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"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
So it is not as big a deal as one might think. Got it.
Well, no, it's... a very big deal. It's the deal. But asking for a comprehensive explanation of how psychoanalysis relates to introspection and the problems thereof is kind of like asking "what does physics say about matter and how it moves?" How much time you got?
Can I ask for a recommendation on Freud and/or Jung here?
For listening material, and also probably the easiest place to start: look at the backlog of episodes for the Why Theory podcast, pick one that interests you (quite a few of them specifically analyze different works by Freud and Lacan), and just dig in. (Lacan was another important psychoanalytic thinker who took himself to be developing and expanding upon the work of Freud.) They're fun to listen to and they usually stay relatively grounded in terms of concrete examples.
For reading material:
For Freud, many of his works are self-contained and you can start almost anywhere, although I'm fond of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Totem and Taboo.
The book that actually turned me onto psychoanalysis in the first place was Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. It... does have a decent amount of woo jargon, but as the name implies, it's focused on showing how psychoanalysis works in a clinical setting, so you can skip the theory parts if you want and just read the case studies, if you want to get an idea of how this stuff actually works as a therapeutic practice using real life stories.
The Jung book that MBTI was based on is called Psychological Types.
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1mo ago
Hanson’s arguments emphasize that there are some emotions and thoughts that we are not fully aware of because it is better not to know.
...Yes, that was the foundation of Freud's entire body of thought. Jung was a close associate of Freud's in the early part of his career. He was intimately aware of all these issues. (Hanson thinking that he's providing an original insight here is a bit like someone walking up to an engineer who's knee deep in troubleshooting a critical production issue and asking them, "have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?")
Although the problems of introspection are extremely complex, it's also clear that people are able to successfully introspect on certain things at least some of the time. Otherwise, they would never be able to accurately report their own emotional states, they would never be able to tell you any of their stable preferences or dispositions, they would never be able to accurately report on biographical memories, and in short, it's hard to see how interpersonal interaction could ever function at all. So, keeping in mind that introspection will sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, we have to simply dive in and get started, and address individual problems as they arise.
There are certain well known biases in the MBTI community, in particular it's common for people to mistype themselves as INxx types because these types are seen as the most "intellectual" (which is, well, one way of putting it I suppose. Personally I think that the INxx types all represent distinct flavors of autism spectrum disorders, or at least they represent personality types that are "on the way" to autism spectrum disorders). But there are many other cases where people are honest about their own traits and honest about their own strengths and weaknesses.
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1mo ago
I'm skeptical that there's a rigorous way to show a difference between really experiencing something vs. claiming to experience it for the evolutionary advantage.
I of course knew that in many cases, we would quickly run into this issue of a fundamental difference in perspective. Which is perfectly fine. Not everything has to be for everyone.
First-person subjective experience exists. Almost all materialists will acknowledge that humans are not pure behavioral black boxes, but instead they also have subjective experiences that accompany their behavior. These subjective experiences are, in principle, not directly observable by anyone except the person who is having the experience. You know what red looks like, and you know what blue looks like, and you know how they're different, but I can never be 100% sure that your red is the same as my red, nor could you put your experience of red and blue into words that would communicate the experience to someone who has been blind since birth. You can only describe the experience of red in relative terms ("a very dark shade of red") to people who already have some sort of shared subjective experience with you that they can use as a starting point.
I have my own subjective experiences, and other people have theirs, and it seems clear enough that these do not always align. Individual variation in subjective experience is intrinsically interesting and worth studying in its own right. Since we can't actually observe the subjective experience of another individual, we have to ask them to talk about it instead. This will always be fraught with dangers, as there are numerous philosophical problems regarding the nature of introspection and the extent of its reliability (this was essentially the founding problem of the psychoanalytic tradition, of which Jung was a follower), but, since the pressing nature of the inquiry cannot be ignored and we have to start somewhere, we ultimately have to start with the only tools we have, which are introspection and linguistic communication.
If you disagree with any of the above, then Jung's thought is simply not for you. And that's ok! You are encouraged to instead pursue matters that you find more fruitful and useful.
What are those predictions?
Quite a number, but probably the most basic and obvious one is that "introverted feeling" is always paired with "extroverted thinking", which is characterized by a number of traits that center around themes of: driven to use thought as a utilitarian tool to attain tangible, real-world results; low tolerance for theoretical speculation that does not make an attempt to ground itself in "consensus" truth, whether that "consensus" be the facts of empirical reality as observed by the subject, or a religious tradition, or the consensus of the scientific community, or any other source of truth that lies outside the subject; a greater subjective need to have one's own beliefs and opinions grounded in such sources of consensus truth. And "extroverted feeling" is always paired with "introverted thinking" which would be, well, something of the opposite. I am aware that these traits sound somewhat behaviorist, and they are, but you still ultimately have to do a phenomenological analysis to determine whether any given action was performed or any given belief was held for an "extroverted thinking" reason or an "introverted thinking" reason.
And how are they validated or falsified? If not by behavior, then what?
By phenomenological introspection.
I would expect that any correlation with other psychological and personality traits would fall out of the analysis that produced OCEAN.
OCEAN deals with behavior and MBTI deals with phenomenology. MBTI unavoidably does make some behavioral predictions, and if it's wildly inaccurate in those predictions then that would be a problem worth knowing about, but ultimately at the end of the day the decisive factor for the theory is the phenomenology, which empirical psychology does its best to studiously avoid.
If your primary criticism is "MBTI is not empirical science", then yes, I completely agree with you. None of this is empirical science and I do not intend in any way to misrepresent it as empirical science.
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1mo ago
For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like
What my mind knows to be true at the level of rational, propositional judgement: There is no meaning. There are no morals. All value judgements are nothing more than subjective sentiments. The world described by fundamental physics is the only world there is.
