often attributed to their types. On a philosophical level, HSP types with extraverted sensing (SLE, SEE, LSI, ESI) may reject any form of interpersonal coercion and may be wholly uninterested in politics, power, etc. They may often seem "unsure of themselves" or hesitant, and their extraverted sensing may seem to "flicker" on and off. Of course, this is all happening in the mind of the observer, who has a construct of what extraverted sensing is and is not. Without that mental construct, there's probably nothing particularly paradoxical about an HSP's behavior.

HSP ILEs and IEEs I have known (myself included) appear less extraverted than their non-HSP counterparts. More time is spent ruminating about things within oneself, and less time is spent gathering and distributing "random," superficial information, which is more typical of non-HSP ILEs and IEEs.

Effects of sensitivity on socionics schools

The best example of this I can think of is the contrast between Yermak's hard-headed analytical socionics and Gulenko's School of Humanitarian Socionics. Both are LIIs, but the first is non-HSP while the second is HSP.

Effects of sensitivity on intertype relations

HSP-ness seriously impacts intertype relations. The "truest" form of many potentially adverse intertype relations, for instance, is when an HSP is affected by a non-HSP. In other words, an HSP SLE may be more traumatized by a non-HSP ESI than a non-HSP SLE. Put an HSP ESI in place of the non-HSP, and the "supervision" would likely be seriously altered. A HSP IEE might not be much of a "supervisor" at all to a non-HSP ESI. The effect of the supervision might be so gentle as to basically be negligible for the ESI. In fact, the "supervisor" HSP IEE might well experience more distress as a result of the interaction as the "supervisee" ESI.

An HSP child might find even virtually optimal intertype relations with parents to be "traumatic," while another non-HSP child gets by just fine with parents from a completely different quadra. HSPs seem to need things to be "just right" in order to feel good in relationships and in general in life. As a missionary at age 19-21, I experienced many varieties of poor-to-awful relationships and just a few good relationships with missionary companions, while many non-HSPs seemed to "have a great time" with just about everyone they worked and lived with. So much for intertype relations!

Duality and sensitivity

Dual relationships may be quite different depending on partners' sensitivity levels. Two HSPs will probably have higher levels of understanding, but may need to take great care to regulate personal space and autonomy in order to avoid feeling "repressed." An HSP with a non-HSP may experience less mutual understanding, but the non-HSP may provide a greater degree of emotional stability in the relationship. Two non-HSPs may have a more stable and conventional relationship and fewer problems regulating optimal emotional/physical distance.

These are just suggestions, since I would need a lot more relationship experience than I have to make any far-reaching generalizations. Elaine Aron comes to similar conclusions, saying that both combinations have pros and cons but that she believes two HSPs together is probably a better combination than an HSP with a non-HSP.

Comments

I'm particularly interested in readers' comments on this post. I'm sure people will have a lot to say. 

Notes on Language, Energy Exchange, Attention, and Teams

Sometimes I wonder: would intertype relations exist if language did not exist? How would they express themselves in the absence of language?

In different relationships people seem to exchange energy on different levels and in different ways. For instance, in some relationships there is a lot more talking (interchange of mental energy) than doing (interchange of "vital" energy). In others it may be the other way around.

Where talking takes place, not all of it is of the same quality. For instance, contrast the joking and banter that takes place at parties with a serious conversation where you try to explain exactly what you mean by something. Or think of a religious ritual where people perform certain actions together while set phrases are spoken in a particular way, versus a board meeting where you propose undertaking X rather than Y for reasons A, B, and C.

In the former cases you might say that the form of the talking prevails over content; in the latter cases, content prevails over form. Where form prevails over content, we might say that language plays a secondary role. Imagine people in such situations making unintelligible sounds with their mouths while preserving the same emotional coloring. Much of the interest and meaning of the situation would still be discernable. In contrast, an explanation of something mental that is devoid of emotions would become intolerably boring were an understanding of the words themselves to be taken from us.

In all interpersonal situations, energy is exchanged on all levels — mental, emotional, and physical. Or, perhaps more precisely, we experience thoughts, feelings, and physical responses as a result of the interaction. However, our attention during interaction may tend to gravitate towards any of these different "levels." With one person our attention tends to focus in the verbal mind; with another, on physical actions and responses; with a third — on various sentiments; with a fourth — on nonverbal mental images, etc.

Our tendency to seek out diverse types of interaction demonstrates a need to switch attention from one level of experience to another. This, in turn, comes from our need to perform a variety of different tasks and solve different kinds of problems in order to survive and thrive in the world. We are built to be cooperating specialists — able to generate a surplus of one kind of energy (attention) while experiencing a deficit in other kinds. The deficit is not so great that we are wholly unable to survive on our own, but thriving is definitely impossible without cooperation and energy exchange.

To understand how all of this is designed to work, and why, I think one needs to experience something akin to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for some period of time. I have experienced it during long-distance backpacking trips where I had lots of interaction with other people. You can also get a good taste of it at scout camps or team-building activities if they last long enough (at least a few days) and take place outside or at least in a semi-natural setting. During such experiences a kind of "team" forms and one can observe the fluid collective switching of attention from one level to another (mental, emotional, physical, etc.). You can also see that different individuals perform different functions within the group due to their particular variety of energy/attention surplus.

In a good team a lot of diverse interaction is happening on all levels — mental, emotional, and physical. A person will forget the feelings of disbalance that they often have in ordinary life ("I need to stop analyzing everything," "I need to stop wasting so much time," "I need to stop being so lazy," "I need to get out and socialize more," etc.). In my experience a good short-term team needs to have 5 or more members to "cover all the bases." The smaller the size of the team, the greater the importance of interpersonal compatibility and hence intertype relations.

