MBTI has 16 categories, which is really too many. I don’t think all of the categories are likely to be good “fits” for a group of people. Some of them are—if I describe someone as an INTJ, I feel like I’m describing a type of person (the smart guy who thinks he’s always right) that I encounter frequently. The axes seem to vary in how “real” they are. Extroversion vs. introversion is of course a well-established psych phenomenon. Intuitive vs. sensing seems maybe-fake to me, Thinking vs. Feeling seems very much like a fake distinction, and Perceiving vs. Judging seems very real to me intuitively.
Enneagram describes some people very well, but not all people fit firmly into a bucket. I’ve met people for whom the most efficient way to describe them is an Enneagram bucket -- 9′s are a very distinctivething, particularly among people with trauma—but I’ve also met a lot of people, including myself, for whom the system returns “huh?”
Hogwarts houses are easily subsumed into a lot of other systems, like Magic colors or classical elements; they just use standard Western archetypes.
Four Temperaments seem like they’re probably a real thing in psychology. Melancholic = depressive, Choleric = manic, Phlegmatic = “aspie”, Sanguine = healthy. Real, but not that interesting.
Chakras, seen not as personality types but as human capacities, seem intuitively real, except that I’m not sure that 6th vs. 7th (both wisdom/intellect) and 1st vs. 2nd (both body/sexuality) are really that different from each other. I do have an intuition that “body/physicality”, “willpower”, “emotions”, “speech”, and “thought” are importantly different capacities, but I’m not sure that you couldn’t lump them better as “body”, “willpower/emotions”, “speech/thought”.
Integral Colors are a developmental hierarchy, not a typology: rungs on a ladder, not points on a wheel. I think they refer to real archetypes in modern pop culture, but not very accurate history—the actual Enlightenment wasn’t as Orange as the popular understanding is, the hunter-gatherer → pastoralist → agrarian path may not have actually been a trajectory that peoples progressed along over time, Green doesn’t seem like a great fit for what socialists actually believe(d), etc.
My discussions with people 1-2 steps removed from the developers of Integral Colors indicates that while they claim it’s rungs on a ladder, they don’t really think of it that way and in particular they see the key insight being that Green is Bad; when I asked if that was true while getting the initial explanation they acted like I’d passed a test or something; at a minimum I’d guessed the teacher’s password. Then of course Boomeritis makes it explicit and isn’t subtle about it.
MBTI I think you’re right that some of them are pretty thin/rare, and they’re trying to cover that up to make the system work out. That seems reasonably common; people have some insights, then they feel the need to ‘fill out the grid’ and make all the points on it seem valuable and important and so on, so they’re stuck pretending all 16 are a legit thing. I do think all four contrasts describe a thing, though.
Hogwarts houses I think get way too much credit than they deserve and aren’t especially well thought out, especially in canon where she (as I read/understand it) basically gives up on the idea that Slytherin isn’t evil.
Enneagram I think deserves some credit for not trying to classify everyone?
Comparison to other classifications:
MBTI has 16 categories, which is really too many. I don’t think all of the categories are likely to be good “fits” for a group of people. Some of them are—if I describe someone as an INTJ, I feel like I’m describing a type of person (the smart guy who thinks he’s always right) that I encounter frequently. The axes seem to vary in how “real” they are. Extroversion vs. introversion is of course a well-established psych phenomenon. Intuitive vs. sensing seems maybe-fake to me, Thinking vs. Feeling seems very much like a fake distinction, and Perceiving vs. Judging seems very real to me intuitively.
Enneagram describes some people very well, but not all people fit firmly into a bucket. I’ve met people for whom the most efficient way to describe them is an Enneagram bucket -- 9′s are a very distinctive thing, particularly among people with trauma—but I’ve also met a lot of people, including myself, for whom the system returns “huh?”
Hogwarts houses are easily subsumed into a lot of other systems, like Magic colors or classical elements; they just use standard Western archetypes.
Four Temperaments seem like they’re probably a real thing in psychology. Melancholic = depressive, Choleric = manic, Phlegmatic = “aspie”, Sanguine = healthy. Real, but not that interesting.
Chakras, seen not as personality types but as human capacities, seem intuitively real, except that I’m not sure that 6th vs. 7th (both wisdom/intellect) and 1st vs. 2nd (both body/sexuality) are really that different from each other. I do have an intuition that “body/physicality”, “willpower”, “emotions”, “speech”, and “thought” are importantly different capacities, but I’m not sure that you couldn’t lump them better as “body”, “willpower/emotions”, “speech/thought”.
Integral Colors are a developmental hierarchy, not a typology: rungs on a ladder, not points on a wheel. I think they refer to real archetypes in modern pop culture, but not very accurate history—the actual Enlightenment wasn’t as Orange as the popular understanding is, the hunter-gatherer → pastoralist → agrarian path may not have actually been a trajectory that peoples progressed along over time, Green doesn’t seem like a great fit for what socialists actually believe(d), etc.
My discussions with people 1-2 steps removed from the developers of Integral Colors indicates that while they claim it’s rungs on a ladder, they don’t really think of it that way and in particular they see the key insight being that Green is Bad; when I asked if that was true while getting the initial explanation they acted like I’d passed a test or something; at a minimum I’d guessed the teacher’s password. Then of course Boomeritis makes it explicit and isn’t subtle about it.
MBTI I think you’re right that some of them are pretty thin/rare, and they’re trying to cover that up to make the system work out. That seems reasonably common; people have some insights, then they feel the need to ‘fill out the grid’ and make all the points on it seem valuable and important and so on, so they’re stuck pretending all 16 are a legit thing. I do think all four contrasts describe a thing, though.
Hogwarts houses I think get way too much credit than they deserve and aren’t especially well thought out, especially in canon where she (as I read/understand it) basically gives up on the idea that Slytherin isn’t evil.
Enneagram I think deserves some credit for not trying to classify everyone?