Socionics needs competent Critics, not Ignoramuses pretending to be Authority Figures!
Socionics is a popular theory connecting the human psyche, human behavioral patterns, information processing and sociology. It is interesting and useful to many people, granting them what they believe to be additional self-knowledge, increased abilities to understand and interact with other people, increased self-esteem, finer ability to choose partners and careers, and more besides. Many people involved in Socionics consider it to be more rigorous than an average personality or psychology theory, but most do not consider it to be some perfect, absolutely settled science. It is certainly an imperfect theory needing more refinement, experimental tests, instrumental methods, rigorous statistics to cover all aspects, etc., and some in Socionics are already working towards this (though it is already a useful tool to many psychologists and enthusiasts).
Socionics is very bothersome to such people who are highly invested in academic orthodoxy. There are some trait theories popular in academia, such as Big Five, which almost everyone using Socionics knows about and considers much more surface-level and much less useful. Some academics are invested in such methods because they are convenient, easy to measure with statistics, and only require self-reporting tests that can’t even inform deeply about the psyche and personality beyond what a person can already answer about themselves according to the limited pre-defined criteria of Big Five tests.
Yet, some mistakenly take the Big Five as if it is some totally settled empirical science and the only way to measure personality. In the opinion of these academic orthodoxy warriors, if anything comes to different conclusions or uses different methodology than the Big Five, it must be pseudoscience and incorrect by that reason alone. Alexander Panchin recently made exactly this mistake in his linked video which was critical of Socionics. The main argument in his video is that Socionics is baseless and wrong because it differs from Big Five conclusions and methodology. In the next few paragraphs, an internet denizen who goes by the name “Azdahak” will explain how limited Big Five methodology is in understanding the primitives of human personality and psychology, proving that the entire basis of Panchin’s argument is incorrect from the start:
They simply take your vector space (which is already an arbitrary lexical estimate of the proper gestalt mind) and orthogonalize it such a way that the basis vectors with the most variance are ranked into the first n-vectors. How many factors you choose depends on how much variability you feel is required to account for what you are measuring. These models are lossy compression, lower dimensional statistical models of the entire thing. But these do not necessarily capture the actual 'primitive' categories in the sense that they are somehow fundamental structures which underly personality.
The MBTI dichotomies are theoretical primitives which have a remarkable correlation to the measured statistical models of the Big5. That just means Jung was a good hypothesizer and stumbled upon the same description space that the Big5 captures with lexical analysis.” – Azdahak
Thus, the Big Five doesn’t even study the complexity of the deep psyche or much of human behavior, which is what real psychologists and deep-thinking citizens need tools to deal with daily. What I quoted from Azdahak already refutes the main argument of Panchin’s video, so even though this article is long, you can stop here if you already understand the main point that Big Five practically doesn’t prove anything about Socionics or the fundamentals of human psychology.
Unfortunately, since Panchin is an academic, some uneducated people on the internet confuse him as an authority figure, even though he has no knowledge and credentials in fields like psychology and Socionics where he tries to act like an authority. Accordingly, some gullible people have uncritically accepted his arguments, so I’m going to thoroughly refute Panchin’s entire video and prove that he has no credibility on this topic.
His entire video contains almost nothing but logical fallacies, misquotes, misrepresentations, outdated sources, jokes and sniggering ridicule. The sad thing is that Panchin making a video this unprofessional is very embarrassing for him and it really destroyed his credibility as a scholar among more intelligent and knowledgeable people, who can see that he thinks jokes are a replacement for actual arguments and knowledge. I would encourage other people to check Panchin’s other videos and scientific studies, because someone this dishonest and unreliable almost surely made many more mistakes that might mislead gullible uneducated people who confuse any scientist for being an authority figure (granted, Panchin might be more competent and reliable in his narrow expertise of computational biology, but I think that should be checked more thoroughly just to make sure).
The saddest part of all is that Socionics is an imperfect field which is in need of intelligent critics and experimenters, but Panchin’s criticism of Socionics is so embarrassingly unintelligent and full of logical fallacies that it makes Socionics look more credible than his entire brand of academia, and Socionics probably does not really deserve this. Talanov published another excellent criticism of Panchin which I have translated to English on my blog (read Talanov’s criticism instead of mine if you want the shorter, more essential version of why Panchin is strawmanning Socionics and has zero credibility).
