Dealing With "Isms"

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group.  A racial group.  Or a language.  Or anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.  Friday Baldwin in Friday. Robert A. Heinlein. 1982.

One of the unfortunate features of social media is that people are sorted out into groups based on one "ism" or another, usually on the basis of what they are against rather that what they are for.  Feminism for example has a package of male behaviors that they rebel against, Paternalism, privilege, Bro networks, sexism, (as defined by feminists) and others.   Many of these are justified, but men are judged by gender rather than whether they actually exhibit any of these behaviors. 

 Once an "ism" gains traction it generally fractionates into groups with agendas that are more important than the overall ideals of the nominally fundamental "ism."  In a few cases a charismatic leader can unify the groups under a larger tent and become a political or socially potent movement.  Charasmatic leaders generally are short lived, frequently literally, and their movement fractures once again into narrow interest groups.

 The most important way of dealing with isms is not to get sucked up into one.  The customs of your ism become a part of your cultural matrix.  

To believe you can live free of your cultural matrix is one of the easiest fallacies and has some of the worst consequences. You are part of your group whether you like it or not, and you are bound by its customs.

Don't belittle customs.  It is easier to change Mendelian characteristics than to change customs.   If you try to ignore them, they bind you when you least expect it.

Don't break them--avoid them.  Take them into your considerations, examine how they work, and make them serve you.

Claude Morden, Beyond This Horizon, Chapter 15, p 147 NAL, Robert A. Heinlein.  

 While I am an ally and active supporter of many isms, I am very selective in how I do so, and am very careful to avoid making the cultural matrix of the ism part of my thinking and behavior.  

 I was brought up by strong, independent women to believe that women were just as capable as men at anything they chose to do, and therefore chose to consider only such women as possible mates.  One would think that Feminism would therefore be a natural cultural matrix for me, but none of the strong, independent women I knew would have anything to do with Feminism as they were too involved in their own ventures to have any interest. I chose to do all that I could to support their ventures, at a high cost due to the cultural matrix of the Paternalistic culture I was part of as a child, and opposition from the cultural matrix of the feminists.  I expected the Paternalist opposition, and knew how to deal with it, the Feminists were a surprise. 
https://jcarlinbl.blogspot.com/2016/03/why-i-am-not-feminist.html
       

Jung, MBTI, Astrology and other Pseudoscience.

 Most of the innovations in science come from studying the tails of the “normal population” curves.  It can be easily proven that almost all inferences of innovators in psychology, including by the way astrologers, do not work generally with the 68% of the population in the two sigma area of the population curve.  The average person cannot easily be sorted out into the usual categories based on questionnaires, birth date, and clinical manifestations of disease paradigms. People in general are too complex to fit themselves into little ticky-tacky boxes, although the ticky-tacky boxes they choose tells more about them to the sophisticated and generally unscientific researcher than they would like to think. 

 I say unscientific investigator since science by and large is a belief system not a neutral investigation into the basics of human behavior.  Or natural behavior but that is a different essay.  For most "scientists" Science is a belief system just like religion or politics. They search out and find published data that reinforce their confirmation biases and go back to the lab and run experiments based on those beliefs until they get a few that are statistically significant to publish. Then they are "outstanding in their field" and have published data to prove it.

  Psychology that begins and ends with controlled studies and no clinical observation is at best useless and probably dangerous.  You can learn more about the psychology of the general population from the tails of the psych curves, than from the academic studies of the general population 5% of which are statistically certainly wrong, and given the 3 sigma publication bias, I have seen estimates as high as 25% wrong, not counting fraud. Personally I rely more on good clinical psychologists and LCSWs than academics both for the general population and symptomatic subjects.  Most keep up with the academic publications, I won't comment on their opinions of them. 

  Intuitive data selection is fairly reliable, particularly in minds categorized as thinking and perceiving whether by MBTI or observation. 

 Innovators in science and most other creative fields, tend to focus on fringe effects and see if they can push them back into the mainstream. On the fringes MBTI is highly predictive of behavior.  Pushing it back into the mainstream population takes trained observers who have learned what to look for among the populations where there is no question of type.  

 The various questionnaires out on the web are almost useless and are the reason the MBTI is characterized as pseudoscience.  The questions are necesssarily ambiguous.  For the average person most can be truthfully answered as true for any choice depending on current mood and challenges. For those clearly one type or another the questionnaires are essentially redundant.  They can look at the definitions of the type indicators and assign a type quite reliably.  Note that the one word basis of the index is essentially arbitrary and must be accepted as is.  


http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/home.htm?bhcp=1

Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extroversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).