4 Directions in Modern Socionics

A brief consideration of 4 directions in modern Socionics that I have encountered, and their possible advantages and disadvantages.  This does not purport to come close to a whole survey of what any version of Socionics has to offer.

4 versions:

-Archetype Center: Timur Protsky

-Humanitarian Socionics: Victor Gulenko

-World Socionics Society: Jack Oliver Aaron

-Talanova Questionnaires: Victor Talanov

Archetype Center Possible Advantages:

***Semantics of functions in speech are seemingly very clearly distinguished and you can even observe it in written work so it is a very flexible method in its usage.

-Possible Counterpoints: How much investigation has really gone into the reliability and stability of the semantics in speech?  Can we check our perceptions in the present and how consistent they are over time in some more rigorous way?  In using semantics, they have to use language, so have they considered critiques of languages such as those of Wittgenstein, Mauther or Quine?

***The simultaneous use of psychosophy with Socionics could possibly explain certain variations in Socionics types that people are trying to describe using less clear or stable subtype systems (DCNH, contact/inert, arc theory, functional accentuations, masks, visual identification similarities, etc.).  It may also help explain the dynamics of these subtype systems (including reasons for them to change, since part of the reason is our internal attitudes which are described by psychosophy).

-Possible Counterpoints: Are psychosophy types really stable from birth?  Do they have any way of tracking changes in subtype and accentuation like Victor Gulenko claims to observe?  Does psychosophy type take into account behavior patterns as well as Victor Gulenko's more holistic, behavior oriented Socionics?

...

Archetype Center Possible Disadvantages:

***The different systems used, Socionics and Psychosophy, are used in a schizophrenic way; they are not bridged together in a way that makes them a holistic theory.  It may be that Psychosophy is just being used as a more flexible system to explain away deficits in their version of Socionics, since they seem to think the Psychosophy types are even more important for relationship compatibility.

-Possible Counterpoints: Maybe Socionics and Psychosophy types are truly different systems in humans which act mostly independently.  Maybe the mechanism or complex systems connecting Socionics and Psychosophy exists and just hasn't been found yet, and it will be a holistic system one day.

***This is the least flexible approach in Socionics, since it relies strictly on semantics of speech and then uses psychosophy to explain the rest.  If there are other patterns in Socionics in other dichotomies or behavior, then they will be discovered by semantics in speech or simply ignored.

-Possible Counterpoints: Maybe it is only inflexible because its approach in combining Socionics and Psychosophy has really effectively captured the mechanisms of the theory.  So perhaps it is merely a case of Occam Razor's, not adding more complexity than necessary since the rest is less reliable noise compared to the main mechanisms.

Humanitarian Socionics Possible Advantages:

***This is the most holistic model, which takes into account complex systems theory and the results of gestalt psychology and Paul Ekman's research and more besides.  It integrates sociotype, DCNH subtype, functional complexes and functional states together in a single multi-level theory of energy-information metabolism and the communicative space.

-Possible Counterpoints: Maybe all of this complexity is only needed to "fudge" certain factors that are more simply and clearly explained by the other directions of Socionics.

***There are many patterns tracked in this version of Socionics that many others do not attempt to track: temperaments, communicative distance, supervision and benefit rings, functional states, facial expressions, etc.  If these patterns exist and other theories are failing to notice them, then that is a serious omission on their part.

-Possible Counterpoints: How reliable are these patterns?  Can they be tracked with more instrumental methods like machine learning, genetics, or neuroscience?  Can we say that we are sufficiently taking into account confirmation bias?  Are they partially true but not quite as symmetrical as claimed?

...

Humanitarian Socionics Possible Disadvantages:

***Compared to other approaches, it seems to be greeted with the most misunderstanding and hostility.  It may be that there have been insufficient efforts put forth to explain these theories in a way that more people can understand, which leads to a lot of possibly avoidable and painful conflicts and misunderstandings.

