The idea that human personalities and behaviors can be sorted into two simplistic piles or even a scale between two piles is just silly.
There’s no predictive value to it- you can’t objectively classify\quantify people’s ‘vertion’ and then predict behaviors or outcomes based on those classifications, not even statistically from a large sample set because it’s meaninglessly subjective.
People are complex. Someone might appear ‘introverted’ in a social situation they’re unfamiliar with, but in a different setting my appear ‘extroverted’ because they’re very comfortable.
And some will say “social interactions give energy to extro and take it from intro” but what the hell does ‘energy’ mean in that context anyway? If I go to a small party with close friends all talking about sci-fi I’ll enjoy myself all night and feel refreshed, but I’d be exhausted after 30 minutes at a rave and need a week to recover.
And do people migrate between intro-extro throughout their life? In my 20’s I felt compelled to meet and experience new people all the time but now in my mid-40’s I don’t really care and tend to stick to the people I know. Does that mean I turned more introverted at some point? That’s why even as a personality scale it’s nonsense.
It’s all just Myers-Briggs for dummies, which is already for dummies.
The only way it makes sense is as a description of immediate behavior, not of a personality. Someone may be ‘behaving in an introverted way’ but saying that makes them an ‘introvert’ is nonsense because they may go somewhere else and behave in an extroverted way an hour later.
I know we had a run-in the other day, over on my stupid-ass Olympics post…but I agree with this post SO FUCKING MUCH.
I mean, not for nothing, but I actually think ALL psychology is nonsense, pop or otherwise.
During the same time that physics (ya know, an actually real branch of science) extended its grasp of nature to prove the existence of atomic, sub-atomic, and quantum particles, as well as the theory of relativity and the Big Bang, what did psychology do?
During that exact same time period, psychology went from Freud’s perverted bullshit, through to the “awareness doesn’t actually exist, lol” behaviorist era, through to a bunch of other debunked, unhelpful, failure-ass theories. And then there was that time when dipshits stuck metal rods into non-consenting patients’ faces and carved up parts of their brains.
Annnnnd, throughout the whole time, LGBTQ people were defined as mentally ill. In case anyone doesn’t know, homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness, up until 1973, according to the DSM manual.
And where are we now? Still nowhere. There still isn’t a really good, unified theory of human psychology to show for all that effort. And all those actual victims.
At the end of the day, I don’t even think this should be surprising, because we’re asking human minds to derive a theory of human minds. I’m pretty sure you can use math to prove that any given system can only analyze other systems that are LESS COMPLEX than itself. Our minds are literally too complex for us to meaningfully study. We should literally, actually stop trying to do it. All we’re doing is producing an endless parade of half-baked, harmful procedures, based on completely incorrect guesses.
If we want an answer to the question of “how do human minds work,” we need to finish developing artificial intelligence. If we produce a system more complex than the human mind, then it WILL be able to analyze the human mind, and deliver meaningful conclusions.
Of course, we probably won’t be able to understand those conclusions, and also the AI might want to destroy us. But at this point, I think we deserve it, as a species. The best thing we could do is bring about a better being and then give up the whole being-a-species game, once and for all.