- If Panchin is criticizing stereotypes, then he’s criticizing stereotypes about Socionics, not Socionics itself. It’s fair to criticize stereotypes about Socionics, but this in itself is not a criticism of Socionics since Socionics is against the stereotypes he just mentioned
-Socionics doesn’t make claims to explain everything in someone’s behavior, this is what I mean when I say Panchin is criticizing unprofessional Socionics from some online forums, even though any professional Socionist would disagree with what Panchin criticizes just as much as he does. That’s a strawman argument on Panchin’s part.
“Socionics: strange way of finding a mate, self-knowledge, and choosing a profession”
While Socionics can aid in finding a mate and choosing a profession, it obviously cannot do all of those things for a person, since much of that is individual, not just typical. So Panchin is also strawmanning there. Learning about systematic aspects of the psyche can obviously increase self-knowledge, so I don’t agree with him that it’s strange in that regard.
“Panchin makes fun of people talking about themselves like Stirlitz and Doestoevsky from a movie, basically stereotypical Socionics”
Again he makes fun of stereotypes in Socionics, this is a dishonest strawman. Socionists would criticize that kind of thing as much as he would, only perhaps they would criticize it even more fiercely.
“For example, I could describe myself in a lot of ways from the point of view of different typologies.”
That is simply a true fact, not a criticism of the fact that man has typological aspects. You in fact have many different systemic aspects of your body and psyche, as do most people.
“But God be with him. Three different methods of socionics have led to different results. I am sure that socionics has some kind of answer to this.”
That’s not Socionics, it's a test based on self-perception. Socionics is either based on far more rigorous tests like Talanov which perhaps have even more rigorous methodology than the Big Five, or at least comparable, or they are based on expert diagnostic methods, not self-perception tests. Again, Panchin is strawmanning here.
“For example, it is a fairly common situation that a person is not hired because he does not correspond to some type of personality that should be successful in this profession in the opinion of an agency or an employer who hired such an agency for some reason.”
This is also a strawman argument; it’s called “nut picking”. Pointing out that Socionics is used in ridiculous ways does not effectively criticize its fundamentals. The fact that nuclear bombs can be used to kill people is not a good argument against the validity of many conclusions in nuclear science. All it implies is that there is an ethics on how to use Socionics, just like any other discipline, and sometimes people don’t follow it.
“If we assume for a second that this whole typology has nothing to do with reality, then this method of acceptance solutions, this way of selecting experts for work or partners can be almost exclusively negative consequences.”
Making assumptions makes for a circular argument, which is fallacious. We should properly investigate rather than assume.
“Well, roughly speaking, imagine that you came to a restaurant, you want to choose some dish so that it would be delicious for you, and you looked at the menu and you see, so here is some cool steak, I guess I'll like it. Here is borscht, which I love very much, and croutons with garlic, this is also my taste. And then a waiter comes and says, you know, we've done a food typology of your personality here, and according to this food typology, here's a steak that doesn't really suit you, but horseradish is more suitable for you. "Is everything to your satisfaction?" "Fine, thanks".”
This is another strawman argument. It’s assuming Socionics doesn’t work in the first place (which is circular), and then making fun of some other random ridiculous thing that obviously doesn’t work, as if that can prove a circular argument. That’s not a legitimate or useful criticism of Socionics. Socionics never claimed to describe all your minute preferences or tried to control your decisions in minor matters; that’s just something Panchin is afraid of (Panchin is likely an EP type in Objective Personality who has demon Control and he projects his demon Oi all over the place, apologies if you don't get the reference but it's not necessary).
“And the person starts to think, listen, well, maybe, really, if this is a serious science, horseradish is more suitable for me than the steak that I chose for myself.”
Yes, people are suggestible, this is true. It needs to be taken into account, but by itself, it’s not a criticism of Socionics, since Socionics acknowledges suggestibility. The argument “people are suggestible” therefore “Socionics isn’t valid/correct/doesn’t work” simply doesn’t follow logically (it's not logically valid).
