Tag: By Justin

aLBoP is not MBTI

Hey, it’s Justin!  So…this post has words in it.  It’s written with words.  I’m typing words right now, with the strange expectation that words can communicate thoughts and ideas.  It’s odd, and it hasn’t seemed to work very well so far.  Yet maybe, there’s a faint chance that typing a few more words might be able to communicate something to somebody.

A Little Bit of Personality is not Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  We say so right there in the intro video…and in lots of posts on here, posts with words.  We started there, as we’ve said before, because we were just having fun and we, like so many, presumed that MBTI was a reliable, scientific system.  Yet as we’ve said before, we gradually came to see more and more ways in which MBTI is inconsistent, in which it does not work, in which it encourages and even relies on stereotypes and superficial simplifications of people.  And what was worse, we started to see that many, many people apparently wanted those stereotypes and simplifications.

We started to see how much “personality typing” was used as a petty weapon in infantile campaigns to put down anyone whose mind worked differently.  We cringed more and more whenever we saw four-by-four grids that listed insultingly shallow sets of qualities for each of the sixteen types, and which portrayed some types as clearly better, smarter, more reliable, more successful, more creative, more visionary, more concrete, more compassionate, more practical, or simply of greater worth and value than the others.  Personality typing had become a shallow and subjective mudfight through which people tried to compensate for their own unresolved personal insecurities by putting down others who made them feel inadequate.  Apparently, there are a lot of second-graders online who are quite skilled at writing up passive-aggressive four-by-four grids.

So we went back to the beginning, because we knew there was so much good here!  We, like so many of you guys, had gotten excited about personality typing for a reason.  It was exciting to see how our minds worked, and how others’ minds did too.  It was so cool to try to figure out the personality types of fictional characters, or of historical figures or celebrities we liked.  But now that we had seen how personality typing had become such a putrid and subjective cesspool, we had to go back to the basics to figure out what was good and what was brain-damaging.

We’ve talked about this before, in several posts that use words.  We’ve described how a clarification of basic definitions is one of the first indispensable steps in any effort to replace subjectivity with objectivity.  We’ve talked about how we didn’t have to throw out the baby with the poisonous bathwater, and so we were able to use the brilliant original work done by Carl Jung and by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers (all of whom died long before the internet), without the simplified dangers of modern MBTI.  On aLBoP Phase 2, we go into far greater depth about our scientific process, how we were able to clarify definitions that made Cognitive Typing into a reliable and repeatable hard science, rather than a subjective and dubious soft-science.  But all those posts use words, words that invite you guys to see “Hey wait, this is different. This isn’t what I thought I already knew.”

A Little Bit of Personality is part of a larger endeavor, which we call our “Twenty-Five Year Plan,” a plan to simply help make life better for as many people as we can.  As I’m writing today, we’re a bit more than eleven years in, on the fourth of eight stages.  This is all stuff that’s explained in depth on the full Phase 2 site.  It’s really exciting to us, and though we did not initially expect to use Cognitive Typing or anything like it as a tool in this plan, aLBoP has become a powerful way for us to reach and help so many awesome people!  Yet originally, we didn’t plan to have Phase 2 be a separate website; we were just going to put all the information right here on one site, for all the internet to see.  We’re very glad now that we didn’t.

There is nothing secret on any of our sites, and all the information on all three of our sites (Phase 1 here, Phase 2 Intro, and full Phase 2) is all completely free of charge.  But we realized that we had to separate our content into multiple sites when we saw the bizarre and aggressively cruel reactions of so many people to even the comparatively basic concepts of Cognitive Typing.  I’m not referring to insightful and engaging questions; for instance, a lot of cool people have asked very good questions, like “How do you have a large enough sample size to make sure your conclusions are accurate?” “Why don’t you submit to scientific journals?” “What exactly is your experimental process?” etc.  Those sorts of thoughtful questions are the sort of thing that we’ve had to save for the later websites, because we realized that even the introductory information here on Phase 1 seems to be far too much for some people to read.  Too many words.

We wanted an engaging and active forum where we could talk back and forth with people, instead of only posting articles on a website, but it soon became clear that if we went ahead and put a forum here on Phase 1, open to the internet, then any potential discussion would be buried under arrogant assertions and bitter argument.  In fact, when we started a forum on Phase 2, it was astonishing how rapidly that happened, how quickly it became a toxic atmosphere where thoughtful, intelligent people grew ever more wary to post anything.  If we didn’t do something, our forum was going to become yet another place on the internet where the discourse was dominated by the bone-headedly obnoxious.