What my "soul" knows to be true via perceptual, lived experience: There is such a thing as meaning, and there is such a thing as "The Good" that exists outside of us, although saying anything about it in concrete terms is virtually impossible. It is the height of arrogance to think that The Good would allow itself to be encapsulated in straightforward principles like "justice" or "fairness" or "duty". The Good is a trickster; it delights in doing strange things and keeping people on their toes. The only way to know anything of The Good is to humble yourself, be quiet, and listen closely to what each individual moment is telling you. After a lifetime of cultivating this practice, it is possible that one may obtain something that could be called "knowledge", but it will only ever be one piece of a larger whole.
your own vision of the future of society going forward is.
It'll continue to muddle on as it always has. Different races, civilizations, forms of life are always constantly ascending or declining, this is nothing new. I do believe that it's possible for the universe as a whole to reach a "bad ending", although how likely this is to happen is anyone's guess.
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1mo ago
Why use MBTI when OCEAN is available and makes better predictions?
Because MBTI (or you could say more generally, "Jungian typology") is a language for talking about internal phenomenological experience; it's not a tool for making behavioral predictions (although behavior is obviously correlated in an important way with internal phenomenology). OCEAN could perfectly predict all human behavior for the rest of time, while also simultaneously telling us nothing about what it actually feels like to be a given individual, from the inside.
See the other reply I just wrote for some examples.
And how is the Fi/Fe dichotomy different from just Agreeableness?
There's certainly a high degree of overlap, yes. The biggest difference is that I've here proposed a(n admittedly highly speculative) mechanism that helps explain why some people are highly agreeable and some are not, along with an attendant phenomenological account of what being an agreeable or disagreeable person feels like from the inside. And furthermore MBTI makes additional predictions about Fe and Fi being correlated with other (rather specific) psychological and personality traits, instead of simply treating it as an isolated and free-floating random variable.
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1mo ago
As an INTP, it falls to me to point out that MBTI are basically zodiac signs for nerds.
The model certainly does predict that you would be predisposed to do that, yes!
As an INFJ who naturally wants to see everything, particularly other people, in terms of patterns and underlying meanings (even in cases where these "underlying meanings" may admittedly be delusional), there are few things that tickle my brain more than systems like MBTI which allow me to view people as individuated instances of stable generic archetypes, whose behavior can be explained by (or at least, statistically correlated with) underlying hidden variables. But it is precisely because I am highly conscious of this subjective bias within myself that I am all the more conscious of the need to submit my thinking to critical inquiry.
Naturally, there are 4! ways to arrange the first letters, and for each possibility you can pick the first suffix, so you should have 48 types in total. Luckily, 32 of these are swept under the rug
Well, no, they're not swept under the rug. It's simply an axiom of the system that when one of the perception functions is introverted, the other must be extroverted, and similarly with the judgement functions. "You're seeking on the outside what you lack on the inside", would be the poetic way of phrasing it I suppose.
With a large enough sample size and a precise enough conception of all the "cognitive functions", this could ultimately form the basis of a research program for empirically checking the model's predictions, although, as I have to reiterate, it's ultimately not behavior we're looking to validate, but rather internal phenomenology and underlying thought patterns. And because two distinct underlying thought processes can manifest as the same external behavior, any attempt to empirically validate the model will result in endless fractal complexity (you have to ask people to introspect, and you have to trust them to be honest, and you have to verify that we all agree on the meanings of the key terms and we're not talking past each other, and so forth. This does not in any way imply that the study of internal phenomenology is fruitless or pointless. It simply means that phenomenology is more of a task for philosophy than it is for empirical science).
Each of these letters then gets a paragraph reading like a horoscope
Funny that you bring up Si in particular, because the most dramatically successful empirical prediction of the model to date for me came when I asked someone about Si, which I'll get to in a moment. I agree that the description of Si you quoted is vague and vulnerable to the Barnum effect. You really need to synthesize a lot of examples and a lot of different descriptions of the functions from different angles before a clearer picture starts to emerge. But nonetheless, I would submit that even the vague description of Si you quoted is already more interesting and less horoscope-like than you might expect.
What does it mean to think in a "stable" and "linear" fashion, anyway? Does everyone think the same, or do we think differently from each other? Could some people legitimately be described as thinking in a more stable and linear fashion than others? Consider for example the description that urquan (who I believe to be an INTP) gave of his thought process, and compare it to the description that FistfullOfCrows (who I believe to be an INTJ) gave of his thought process. urquan's is intrinsically highly verbal, while FistfullOfCrow's is only verbal after some conscious effort. I would submit that based on these descriptions, they don't think in the same way, and that furthermore urquan would be described as the more stable and linear one. This immediately raises a number of further questions: how many different "ways" of thinking are there, anyway? Are the two descriptions I cited just mere idiosyncrasies that are unique to the individuals in question, or could they represent isolated instances of more general patterns? Could your "way of thinking" be correlated with other psychological and behavioral traits?
Si-dominants (so, people who use Si as their "dominant function", the ISTJs and the ISFJs) seem to be more likely to report experiencing the external world through a sort of hyper-subjectivized lens, where direct sense perceptions are automatically associated in a literal, ineluctable way with memories and concepts that have personal meaning to the individual (I will simply include as a universal qualifier over all statements here that everything in individual psychology must ultimately be statistical rather than deductive, and not all "Si-dominants" will report the same experiences). An ISTJ on reddit described his experience as follows:
Si is a perception function. Si isn't comfortable when something is brand new. Si needs to gather data first, so Si starts out open minded when making observations and gathering the sensory information. Si is about pattern recognition based on past experiences or knowledge, through instant flashbacks. As a high Si user, I might see or hear something, and suddenly, I have an instant flashback to a memory. It’s not every detail, but it’s enough to catch the gist of the thought or feeling.