“And what is curious, and what all of them have in common is a significant bias towards commercialization. Both there and there, everywhere, they earn good money on this, including those very agencies that offer their recruitment services. This is a very large point of such sales.”
Now he is criticizing salesmen in Socionics. Should we dismiss pharmaceutical science because they make much more money than Socionics? How ridiculous. Criticizing business and salesmanship practices is one thing, and totally fair. It’s not relevant to criticizing Socionics directly as a discipline though.
That these people have nothing to do with psychology is obviously false, since they invented psychological theories. They may not be academic psychologists, but to act like this makes them automatically wrong is a genetic fallacy and an ad hominem attack that is not relevant to their theories. It’s also an argument from authority. Even if Panchin is not trying to say that only academic authorities can come up with theories, then he’s going off topic; stick to the facts and theories and try to refute those if you want, otherwise you aren’t making relevant criticisms. Plus, most people who use Socionics aren’t using Aushra’s ideas anymore, they’ve long since moved past this; in the Western World especially, most people who use Socionics haven’t even read Aushra and use enormously different theories.
“And one might wonder why, in fact, she decided to identify 16 types, where did she get it from, how does she justify it? And she has a lot of references to some philosophers, for example, to Hegel, she has references to psychologists, for example, to Jung, to Kempinski. But what is not in this book is any real research. That is, there is no testing as such, there is no large sample of people on whom this would be studied. There is no serious statistical analysis or anything like that. That is, these are just some speculative concepts”
Aushra’s work is indeed speculative; it was just a hypothesis. Making hypotheses is an important part of the scientific method, which Panchin seems to have forgotten, which is sad to see in a biologist who should know the scientific method better. Not to mention, many modern Socionics schools don’t base their ideas on Aushra’s work, concepts or justifications, but their own concepts and practices, like Model G, real life behaviors, semantics of speech, nonverbal signals, energy metabolism, functional states, different definitions for almost every concept as compared to what Aushra had, applying theories in real life to verify the results of Socionics concepts on hundreds (maybe thousands) or people, etc. The fact that Aushra wrote some hypotheses about Socionics theory at its inception, near half a century ago, doesn’t prove anything about current Socionics theory and practice. Many concepts in Socionics haven’t even had the opportunity to be instrumentally tested yet, because they involve complex systems like the brain, the human psyche, human society, and many are looking to test and refine these concepts as soon as possible. Plenty more experiential, double-blind, statistical and practical tests have already been applied to Socionics and similar typology theories, as we will get into later.
“That is, these are just some speculative concepts, and there is nothing surprising in this, because the author of socionics, the person who invented all this, never had any psychological education. "It can't be!" "No, it happens in life." Aushra's education was not psychological, but economic.”
Wow, I am surprised that a biologist like Panchin apparently knows so little about science, and apparently doesn’t know that scientists in subjects ranging from physics, clinical psychology, economics, etc. apply many speculative concepts in useful ways in their practice and get real results (just check out string theory, loop quantum gravity, Jungian psychology, clinical psychology, deep neural networks which involve lots of speculative, practical tricks and complex systems, etc.). I am just amazed to see this kind of incompetence from a supposedly professional scientist! Panchin is giving a great example of why arguments from authority don't work: here he is, making another genetic fallacy (Aushra had the wrong education, so her conclusions must be wrong). By Panchin’s ridiculous logic, it’s impossible to invent any new field of study, because you did not have an education in it, so your conclusions must be wrong! I don't know what academy Panchin studied from, but I suspect they did not teach him classes in critical thinking which are necessary to have a certain level of professionalism as a scientist.
“In socionics, there is a term dual, this is the person who is most compatible with your type from the point of view of socionics. A separate question, of course, to these duals, but, in fact, did someone check carefully, is this really the case? For example, according to divorce statistics. "Three divorces, three divorces!" Let's take a large number of people, type them in socionics and see. These couples got divorced, these couples didn't get divorced. Does this somehow correlate with socionics forecasts? You will be surprised, but such studies cannot be found in Aushra Augustinaviciute.”
