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naraburns  nihil supernum  2mo ago (text post)   Edited 2mo ago   4859 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for August 2025

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@faceh:

@RenOS:

@FiveHourMarathon:

Contributions for the week of July 28, 2025

@kky:

Contributions for the week of August 4, 2025

@FtttG:

@SirJohnFalstaff:

@Rov_Scam:

@OliveTapenade:

@Primaprimaprima:

@EverythingIsFine:

Gun Mods

@cjet79:

@self_made_human:

Contributions for the week of August 11, 2025

@naraburns:

@07mk on:

Dates and Mates

@quiet_NaN:

@faceh:

@self_made_human:

@urquan:

Contributions for the week of August 18, 2025

@100ProofTollBooth:

@thejdizzler:

@07mk:

@RandomRanger:

@FCfromSSC:

@Amadan:

@Dean:

Contributions for the week of August 25, 2025

@MadMonzer:

@Hoffmeister25:

Vengeance is Mine, Saith the Lord

@FCfromSSC:

@FtttG:

You Can't Put a Price on Your Health (That's Someone Else's Job)

@ControlsFreak:

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

@self_made_human:

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I always thought MBTI was horoscopes for Korean people.

Blood type is horoscopes for Korean (and Japanese) people. And so is Chinese horoscopes. I see MBTI as horoscopes for educated fans of science who look down on horoscopes as superstition but who haven't done enough research into science to learn about the veracity of MBTI as well as the existence of OCEAN/CANOE. Then again, that's probably more reflective of the population of people I encounter rather than population of people who buy into MBTI.

I've heard it called "horoscopes for men", but while funny, it's a bit of an unfair comparison. You can technically explain basic horoscopes as "your personality is shaped by what you experience during the first year and this experience is shaped by the seasons", but this is about as reasonable as "Jews do not eat pork because there were no fridges in Iron Age Levant and the taboo protected them for parasites".

Should people born in Punta Arenas read the horoscopes for the opposite sign? What about people born in Singapore? Does growing up in the modern US where you nap and play in your air-conditioned and artificially-lit bedroom make you less of a Gemini?

MBTI (and its transveliferreus counterpart, socionics, and the rest of the Jungian systems), at least, uses actual answers to behavioral questions to classify people, so it has at least some predictive power. You can find fault with it easily, of course: no matter how pronounced a trait, classical MBTI has to fit you into one of its sixteen classes. And the whole "this type is your ideal partner and this one is your ideal friend" is too far-fetched. But it's nevertheless about as useful as BMI.

I've heard it called "horoscopes for men"

My sister said this once. She was very disappointed when I told her about all the women's dating profiles I'd seen with their ostensible MBTI in the bio.

The community overall is majority women. But the people doing hour long deep dives on Marx’s or Nietzsche’s type and how their cognitive function stack influenced their work, are all men. So in that sense it has a more masculine bent than astrology does.

Level 1 MBTI is horoscopes for Korean people.

Level 10 MBTI is like... imagine you're standing on the sidewalk on a busy street, dazed and with a vacant look in your eyes as you stare off into the distance, while throngs of people pass you by. You've been deprived of any stable reference point for unifying the sensory manifold before you into a single coherent "experience". You (half consciously) perceive other people, but you have no way of knowing if any of them are even sharing the same reality as each other, or if the fundamental constituents of their phenomenological experiences are at all commensurable. We may indeed be condemned to a fate of Leibnizian monadism. What was fantastical has become mundane, what was trustworthy has become suspicious.

A passerby notices you in your silent reverie, and asks if you're ok. You're vaguely aware that they uttered a sentence, and that that sentence was composed of words. But what even is a "word", and what even is a "sentence"? The raw sensory impressions have already denatured themselves into their basic indissoluble components. The world has been deworlded, to use Heideggerian terminology. You're still not sure if the scene unfolding before you is a memory or a dream, or some as yet unnamed phenomenon that is more properly to be located in the crevices between them.

You have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

(Speaking of Heidegger, Michael Pierce and Renaud Contini had a fascinating exchange regarding the typological implications of Being and Time in the comments section of Heidegger's PDB page.)

My understanding was that psychometricians currently rely on individual self-reporting of where you assess yourself on the Big 5 personality traits. It's still subjective but still provides key insights and data you can do interesting things with. I've taken one myself, only at the persistent request of others.

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