[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>] Friday, January 29, 2021
Modeling Modelers
I'm seeing a lot of replies, by Settler types, to my recent post, The Pioneers Get The Arrows, that go along the lines of "he's just trusting one authority instead of another".
Which reminds me of another claim of mine: that people simply can't see that which they can't imagine. Here, they have no concept of what it means to truly understand a wide array of complex topics for yourself--they can't imagine it, so they can't put any reasonable interpretation on what I'm saying, and instead it gets mapped to the nearest thing that already exists in their world: trusting different authorities.
This fits my experience with the fellow in question that inspired the original post. The more I get into any causal specifics of anything, the more he replies as if I'd just said "blah blah blah Ginger", and the more he focuses on credentials and reputations and lack of agreement with his sources, without ever actually engaging the models. It's not that he doesn't understand me (he could ask for clarification; he could argue against his best understanding; anything!) it's that understanding me isn't on his menu. His only option is comparing what I say to what his trusted authorities say (or what he has emotionally/intuitively integrated from that).
My recent Settler/Pioneer observation is largely just a re-discovery of (perhaps the extreme ends of) the S/N axis observed by Jung and applied more recently in Myers-Briggs personality typing. This re-discovery happens over and over because it's so counter-intuitive that there could be such completely different ways of thinking that still work at all. But there are, and the Pioneer/N way is the minority (at least three to one!). I have no doubt, in retrospect, that the friend in question is an S, so I should have known better. (He's someone I am connected to more by history than choice. I noticed a while back that essentially all of my good friends are N types, which is the empiricism that first intrigued me into appreciating Myers-Briggs more.)
For me this is the third time I have personally re-discovered, or re-confronted this reality. The other one was The Programmer's Stone, which called the S (Sensing)/Settler types "Packers", and the N (iNtuiting)/Pioneer types "Mappers". (I'm still surprised The Programmer's Stone doesn't make explicit mention of this obvious connection to Myers-Briggs. Also, it's a shame the original Programmer's Stone, which was relatively concise and insightful, has blossomed into the rambling mess it is now.)
If I were seriously naming these two groups from scratch, I would probably call the iNtuiting/Pioneer/Mapper types "Modelers", but I'm still unsure what word best captures the Sensing/Settler/Packer types. Suggestions? (Let's just nix "NPCs" in the bud...)
A summary of the Programmer's Stone provides this table of conflicts between two sides:
- Packing is the social norm and the world is set up for packers
- The results of mapping are called 'common sense', which isn't so common
- Mappers think packers are cynical or intellectually lazy
- Packers think mappers are unfocused and irrational
- Packers spend much of their time playing politics, where reason matters little
- Packer psychology is usually understood by packers but less so by mappers
- Mapper psychology is often understood by mappers but never understood by packers
- Mappers are guided by reason rather than culture
- Mappers teach themselves, which packers struggle with, but also learn from others.
This one is particularly germane here: "Mapper psychology is often understood by mappers but never understood by packers".
Indeed.
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