I’m no expert on Myers-Briggs or any other personality test, but the good tests DO recognize that people fall on a continuum (where two people could test as, say, “INTP” but maybe one person is very strongly introverted (I) and the other only moderately so). I’m not sure how well they do in teasing out the nuances in terms of in WHICH situations and contexts a person will respond in a more “thinking” way or a more “feeling” way or whatever. But the good ones DO allow for a certain range of complexity, including the fact that people don’t respond in one rigid way in all situations. In fact, this is exactly why personality tests tend to be long and tend to have several questions that are similar but not quite identical–this is their attempt to cover a wider range of possible situations to get a broader picture. A bad personality test would just have four questions (so, do you decide things by thinking or feeling? check. So, do you tend ot be introverted or extroverted? check …)

Of course, no personality test will be perfect. But personally, I do see them as useful — as long as the person trying to use them UNDERSTAND THEIR LIMITATIONS. One of the things this means is to sharply avoid that “near-religious veneration” of the classifications that Berke^Amorpha talks about. Even two people who both test out as very far up the “thinking” side of the “thinking/feeling” continuum (or whatever continuum you choose) will still have certain things to which they respond more as a more strongly “feeling” person would — but the situations in which they respond this way would still differ from person to person. And someone who understands the limitations of personality tests would recognize that and be perpared for some individual variation. BUT, if two people both are that close to each other on the continuum, then in SOME situations they will still respond in ROUGHLY similar ways — more similar to each other than two other people with an entirely different personality “score”.

Someone who goes around accusing, “You just say that because you’re ____ personality type”, or who assumes that two INTPs are always going to be exactly the same (or completely different for that matter) is someone who doesn’t really understand what personality tests can and can’t do.

To make an analogy: suppose we were talking about cookies. Every two cookies in the world are different. Even if they’re both chocolate chip cookies, one might have more chips than the other, or one might have nuts and the other doesn’t, or one is made with the traditional mix of brown and white sugar and the other is made with maple sugar instead. Does that make a Myers-Brigg classfication system of cookies completely useless? No. Someone who really loves chocolate chip cookies but who hates raisins, will still find it useful to have a labeling system that distginuishes chocolate chip cookies from oatmeal raisin cookies. (I know I do!) If I also specifically perfer maple sugar in my cookies then I just have to be able to recognize the fact that the traditional cookie classification system doesn’t deal with distinctions at that level of nuance and find some other way to identify the cookies I want–even if it’s more inconvient. (In the case of cookies: taste them or read the ingredient label. In the case of people: get to know them.)

Any classification system — IF it is any good at all — I think could still serve usefully as a ROUGH GUIDE. The strong caveat is that people do have to recognize that that’s ALL they are — a ROUGH GUIDE. Assuming the classification system is even any good to begin with. No human being (and no cookie :-) ) is going to be a perfect match to the “classic” definition of any given classification, and nor should they expect to be. Even when the classification systems are useful, they’re only going to be useful UP TO A POINT and maybe only for certain specific purposes. Only when people RECOGNIZE THE LIMITATIONS can any classification system be useful even for the limited purposes to which they could legitimately be used (e.g., as a STARTING POINT for understanding another person–NOT, of course, as a substitute for actually getting to know them).

I know even less about the various approaches to classifying austics, but I agree it sounds like the ones that exist seem even less useful and more misleading than any of the personality tests. Some of this is because of the usual limitations of ANY classification system. Some of this is might be because the autistic community is still relatively new, so people are only beginning to compare their own internal landscapes to identify where they share things in common–and where they don’t. Or maybe autism just doesn’t lend itself to “classification” as easily as some people want it to.

And of course, people are not cookies. It’s not always desirable to classify people EVEN ASSUMING A GOOD QUALITY CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM. If people in a given context are going to respond in negative ways or harmful ways, to themselves or each other, then that’s probably not one of the contexts where you would want to use any kind of classification system at all.

This gets frustrating, as I’ve run into several people who apparently treat the Myers-Briggs personality classification system with some kind of near-religious venereation (some of whom start trying to rationalize everybody’s reactions to everything in terms of their ‘type’: “You only say that because you’re an INTP!” Etc).

I didn’t find the categories offensive, or terrible, or vile, just in case you were wondering.  Don’t necessarily agree with them as written, but reasonable people can disagree.