A high Si user will have these comparison flashbacks often and automatically. The constant flashbacks can be a bit annoying at times but it's often quite practical. A high Si user may reflect on their past, compare their experiences based on how they felt about them, and try to replicate positive experiences. When the high Si user last had the experience, how does it compare to the current experience, or an imagined new experience?
Si flashbacks are how high Si users are acutely aware of other people and their surroundings - what belongs and what doesn't. The flashbacks are why high Si users get nostalgic, why high Si users have a reputation for being organized and meticulous, and contributes to high Si users having a reputation for good memories.
Si leans on comfort. Si isn't comfortable when something is brand new. The high Si user preference for routine comes from flashbacks being useful for comparing the quality of experiences. A "routine" comes from the best thing experienced to date being repeated over and over. If it already makes a high Si user happy, they feel they don’t need to keep reinventing the wheel.
This is not how I experience the world. There's no Barnum effect going on here. The phenomenological experience described here is completely and utterly alien to me. I don't believe I've ever had any experience that could really be termed as a "flashback", much less an "automatic" one, even much less to the point that they became "annoying". I have personal memories, certainly, but choosing to explore them is always a voluntary process.
The Si-dominants seem to report experiencing the highest rate of involuntary flashbacks, although I have seen them sporadically reported among "secondary" and "tertiary" Si users as well. In general, any type that uses Si as one of their main functions seems to report an increased vividness of detail in personal memories, and simply a greater capacity for retaining personal memories in general (this could include both memories of personal life events, and "personal" memories in the sense of "I have a vivid memory of exactly what was on that Wikipedia page that I looked at last night"). One INFP (tertiary Si user) said that they were one day struck by a flashback of an unpleasant memory that was so vivid it was almost as if they were reliving it. I have simply never experienced anything like this, and I'm not even sure if I'm capable of having such an experience. In terms of raw sensory impressions, personal memories of actual events from my life seem to be about as vivid as imagined simulations of experiences I've never even had before.
Back to that "empirical success" I was talking about: based on a few facts about my mother's behavior and biography, I immediately narrowed her type down to ISFJ. There were simply no other choices. This is a Si-dominant type, so I would expect her to be more prone to experiencing these flashback sensations. She's never talked before about experiencing anything like this phenomenon in her life. But, I decided it would be an interesting test of the model, so I simply went and asked her, "mom, kind of a weird question, but do you ever just look at something, say in the house or when you're out walking or whatever, and you get a strong flashback that's kind of like-" and before I could even elaborate further, she immediately responded with, "oh my God yes, all the time!" And she launched into quite a vivid description of the experience. Frequently these flashbacks are to specific events from different points in her life, although sometimes they have a more abstract and ineffable "ancient" quality, which she always interpreted as visions of a past life (she's devoutly religious). She learned from a young age that not everyone has these types of experiences, so she learned to keep quiet about them and not share them. When I asked her if this is where her preference for routine comes from (she is extremely ritualistic in her behavior), she responded with "yes, that's exactly it! New experiences won't give me the flashbacks. I always like to have them with me, they help me feel safe and grounded". (I do not consider this to be a leading question. I too am rather a creature of habit, but in my case, that's simply due to a generalized anxiety about future possibilities. Describing my preferences as being related to any sort of "flashback" process is, as I have already stated, simply absurd to me.)
So, all in all a very fascinating event. Of course, one data point does not a successful model make. But, if nothing else, I am extremely grateful to MBTI for alerting me to the existence of these "exotic" phenomenological experiences, even if the distribution of these experiences in the general population does not ultimately match the distribution that would be predicted by MBTI.
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1mo ago
it’s so unfair and he doesn’t want to die, and his executioners and their priest tell him to show courage and die with dignity …. But why should he help them to commit an unjust act?
I agree that if you're about to be literally executed, then the dignified thing to do (or, one of the dignified options you have available to you, at any rate) is to fight to the last breath. Although I think there are some important dissimilarities between that sort of situation and Hlynka's situation (assuming this really was an alt account of his).
To continue to attempt to surreptitiously use TheMotte after you've been banned from TheMotte means that you simultaneously derive value from the community, while also disrespecting the rules and procedures that allow the community to be what it is and generate that value in the first place. It comes across as selfish and confused. You should either respect the site as a whole, or not. (Of course, this is the problem that Socrates considered in the Crito, where he refused to escape from prison and from his own execution because he felt that it would be unjust to violate the laws of the community that had, up until that point, provided him with life and sustenance. In that case I would disagree with Socrates, perhaps because I somehow view "society" and "the state" as being more separate than "TheMotte" and "TheMotte's moderation" are, and also perhaps because I view the right to one's own life as particularly sacrosanct, but, in any case...)
Hlynka will always remain as one of my all time favorite Mottizens, but if he is creating alt accounts without asking the mods first, then that would be quite disappointing.
It seems to me the ways we can be internally wired are surprisingly numerous. For me its neither. Emotions aren't a physical sensation, they aren't thoughts either. Instead they are a different sensation i'm at a loss to describe.
I would basically agree with this, yes. That was the "something ineffable" part I mentioned in my own description. I think that's what a lot of the people who answered "thoughts" were getting at, although obviously there's no way to be entirely sure.
One person mentioned that they literally have to examine the linguistic contents of their internal monologue in order to know what they're feeling, which is quite bizarre to me, and not how I experience things.
It feels more like my mind operates in an abstract, global regime, where meaning exists in a raw, platonic form before any linguistic scaffolding is applied. The “translation” into language is almost a compression process, reducing something vast, multi-layered, and instantaneous into a linear stream of words that inevitably loses detail.
