Personality Space

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Explore the Myers-Briggs personality space through your MBTI result!

I loaded the explorer with just a sample of 6 of @HeidiPriebe1's hundreds of 2014-2017 articles on MBTI for @ThoughtCatalog. They're a goldmine! Her writing is playful, with heart & insight. thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe/

Here's what's going on: The 16 types of MBTI are usually presented as a table but playing with representations took me to nested quadrants & a hypercube graph.

Playing with hypercube perspectives, took me to a shape-free graph, with 4-edges per node as its defining quality. Fun starts when we pick a node (say, YOUR personality type) and then stretch the graph along the edge-DISTANCE to you.

Here's that same strestretch-tiletched graph but now, instead of balls as nodes, we have tiny grids that highlight the edge change:

🗺️ This strange notion of distance between personalities allows you to stumble on new ways to think about yourself & others: Who are your adjacent selves, 1 step away? Who's your opposite self, your antipode? How does the world look like to others?

You can play with this tool right now: It's just a Google Sheet. Go to this link to make your own copy to play with 👉🏼 docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/176fwoj8LbHhKSb6oFsX7zzxztitPkPDbgmKsxcQQ36s/copy

Notice how strange a spreadsheet this is! I think you could do something like it in @shishirmehrotra's @coda_hq but making it in @NotionHQ would just be painful. I'm using sheet's value rule, their time-less/spaceful nature, & array spilling. See more at: twitter.com/elzr/status/1610084298501271554

Would be fun if visual theorizers like @thekenwilber, @vgr, @tiagoforte, @balajis, @kevinkwok, @eugenewei, @packyGM, @benthompson, @ystrickler, @tegmark, @Alex_Danco experimented with 2x2x2x2 hypercubes to play with the distance between their concepts, methods & scenarios.

2D 4x4s "achieved the status of intellectual farce," @vgr wrote in a classic 2009 essay. Yet they're still indispensable: 1D/Δ too limiting, 3D overwhelms our visual processing. But 4D, starting at 2x2x2x2=16, can introduce Hamming-distance for concepts! ribbonfarm.com/2009/04/20/how-to-draw-and-judge-quadrant-diagrams/

I was inspired by @gordonbrander dream of: "More tarot than flash cards. Tarot for thought." subconscious.substack.com/p/second-subconscious This explorer is a bit like what Brander calls oracles (geists inside Subconscious). Like @brianeno's 1975 Oblique Strategies or @jesseschell's deck of lenses.

Notice the stance! Asking whether an oracle is truly "scientific" or "magical" or "aware" is besides the point —of course not! These tools dare YOU to create meaning. They prompt YOU with their procedurally-generated creativity.

There's a long tradition of 🃏 card-based oracles & games. The (shuffled) deck is the latent space & your hand the prompt. Personality tests (from the Big Five to @BuzzFeed quizzes) as a proposed personality space, with your answers as prompt, the initial vector of exploration.

Or consider the TRIZ matrix, a database of known solutions able to overcome contradictions. A space of principles that you explore through a vector of contradiction (feature you want to improve × feature you want to preserve). twitter.com/worrydream/status/1614087776194166784

Of course there's also the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text. But I know too little about it yet to say anything other that I once made a visualization for logic gates that many remark looks a lot like the I-Ching hexagrams: twitter.com/elzr/status/1169409893197111296

I like how @HowardxBloom defends oracles as vital identity-boosters & aids-to-choice for our constant identity crises & decision panics. He urges us not to look down on them but to make better aids for making up our minds.

Finally, see @slatestarcodex's defense of personality types as a handy vocabulary: slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/27/on-types-of-typologies/ "MBTI is trying to separate... continuous personality space into discrete and easy-to-think-about terms suitable for human processing."

OK, end of rant. To wrap up, this is a toy explorer of MBTI as a personality space. Should be fun, might be useful. Try it now! 👉🏼 docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/176fwoj8LbHhKSb6oFsX7zzxztitPkPDbgmKsxcQQ36s/copy