User:Aestrivex/essays/A discussion on VI

VI is misleading and unreliable.

this is probably not news to most people. i think that virtually anyone with a limited familiarity in the topic has developed to an extent their own sense of epistemology and almost everyone, for instance, seems to regard ganin's method of VI as essentially crackpottery. what i find confusing perhaps is the extent to which many people continue to sort of place a passive reliance on VI; denouncing it and then using it anyway, perhaps using it as a "secondary" method of type identification or delving into discussions of the right and wrong kinds of VI.

personally, i would hesitate even to talk at all about the merits of VI or the "right" and "wrong" way to use VI; i think it would be better off ignored altogether. this isn't to say that people like rick don't have fairly constructive ways of using it -- on the contrary, i think that rick's approach to VI is very hard to argue with from a level of "why does this even work?" in my mind the situation is sort of in a way analogous to "well, yes, in a very abstract and technical sense, quantum mechanics is true and interesting to explore on a theoretical level. but in dealing with most newtonian applications, forget it; thinking about quantum mechanics can only confuse you and doesn't add anything to your understanding of what's going on." (this is an imperfect analogy -- sorry i couldn't come up with anything more appropriate).

so, briefly, let's talk about the "right" and "wrong" way to use VI:

physiognomy is the wrong way to use VI and in my opinion is absolutely useless (i disagree with rick on this). this tends to be the sergei ganin approach, and this is why sergei ganin's typings suck ass. things like "intuitives have a long, triangular face" are essentially things that i have no faith in as being related to socionics; these things are genetic. rick brings up the point in his overview linked above that sometimes he simply notices relationships between physical facial features and people he's typed. as an example, he suggests SLEs often have rectangular eyes, and points that 5 of 6 SLEs that he had on his page in 2007 had this feature (one of whom, quentin tarantino, he has changed his typing of). at the same time, he also lists a counterexample SLE (madeleine albright) as not corresponding to this physiognomic trait. what this means is basically what common sense would tell you -- physiognomic relationships are not deterministic and not reliable, and shouldn't be used as a justification for typing people (assuming, for the sake of argument, that you accept rick's typings, which you should, because no specific typing is central to the point at hand).

perhaps the biggest substantive point of where i disagree with rick is in the usefulness of these physiognomic relationships at all; to me declaring even something like "perhaps this guy is SLE because he has these rectangular eyes; let us further examine this prediction using more behavioral information," as rick suggests, is not something that i see as a valid line of thought.

by contrast, the "right" way to use VI is to make observations about someone's self presentation (though the line between these kinds of observations and observations which try to make unfounded inferences about every aspect of one's character from "reading" their eyes or something similar -- a comparatively useless commentary -- is very blurry). here's rick's discussion:

Impressions of people's type obtained from visual observation are no worse or less authoritative than impressions obtained through other means; the difficulty is conveying these impressions to other people in a constructive way. In all my experience observing visual diagnosis attempts on socionics forums, I almost never see what I would consider constructive discussion. In real-life discussions the situation is not much better. People seem to be too lazy to verbalize their observations and impressions and instead immediately jump to type conclusions.

Nonconstructive statements:

• "He is just like my friend, who is an LSE."
• "The heavy jaw speaks of extraverted [sic] sensing."
• "He has the eyes of a EIE."
• "I'm telling you, he is an ESI. Just look at him. Just look at how he smiles."

Each of these statements require that we take something on faith, not having sufficient information to make our own judgments. These statements also cannot be refuted, because they do not focus on factual information.

Constructive statements:

• "He seems like someone who would... (description)"
• "He has a threatening expression most of the time."
• "His expressions are very changeable, and his smile is very warm."
• "He has a blank look everywhere."

Note that these statements do not provide an immediate type conclusion, but focus on developing observations and making inferences about the person's life or personality that can be verified or refuted by studying the person's biography and others' impressions of him. These statements can lead to a more correct perception of the person being typed, which in turn will help in type diagnosis. In addition, participants of such discussions are free to make their own judgments regarding the correlation between the traits noted and the person's socionic type.

making observations about the way that someone presents themselves and the kind of energy that they bring can be very informative, and in the case of any attempts to use VI i agree with rick that basically this is the way that it can be useful. at the same time, i think that making discernments of others' energy is probably something that is more reliably dealt with apart from VI.

the problem, of course, with VI, is that in practical usage so many people get it wrong (and, in some cases, dogmatically defend their observations). one argument in favor of VI is that anything greater than a 6.25% rate of success is better than average and is progress. a 15% rate of success means that, statistically, you're not a computer. it suggests that in most cases you're probably doing more than nothing, and maybe identifying some aspects of a person right from photographs.

in my opinion and observation from various VI "tests," the highest approximate rate of success attainable by VI alone is about 25% (this number is a bit chosen at random and actually a bit inflated from what i have seen from actual experience -- it's meant to be a liberal estimate, assuming basically that some people are a bit better at it than i've seen).

even this relatively liberal estimate of 25% is absolutely pathetic as an actual tool for typing anyone, even as the "supplementary method" that so many people proclaim it to be. that means that in the vast, vast majority of cases, you get it wrong. maybe you're actually finding something in the photographs -- and maybe you can even pinpoint elements of someone's character that don't directly involve a diagnosis of socionics type. but that's a very far cry between thinking of VI as a useful methodology.

all of this, in my mind, is pretty close to what common sense tells you; reading someone's personality from a photograph, or even a few photographs or a short video, is not actually viable. what IS potentially viable in some circumstances about the method of VI is getting to know someone, seeing them (preferably in person) a bunch, and getting to understand how they do the things they do, and how their self-presentation, self-expression, or activities are a reflection of their character.

but, if you come in to a situation expecting to be able to automatically discern something by their physical presentation (or, indeed, expecting to be able to understand someone's dynamic and type them at all), then my suggestion is that you're probably doing something wrong.