The MBTI jargon for this way of thinking is called "introverted intuition". I was always under the impression that this is just how "thought" worked in general, although recently I've discovered reasons to doubt that this experience of thought is as universal as I had originally anticipated. Although I wouldn't describe my experience quite as intensely as yours (maybe you just have a stronger "CPU" than me haha), I do feel that my thoughts exist in non-linguistic form prior to being given linguistic expression (the "thought" comes first, abstractly, and then I have to start "writing out" as a sentence what the thought actually means and what implications can be drawn from it, assuming I want to communicate it).
Do you think or feel your emotions? It’s obvious a both/and situation.
That question in particular wasn't related to any "MBTI dichotomies" (although I suspect it might be correlated). It was just a way to get people to start thinking about the diversity of emotional experience.
And for what it's worth, a number of people in the reddit thread said they experienced them as thoughts only.
If you mainly feel with your thoughts you probably have alexithymia, a surprisingly common condition
That's the thing though, I don't think I have "emotional blindness". I've never felt unable to identify what emotion I was feeling; I do it easily and often! I'm practically trauma dumping in my group chat on a regular basis about every subjective impression I have, positive and negative. I just... don't get bodily sensations with them. Except for, as previously mentioned, anxiety.
(Although, since learning about this stuff, I may have suddenly become consciously aware of bodily sensations associated with other emotions on a couple of occasions, and... I'm not really into it. I think I'd rather nip this in the bud before it gets too far. I have quite enough on my hands to deal with as it is, best not to go throwing all new ingredients into the mix.)
So what happens when a Fi gets programmed with highly neurotic/anxious software? Are they discernible to other people as any different from an Fe?
Good question! Under the schema I've presented, they could end up as behaviorally identical, yes. But I don't see that as much of a problem. The point isn't really to talk about behavior (nor is the point even to "sell" you on any particular theoretical view), but rather the point is to talk about the underlying phenomenological experience / thought pattern behind the behavior (which is what Jung's thought is really all about in the first place; the "personality type" stuff, based as it is on behavioral stereotypes, is just a ruse for the normies). Two people can exhibit identical behavior for very different internal reasons.
I believe I've shared this anecdote on TheMotte before, and it's one of the anecdotes I reflected on when introspecting on my own "herd animal" nature. When I was young and naive in the early 10s and I first discovered wokeism, I was immediately taken in by the "vibes". It just felt really good, y'know? I wanted to be a part of a group, I wanted to base my identity on a group, I saw that these people were enjoying themselves and I wanted to be part of that so I could enjoy myself too. But relatively quickly, my rationality kicked in and I realized that their actions violated principles of fairness and impartiality that I held to be important, which made me not want to be woke anymore.
So the movement was from sentiment (based on what I perceived to be the sentiments of others), to dispassionate analysis. And due to typical-minding, I assumed that this was essentially a universal human experience; of course everyone makes vibes-based decisions to determine their identity, and if anyone says they don't, they're probably lying because they're ashamed to admit it. But now all this stuff has got me thinking, well, maybe it's not a universal human experience. Maybe there are (neurotypical) people who don't weigh the vibe in the room, don't care about the vibe in the room, maybe they don't even perceive the vibe in the room because they've deemed it not even worth their time to assess it (obviously in the case of someone with say Asperger's, it would be different because their ability to pick up on emotional and social cues is actually compromised). In their case, they might make the opposite movement, from dispassionate analysis to sentiment: first a dispassionate "well, everyone seems to think woke is right, and they probably have good reasons, so I'll believe it too", but then their own internal "alarm bells" start going off indicating that it doesn't fit their own personal identity. And they could do all this without ever consulting the overall "vibe" of the collective. So we could have two individuals who exhibit identical behavior via very different processes.
Of course the point being, there is no way to observe these underlying processes behaviorally, you just have to introspect on yourself or ask others to introspect on themselves and report back.
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1mo ago
Apparently large swaths of healthy, neurotypical humans have been experiencing emotions and ethical decision making in entirely different ways from each other and no one ever told me?
I took a one week break from TheMotte because I was writing an entire freakin' novel about all the weird and wonderful facets of human subjective experience I was learning about from my study of the MBTI personality system (it's actually not a theory of "personality" per se, it's more like a theory of perceptual cognitive architecture of which personality is just a nondeterministic byproduct, but, whatever). And then I realized that if I broke the 10k word mark, there would probably be no one who would actually take the time to read it. So you're getting a hyper-condensed version of what was going to be "chapter 1", because this concept in particular was just so fascinating to me, and so immediately applicable, that I really felt compelled to share it.
I quickly learned from discussions with the MBTI community that many of us are subjectively experiencing the world in quite dramatically different ways, and I had let some of these differences go underappreciated before. This reddit thread was one the earliest signs that something interesting was going on; it asked the question, "Do you feel emotions as physical sensations or intense thoughts?" My immediate reaction was, "well obviously intense thoughts, right? Or, I guess it's a little more abstract than that, it's more like a thought plus something else that's kind of ineffable. But not a bodily sensation. What would that even mean? Stuff like 'getting red hot with anger' is just a metaphor, right? I mean, ok, I guess if you hooked me up to a machine when I was angry you could measure an increase in body heat, but I don't think I've ever been consciously aware of that in the moment. The only emotion that comes with a physical bodily sensation is anxiety. Now that one is very palpable, the characteristic stomach-twisting nausea of intense anxiety is unmistakable. Thick weights dragging you down, unable to move. One of the primary, perhaps the primary, sources of unhappiness and discomfort throughout my entire life. Surely this sensation is a universal part of the human experience, yes?"
