Categorizing oneself into one of a number of discrete psychological categories has merits as a start. For example, one might discover unknown proclivities in behavior. But ultimately it's counter-productive.
Ultimately behavior arises in context of disagreement whenever interesting behavior is important. And therefore behavior is a matter of dynamics not the statics of a single identified category. It's best to think of interesting behavior pair-wise say in a team, family, and so on.
Here [1] is far more useful, and far more practical. The salient analysis arises like this, say in the context, of a team:
* teams fail because individuals fail
* individuals fail because they refuse to change
* individuals refuse to change because the change the environment desires conflicts with the self-esteem of the stubborn individual. To change the stubborn individual would have to admit that their sense of things is wrong.
* Until the individual changes, the individual will often exhibit defensive behavior to delay or defray change e.g. play off the problem, criticize others, play the victim. All these behaviors have the same goal: as long as one is putting the focus elsewhere, it's not on me, and I don't have to change because I'm not wrong.
Example: the boss wants a team member to have more control, competence in sorting out a task, which he/she doesn't see. This is a conflict over control. There are any number of realities underlying this,
* the boss feels overworked and doesn't want more work. he/she feeds undervalued, under payed, disrespected. So the boss pushes harder.
* the worker feels the work is unimportant, feels micro managed, or feels they are made to suck up crappy work that previous workers never did right. The worker refuses to change.
Until and unless the feelings and contextualization of this conflict is engaged, it will not be resolved. As Human Element correctly notes, good teams have a valuable asset of adaptability. There need not for example be an alpha leader, common vision etc (more static idealogical constructs) to getting things done, if these other deeper ideas are pursued.
I failed to plug @chrisweekly parent comment. He's right: ultimately what matters is change/adaptability, and refusing to fall for static, discrete, unchanging boundaries of some psychological categorization. Here's the Human Element's book's opening quote from Jung,
"The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.”
The key work in Human Element is, in a practical way as possible, getting that deeper realization in which problems that seemed impossible become doable. It rings true to me; there is no magic solution. There is no easy HBR article about the alpha guy with the right vision to make teamwork run well. It depends on the ability of individuals in a team to learn about themselves and co-workers and evolve.
It’s an interesting topic but I find the article’s writing style impenetrable.
For example:
> The polish applied in adjectival designation inclines one to believe that a definition has been achieved, a conclusion won. A pile of qualities furnishes a synoptic view of the whole, and so begins the slippage from the conditional mood to the declarative.
Sorry, me too dumb to parse. This is just one sentence picked at random
I think that, with phrases like "applied in adjectival designation" and "conditional mood to the declarative", this is the author subconsciously admitting that he'd rather have been a research fellow in linguistics than in culture!
Ok I enjoyed the article as a piece of self-indulgence. I agree it is pretentious and I don’t write like that. But just for funsies:
“Once your ‘personality type’ has been found, it feels like you know something definitive about who you are. You only answered some small number of questions about small segments of your life, but the quiz authoritatively asserts it has seen you to the core. In this way the quiz turns ‘when X happens I do Y’ statements into ‘I am X kind of person so I always do Y’ statements. This is probably bad.”
Bad reading, rather say. The impatience is typically qualified as that of men (it is always men) with too much on their hands and not enough time, but eventually the impression becomes inescapable of the infant in a high chair mewling for the next spoonful of baby food.
Besides, it's a bit rich to complain of excess length after the author has handed you his entire thesis by the end of the second paragraph. If you keep going after that despite not caring for the style, you're either a glutton for punishment or not paying attention.
If you assume a starting point that writing is to communicate clearly (as in delivering a thesis or argument) and your writing does not do that, then it's bad writing.
You might not want to assume that. There are other reasons to write ambiguously with excessive and unnecessary ornamentation:
* Everyone else in your field does it, and you want to write in a familiar style
* You hope people confuse the advanced vocabulary in your writing with an advanced argument and it will bolster your credibility
* Pretension: you want to feel clever whilst writing it, or appeal to those who will feel clever whilst reading it
All of those are perfectly valid to my mind - even writing verbosely for the sheer love of the language is fine.
I just don't think this article does any of that well.