Statistics of intertype relations have been taken in various Socionics schools, and duality has been found statistically as the most common relationship, among other things. So, there is statistical evidence for Socionics hypotheses at this point, but Panchin never studied any of that (and apparently he never even consulted any Socionists). Not to mention, I have yet to encounter a single modern Socionist who agrees with Aushra’s hypothesis that duals are compatible and other types simply aren’t; nearly every Socionist agrees that there are many other factors which influence compatibility (subtype, psychosophy type, personal interests and values, physical attractiveness, etc.), even though it’s generally thought that duality is a quite compatible relationship, and there is evidence to support that statistically and experientially. What Panchin doesn’t seem to realize is that fields of study evolve very far from their initial papers from half a century ago, and he needs to take that into account to make a serious criticism.
Socionics doesn’t even study personality type. It studies “Sociotype” or “Psychological Type”. This is far and away different from personality, which is obviously something more individual (although it is influenced by the Sociotype, among many other things). Panchin does not even understand the basics of the discipline he believes he has the intellectual authority to suppress.
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"If we consider the issue in a theoretically abstract way, then the movement of energy charges occurs in the brain during its functioning. Two rings of information metabolism (IM) are formed." Why two rings? Why not two rings, but a carnation in the middle? Why not three rings? What kind of rings? "Three were given to the elves, seven were given to the dwarf lords, and nine... Nine rings have been handed down to the human race." What kind of rings are we talking about? Modern neuroscience does not know about any such rings or about any information metabolism. That is, this term is absolutely made up, the same as the term chakra, aura or something like that.”
Information metabolism is a psychological theory invented by the Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kepinski about how biological organisms interact with their environment; Aushra did not even come up with this so you can’t blame her! Someone more educated in psychology than you came up with it, so it must be correct, right Panchin? Just kidding. Kepinski’s theory uses many scientific concepts such as cybernetics, cell biology, open systems, energy, information, catabolic and anabolic processes, etc. This theory is a credible speculation created by a famed Polish psychiatrist, and many Socionists don’t even use this theory in their work anyways because it’s too speculative and unnecessary for their work; they prefer to use the everyday behavior of people and nonverbal signals instead. Only one type of Socionics uses Information Metabolism, and it’s called “Information Socionics” (this type of Socionics is common to be fair). As it turns out, it’s Panchin’s criticism that is “made up” and more at the level of auras, whereas Socionics has been far more thoughtful and rigorous in its methods.
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“Aushra Augustinaviciute is a scientist from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Of course, the scientific community does not know anything about socionics. You will not find any scientific publications in international, peer-reviewed scientific journals. But I must say that Aushra Augustinaviciute has a medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Not WOUNDED, but WOUNDED. We have a joke that there are academics from the Russian Academy of Sciences, and there are academics from the Russian Academy of Sciences. This is an organization that more or less anyone can join. But Aushra received a medal named after Academician Kapitsa. I think Academician Kapitsa turned over in his grave at that moment.”
For someone who makes fun of Aushra so much for not being rigorously scientific, pretty much all Panchin has done so far is strawman Socionics, make jokes about it, use logical fallacies and generally lack basic knowledge about the subject that he’s talking about. And he admits that Aushra is an award winning academic. Maybe Panchin is the one with less credibility than Aushra? I don’t think I’m going out on a limb there. What’s funny is he criticizes nothing here, and he makes literally no argument at all, either against Aushra or Socionics as a whole, and he still expects this to be a persuasive critique of Socionics to credible, professional people. Panchin is embarrassing himself.
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“Why is socionics popular? What I have read, these quotes from the most important book, which, in fact, marked the beginning of this whole direction of socionics, is senseless scientific nonsense.”
Those are just some rude insults to Socionics, not an argument or a useable criticism. His unprofessional commentary continues to damage his credibility.