As I’m writing this, I have an online game open in the background, where one of my characters is happily crafting food for me.  But I usually play most games with the general chat channels turned off, because while there are a lot of sweet and helpful people in a lot of games, the general chat channels tend to get dominated by the least common denominator.  When we first started our Phase 2 forum, some people were convinced that it couldn’t possibly be any different from anywhere else on the internet, calling us naive for trying to create a place online where people could feel safe to freely share ideas, where the thoughtful majority didn’t have to remain silent or risk setting off the irrational blowhards.  Yet now, on the full Phase 2 site, we have an awesome and active realtime chat forum where everyone feels safe to think, to work through problems, to discuss ideas, to share their lives and make precious friendships.  I’m actually making them wait right now while I write this, but Calise and I thought that this little post was worth taking the time for.  Yet that forum would have been impossible if we hadn’t first created a safe place insulated from the wild, aggressively-asserted opinions and jaw-dropping simplifications on the internet.

We wanted to put all of it on one website, and perhaps we could have, were it not for the apparent fact that the current culture of the internet trains us not to read.  Trains us not to think.  Not to stop and digest.  Not to sit back and make sure we understand things before moving on.  And it certainly seems to train people to post comments before, you know, reading.  We wanted to do videos as well as posts, and we did make a few before moving them away to Phase 2.  We wanted to do podcasts, which are a ton of fun but we only do them for Phase 2.  This is not meant to be an advertisement for Phase 2 (especially because we are very, very, very behind on responding to Phase 2 invites, really sorry about that!), but rather a challenge to read what’s here on Phase 1.  If people can’t do that, then how could they possibly read more anyway?

It’s gotten to the point that I wasn’t sure I should even take the time to write this, because I wondered who would read it?  Not that we don’t have plenty of traffic, but I wondered how many people would do more than skim.  One of our closest friends, whom we met through aLBoP, told us that when he first stumbled across Phase 1, it was a real shock to him because he had to slow down to really understand it all.  He told us that he had grown accustomed to being able to skim most things online, that most articles were fairly simple ideas expressed in way too many words, so he’d gotten used to skimming.  But with aLBoP, he had to seriously re-adjust his expectations; he had to take time and think about the content.  Another of our friends, upon reading the first Super Simple Series post, said “That’s not simple at all!”  We’ve done our best, heh, and we hope that it really is pretty simple and straightforward, but it is also new stuff, not just the same old familiar repetition, so it can’t be simply skimmed.

A couple weeks ago, someone walked up to me and declared that I was an INFP.  I tried to be diplomatic and inviting, telling him that I’d be interested to hear what made him say so, and I asked what definitions of the letters he was using.  He seemed confused and a bit bothered by the question, and said he was just using MBTI.  I still don’t know what made him think that he could so confidently assert someone else’s type like that.  Of course, on aLBoP we do quite confidently assert the Cognitive Types of both real and fictional people, but we can only do so as a result of using concrete, clear definitions that leave no subjective wiggle-room.  There’s no uncertainty about whether someone is a Cognitive Introvert or Extravert; the definitions are very clear, they leave no room for fudging or gray areas, yet they are also not the same soft and elastic definitions of current MBTI.  We have said so, over and over, using words.  And yet we still get comments by people unilaterally asserting “Nope, you typed that character wrong,” based on definitions that we are not using, definitions we cannot use for reasons that we have explained repeatedly.

The problem is in the assertiveness, the astounding certainty with which people treat their own points of view as objective fact.  There’s nothing wrong with asking questions, with re-examining and re-questioning over and over, with constantly re-checking and revisiting even the things that seem the most well established.  Sometimes you might find a mistake, like the time on the Phase 2 Typing Library, when I accidentally put ESTP(ep) Usain Bolt on the library pages for two different Cognitive Types because his picture had somehow got copied over into the wrong folder.  Just this morning, someone pointed out a typo where I had said “our” when I meant “or.”  And we get so many sweet comments where people ask questions rather than assert opinions as fact.  “Why did you type Gandalf as an F instead of a T?” shows a mind that wants to think, to understand, to hear feedback and decide whether or not it makes sense.  Yet when someone flippantly comments “No, Gandalf is INTJ like me,” then that shows such a closed unwillingness to question or examine one’s own point of view.  No wonder current politics are such a nasty echo-chamber.