Oh, it does pretension very well, as it should given the market in which and to whom it's published. The Hedgehog Review appeals to aspirant biens-pensants of a notionally resurgent school of cultural conservatism notionally in the mold of Mencken and Buckley. Which is a sad joke, of course; say what you would of either man, both knew the value of firm principle, and of concision in honing the sharp side of a tongue. But however footless the pretense, it should be pretty well gratified by an article that takes the parable of the blind men and the elephant and dresses it up in five thousand or so mostly unnecessary additional words. (The effort at history is at least justifiable, if little more usefully pursued.)
What galls me is really just the lack of critical engagement. Whining about an article being "too long" is the tantrum of a Tiktok-addled child. Complaints that add up only to "this isn't meant for me" are well suited to the self-centeredness of a teenager. The questions of who this is for, then, and why, and what that might say about something else, are actually interesting, and around here somewhat tiresomely rare in the asking.
It worries me that people are comfortable in declaring themselves unwilling or unable to read critically, or to reckon with a thought of any complexity. I realize that's not what they understand themselves to be doing, but it is what they're doing nonetheless.
I made the mistake of reading the entire article, expecting some kind of structure and conclusion. But it just rambled on for pages and pages in this same obtuse and verbose manner, like a Grandpa Simpson with a few more IQ points but the same strength of mind.
Thanks for pinpointing it. There was something about this I just found offputting. Like the author's trying too hard.
Interestingly enough, I'm finishing up an article about open office plans and return-to-office, and I realized that the people who decide these things are overwhelmingly Extroverted, in MBTI terms. They think those Introverted types who like some private space to think need to be dragged out into the open where they can Communicate.
There actually are scholarly articles about which MBTI types should be leaders and managers. I won't burden you with them here.
It reminds me of how Eric Weinstein talks. It's either a complete lack of communication skills, or will to actually share knowledge, just an attempt to make what you're talking about seem impenetrable. It's a sad display of intellectual insecurity by the author.
“Scans” means the sentence is plausible. Not having read the article, I can’t say I agree or disagree.
I could expound on the grammatical structure and syntactical components of the sentence but I have to confess I’m too lazy to do so.
Basically, humanities have their own specific discourse communities and looking at an article that assumes prior knowledge can be usefully compared to starting with a paper on relativity theory without having understood Newtonian mechanics.
My apologies to any scientistic types I may have offended.
This is an unhelpfully shallow dismissal, and not what I took from the article.
The author acknowledges the usefulness of such tests, but cautions against the tendency people have to reduce themselves to a set of rigid traits. And I tend to agree.
I personally have found such tests useful at times, and they have helped me understand aspects of myself. In a work setting, they can help teams better understand each other and improve communication.
But there’s also a tendency to take these results too seriously. Taken too seriously, they feed self limiting beliefs. This is in the category of issues that the author seems focused on.
While I had long known I was an introvert, and an MBTI test certainly confirmed that, it took me far too long to realize that social skills still had a major impact on my social life, and that my social anxiety wasn’t just about introversion.
Social interaction drains my batteries, but social skills are orthogonal to introversion and still need to be cultivated. Believing that my social tendencies were modulated purely by my introversion kept me stuck in anti-social patterns for too long.
The truth is that the self is malleable and ever changing. I’ll always be an introvert, but I’m not the socially anxious introvert I once was. This means I do more social things and spend less social energy than I once did.
I know a decent number of people who base daily decisions on how they categorize themselves (or on how they don’t categorize themselves) instead of entertaining the possibility that they might like something. I was one of those people for quite a long time, and I’m still breaking the habit of being me on a regular basis.
These tools are more useful than a horoscope, but if rigidly applied, not by much.
I agree that my dismissal was shallow. Oops, my bad. In contrast, your comments were clear and concise. I think my inclination towards criticism sprang out of the flowery and obscure prose the author used to make his points. I would wish the original author had been as clear, concise and to the point as you are. As other commenters have said, some of the sentences leave my brain swirling with "what is this man trying to say, I have no idea?"
Hey, thanks for the comment, and respect/kudos for the reflection here.
I do agree with you that the writing was unnecessarily impenetrable, especially for a topic that seems geared towards guiding people away from something unhelpful. It'd be far more effective if written in clear and understandable language.