And then I scrolled down to the replies:
I’m INFP. I would primarily say I experience emotions on a physical level in my body. Which makes sense also, as I have almost no internal dialogue. The exception would be when I am in an anxiety spin. Then I do feel in thoughts.
What the heck are you talking about how do you have it exactly backwards, also what do you mean you have no internal dialogue how can you just admit to being an NPC like that.
Ok, so what I thought was universal from birth, turned out to not be universal. Got it. What else could I have gotten wrong?
Each of the 16 MBTI personality types is classed as either an "introverted feeler (Fi for short)" or an "extroverted feeler (Fe for short)" (you can check here if you're curious which one is which). What these terms actually "mean" is... not entirely clear, because this whole thing was based on some notes that Carl Jung scribbled in a book in 1921, and people have just been kinda wingin' it since then. But I had independent reasons to believe that there was a legitimate phenomenon going on here that was worth investigating. If you just engage in a cursory "surface level" investigation for the actual definitions of Fe and Fi, you'll often be presented with something like the following: Fe means "placing the group above the individual; orienting one's value judgements based on what the group thinks, rather than what the individual personally values; acting in accordance with commonly accepted values", and Fi means "placing the individual above the group; orienting one's value judgements based on one's own internal moral compass, independent of the moral judgements of others; acting primarily to maintain one's sense of authenticity to one's own values". And those concepts seem... bizarre and not particularly helpful. Surely everyone's a bit of one and a bit of the other? Few people, under these definitions, would want to admit to being a "Fe user" (as the MBTI jargon goes). Value judgements are always a complex interplay between self and world; they are never purely internal nor purely external. Furthermore, a number of self-identified "Fe types" were making what seemed to me to be highly bizarre claims such as, "I'm not even sure if I have any opinions of my own sometimes, I can't really know what I'm feeling until I externalize it somehow". How can someone not know what they're feeling at any given time?? Nonetheless, I was intrigued enough that I had to keep digging.
The breakthrough really came when I realized that I had to stop thinking in terms of grand philosophical examples and life-defining choices and focus on how people act in ordinary, everyday, non-stressful social situations. At that point, a clearer dichotomy between "Fe" and "Fi" (or, we might say more uncharitably, "neurotic people pleasers" and "selfish assholes who seem to be unaware of the existence of other humans") starts to emerge. Michael Pierce gives probably the best "definition" of Fe and Fi (aside from my own definition that I'm going to give right after this):
A boy and a girl, being an introverted feeler and an extroverted feeler respectively, are approached by a stranger who attempts to interact with them. The extroverted feeler, the girl, acts in a way that she judges most appropriate for the situation. She finds the stranger amiable, and so she seeks to respond in a way that will be most comfortable for this particular person, or at least that will have the most effective impact on the person's feelings. Thus, she is working out her judgements of value in the moment by working with the person, and is removing herself from her calculations, focusing entirely on what is comfortable for the stranger, for them. In contrast, the introverted feeler, the boy, observes the stranger with detachment at first, somewhat shy and deciding whether the stranger's manner is appealing to him. He compares and relates the stranger's actions to what he, the introvert, personally feels is pleasant or unpleasant, and very much makes it a matter of what he himself feels and knows is right. He therefore remains much less expressive than the girl, as he is not focused on how this stranger would expect him to act, but only how he feels that he should act, and much of that action is purely psychic, as it is not the boy's primary concern to influence the stranger's feelings in any way. He'll also notice certain things the stranger does that he finds commendable, and others that are irritating to him, and these stand out as important as the boy assimilates his impressions of the man into himself and renders his judgement.
In either instance, the default instinct (in the girl's case, to act amiably, and in the boy's case, to act according to whatever is rendered by his own internal value judgements) can be overridden by rationality if the situation calls for it, but this is a picture of the default "pull of gravity" in the introverted feeler and the extroverted feeler.
The account of the introverted feeler here seems to be approaching an almost mythological level of detachment from social norms and practical concerns, an ideal standard that no mortal could ever reach. Like, barring mitigating circumstances, how can the goal of social interaction not be to make the other person feel good, or at least avoid causing offense? Hello?? But, if the accounts that I've been reading are correct, this is essentially how a great number of people go about experiencing life on a daily basis (or at least this is how they subjectively experience life, regardless of how much they must actually modulate their behavior due to social norms out of rational self-interest).
After a great deal of ruminating on various anecdata and my own personal experiences, I arrived at the following "distilled" definitions of Fi and Fe. My highly speculative hypothesis is that these are not just statistical generalizations of clusters of traits that are observed in the population, but may be related to actual neurological differences between individuals; sort of like two different architectural versions of the Human Morality Processing Chip, Intel vs AMD. Both of these architectures are very much designed for functioning in face-to-face interactions in tribal hunter-gatherer societies, and should be thought of in that context, rather than as generators of abstract moral beliefs:
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Fe is more of a quick and dirty algorithm, like an embedded system that can only do one thing: the directive is simply to minimize human suffering in the immediate physical environment, and that's about it. The Fe user takes in as much emotional data from other people in the environment as possible and unavoidably factors that data into the decision making process; negative emotional states in other people will almost always produce some level of felt discomfort, resulting is an instinctual pull towards alleviating that discomfort or extricating oneself from the situation, though obviously there will be many mitigating circumstances where this empathetic pain reaction can be blunted, e.g. in cases of self-defense. Fe users tend to feel emotions in a less intense and more transient manner than Fi users, and, speculatively, they may in some sense have less emotional introspection on average than Fi users. It seems that things are set up this way so that their own emotions will not override the "prime directive" of focusing on others' emotions, and this all seems to be tied into their tendency towards greater emotional expressiveness as well. (I tried doing an experiment myself. Normally I like to be walking around while listening to music, or at least doing something active. I tried sitting absolutely still, not even any facial expressions, while listening to a song that normally makes me quite happy. The emotional reaction did seem to be significantly blunted, almost to the point of disappearing entirely. I'd be interested to know how common this reaction is.)
