Personality quizzes are fake frameworks that help us understand ourselves.
What-character-from-show-X-are-you quizzes, astrology, and personality categorization instruments (think Big-5, Myers-Briggs, Magic the Gathering colors, etc.) are perennially popular. I think a good question is to ask, why do humans seem to like this stuff so much that even fairly skeptical folks tend to object not to categorization but that the categorization of any particular system is bad?
My stab at an answer: humans are really confused about themselves, and are interested in things that seem to have even a little explanatory power to help them become less confused about who they are. Metaphorically, this is like if we lived in a world without proper mirrors, and people got really excited about anything moderately reflective because it let them see themselves, if only a little.
On this view, these kinds of things, while perhaps not very scientific, are useful to folks because they help them understand themselves. This is not to say we can totally rehabilitate all such systems, since often they perform their categorization by mechanisms with very weak causal links that may not even rise above the level of noise (*cough* astrology *cough*), nor that we should be satisfied with personality assessments that involve lots of conflation and don’t resolve much confusion, but on the whole we should be happy that these things exist because they help us see our psyches in the absence of proper mental mirrors.
(FWIW, I do think there is a way to polish you mind into a mirror that can see itself and that I have managed to do this to some extent, but that’s a bit besides the point I want to make here.)
They help us understand others as well—even as fake frameworks, anything that fights against https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Typical_mind_fallacy is useful. I’d argue these categorizations don’t go far enough, and imply a smaller space of variation than is necessary for actual modeling of self or others, but a lot of casual observers benefit from just acknowledging that there IS variation.
Personality quizzes are fake frameworks that help us understand ourselves.
What-character-from-show-X-are-you quizzes, astrology, and personality categorization instruments (think Big-5, Myers-Briggs, Magic the Gathering colors, etc.) are perennially popular. I think a good question is to ask, why do humans seem to like this stuff so much that even fairly skeptical folks tend to object not to categorization but that the categorization of any particular system is bad?
My stab at an answer: humans are really confused about themselves, and are interested in things that seem to have even a little explanatory power to help them become less confused about who they are. Metaphorically, this is like if we lived in a world without proper mirrors, and people got really excited about anything moderately reflective because it let them see themselves, if only a little.
On this view, these kinds of things, while perhaps not very scientific, are useful to folks because they help them understand themselves. This is not to say we can totally rehabilitate all such systems, since often they perform their categorization by mechanisms with very weak causal links that may not even rise above the level of noise (*cough* astrology *cough*), nor that we should be satisfied with personality assessments that involve lots of conflation and don’t resolve much confusion, but on the whole we should be happy that these things exist because they help us see our psyches in the absence of proper mental mirrors.
(FWIW, I do think there is a way to polish you mind into a mirror that can see itself and that I have managed to do this to some extent, but that’s a bit besides the point I want to make here.)
They help us understand others as well—even as fake frameworks, anything that fights against https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Typical_mind_fallacy is useful. I’d argue these categorizations don’t go far enough, and imply a smaller space of variation than is necessary for actual modeling of self or others, but a lot of casual observers benefit from just acknowledging that there IS variation.