-Possible Counterpoints: It could be that Gulenko's ideas are more revolutionary than other people's and require the greatest reorganization of people's perception of the world; this often provokes hostility and misrepresentation due to the integrity and effort required to make such changes.

***It is unclear where to draw the line in allowing variation within a type, and it is odd that subtype and accentuation can sometimes seem more important for our focuses and compatibility than type.

-Possible Counterpoints: Perhaps the epistemological problem of distinguishing between systems and subsystems is not taken seriously enough in the Socionics community.  It may be that our types are biological and hard to perceive due to being flexible and not conscious, whereas subtypes and accentuations deal with roles that we adapt to due to inherent psychological flexibility and obsessions we develop by conscious efforts and/or imprints that then become semi-stable.

World Socionics Society Possible Advantages:

***There is a lot of charisma and youth appeal that the leaders of this approach have, in particular Jack Aaron.  They have a lot of showmanship in their presentation, and they know how to attract attention, interest people in their views, portray themselves in the best light, and create team spirit.

-Possible Counterpoints: There is a particular danger of group think and suggestibility with such charismatic leadership and "team spirit", although that is a serious danger for everyone.  While charisma and being a good contactor of people is important, it doesn't create the most disinterested environment for critical and objective thinking.

***There is a great deal of effort put into narrowing down the basic elements of the system in an easily digestible way for people, making logical arguments for typings, and having debates and discussions with a variety of friends and rivals.  This is excellent for communication and popularization, and also creates a culture of open communication and exchange.

-Possible Counterpoints: With things narrowed down in such "simple" ways, can we still be sure they are reliable and don't coarsen reality and oversimplify people's behavior and motivations?  Is more emphasis put on ease of understanding for people than making sure these people don't have any illusions or misconceptions about the limits of these ideas?

...

World Socionics Society Possible Disadvantages:

***There is an overbearing confidence and competitiveness in the views of this school.  If you disagree with their views, you can count on being made fun of, being subject to intrigues, being ganged up on by their followers, and in some cases they will sink to misrepresentations of your ideas which there is low willingness to correct.  They get into a lot of conflicts which they are very enthusiastic about, and there is a tense atmosphere if you disagree.

-Possible Counterpoints: While tiresome, the truth does sometimes come out in conflicts, so maybe how cocksure and confrontational they are will make people's real positions clearer and help the truth come out via struggle.  Maybe it will help people take themselves less seriously (though I wonder if that will apply to themselves).

***There is a quasi-fundamentalist belief in Model A in this school.  They will only accept theories if they can be shown to follow deductively from their understanding of Model A, or if you convince Jack Aaron that they could "replace" Model A (but he is never clear on what would be required to make this replacement and seems to underestimate the effort that would actually take for him to go back and dismantle so much).  They believe their understanding of Model A is greater than all the Eastern Socionists without whom they wouldn't even know it existed, even though they aren't well-versed in the views of these other schools.  All of their reasoning is based on certain axioms that there is close to zero willingness to question and which they believe to be self-evident.

-Possible Counterpoints: Maybe Model A really is a fundamental truth to the universe and they uniquely were able to understand this.  Maybe their success in persuading some people on facebook, discord and youtube, which Jack often flaunts, really is proof of how self-evident and strong their views are, and the other views will just phase out into unpopularity and irrelevance over time.  The "holdouts" might just be people stuck in the hypnotic groupthink of some old school, too mired to break with defunct less persuasive views or just wanting to have their own original views to not have to acknowledge that they aren't as good at typing as people like Jack.

Talanova Questionnaires Possible Advantages:

***This school has the most voluminous collection of empirical data.  They are doing all kinds of surveys all the time to figure out different aspects of the types.  They give out these surveys to many people and then perform statistical analyses.  They then make the results of this data collecting and statistical analysis available on sites like Danidan and VK and Talanov's website.

-Potential Counterpoint: Maybe it is a waste of time to go out and collect so much data in such a misdirected fashion without organizing the theory into a more concise framework first, because you are just likely to get lost.  But in general, it is hard to find a counterpoint to this.