A well-matched dual pair probably makes the most robust "micro-team," but even here the interaction is not varied enough to satisfy the need for energy exchange on all levels. Each partner will have a need to regularly share information with others who have specializations similar to their own. In addition, they will have a need for some degree of community interaction and belonging that can't be met by a single other person.

From the perspective of a single individual, a team of 2 has just 1 configuration for energy exchange. A team of 3 has 3 configurations (2 pairings + 1 group of 3) but tends to subdivide into one pair and one "loner." A team of 4 has 7 configurations (3 pairings + 3 groups of 3 + 1 group of 4) but often subdivide into two pairs. A team of 5 has 15 configurations (4 pairings + 6 groups of 3 + 4 groups of 4 + 1 group of 5), which is often enough unless there are two very "closely knit" pairs. A team of 6 has 31 configurations (5 pairings + 10 groups of 3 + 10 groups of 4 + 5 groups of 5 + 1 groups of 6), a team of 7 — 63, a team of 8 — 127, etc. A theoretical "socion" of 16 people of different types would have 32767 possible configurations for energy exchange for a member of the group.

These large numbers are deceptive. The vast majority of the larger configurations will feel "about the same," and only a limited number of the smaller configurations will be productive and stable enough for an individual to want to experience them on a regular basis. Also, gender, age, and certain other roles place limits on the level of interaction possible (acceptable) between members, in effect shrinking the size of the group in terms of configurations of energy exchange accessible to each individual. However, at some point a group size is reached where almost everyone can meet almost all their needs for diverse interaction and activity engaging the mind, emotions, and body.

Hopefully these digressions have been interesting. Returning to the opening question, I think that intertype relations would exist even without language. Some relations do seem to focus more attention on verbal interaction — generally two static types or two dynamic types. Of these relations, conflict, supervision, and mirror relations tend to be particularly verbally-oriented (in my experience, as an irrational). In these relations it can seem like misunderstandings and mistrust all stem from different ways of talking about things and expressing things in words. It would be particularly interesting to study these relations in a totally nonverbal environment.

Perhaps I'll write more on these subjects in subsequent posts.

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.

Socionics Model and Associations

Here's most of a letter I wrote recently regarding my typing of person that was discussed at the Polish socionics forum:

---

The fact is, all socionists type by association, even those who claim otherwise. And all socionists apply some type of "model thinking" — even those who seem to type by association alone. I used to make more of an effort to present my thoughts and conclusions in "model language," but I don't care enough anymore. It's a kind of intellectual laziness that comes from feeling that the socionics model as it is is doomed anyway. Associations with people of known types are actually a good way of typing (and again, every socionist relies on them heavily) inasmuch as the types of the people being associated with were properly identified and analyzed by the typer.

People would like to think that socionists have some strict algorithm they apply, because this would make socionics easier to understand, apply, and develop further. However, I don't believe I've ever met such a socionist. As soon as a person begins taking responsibility for his typings of others, he finds that "model thinking" alone is insufficient to produce a result. It's like listening to a technical debate between two experts and trying to determine who is right using your emotional reactions alone with no intellectual knowledge of the subject. Emotional reactions can be honed and cleansed of outside influences to the point that they become a fine tool for understanding many things, but they are clearly inadequate to deal with primarily intellectual matters. Likewise, socionics is primarily about how we respond to different types of people on a mostly unconscious level. Using "model thinking" alone (if that were even possible) can get you quite far, but it's not the ultimate arbiter. The ultimate arbiter is the network of invisible psychological-emotional connections between people, which are hard to put into "model language." Once this invisible network becomes evident, you can use that to correct your understanding of the model.

At least that's the way I see things. Many socionists who emphasize a model-heavy approach would disagree with me, particularly those who are unable to feel the nuances of interpersonal interaction on an emotional level. But actually the whole reason of socionics' existence is to explain relationships, and the better it does that, the more useful it becomes. The model is a semi-decent approximation at best.

Wikisocion Needs a New Admin

Wikisocion may have a hoster lined up but still needs an admin to perform relatively frequent security updates.

Note from current admin:

"The version of mediawiki used for wikisocion is version 1.15.5, and the latest version of mediawiki of 1.17.0. I already had written a script that I used to update 1.15 versions, but this probably won't work for upgrading to 1.17, so that needs to be done manually, and it's a bit of work to find out what needs to be done."

Interactions Between Male and Female Attractiveness

The previous two posts raise many questions that need to be addressed separately. I will mention them briefly in the post to avoid potential misunderstandings and to suggest some interesting avenues of thought:

• Do people choose partners who are at a similar place in their lifetime graph of overall attractiveness?
• If men reach peak attractiveness on average X years later than women, why is the average age gap between the sexes at time of marriage only Y years? Does X = Y? If not, does this suggest my models are off?
• What more can we find out if we begin graphing not attractivenes relative to an individual's peak, but "absolute" attractiveness relative to other people? For instance, can we identify possible causes of a pattern of older men remarrying younger women, but of lower status/stature than previous wives? Or can we identify moments when the overall attractiveness of a couple begin to diverge, creating potential for problems?
• Here we have looked at sexual attractiveness, but what about the role of friendship in choosing a mate? Friendship likely tends to be easier with someone of roughly the same age. Does this temper differences in absolute attractiveness and attractiveness relative to one's lifetime peak?

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.