I observe that Wu Xing (the five phases) might be expected to have a mapping to the five MTG colors. But it doesn’t look like it to me, or at least it’s not obvious. Wood reads as red/green, Fire as red/black/green, Earth as… possibly green/white, Metal as something like white/blue/black, and Water as something like blue/green.
I find that when I’ve tried to classify people with phases, I have much more often been able to identify someone as having a single phase—”ah, yes, Steve is fire and I am water, and that explains [event] and [reaction]”—than I have been able to identify people as having a single color. (Steve and I are both deeply blue, and also rather white; if anything, I’m more red than Steve is.) This suggests to me the Wu Xing has a much better ability to compress human variation / is pointing at clusters that are thus ‘more real.’
Sadly, I don’t seem have to have a great presentation of the Wu Xing available; the link at the top of this comment is the best thing I could find on short notice. From your read of that, do you have thoughts on the two / any cruxes that come to mind that would make you favor one or the other?
I found another source that I worked off of earlier, which is five wikipedia articles: wood, fire, earth, metal, water. They paint a stronger picture of the difference between wood and fire (I would fill this with examples of people if I thought we knew the same people; I’d be very surprised if you knew Steve, for example).
I noticed a thing that seemed cruxy for me, which is that the MTG color wheels have, at their heart, goal-methodology pairs, which the Wu Xing doesn’t have. Blue looks like the consequence of an optimization process, whereas Water looks more like an empirical cluster. This feels like an additional constraint that is more likely to reduce than increase the color pie’s alignment with reality, while perhaps making it more compelling / memorable / or so on.
Which brings up that it seems like the MTG color wheel could be instead a goal-methodology matrix, where you consider the five goals combined with the five motivations. It seems like all of “peace through acceptance,” “peace through action,” “peace through ruthlessness,” and “peace through knowledge” are real things. Things with very different flavors, to be sure, but it’s not obvious to me that “peace through order” would seem more real than “peace through ruthlessness” without the priming of MTG. (Legalism is more real than Confucianism, for example.)
Loren ipsum
I observe that Wu Xing (the five phases) might be expected to have a mapping to the five MTG colors. But it doesn’t look like it to me, or at least it’s not obvious. Wood reads as red/green, Fire as red/black/green, Earth as… possibly green/white, Metal as something like white/blue/black, and Water as something like blue/green.
I find that when I’ve tried to classify people with phases, I have much more often been able to identify someone as having a single phase—”ah, yes, Steve is fire and I am water, and that explains [event] and [reaction]”—than I have been able to identify people as having a single color. (Steve and I are both deeply blue, and also rather white; if anything, I’m more red than Steve is.) This suggests to me the Wu Xing has a much better ability to compress human variation / is pointing at clusters that are thus ‘more real.’
Sadly, I don’t seem have to have a great presentation of the Wu Xing available; the link at the top of this comment is the best thing I could find on short notice. From your read of that, do you have thoughts on the two / any cruxes that come to mind that would make you favor one or the other?
Loren ipsum
I found another source that I worked off of earlier, which is five wikipedia articles: wood, fire, earth, metal, water. They paint a stronger picture of the difference between wood and fire (I would fill this with examples of people if I thought we knew the same people; I’d be very surprised if you knew Steve, for example).
I noticed a thing that seemed cruxy for me, which is that the MTG color wheels have, at their heart, goal-methodology pairs, which the Wu Xing doesn’t have. Blue looks like the consequence of an optimization process, whereas Water looks more like an empirical cluster. This feels like an additional constraint that is more likely to reduce than increase the color pie’s alignment with reality, while perhaps making it more compelling / memorable / or so on.
Which brings up that it seems like the MTG color wheel could be instead a goal-methodology matrix, where you consider the five goals combined with the five motivations. It seems like all of “peace through acceptance,” “peace through action,” “peace through ruthlessness,” and “peace through knowledge” are real things. Things with very different flavors, to be sure, but it’s not obvious to me that “peace through order” would seem more real than “peace through ruthlessness” without the priming of MTG. (Legalism is more real than Confucianism, for example.)
Loren ipsum