When everyone is a special snowflake and anyone can make it big if they work hard enough
This is my observation of why personality theory upsets people, I should have spelled it out more.
If life success correlates with certain personality traits and IQ, (which are mostly a roll of the dice and genetically influenced, i.e. not egalitarian, cannot be changed), then the reality is that some people are going to achieve more and some are going to have to work a lot less to achieve certain levels of success.
This flies in the face of what society tells itself, that if you have no success it's because you did not work hard enough, that if you work really hard you can do as well as the other guy. This is not true, despite how nice it sounds and how good it makes people feel.
It doesn't matter how hard you try, you are not going to be the next Bill Gates, you are not going to be the next Elon Musk. Applying to Y Combinator and flipping to Google is not within the reach of everyone no matter how many hours you put in.
Modern personality theory brings this to light, and it's bloody uncomfortable for most people. The US Army, for example, during wartime, considered that people with an IQ of less than 85 were not trainable, at all, and were more of a liability than an asset. If I remember right that is roughly 10% of the population. 10% of the population cannot be trained to do anything useful in capitalist society, not even by the Army during wartime.
Now, can everyone just "get a job" or "work hard and make a living"? Science seems to be saying no. The biggest US government institution looking for bodies said no. There is no saftey net built in to society for these people in some of the biggest first world countries. Now imagine being below average... aren't you just lucky the dice rolled in your favour. This is what I meant.
If you don't find this unsettling then you may just be a psychopath!
EDIT: It's not ironic at all that you make a sweeping assumption about me based on something I wrote, not at all :)
You're getting IQ and personality type all wrapped up in each other.
Does personality type have any predictive power at all as to what jobs a person is good at? 29% of programmers are INTJ - OK, great, but that doesn't tell you if they're actually any good at it.
IQ is certainly a better predictor of performance, in as much as every job has a lower bound on IQ.
And you're straw-manning the "hard work leads to success" argument. Probably no one - even the staunchest believer in bootstraps - thinks a sub-85 IQ can be the next Bill Gates no matter how hard they work.
It's not ironic at all that you make a sweeping assumption about me [...] If you don't find this unsettling then you may just be a psychopath!
tit for tat, I guess.
Look, don't take this the wrong way, but my observation is that most INxxs (especially INTJs) put a lot of stock in the MBTI because they believe their type indicates that they're really smart.
Comments
The whole industry is doing TDD and using the same programming language? Programmers disagree all the time about that stuff.
You've got some serious baggage.
This is my observation of why personality theory upsets people, I should have spelled it out more.
If life success correlates with certain personality traits and IQ, (which are mostly a roll of the dice and genetically influenced, i.e. not egalitarian, cannot be changed), then the reality is that some people are going to achieve more and some are going to have to work a lot less to achieve certain levels of success.
This flies in the face of what society tells itself, that if you have no success it's because you did not work hard enough, that if you work really hard you can do as well as the other guy. This is not true, despite how nice it sounds and how good it makes people feel.
It doesn't matter how hard you try, you are not going to be the next Bill Gates, you are not going to be the next Elon Musk. Applying to Y Combinator and flipping to Google is not within the reach of everyone no matter how many hours you put in.
Modern personality theory brings this to light, and it's bloody uncomfortable for most people. The US Army, for example, during wartime, considered that people with an IQ of less than 85 were not trainable, at all, and were more of a liability than an asset. If I remember right that is roughly 10% of the population. 10% of the population cannot be trained to do anything useful in capitalist society, not even by the Army during wartime.
Now, can everyone just "get a job" or "work hard and make a living"? Science seems to be saying no. The biggest US government institution looking for bodies said no. There is no saftey net built in to society for these people in some of the biggest first world countries. Now imagine being below average... aren't you just lucky the dice rolled in your favour. This is what I meant.
If you don't find this unsettling then you may just be a psychopath!
EDIT: It's not ironic at all that you make a sweeping assumption about me based on something I wrote, not at all :)
You're getting IQ and personality type all wrapped up in each other.
Does personality type have any predictive power at all as to what jobs a person is good at? 29% of programmers are INTJ - OK, great, but that doesn't tell you if they're actually any good at it.
IQ is certainly a better predictor of performance, in as much as every job has a lower bound on IQ.
And you're straw-manning the "hard work leads to success" argument. Probably no one - even the staunchest believer in bootstraps - thinks a sub-85 IQ can be the next Bill Gates no matter how hard they work.
tit for tat, I guess.
Look, don't take this the wrong way, but my observation is that most INxxs (especially INTJs) put a lot of stock in the MBTI because they believe their type indicates that they're really smart.
Please don't post things like this here.