So when people assertively tell us “I’m an ENTJ,” “I’m a Ne dom,” etc, it makes us wonder if they’ve really read much of anything before commenting.  We do not use the simplistic “dom” system because it turned out to be tremendously subjective, with apparent “dominance” depending far too much on potentially cherry-picked factors that are all too easily used to weigh the result toward a preferred conclusion.  As someone once said to us, and as we’ve quoted before, “Personality typing is just horoscopes for people who think they’re too smart for horoscopes.”  In other words, it’s all subjective fluff that can be applied equally well to anyone, of any type, as long as people are eager to adolescently define themselves in a way that parodies the real work of finding oneself.

But then, as soon as we mention that, we get sincere comments telling us that astrology is real too.  Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not; personally, I have seen many, many reasons to believe it is not accurate or reliable in any fashion, while I have not yet seen anything to suggest the contrary, so far.  Yet I have to wonder: what makes someone feel equipped to say that astrology definitively does work, or does not?  As soon as we start treating our own personal experiences as universal truths, as soon as we start treating our own opinions as objective facts, and as soon as we make the incredibly self-centered error of saying “I have no experience of such-and-such, therefore it’s crap,” then we shut off our ability to think, to learn, to approach anything in any sort of rational manner.  That quote about personality typing being mere horoscopes in disguise, displays its own form of narrow and lazy thinking, by asserting that all “personality typing” is this way, painting life with such a broad brush.  It’s this sort of simplistic thinking that leads to racism, sexism, or any other form of prejudice, that says “I’ve seen dumb religions, therefore all religions are dumb,” “I’ve known vile men, therefore all men are vile,” “I only hang around with dishonest people…and I am one myself…therefore nobody is honest,” etc.  It’s a lazy and anecdotal simplification of the complexities of people’s lives, hearts, and hopes.  It’s mean.

But just because the internet trains us to make everything simplistic and skimmable, just because the current online culture trains us to view our own personal opinions as objective fact, that doesn’t make it our fault.  We can learn to see outside our own points of view.  We can learn to recognize the powerful lenses of emotion, pain, and desire which skew and distort how we see every experience that happens to us.  We can explore just how not objective we are, and then learn to grow past that subjective isolation.

This is why Calise and I have had to de-prioritize Phase 1 for a long time, though.  We’ve been working feverishly, constantly, but most of it has not been here on Phase 1.  We did put eight months of work into The People of Stranger Things post, we put so much thought and feeling into it, so much care and planning, for a total of more than fifty thousand words.  There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but it has produced hardly any results.  How can we justify prioritizing the addition of more information here on Phase 1, when people repeatedly show us how little they’ve read of what we’ve already written?

We love our Personalized Typing service, we love seeing people’s faces and hearing about their lives, we love connecting with them, and it’s a great way to find thoughtful, good, decent people.  And yet, over and over, it’s an uphill battle to remind people who order typings that we are not MBTI, that we do not use those definitions, as we’ve said so many times in so many posts.  Whenever we send out a typing, we always caution people that if they look up their Cognitive Type online, then they are going to find things that are very different, and likely demeaning and limiting.  And yet we still get replies of people saying “No I can’t be this type, because here’s what MBTI says about it, and that’s not me.”  The Cognitive Orientation Guidebooks, which we package with each typing, spend a fair amount of time explaining and reiterating precisely how each Cognitive Type is different from the popular stereotypes. We really hoped words would get that across.

Yet we know what the internet culture is like, and we know that sometimes we all need to be reminded that it’s okay to slow down and process thoughts instead of living life through reactions.  Sometimes I find it intriguing to hop between news networks as they cover the same story, to see how differently each network portrays the very same events.  Which bits of video do they show, which do they edit out, and which do they repeat endlessly?  Which adjectives and adverbs do they use, to influence viewers’ conclusions?  What information do they focus on, what information do they downplay, and what information do they conveniently fail to mention entirely?  Like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, the same event and the same data can be interpreted in wildly different ways even when people have the most honest of intentions.  So when people are less honest, when people have an agenda, a worldview, an ideology or attitude that they want to push, how much more careful do we have to be before we draw any sort of confident conclusions?