***There is a greater flexibility to this school than any other when it comes to fitting the models to the empirical facts.  This leads to a variety of quixotic descriptions and observations of the types which are quite distinctive, and which people can directly relate to without feeling like they are being fit into some model or framework.  There have also been more models entertained here than in other schools, such as Model T and the Questing/Declaring functions.  They are willing to entertain skewness and find the cracks in our symmetries more than other schools.

-Potential Counterpoints: The potential problem with such flexibility is fitting to the noise rather than the signal, which is a common problem in statistical modeling.  Also, you can fit the model to desired aspects of people's self-conceptions which they give as answers on the survey, rather than stand firm on possibly unpleasant truths and structures that people might not as readily identify with.

...

Talanova Questionnaires Possible Disadvantages:

***In the surveys given, there is a lot of self-assessment, since it impossible to use highly quality expert methods on such a high volume of people and data.  This presents a significant obfuscation to the objectivity of the data being collected since it is more objective to be assessed by disinterested and experienced parties.  It is very hard to see a way past this instead of converting to using methods that do more to mitigate people's biases, and such biases are shown by psychology to be numerous.

-Potential Counterpoints: Frameworks like the Five Factor model are also using a lot of self-assessment, and they still find a lot of significant statistical correlations that are even respected in academia.  Even if it turns out that the trends based on self-assessment are more biased and limited than trends based on expert or instrumental methods, the sheer volume might still be useful to make some informative claims.

***Because the model is based on constantly updating empirical data, it is relatively inelegant and lacking in symmetry.  This makes you wonder whether it really is discovering a fundamental system into which humans organize themselves like the other schools often claim to, or just fitting the best model to the current data which may be overturned with different surveys and new proposed definitions and frameworks in the future.  It's also harder to use such a constantly changing model and find consistent relationships in it if you can only identify with types by certain percentages rather than categorically (even if all categories are provisional in some sense).  Also, such focus on fitting the model to data points is an obstacle to holism and the big-picture integration of the system.

-Potential Counterpoints: Our instincts and desire for symmetry and patterns and narratives into which things neatly fit can actually mislead us quite a bit (see Nassim Taleb), and at least in the stage of modeling, Talanov's school has the most protections against this suggestibility with its adaptive constructions (though it's still vulnerable on the other side of data collection due to less objective self-assessment narratives).  Having someone to constantly doubt our models and try new ideas is a good thing, provided it doesn't prevent us from taking action and making use of the theories.  Building up a picture carefully from the details will at least mean that the trends we are observing have some rigor (albeit imperfect of course).

There are more schools of Socionics than I have presented here, and their ideas may also be valuable, I simply have less experience with them:

-In Western Socionics, there is also Ibrahim Tencer.  He is even more stiff than Jack Aaron, but his ideas are higher resolution and quality than Jack's, and there is a lot more original and independent thinking with him.  He is not as charismatic or attention-seeking.

-Prokofieva: another user of Model A who focuses a lot on semantics

-Yermak: systems Socionics, which connects Socionics to some broader theoretical issues and also uses model A and semantics and systems theory

-Bukalov: has his own model B, and comes up with lots of ideas about the relation of Socionics to history and science

-Reinin: uses the Kalinkoulas model, pretty open-minded and tolerant, and originally discovered some important dichotomies in the mathematical structure of the theory

-Mironov: uses a lot of dichotomies and information to type people, entertains expansions to Model A, has theories about the origin of temperament, etc.

-Stepanov: developed his own version of Socionics into a whole natural-philosophic interpretaion via quantum mechanics, puts a lot of thought into the mechanism of information metabolism

-Tsypin and Trekhov: have a lot of unique thoughts about arcane various dichotomies and misconceptions with more commonly used one's

-Mitrokhina: has her own unique model of asking/declaring functions and her own interpretation of many archetypes in the collective unconscious via Socionics

-Meged and Ovcharov: have their own subtype theories and connections of Socionics to astrology