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Fi is more like a programmable CPU; it can do almost anything, and the exact "software" that is being run will vary greatly between different Fi users. The "instinctual pull" in this case is towards the fulfillment of the Fi user's own judgements, and not towards the alleviation of suffering in other people. Fi users certainly can factor another person's internal subjective emotional statement into their decision making process, but this is only done contextually when the Fi user has decided that it's relevant according to their own internal value standards. It is not the same automatic, unavoidable process that it is for the Fe user. As the name "introverted feeling" implies, Fi naturally sees its own feelings as, well, introverted: private, unique, generated wholly out of the self, and therefore, not something that needs to be shared or discussed. In a sort of automatic typical-minding, the Fi user assumes that I have my feelings, you have yours, they have no particular relationship to each other, and so there's no need to express them in outward displays of emotionality. (This is not the case for the Fe user, as their emotions are quite literally dependent on the emotions of those around them.)
It is not the case that one can straightforwardly say that Fi = male and Fe = female, although that is the general trend, despite numerous exceptions. According to random images on Google image search that had data that was probably pulled out of someone's ass, the two most common MBTI types in men are ISTJ and ESTJ (both Fi types), and in women the two most common types are ISFJ and ESFJ (both Fe types).
We can now see where the earlier surface stereotype of "Fe = herd animal" came from. If your body has told you on a literal, physical level from birth that your value is dependent on the value judgements of the people around you due to the palpable discomfort you feel at the negative emotional states of others, then the general trend will be to align your more abstract moral views with the views of those around you, in order to seek their approval and minimize internal cognitive dissonance. It takes an intelligent and independent-minded individual to develop their own independent moral thinking in these circumstances. (I'm not throwing any shade at women here -- this is absolutely how my own body works too, and I'm frankly shocked to discover that this may not be a universal human experience!)
My entire life I've been perpetually flabbergasted at how so many men could just... do things, without seeming to care much for the impact that their actions have on others. These things could be anything from aggressive sexual advances on women that any reasonable person could predict would cause them distress, or it could simply be a tendency towards perpetual rudeness and bluntness in situations where I would be instinctually driven to sugarcoat my words and attempt to elicit agreement. A generalized weakening or strengthening of the anxiety response in different individuals is probably part of the explanation, but it's not an entirely satisfactory theory on its own, as one individual may be highly neurotic about one thing but not neurotic at all about others. (It is easy to imagine, for example, a ruthless corporate attorney who ruins lives for a living while also being a huge germaphobe, or perhaps he feels palpable fear over issues of immigration.)
I never really thought about the issue that deeply; I suppose I just accepted it as a fact of life. If I had a theory for how some individuals were able to act so boldly in matters of interpersonal conflict, it would have been something like... a total obliviousness to the potential consequences of their actions? As in, they just weren't "thinking" as much as me, and if they "thought" more then they would align themselves closer to me in terms of choosing to act cautiously. Or else they had access to some infinite wellspring of courage and willpower that I did not. But this new theory seems quite a bit better: some people are literally capable of just not weighting their decisions based on the emotional states of others, even in the absence of significant stressors. (This might sound like a huge "duh" moment, but keep in mind that when I talk about "weighting" data in the decision making process, I'm talking about palpable, involuntary, bodily instincts; it's very easy to typical-mind and assume that everyone is feeling the same physical sensations as you, and they're just choosing to deal with them in different ways.)
In spite of how highly speculative this concept is, I feel like it's been so immediately applicable for me that I can't throw it out. There are certain people in my life whose behavior used to mystify me; now that I understand them as "high Fi users", it suddenly all makes sense, and I'm much more empathetic to their point of view.
Anyway, that might all sound insane because I had to cut out multiple examples and intermediary reasoning steps, but if this idea sounds interesting then I'm certainly willing to discuss it further.
(As a parting gift, I was fortunate to come across this today, although it should perhaps be renamed to "Real Fe vs Fi moment")
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2mo ago
Everyone here needs to chill.
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2mo ago
Huh you preempted my post, I was coming here to essentially say the same thing:
On the rare occasions I wade back into reddit these days, I'm reminded how much lower quality the discourse there is in general. Arguing to win is the default, instead of arguing to understand. People will happily and uncharitably pounce on any minor mistake or misunderstanding they can in order to get a rhetorical edge. I've gotten old enough at this point that I just don't care anymore, as soon as I get the impression that someone is arguing to win I just nope out and let them have it.
There were no "golden days" of reddit either (aside from when TheMotte was there lol), I've been on reddit essentially since the very beginning and although it's had its ups and downs it's never reached the heights of TheMotte.
So yeah, this place is amazing, and I hope you guys keep doing what you do.
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2mo ago
The "word on the street" among the conspiracy crowd is that the "most requested" age range at Epstein Island was 14-16. That was typical. It was mainly Epstein himself who had the more, well, "unusual" preferences.
Completely unverified rumors! Make of it what you will!
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2mo ago
The rules for what's allowed in the CW thread have always been extremely loose.
It would probably be good to encourage people to create more threads outside of the CW though, because then people might actually start looking at the non-CW threads more often!
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2mo ago
The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age.
TRP has a tremendously difficult time conceiving of women as individual humans who have their own desires, interests, and other properties that aren't fully exhausted by their status as women, so that can help explain their blind spot in regards to this issue.
The guy I know who's really into TRP is always saying, "I don't care if she's into what I'm into, I don't care if she's good conversation, I don't care about any of that. I have male friends for that. Why would I go to a woman to socialize?"