You have no idea what offends me, and I have no idea what offends you, so that’s equal.

It still looks about the same to me, except now it has an extensive disclaimer.

I’m still not sure what it is that I wasn’t seeing about it when I responded to it.

About half my post was a response to something I’d been asked by someone at an offline gathering of autistic people several years ago, too.

And then a lot of the general sentiment was just a response to a trend I see (I have no idea if it’s what was going on on AFF or not, since I’m not there) where newly-diagnosed auties freak out about where they “fit” in a categorization scheme. Which was not saying that this will necessarily induce people to do that.

A lot of my posts follow that pattern. I write about something, and then about something that makes me think of, then something that makes me think of. It doesn’t mean that I’m implying a causal chain between the things I’m thinking about. Like, all the stuff above about not fitting categories within other communities and the way people who refuse to be categorized are then categorized. That wasn’t saying “AFF is doing that,” or even “ANI is doing that” (it was at an ANI gathering that I met that guy, but ANI has nothing to do with that guy’s opinions) it was just saying it happens sometimes around categorization systems.

Sort of like the next thread has veered into territory that the original article didn’t cover.

(I actually think there are probably “subtypes” of autistic people, but I’d rather look to other ways of determining them.)

http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/index.php?page=documentview&document=Aspergers_types

So one attempt to show you I wasn’t attacking you and to promote a project of yours (despite not knowing a lot about it, but figuring from the title that it was a good thing — and later writing ANOTHER post promoting it), and one somewhat negative response to something I didn’t know you’d written and didn’t know was unfinished (and that was more musing on overall trend than just that specific thing I’d just read), and you’re viewing this as a negative pattern on my part?

If you end up doing something with it that I like, and I notice it, I’m sure I’ll say so. If you end up doing something with it that I don’t like, and I notice it, I’m also sure I’ll say so. That’s how I tend to operate. I’ve seen dozens of classification systems that look like this before, I had no indication until now that this one was any different (I still won’t know for sure that it’s different until I see what you’re doing with it, but I had no indication whatsoever before), and I’m fairly confident that the amount of mind-reading you’re expecting is way outside my capacity.

You talk about inferring things that weren’t there — I wasn’t inferring anything that wasn’t there. I was reading exactly what was there, and failing to infer that there was anything more to it, because there was no indication until now that there was.

I’m not “very unhappy,” just very baffled at the things you take offense at.

When GRASP violated my copyright on a work-in-progress (as well as several finished works), I was pissed off at them, but not at anyone who’d happened to read it, assumed that it was legit, and responded to it.

When someone posted pictures of me on the net without my permission, I was mad at him, not the people who read his questions about my current life and whereabouts and responded as if he did have my permission.

And if I were going to tell people how disappointed I was in them for believing someone else’s illegal reposting of something I wrote, I think I’d tell all of them, not just one of them. (I’ve never done that though, I’ve just told whichever ones I noticed — and the ones linked to the post itself in this case would’ve probably been the first I noticed — that it wasn’t legit and/or wasn’t completed yet and shouldn’t be taken as written. I’ve never inferred anything about their character, even if some of them had sometimes done things I didn’t like, and even if some of them responded negatively to what I’d written or to what they thought I’d written.)

For that matter, I’ve had the media distort things I said, and it’s the media I had the problem with, not the people who read and believed what the media had to say and responded to it.

…and this is why I can’t predict what offends you. At all.

I thought you were about finding the truth behind what people say, certainly regarding autism.

Something that I wrote and displayed privately, which I expressly asked NOT to be put anywhere else, as it was not in any way finished and was still being debated with members of the autistic community, was taken and bandied about on livejournal, and you have immediately found 1% of the information, formed an opinion, and dismissed it! Hey presto!

The names were given as well as numbers for people to remember, they in no way whatsoever are supposed to be LIKE the name. Does anyone even know who Enoch Powell was here???

I am really disappointed that you have done this from having so little info and forming huge conclusions on it. The other irony is that we do so many other things that get completely ignored, do 100 good things be ignored, do 1 thing someone doesn’t like – be villified.

It’s like the treatment the media give out.

You will no doubt be very unhappy about this, after the last post where you said I was hugely bothered or some such thing I gave you the benefit of a doubt that you had heard something and reacted, but now it seems that you will go on hearsay/gossip/graffiti-on-the-fly posts without checking any of it out.

How systematic. ; )