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“This may partly explain why this nonsense is so popular. The fact is that there is a wonderful study by a modern psychologist, such as Gordon Pennycook, who showed that you can take generators of random pseudo-scientific proposals, such as, well, an example of such a pseudo-proposal: "The generator of the triple integral generates the sine of the cosine angle." It's a meaningless set of words, but for some people it turns out to be a meaningful sentence. And it was shown that, firstly, (a) people very often interpret pseudo-deep-thought pseudo-proposals for some meaningful proposals, but also that supporters of various kinds of mysticism, isotherics love this very much and even more easily interpret it as something meaningful and reasonable. Maybe because when a person is faced with some kind of scientific jargon, he really does not want to seem like such a fool who does not understand what he is talking about. That is, they tell you like, yes, the triple cosine integral, and you're like, mmm, yes, yes, yes, I understand what you're talking about. But you don't want others to think that they are smarter than you. And people don't want to act as such a person who says, oh, I didn't understand something, please explain to me what you meant. And is there a clear definition of your term, what is hidden behind it? How did you know that? No, it's much easier to behave like this. Maybe this partly hides the success of this kind of pseudoscientific nonsense.”
That’s a nice story. Unfortunately, Socionics often has its own jargon for the phenomena it studies (which obviously isn’t a flaw by itself), and it doesn’t use some random scientific terms in random order. This silly random story hasn’t been connected to Socionics in any concrete way, it’s a criticism you just have to “believe in”, like astrology. It sounds profound but doesn’t make any specific predictions or comments.
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“How do socionics themselves explain Why socionics refers to the works of Carl Gustav Jung? why don't they have outright nonsense, but still real science, or at least protoscience. Aushra says, well, I'm referring to Jung, and Jung, he had his own typology. He came up with the idea that people can be divided into certain types. That's it, please. Even Jung himself, who is also a respected, well-known psychologist, identified some types of people.”
Jung is indeed a major influence on Socionics, and this is more than just regarding types. He also studied major archetypes used in Socionics and influenced Socionics’ conception of the functions. However, he is only one influence on Socionics, and in terms of definitions and methods, Socionics diverged from Jung a lot, so focusing on Jung isn’t relevant to a criticism of Socionics.
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“There are many reservations to be made at once. Well, firstly, Jung, with all due respect to him, was engaged in psychology at a time when psychology was not yet a full-fledged science, when many things were understood very speculatively and did not justify themselves in any way. That is, there was no big data, no statistical analysis as such, no comparison between any large samples - there was nothing like that. That is, he just made it up and assumed that maybe it was so.”
I agree with Panchin that psychology was less scientific at the time of Jung. However, Panchin makes some very ideological conclusions from this.
- First of all, Panchin characterizes science as just being about “big data”, “statistical analysis”, “large samples”, etc. While such things are very useful in science, they are not what science is generally about. Science is a method, with various stages. Early stages include things like hypothesis formation, experimental trials, dealing with complex systems that can’t always be reduced to strict mathematical descriptions, etc. And Socionics is very much engaged in these early stages, which is why it is protoscience, not a pseudoscience (though it’s true that some nuts who consider Socionics pure and totally justified science, without any reasonable doubts, use it in a pseudoscientific way, and I share Panchin’s criticism of these people). Overall Panchin’s characterization of science is incorrect and is damaging to his credibility as a scientist.
- Second of all, Panchin proffers the ideology of scientism. He claims that because psychologists in Jung’s time were not far enough along in the scientific method in his opinion, everything they did was just “made up”. This is a grossly incorrect and unscientific opinion. Jung’s ideas, even if not absolutely proven, have many analogues in history, philosophy, medicine, etc. that he laid out in his book Psychological Types. He also applied these ideas, with real results, to untold hundreds, maybe thousands, of patients, and he achieved concrete results in real life. Even if he did not justify everything with statistics, this is a far cry from just “making up” his theories, when he refined his real psychological practices and hypotheses for decades, just like Socionics does. In addition to that, science is never absolutely complete, so even using things like statistics, big data, large samples, etc. only exposes scientific hypotheses to even more tests and fewer doubts; they don’t prove anything absolutely, since more experiments and better hypotheses could always be generated in the future. Thus, when Panchin claims that everything not based on statistics and big data (even if it’s tested in real life like Socionics and Jungian psychology are) is just “made up”, he’s not being scientific. Panchin is being ideological, subscribing to a baseless ideology of scientism, which open-ended science doesn’t even support.