Obviously you tend to share more in common with people who are of a similar age and education level to you. And, surprise surprise, the majority of men do want to be able to have reasonable social interactions with the person they're going to be spending the rest of their lives with, funny how that works out.
very INTP of me, I know /s
Haha, yeah that stuff has been on my mind a lot lately. I'm very much an NF type. I have an appreciation for both the strictly logical side and the vibes-based side.
I think Marcuse's claim is level 3 as presented in your list.
I'd say that's basically mission accomplished then.
Something like "Death Note was not that good" is an evaluative judgement of quality, not a statement of fact.
I don't particularly disagree with what you've said here. I just don't draw the same judgements that you do with regards to the text.
If someone writes a review of Star Wars that starts with "Star Wars is the worst movie franchise of all time.", you don't say "ah, the author has presented a value judgement as a statement of fact. Confused as he is about this basic distinction, I must now consign his words to the flames". Instead you say, "he's presenting his value judgement in a hyperbolic manner as a rhetorical tactic. If I already have preexisting reasons to trust this author's judgement, I will continue reading with the reasonable expectation that he will provide reasons for his value judgement that I may be responsive to”.
You were quite correct to say "a big part of convincing people in this regard is trying to force them into your mental framework; to get them to understand you on a qualia-level". That's part of what Marcuse is doing here. When he says "the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values, withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society, and enters another dimension of existence", you're not supposed to go "erm, doesn't he know there's only one dimension of existence?" You're supposed to go, "ok, he's sort of painting a picture with words here. He's communicating his value system and inviting me to share in it. Is that something I'm interested in exploring? If yes, why? If not, why not?"
If there's one thing you should take away from continental philosophy, it's that your values are not set in stone. You can choose to change them.
If you already have a strong prior against Marxism (as I do too!), then you're obviously not going to be interested in sharing his value system exactly. And that's ok! You might still be able to mine his work for concepts and ideas that you can repurpose for other ends of your own.
On the other hand, assertions such as "Art that emphasises subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" aren't of the same nature that "this show was bad" is, in that they are not value judgements. It is a factual claim about the effects of a certain course of action.
Right, that's another part of what he's doing. He's suggesting that his way of looking at things might have pragmatic value for advancing a certain political agenda, and this is a claim that is at least conceivably subject to empirical verification and falsification. Can he prove his claim? No. But I don't think he necessarily needs to. It's fine to just throw stuff out there and speculate sometimes. We can just chill and mull it over for a while. We're just brainstorming. Opening ourselves up to new possibilities.
The question of "standards of academic scholarship" is an interesting one. This is, again, something that will vary heavily based on context, but I'd say that in general continental authors would have some issues with your conception of academic rigor, and would be more likely to see their work as being continuous with "ordinary" thought and speech, as opposed to being distinguished by a particular kind of academic methodology. More like internet shitposters than scientists. (And your revealed preference is that you do see a place in the world for internet shitposting -- you're here, after all.)
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2mo ago
Indie meaning non-hololive yeah. Just random women with their own channels.
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2mo ago
I can’t remember the last time I saw an “indie vtuber” who didn’t have an OF or a Patreon where she sells audio porn, it seems to be a requirement.
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2mo ago
Why don’t you just ask people directly how rich/poor or urban/rural they are?
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2mo ago
Hopefully this exchange isn't too tedious to you.
Not at all! There are few things I love more than getting to talk about this stuff.
I have been working my way through The Aesthetic Dimension and already have quibbles with the approach just a small amount of the way in.
The first few pages of this book are great to look at in this context because they both a) demonstrate how analytic and continental philosophy can have convergent concerns and b) they give you a feel for what's distinctive about the continental approach as a whole.
Marcuse in this book is speaking to the debate within Marxism between the humanist Marxists and the anti-humanist Marxists. The two camps disagreed on questions like: what role should individual subjectivity play in our theory of politics, does Marxism even need a "theory of the individual" at all or is everything interesting you could say about an individual exhausted by his class position, etc. These debates are similar to questions that analytic philosophers are working on today, albeit with a much less overtly political bent. François Kammerer is an analytic philosopher whose work focuses on defending illusionism about consciousness: he thinks that consciousness isn't real, he thinks that pain is as real as unicorns are. This seems like it would present a problem for any ethical theory: if there are no sentient beings, then why would anything matter? So he argues in that linked paper that it is possible to construct an ethical theory that makes no reference to subjective states of consciousness.
Marcuse is addressing similar concerns, but he takes the opposite stance: he thinks you can't have an ethics without subjectivity (and furthermore, you can't have a politics without an ethics), and thus the stance of the anti-humanist Marxists is politically impoverished.
This claim doesn't feel meaningful to me.
Well, let's take a step back for a second. What is "meaningful"? The term "meaningless" is somewhat ambiguous unless we give it further clarification.
It seems to me that there are at least four different ways that a sentence can fall short of providing true, interesting, useful information:
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Level 1: The sentence is either just completely grammatically incorrect and can't be interpreted as a valid sentence at all, or it's grammatically correct but it's formed in such a way that it means nothing. e.g. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".
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Level 2: The sentence does have a meaning, albeit one that can only be interpreted in a poetic or mystical fashion. e.g. "The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy".
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Level 3: The sentence is meaningful, but it's trivially false, or it's just uninteresting and irrelevant regardless of whether it's true or false. e.g. "Mathematical entities exist as non-spatiotemporal objects" (I would not put this sentence on this level myself; I think this is an interesting claim that one can have a valid debate about. But I think the average Mottizen, upon hearing this claim for the first time, and receiving clarification that a "non-spatiotemporal object" is very simply a real object that is not located in time or space, would say either "that's obviously false" or "even if that is true, it's irrelevant to anything that matters so I don't care".)