It’s our hope that, by taking a few hours away from other work to write this, maybe this might help nudge aLBoP Phase 1 toward being a site where we can post more information, more Type Heroes, more character spotlights, and just more fun articles.  I’ve been wanting to do an article about Winston Churchill for years now, titled “How an ENFP Saved the World,” because he really did, and yes he was unequivocally an ENFP(ip), but how can I justify taking the time to write that, time I could be giving to other people, when so many readers here on Phase 1 won’t, well, read?  I worry that so many internet skimmers wouldn’t get past the title before firing off comments authoritatively declaring “He wasn’t ENFP!! He was [roll the dice and insert any number of different types here]!”  We owe Gwen and Phil 20 bucks, since someone did indeed leave a comment (one of the many that we decided to leave unapproved) assertively stating that, because Lord Shen has a grand vision, he is therefore INTJ.  Wow.  So that’s how we’re defining these complex variables of human thought and desire, now?  And so none of the other fifteen Cognitive approaches to life can have a grand vision?  Seriously?  Sorry Elon Musk, no ENFJ(ij) for you, you gotta be INTJ I guess.  The all-knowing internet decrees it thus.

We really hoped, and I still do hope, that by bringing the subject of Subtypes here to Phase 1, it would be a quick way to immediately show people “Hey look, see those two little letters in parentheses?  Then maybe, just perhaps, this is something a little bit different from what you’re already used to.”  We hoped that would help the Personalized Typing service more easily show people “Hey this isn’t just MBTI, see?  We’re giving you six letters, not just four.”  There are actually more than six letters, more than eight; it seems to be a magnificently reiterating fractal of complexity, with each new layer of sub-typing adding ever more clearly definable nuance to the intricacy of consciousness, but we figured that the basic idea of Subtypes was plenty enough for Phase 1 right now.  I worry that even by dangling that little hint of more information, it might lead people to leap to conclusions and simplifications.  Fair enough, but I also hope that this can encourage more of you to read a little more carefully, to ponder a little more than you already do, to consider, to question, to dig deep, to see outside your own point of view and become a voice for understanding instead of adding to the cacophonous chorus of cartoony, rigid simplifications.

TL;DR: aLBoP is not MBTI.  But more accurately, if you really want a “Too Long, Didn’t Read,” then why are you even here?  There are plenty of skimmable websites that will be more than happy to let you simplify people into shallow little subjective boxes.  This is not a blog, though it did start as one over on blogspot, but pretty quickly we realized how much aLBoP could help us find and help cool people, honest and thoughtful people, people who are willing to expend the labor of time and energy to earn what they learn.  That’s the sort of person we love to meet.  That’s the kind of person we love to learn from, exchange ideas with, and see how we can help them add to the world in their own way, in their own life.  That’s what we’re all about.

A Little Bit of Subtypes

Alright!  This is Justin again.  So we’re gonna try to keep this huge, ginormo, super in-depth topic really short here (edit: ha!), because this is just sort of a preview.  But we’re still pretty excited to get to talk about subtypes here on “Phase 1!”

See, the full post about subtypes is on aLBoP Phase 2, and even that post is just the intro to the topic.  Phase 2 goes into far more depth about, well, everything!  But as you might expect, it kinda requires and presumes that you’ve already gotten familiar with everything here on the starter site.

Which, right, before I go on…  If you haven’t checked out at least the basic information here on aLBoP, I’m afraid you really should go read that before diving into this.  Watch the intro video if you haven’t already, and then get your bearings with the Super Simple Series.  Remember, aLBoP is not MBTI, so it’s probably best to go back to the start so you can get a handle on everything.

Okay!  Got that covered?  At least a bit?  Cool, so like I was saying, we go into much more depth and detail about subtypes, what they are, why they are, and how they work, on the Phase 2 site.  However, we really really want to talk about subtypes on our upcoming Stranger Things post!  Also, it’s nice to be able to put people’s subtypes after their main cognitive types, partly because it immediately shows “Hey, look!  This is something different, so maybe drop your assumptions about typing at the door.”  And then, hopefully, maybe, if wishes were horses, we might get fewer people strolling in, glancing at a few pictures, and leaving a “nope that’s wrong” comment without, you know, reading stuff.  We can dream.