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“And I must say, to give Jung his due, that he himself never took this, his typologies, directly seriously. First, he noted that each individual is an exception to the rule, that is, he emphasized that people are different. There are really 8 billion of us now, we can say that there are 8 billion types of people on the planet”
Panchin is wrong that Jung did not take typology seriously, and he proves that he doesn’t even understand what typology is. Typology is not the denial of individual difference, as Jung himself insisted. Here is what Jung actually said, which Panchin quotes incorrectly and out of context, further damaging his credibility as a serious scholar:
“As a rule only careful observation and a weighing of the evidence permits a sure classification. Clear and simple though the fundamental principle of the two opposing attitudes may be, nevertheless their concrete reality is complicated and obscure, for every individual is an exception to the rule. Therefore, one can never give a description of a type, no matter how complete, which applies to more than one individual despite the fact that thousands might, in a certain sense, be strikingly described thereby. Conformity is one side of a man, uniqueness is the other.” – C.G. Jung
Here Jung is acknowledging that people have systematic similarities (types and “typical” behavior) while also acknowledging that they are individuals and thus different in some ways as well. Thus, Panchin’s fallacy is assuming that because typology studies typical, systematic aspects of people, it therefore denies individual differences. Nothing could be further from the truth, and he’s again strawmanning Socionics. There aren’t 8 billion types; there are 8 billion people, many of whom are similar in a variety of systematic ways, while nonetheless having differences.
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“And secondly, this is how he talked about his own typology and overly serious attitude towards it: "This type of classification is nothing but parlor games, as futile as dividing people into brachycephalians and dolichocephalians.""
Again, Panchin quotes Jung incorrectly. That is very dishonest, and I’m not saying that to be cruel or something, it’s just a fact. Here is the actual quote:
“Jung didn’t believe that types were easily identifiable, and he didn’t believe that people could be permanently slotted into one category or another. “Every individual is an exception to the rule,” he wrote; to “stick labels on people at first sight,” in his view, was “nothing but a childish parlor game.”
Jung did not consider any usage of typology as a parlor game, and he did take it very seriously, writing books and seminars comprising thousands of pages on the subject even into his later years. What he considered a parlor game is sticking labels onto people at first sight, as opposed to “careful observation and weighing of the evidence”. But given a thoughtful application, Jung felt that typology was quite necessary. Here is what he said about it:
“I would not for anything dispense with this compass on my psychological voyages of discovery.” -C. G. Jung speaking of his model of psychological types.
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“Jung treated it with some self-irony, that is, it was a kind of tool that he came up with, but did not pretend that it was something super so vital, and that it was some kind of basic tool for cognition of the human psyche.”
Jung in fact treated his typology as essential (even if he acknowledged that it was imperfect). Jung wasn’t interested in pandering to ideological scientism like Panchin (in American terms, Panchin is just a meme called a “deboonker”); he was interested in pursuing some of the deepest, most eternal philosophical questions humans can ask, which science has a very difficult time answering: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν
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“In fact, I must say that Jung himself, of course, was sometimes carried away by strange ideas. In particular, Jung is credited with inventing the concept of synchronicity. Well, roughly speaking, imagine that you thought of your friend and he called you. It seems to be a coincidence, but Jung will tell you: it is synchronicity that it happens in the world that some manifestations of the human psyche and the real world coincide in an unusual way, in a meaningful way. In modern psychology, you will be told that everything that has just been described is an example of apophenia, when people find patterns in random or meaningless data. And this is apophenia, this is Jungian synchronicity.”
Panchin literally criticizes Jung’s ideas as if they are self-evidently wrong just because they are “strange”. This is such an empty, unscientific criticism as to be embarrassing. Where is the evidence that Panchin’s concept of apophenia accounts for everything Jung put under the label “synchronicity”? Of course, apophenia is useful psychological concept to know. However, synchronicity is also a phenomenon that PhD psychology researchers (like Dean Radin) with high positions in the American government have thoroughly studied and believe in (The Global Consciousness Project | Global Oneness Project). It looks like Panchin’s scientism doesn’t even meet the standards of modern academic science, and he is losing even more credibility.