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Level 4: A claim that coincidentally turns out to be false, but would be very interesting and worthwhile if it were true. e.g. "The LHC will find evidence of SUSY".
When you say "meaningless", it's not clear whether you're referring to level 1, 2, 3, or maybe even something in between.
My goal here is to impart to you that the majority of continental philosophy can be brought up to at least level 3, once you're familiar with a specific author's terminology and the historical context in which they were writing. Whether what they're saying is true and interesting is a separate issue that will obviously vary heavily from claim to claim. A lot of times you'll read philosophy and just come away thinking that it's dumb or wrong, as is often the case in many other fields. 90% of everything is crap. (The funny thing about philosophy is that everyone has a different opinion on which 90% of it is crap.)
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3. You seem to understand what the sentences are saying; you think they're wrong, but you're able to give coherent reasons for why you think they're wrong.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Granted, you prefaced the sentence with "I feel", so you could say "it's just a pure expression of my own inner subjective state, nothing more, and it's therefore unimpeachable in that regard; and all similar sentences should be interpreted likewise, even if I leave off the implicit 'I feel'". But that doesn't seem to quite tell the whole story. If you're just expressing pure arbitrary subjective feelings, then why did you have the conversation at all, and why did you structure the conversation in the manner that you did? It seems like you're giving reasons for your opinions, reasons that you have at least some expectation that other people will be responsive to: Death Note is subpar because it's not multilayered, because the characters don't have enough psychological depth. It's not a purely rational argument, but it's structured like a rational argument: it seems to exist somewhere between sense and nonsense. We have a shared intersubjective conception of what artistic quality is, and you can reasonably expect that other people will be interested to learn that e.g. a show's characters lack psychological depth. Of course, someone could always come along and flatly tell you "actually I like one dimensional cartoon villains, you can't tell me what to think". And you couldn't prove him "wrong". But that doesn't render your previous utterances meaningless.
One helpful way of thinking about some continental texts (I have to keep repeatedly stressing that there is no single interpretive framework that will apply to all continental texts) is that they're kind of like a movie review, except instead of reviewing movies, they're reviewing society and history / life itself / other philosophers / whatever. Can the critic prove to you that the movie sucked? No. But can he say "the characters were all stereotypes, and the ending was predictable"? Sure. And then you might come away thinking "actually yeah, that movie did kinda suck", even though you may not have realized it at first. Can Marcuse prove that subjectivity invalidates capitalist values? No. Can he suggest that an ethics based on subjectivity could be more humane, more tolerant of individual creativity and expression, more process-oriented than results-oriented, etc. than an ethics based on the profit motive? Yes. And that might end up changing your perspective on things.
This is, to me, a good example of what I said before: "You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone."
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
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2mo ago
Oh I didn’t think you were snippy at all! And even if you were, that’s nothing to apologize for, goodness gracious. Your daughter is the most important thing in your world, of course any time you talk about her it’s going to be emotionally charged. Plus I appreciated hearing the extra context.
I do hope everything works out for you.
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2mo ago
My apologies, I didn't know how much you had already tried! The whole "therapists and soft safe closets" thing made you sound like the permissive type, but if you're not, then fair enough.
The design space of possible minds is very large. I suppose there are some people who would just die without drugs; and perhaps they did, for most of history. That's a bit sad though.
Do what you have to do to live a normal (and physically safe) life obviously. Although I do think you should listen to your intuition that "it doesn't sit right with you". At the very least, don't let anyone talk you into thinking that it should sit right with you. You can at least have that much.
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2mo ago
idk, when I was super little and I would start acting up in public my dad would physically pick me up, carry me to the car, and say "we are never taking you anywhere ever again if you're gonna act like a brat". And I would usually shut up pretty fast after that. For in-house infractions they'd hide my toys or something until I calmed down. Seemed to work well enough. It's possible I was a more "mild" case though, because by the time I was in first grade I had already become a relatively docile teacher's pet.
Basically I'd throw out all the psychiatry shit and say "sink or swim kid, up to you". That's how people did it for, you know, all of human history up until the last ~50 years or so. You think they had L-Theanine 1,000 years ago? No they said pick up a fuckin' shovel kid or we're all gonna starve this winter.
I think we could all be diagnosed with a little PDA, yeah? I got PDA for days. I'm still a lazy piece of shit as an adult who doesn't like to do anything. The only thing that makes me actually acquiesce to the "demand" is a hard deadline (with consequences) and a swift kick in the ass. It never goes away, you just gotta learn to deal with it. People like me appreciate the kicks in the ass, trust me!
I'm rather torn on this issue.
On the one hand, I do think that people have a fundamental right to commit suicide if they want to, and I think it would be healthy if we as a culture took some steps to demythologize suicide. Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires. If these outbursts were met with indifference instead of panic, maybe people wouldn't be so quick to go there. Alan Watts once mentioned that he would occasionally get people coming up to him and telling him that they were suicidal, and his response was always, "Ok! Well, you can do that if you want". And in the majority of cases, the person would immediately start feeling better upon hearing this; it simply "deflated" whatever problem they had become fixated on. What happens sometimes is that people get stuck in a powerful negative feedback loop where they feel suicidal, and then they realize that that desire is bad and wrong and they shouldn't want to do that, which makes them feel even worse, which makes them more suicidal, and so on and so forth. By demythologizing suicide, you make it a less attractive option in the first place and you cut off the feedback loop.
On the other hand, you are correct to point out that there are clear dangers associated with suicide becoming a "business" (or even worse, an "institution"), and this institutionalization is indicative of a fundamental underlying current of cultural nihilism.
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