Interesting Links for 20-05-2017

[andrewducker]

The Definition Of Hell For Each Myers-Briggs Personality Type

(tags: personality funny hell myers_briggs )

How and Why Has "Mr Brightside" Never Left the UK Charts?

(tags: music odd )

Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts

(tags: globalwarming food plants OhForFucksSake arctic viaElfy )

This is pretty-much how I feel about bodies

(tags: comic xkcd biology )

The Electoral Reform Society on proposals for Voter ID in the UK

(tags: uk voting fraud Conservatives )

Comments

[major_clanger]

I'm supposedly an I[SN]TJ, and sure enough the suggested hell scenarios for INTJ and ISTJ came across as almost tailor-made to be ghastly for me. But so did about half the others!

These days I'm of the view that Myers-Briggs is mainly useful for generating amusing memes. It is, as someone once referred to it, Astrology for Nerds.

[andrewducker]

I think it's better than astrology - my results have been remarkably stable for decades, and it correlates a fair chunk with the Big Five. It's just not nearly as good as the people selling it make out.

[njj4]

INTJ - Every time you open your mouth to say something intelligent, something entirely idiotic comes out instead.

"Why this is hell, nor am I out of it."

It's just not nearly as good as the people selling it make out.

I went to an interesting Sceptics in the Pub talk about Myers-Briggs a few years ago. If I remember correctly, the speaker noted that your MB type doesn't indicate your actual personality, just your preferences. He further observed that Myers and Briggs themselves cautioned against using it for personality typing; despite that lots of management and HR types do precisely that. He said that it's basically a dead topic in academic psychology, and has been for decades.

But yes, I usually end up somewhere on the INTJ/INTP spectrum, usually slightly closer to INTJ, and the descriptions for those categories do sound like me. But according to western astrology I'm a Sagittarius, and in Chinese astrology I'm a rat (a water rat to be precise) and the standard descriptions for those also sound like me (I think) despite astrology clearly being nonsense in several different ways.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, for actual academic research you want Big Five, or HEXACO. But people have had less luck coming up with a neat little description of each of the options there...

RE: xkcd bodies

[yalovetz]

Yup, I was walking through the office last week and had a sudden moment of "Oh my God, I have a rib-cage holding my lungs in and all these muscles attached to it to help me breath and surely that's all way to complicated to actually work..."

Re: xkcd bodies

[andrewducker]

I feel that way about software a _lot_ too.