So on then with the subtypes crash course!  To start with, putting it simply, subtypes are kinda just what they sound like: a subset, a personal focus within each cognitive type.  Continue reading

Bloopers Video to Celebrate 4 Years of aLBoP!

Last week marked four years of A Little Bit of Personality, so to celebrate we decided to share a goofy behind the scenes look at our very first video, made three years ago! The filming process took twelve hours straight, with a lot of sweat, a little bit of tears, and a lot of silly outtakes. Here are our favorites.

Thank you guys for everything you do! aLBoP is made worthwhile by you guys, and we seriously couldn’t ask for better friends than the ones we’ve found through this amazing journey ❤️

See the original video here.

Music credits:
Locally Sourced – Jason Farnham
Sunny – Bensound.com
Dance – Bensound.com
Pop Danthology 2012 – Daniel Kim
Funny Song – Bensound.com
Ukelele – Bensound.com
Clap and Yell – Bensound.com

Typing Tutorial (plus Character Spotlight!)

Hey!  This is Justin!  Since I’m gonna be doing a lot of Phase 2, it’s probably good for me to say hi.  It’s been awesome getting to talk to you guys over chats and emails, and I’m excited to finally get to do some character spotlights!

For this first one, we’re going to be focusing especially on how to type people.  A lot of you have asked for help with typing people yourselves, so let’s walk through the process!

We’ve also convinced a couple of stick people, Gwen and Phil, to sacrifice their dignity and show us how *not* to type.  They’re going to do their best to type correctly, using oversimplified, stereotypical methods and definitions, and we’ll see how they do.

 

For this tutorial, we wanted to type a cool, engaging character who’s also kinda obscure.  That way, we shouldn’t have to worry much about preconceptions of the character’s type.  We wouldn’t want to start out with Darth Vader, say.  (We’ve seen Lord Vader typed as pretty much every single type :P)

That’s exactly the sort of subjectivity that we’re excited to get past here!  Regardless of whether we’re typing someone’s behavior or their cognition, if it all ends up coming down to subjective arguments over what type they are, then there’s something wrong with our methodology.  A reliable, repeatable, useful science needs to be objective, no matter who’s looking at it.

This kind of independent objectivity isn’t something a lot of people would associate with personality typing.  All too often, personality typing gets misused as a vague, horoscope-ish way of boiling people down to a simplistic little list of traits that could really be true of almost anyone.  Gwen and Phil are gonna demonstrate how this vagueness doesn’t work.  Aren’t you, guys?

We, on the other hand, are all going to show these two the consistent roots of cognitive typing.  We’re going to walk through how the cognitive definitions of the letters leave no wiggle room for subjective fudging; once we know how the letters work at their root, then every typing becomes clear.

So who’s our lucky, obscure victim for this demonstration?  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you…

…a peacock.

But not just any peacock.  This is the nefarious Lord Shen, the brilliant and, in my estimation, very charming villain of Kung Fu Panda 2.  Yes, there really is a movie called Kung Fu Panda, if you didn’t know.  Two of them, actually, with a third on the way.  And they’re really fantastic, with excellent themes told in a skillful way, and very good plot structure, and also very pretty.  Continue reading

