A friend of mine who's quite into philosophy once told me that a good number of philosophers did little but try to categorize things. Rather than draw meaningful insights, say, or squeeze every drop out of some experience, they'd simply say, here's nature, here's a grid I've drawn, let's see what falls into what square. Ok, good job; but what have you actually accomplished? (So my friend said.)
I don't know if this is true of the history of philosophy (or if it's a meaningful indictment of these philosophers), but I can't help but be reminded of it when I see strenuous efforts being made to bucket various phenomena, and human ones at that. What are we going to do with these categories? Not to put too fine a point on it, these things are complex. Any differentiating scheme simple enough will be insufficient to be the basis of any important decision, and any sophisticated enough won't be neat enough for us to be talking about it like this.
I say this as someone who spent more years than I'd care to admit obsessed with MBTI. Wow, look, there are all these different people with their strengths and weaknesses. I even get a cool framework—a stack—to aid me in psychoanalysis. And then of course you have Socionics, which shamelessly tries, using just sixteen categories, to produce a catalog of human interaction. I am not saying it isn't fun.
Actually, MBTI did help me in one way: by showing me how diverse humans are. In my most advanced, intelligent state, I'm still not going to get along with or be compelling to all of them. That was an important idea for me growing up, and still is.
But beyond that, and running the risk of sounding unsophisticated: who cares?
Eleven years ago Kaiser Permanente hired me to help roll out new software to all their hospitals in Northern California. We had like 3 months of training before going in and one of the things they had us do was some personality type thing with some psychologist.
It felt like this lady was trying to shoe horn me into some category, telling me I am some 4 letter acronym and here are my strengths and weaknesses. I just kept arguing with her pointing out events and situations in my life that refuted everything she was trying to say I was.
It seems like an overly complicated horoscope thing where people love to read descriptions of themselves and others to make sense of the world, even though by looking at someone's face for a few seconds you can make way more judgements about the character of someone.
The "horoscopieness" of almost anything related to personality labeling causes me to feel deeply rebellious. You can't pigeon hole me! Irrational or not, I reject that my personality is fixed.
Exactly. What's my personality like? Well, under what conditions? If I'm stressed I'm different to when I feel calm and safe. What if I'm talking to the apprentices at work, who I've told eight times already not to do something, how do they perceive my personality. And then five minutes later I'm in the bosses office acting like a completely different person.
One of the useful things with bucketing is that stuff almost always tries to optimize itself and naturally cluster at certain areas more even though there are some continuity.
That means in nature, where is some normal distribution, there is often several normal distributions that overlay each other making it look like one continuous function with a noise rather than several continuous functions with different parameters. These studies are trying to uncover just that.
Not saying anything about this particular breakdown, but I do have a personal story about how not all typology breakdowns are useless:
Years ago I was working with two guys - one had become a close friend and one was a guy that I didn't like at all, he totally rubbed me the wrong way. BUT the two of them were good friends, and so my friend kept asking me why I wasn't friends with this other guy since we both liked the same things, looked at the world similarly, etc.
So eventually I somehow discovered this book called "I Wish I'd Said That"[1], which categorizes and analyzes people according to their communication styles.
Now I had studied a bunch of other typologies (MBTI, Enneagram, etc), but all of the sudden this one made it clear that I didn't like my coworker because of how he communicated. I had leapt to conclusions about who he was based on his communication style, and realized I was reacting to the way he spoke, not him as a person. The book gave me a very clear way to reframe how I interpreted his communications and how to engage with him so I could get past the parts of his communication style that didn't match mine and actually get to know him as a person.
Long story short, we are now close friends - 100% due to reading and applying the categories in this book. Your mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure it's hard to NOT learn something useful from it. Highly recommended, especially if you tend to look at the world through an analytic lens.
While I don't believe it's hard to see that perspective and be cognizant of it, I don't quite agree with that sentiment. Categorization itself has an immense level of usability. E.g. building steps to simulate a real human with AI. Even if like the below poster says, the spectrum may be more continuous than discrete, it is perhaps much faster to try to advance in a particular field with categorization than solely relying on unsupervised learning.
> Any differentiating scheme simple enough will be insufficient to be the basis of any important decision, and any sophisticated enough won't be neat enough for us to be talking about it like this.
That seems to be an argument against anyone but experts ever discussing anything.
Simple models are useful, particularly as they can be understood by the less expert of us.
Categorization is one part of model building. But doing nothing else is like using Legos by just categorizing them into piles and then doing nothing with them.
Categorization - to provide concrete value - requires feedback into the categorization scheme from real world data. There are various indicators which might point out that the categorization is useless or totally incorrect and then modify or abandon the categorization scheme.
For instance, in physics it is very practical to categorize collisions into elastic and inelastic collisions (the former conserves energy while the latter conserves momentum). But that's not all of physics, and does not even make sense all of the time.
And then we have categorizations like Meyer Brigs which are just nonsense.
The problem is, as you said, that people often have this strange illusion that just inventing a category somehow is somehow value adding.
Energy and momentum are always conserved.
Elastic collisions conserve kinetic energy. This is helpful to know because you can predict the final speed of the two objects after the collision.
I was a psychology major. My first job as a recruiter, there was a training on personality types. It was taught to better help us with client interactions. Some people said it was actually helpful. I didn't care, I did fall under the logical bucket (usually wanting convincing data vs how it makes people feel, or how it would reflect on me as an employee).
Lucky that I work for a company that's data focused for arguments. And if I didn't, lucky enough to be financially stable to leave a company that's overly political.
I don't know if this is true of the history of philosophy (or if it's a meaningful indictment of these philosophers), but I can't help but be reminded of it when I see strenuous efforts being made to bucket various phenomena, and human ones at that. What are we going to do with these categories? Not to put too fine a point on it, these things are complex. Any differentiating scheme simple enough will be insufficient to be the basis of any important decision, and any sophisticated enough won't be neat enough for us to be talking about it like this.
I say this as someone who spent more years than I'd care to admit obsessed with MBTI. Wow, look, there are all these different people with their strengths and weaknesses. I even get a cool framework—a stack—to aid me in psychoanalysis. And then of course you have Socionics, which shamelessly tries, using just sixteen categories, to produce a catalog of human interaction. I am not saying it isn't fun.
Actually, MBTI did help me in one way: by showing me how diverse humans are. In my most advanced, intelligent state, I'm still not going to get along with or be compelling to all of them. That was an important idea for me growing up, and still is.
But beyond that, and running the risk of sounding unsophisticated: who cares?