CT Premise Elaborations

Thorne

[7:15 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity:
On a note more related to a prior discussion:
The claim is that CT is valid because it is objective and empirical. This leads down two paths.

1. There is an infinite number of datasets, and any single dataset can be interpreted in a variety of ways. To say that you have the best perspective on the information at hand is quite a leap, just like how it would be absurd for me to claim, "CT is bullshit because..." without substantive evidence. Hence why I do not claim that CT is bullshit, but instead have doubts about specific points and concepts.(edited)
[7:18 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity: 2. If empiricism and objectivity IS what makes a system valid, then I can point you to several systems that are just as empirical and just as objective as CT, but reach different conclusions. In these cases, are both systems valid, is one valid but not the other, or is one less valid and the other more valid?

Dave Powers has a method that is heavily rooted in empirical data and is, by rights, objective. I don't know much about it beyond this point, but it surely meets both qualities of a valid system.
Dario Nardi is another solid example of someone with a system that is both empirical and objective within the same Neo-Jungian space.
I have a mental system based purely on a dichotomized version of the Big Five aspects (I/E, S/N, T/F, P/J, and C/L for Calm/Limbic is my current slate) and some basic math. If I collected 25,000 observations and 95% of them supported my theory, is my theory equally valid, less valid, or more valid as compared to CT and why?(edited)
[7:27 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity: I could list a thousand tiny reasons why I doubt the system, but those two are the biggest ones.
To mitigate 1, we need a LOT of evidence. We're talking about a tiny margin of error, tens of thousands of datapoints that correlate along trend lines, and years of study.

2 is the harder one when the systems conflict. Dave Powers' system claims one thing, yours claims another. Both have claims in the same space which necessarily conflict, but both systems have evidence to support their claims in droves. Which is more correct? You will be inclined to support the one you find most appealing, and I will be inclined to support the one I find most appealing, but neither of us can pull the trump card and say, "SEE? You were wrong!"
[7:35 PM] HangryBish (Ne Δ): It's also possible (suppose DSP's system is onto something; I don't know) that the two systems are describing different things. I know nothing about his.
[7:37 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity: @phibious

For the record, CT's falsification condition would of course be the lack of consistent correlations of expression/gesture to personality


The dichotomy-based system I mentioned above would have a falsification condition of the lack of consistent correlations of general behavior and temperament between dichotomy duals (EN, IJ, IT, EF, etc) and triads (ENJ, EFP, IFJ, etc).
Dave Powers' system has a falsification condition also related to behavioral tendencies.
Dario Nardi's system has a falsification condition requiring someone's brain scans to fail to correlate with expected behavior and temperament.

If these systems do not find a statistically significant number of outliers and the correlations, are they still valid?
If the answer is yes, then CT is just one way of hundreds to understand people via typological structures, even when these structures conflict. If the answer is no, something is amiss in the logic being used to judge validity.
[7:40 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): wait wait wait
[7:40 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity: @hangrybish (Ne Δ) This is certainly possible, but why then did Auburn claim that Dave was going down the wrong path? cognitivetype.boards.net/thread/1925/dave-powers
I know Aubs loves it when I quote him (obviously not really), but he pretty emphatically posted about how "He has all the right criticisms of MBTI, but not the right solutions. Fortunately, he's very receptive to hard data and I think there's a chance he might be willing to look at CT's data when the time's right."

If Dave's system is invalid, despite being empirical and objective, then CT cannot be valid by the merit of being empirical and objective alone.
Dave Powers | Cognitive Types
I really should get back to the website (working hard to push this baby to fruition; more updates coming) but I'd like to take a detour to talk about Dave Super Powers! Man, I had high hopes for the
[7:42 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): thinks on how to unpack this ....
i have the same beef with psychometrics in general. you're talking about the problem of measurement based on arbitrary parameters that may or may not yield some level of statistical reality
[7:42 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): i should really post this eventually, but i recorded a podcast where i talked about how CT is not a psychometric.
[7:44 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): you could say... it's closer to a hypothesis about human biology, at core. the behavioral correlations appear to emerge as side-effects of what appears to be a genetic feature in people. the twin studies and hereditary patterns thus far point to CT being a literal, physiological feature in people (just like blood type or sex) that should theoretically be measurable (in some forseeable future) through said biological means.
[7:45 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): this is fudanemtanlly different from psychometrics like the Big Five or the DSM-5 which can only categorize people ...to the degree that their categorization system seems neatly delineated. But little basis exists for where or why to put the boundaries in the areas that they are(edited)
[7:46 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): essentially, CT is trying, via the end effects of vultology, to IDENTIFY... what sort of sub-species of humanity a person belongs to. Or rather, there appear to be four families (alpha, beta, delta, gamma) formed by the combination of four hereditary modes of metabolizing information
[7:47 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): I suspect, for example, that vultology can help facilitate a genetic study in the future where we look for the genetic similarities in (say) 1000 properly typed people of a given type
[7:47 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): from there, we can look for the genes to know what sort of type a person is
[7:51 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity: Then why criticize someone like Dave Powers? If his idea is psychometric and yours is not, then are you not in worlds apart?
Couldn't a psychometric system be entirely valid (in theory, not by default), even if it makes claims that seemingly fly in the face of CT, so long as it doesn't claim to intrude on the biological signals?(edited)
[7:53 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): in a way, but it makes itself redundant. say for example that CT is verified to be genetically valid. then it would mean that... everything Socionics/MBTI/etc were pointing to -- has been validated, but validated in the form that it actually exists.
[7:53 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): We don't keep theories around that describe the same thing, but in less comprehensive ways
[7:53 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): and I do think these theories are all trying to crack the same problem
[7:54 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): for example, I don't think there are separate realities beneath Socionics, Dave, MBTI, etc
[7:54 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): they can only be separate and still valid if one decides to consider that there's nothing deeper beneath them which they were trying to point to... but instead were always just isolated classification systems of their own right.
[7:56 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity: Except that they don't describe the same things.

Read Extraverted Sensing in Jung, Socionics, Singer-Loomis, Myers-Briggs, Nardi, and CT. Tell me what actually matches between them.

Their essential elements change between systems, and the systems all claim something different for the types. Nardi and CT probably are the closest to Jung, but even they are miles apart.
[8:01 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): It's curious to me how you see them as unrelated. o.o
[8:02 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): Hmm..
[8:02 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity: Oh, they are related, but at a much higher level than any system has gone thus far
[8:02 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity: They attempt to describe the same things, but their descriptions do not describe the same things. They describe one side of a die, trying to turn a 3-dimensional D20 into a 2D object for simplicity sake.
[8:03 PM] Thorne | The Vile Monstrosity: CT does the same damn thing.

Even Jung, with his staggering intellect, only saw some of the die
[8:03 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): Ok, phew. Well at least we agree on something here
[8:03 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): that there "is a die"
[8:04 PM] Auburn | TiNe (ll-l): even if people are looking at it from different angles and with a narrow field of view