PPP Show and Tell: Feelers and Logic

Hi everyone!  I hope your summer (or winter, down under) is going well!  Lots of fun and informative stuff coming your way the next while, but one thing we’ve been working on a lot is Personalized Personality Typings.  Thank you if you’ve ordered one, or even if you wanted to!  This time the first two tiers of price points got sold out in 24 hrs!  So we’re sorry if you didn’t get to order yours at your desired price point this time, but when we finish this batch up, we’ll be releasing more (and if you miss that one, same dance next time!).
In the meantime, since we put so much love and care into these, and since they include so much information that we’d like to share with *everyone*, we’re starting this new series, “PPP Show and Tell”, where we share quotes from the various Personalized Personality PDFs we’ve personalized to people (enough Ps, eh?)  While we’ll never share quotes from *your* email, because obviously that’s personal, we do want to share what *we’ve* said to you.  In your PPPs, questions and things about personality typing come up that have either come up many times before (like this post’s content), or that we might not have thought of addressing otherwise, that the whole class could stand to hear.
This time we have lots of quotes from a bunch of *different* PPPs, about the common misconceptions people have about Feelers’ relationship with logic, and what defines F in general.  All these quotes happen to be by my INFJ because, even though we read through your emails, determine your type, and figure out bullet points of what you need to hear, together, he has been writing the vast majority of the PPPs themselves to free me up to write blog posts, comments, social media stuff in general, and not go out of my mind with laundry.  Also, he happens to be an excellent writer and has a sexy grasp of principles.  But, you know, that’s why I married him 😉  (Well, that and he’s a good kisser.)
I hope this clears up a lot of the comments we get regarding “That person couldn’t be a T, their decisions are too emotional,” and “That person couldn’t be an F, they’re too smart,” that make me feel :(.  And hopefully this information will help *you* feel better about the person you are personally, and help you understand others and where they’re coming from.  Because any person can be both useful and meaningful, logical and human. ~
“Now, regarding F, there is a plentitude of misconception about both F and T, to the point that both are often mischaracterized into narrow parodies that are true of only the unhealthiest people of any personality type.  Many of the misconceptions about F are in fact true of unhealthy Ts, and vice versa.  Originally and empirically, those who cognate in the way we refer to as ‘Feelers’ focus first on the meaning and significance of things, and in practice that has complex effects.  For example, a Feeler who had been led to believe that it was cooler, more fun, or in any way better or more meaningful to be a T… would place great meaning and significance on trying to behave as a T, even to the point of attempting to focus on the use of things before meaning.  But through all that, their root motive is still meaning, the meaning of themselves as a person in this case, which they feel requires them to be a T.  Different types will often do the very same things, but for very different reasons.  This is part of why it’s dangerous to type someone based only on what they do, rather than on why they do it, and this is also why attempting to change one’s own actions in order to try to behave as another type tends to result in only a mimic of the other type.”
“Remember, none of this means that you are limited to these strengths.  You can develop the strengths of all the types, of Ts, of Is, of Js, and of S-es.  But in order to gain the strengths of other types, we must first master the strengths of our own type.  If we seek other types’ strengths before first mastering our own, then our own type’s weaknesses will be left unmastered, and they will get in the way.  People who try to master the strengths of other types without playing to the strengths of their own type become merely a parody, attempting to mimic other types without truly becoming them, and trying to hide their own weaknesses without having mastered them.  But as you learn to be proud to be a meaningful F, an observant E, a thoughtful P, and a conceptually-minded N, as you learn why your own strengths are good, then you will naturally and easily begin to develop the entirely new strengths of other personality types.”
  
“…to be human is to have emotions, but frequently Ts are portrayed as being unemotional, while only unhealthy people, F or T, suppress their emotions.  The quickest way to be controlled by your emotions is to pretend they’re not a factor, thereby letting them run unattended through fields of fear, insecurity, and pessimism, usually.”
“Healthy people of all types should cultivate logic, and healthy people of all types should cultivate carefully bridled emotions, since without emotion logic loses context and perspective.  There are many unempirical stereotypes which suggest that logic is a T trait, but it is simply a trait common to all healthy types.  And an attempt to be unemotional is simply unhealthy, the same for Ts as for Fs.  Healthy Ts are not unemotional and certainly not detached from others.  Again, an attempt to act like another type without first mastering one’s own results in mere parody that fails to master the strengths of either type.
“The desire to be unemotional tends to be a very emotional desire, common among unhealthy Ts and unhealthy Fs alike, usually resulting from emotions such as fear, pessimism, doubt, or insecurity.  These negative emotions tend to hinder logic much more commonly than the more cliché, bubbly emotions do.  Negative emotions are emotions, and when we try to ignore their presence they are left free to color our vision and skew all our thoughts.
“A prime example of this is in your references to religion.  ‘[Quoted description of unhealthy religion].’  This description, which you use to refer to all religion, seems to fit only a very small subset of particularly foolish religious people.  But since this unhealthy version of one specific religious group made you feel invalid, telling people that they would go to some hell because of the person they are, which is a fundamentally invalidating thing to imagine, you have formed an emotional opinion against religion as a whole.  The logical act is to acknowledge how much the beliefs of this one group of people made you feel incredibly invalid, and then perhaps to carefully note apparent trends among other groups of people who seem to share the same sort of unhealthiness.  It is not logical, however, to make blanket statements about religion due to the negative emotions that fill your descriptions of these particular groups of people.  In short, to be human is to feel emotions, and that is good because emotions, when mastered, give us perspective and remind us of points that thoughts alone are unable to keep track of.  But the people who tend to be the most hijacked by their own emotions are those who pretend their emotions are not affecting them, thereby turning a blind eye and allowing their emotions to go unmastered.”
  
“Significance and meaning [F], when approached healthily, must be just as objective and measurable as use [T]; subjective reaction is neither F nor T; it’s simply human.  While platitudinous oversimplifications often stereotype Feeling as being irrational or subjective, that has nothing whatsoever to do with T or F; no healthy person, of any type, should indulge in irrational subjectivity, and yet all types are equally vulnerable to it when unhealthy.”
  
“This doesn’t mean you’re doomed; no type is destined to have some laundry-list of weaknesses.  It just means that _______ is a weaker area to keep an eye on.  The thing about weaknesses, however, is that if we face them, they can become stronger than if we’d never had the weakness in the first place, due to the focus that we have to put on them!  And we face them best by using the areas in which we’re strongest, rather than denying our weaknesses or trying to compensate for them.”
 
 
Learn all about receiving your own aLBoP Personalized Personality PDF here!

The Scientific Method: What It Is and Why It’s Awesome!

Good morning boys and girls!  {Good morning Ms. Calise}  Today we have a very special lesson on the Scientific Method from our favorite guest teacher, my INFJ!  Aren’t you all excited to know about how the scientific method really works in practice and how to apply it to anything in your life so that any topic can be scientific? {class cheers, roses are thrown}

But little Bobby is unimpressed.  Bobby reads science magazines and writes on internet forums; he’s got this crap.  He knows how to wield black holes and Occam’s Razor like a boss, so that the other kids look stupid.  Yeah, that’s right!

But what Bobby doesn’t understand is, just because something sounds like “Science!” doesn’t mean it follows the scientific method.  Bobby may be good at Troll Tactics that make it look like his argument holds up, but if the other kids were to follow the scientific method, they would be able to see that what Bobby calls “Facts” are really hypotheses that don’t hold up under experimentation.

Don’t be like little Bobby; understand the scientific method so that you can apply it to every area of your life, not just “sciencey” stuff!  Check out the playlist of all three videos below 😀 or go here to watch them on YouTube.  For Science!

aLBoP Shorts: Tactics by Trolls

Hey everyone!  Just popping in to do two things.  The first is to remind everyone that the first aLBoP Live Video Chat Q&A is tomorrow night!!  :O  And we’d love for you all to tune in and chat with us if you’re free!  It’s at 8pm, EDT (GMT-4), March 29th which is tomorrow!  And we’re super stoked.  Remember, you can email in questions ahead of time to aLittleBitofPersonality (at) gmail (dot) com, or just chat with us right on YouTube while we’re chatting up a storm.  You can ask us about anything!

Go here to watch and chat… and hopefully there won’t be any technical difficulties…

The second thing I’m here to do is to introduce a new series on the aLBoP YouTube Channel, “Tactics by Trolls,” talking about some of the most common and predictable tactics internet trolls use to make it seem like they have an argument, when really they got nothin’.  Here are 5 new videos and this time they star my INFJ so you get to see him on video too!  (I think he’s pretty cute, but you can’t have him ;D)  It’s the internet and trolls are everywhere, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel beholden to their foundationless arguments.  Watch to see how.

Intro

Trolls, Insecurity and Confusion

Tactics by Trolls: The Lawyer

Tactics by Trolls: The Bolder

Tactics by Trolls: The Twilight Zone

Is This Thing On?

Hey all!

This is Justin, “Calise’s INFJ” 😉  It’s a little weird writing on here, but it’s cool!  Calisey’s exhausted so I volunteered to throw out a little update to let you know that she’s eager to get back to you all on your emails and comments, and she will!  First, tho, she’s taking care of a few prerequisites.

See, there’ve really been only two kinds of emails she’s been getting.  The first, and decidedly the most numerous type, have been so real and personal, and they’ve really made her day.  It’s gotten her so excited when people have said, in essence, “Wait, so you’re saying I really can be type XYZB?  How can I be an E, I’m not social!  How can I be a J, I’m not organized!  You’re saying that’s okay?  You’re saying I don’t have to listen to the mean little things people say about my letters?  My type can really be that heroic?  Psychology doesn’t have to limit me?”
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