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“In general, Jung was a bit of a mystic himself, but even being this mystic with some strange views, Jung did not drown as much for his typology as modern socionics do, did not spit with foam at the mouth, did not try to type everyone and did not label everyone. So what's wrong with socionics anyway? And why can we say today that this is not just some kind of bad, unconfirmed hypothesis, but we can actually state that socionics is wrong, that it is a pseudoscience, that it misleads people.”
The term “drown” here is just used as mindless ridicule; Panchin hasn’t established that modern Socionists are having any problem with their typology such that they drown in it. Apparently, Panchin can’t even be bothered to make any criticism of Socionics that isn’t frothing at the mouth with empty jokes, logical fallacies, strawmen arguments, and misquotes. He’s acting like an unprofessional clown that no intelligent person could continue to take seriously. Plus, it is Panchin that needs to label everything that disagrees with his narrow, ideological convictions as “pseudoscience”; Socionists are generally far more thoughtful and cautious about the labels they give out. That criticism is a projection, to use the terms of Jungian psychology.
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“Well, firstly, socionics assumes a fairly strict division of people into 16 innate types. We know that a person is influenced by a huge number of factors, both genetic and social. We are influenced by our genes, our upbringing, our parents, teachers, and so on, and so on, and so on. All this forms the properties of our personality.”
I know of very few modern Socionists or typologists who believe that people can be divided into only 16 types in any kind of useful way. When considering things like subtype, accentuations, psychosophy type, developments, the number of types that Socionists and modern typologists divide people into is more like hundreds or thousands, and even then, people may have many situational (non-typical) differences. Socionists would also be quick to point out that this is only a systematic component of the psyche and behavior of a person; it doesn’t describe everything about their unique individual personality, and further they would acknowledge that many of the traits Socionists measure are dynamic and capable of change. So again, Panchin’s criticism of Socionics is miserably misinformed; he is just criticizing some silly Socionics stereotypes from internet forums or online tests and treating it like professional Socionics. What an unreliable scholar Panchin is proving himself to be!
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“Let's take some sign of a person that can be measured, conditionally, the degree of his extraversion or introversion. We know that this trait has, as modern genetic studies show, some innate component… So, for example, extroversion, introversion has a fairly significant genetic component, which explains about 40-60% of the diversity of people on this basis… There is no single gene, there is a contribution of a large number of genes, each of which contributes a very small part to this single, common trait. The same is true with environmental factors, with upbringing and with the environment… And there is such a thing called the Central Limit Theorem in probability theory. Now I'm going to simplify it very much, but the idea is that if you have some kind of feature, some kind of random variable that is generated by the sum of a large number of factors, each of which makes a minimal contribution, then the most likely, such a plausible distribution of what happens will be a normal dome-shaped distribution. On the vertical Y-axis, we set aside the proportion of people with a certain amount of trait, on the X-axis - the value of the trait. For example, on the left you will have introverts, on the right you will have extroverts, and this will be some scale, then we will see a normal distribution. Most people will be ambivalent, in the middle, and a very small number of people will be as extroverted as possible and a very small number of people will be as introverted as possible. That is, you will not have two discrete types, but you will have such an interesting domed dependence, and most people will be in the middle again”
Socionics would predict the same thing, that this trait is both innate but also somewhat changeable due to subtypical factors. Looks like modern psychology and Socionics agree on this point. Socionics would also predict a normal distribution when it comes to the trait of extroversion vs introversion (as understood by psychology); when you combine the polarity within the type, the subtypical gradations, the volume of expression of various specific functions that relate to extroversion and introversion in a Big 5 sense, the psychosophical type, etc., what you get is the prediction of a roughly normal distribution (extreme extroverts and introverts are relatively rare in Socionics, as there tends to be mollifying factors like subtype, psychosophical type, specific functional accentuations). Thus, Socionics fantastically agrees with the predictions of modern psychology on the expectation of normal distributions for many traits. And all of this is produced by small, systematic factors, just like in psychology, which are in fact typical (just like genes are typical, comprising small, typical components, that build up into something larger and more individual and complex). Looks like Panchin had no idea what he was talking about again, and ironically just proved the plausibility of modern Socionics using established science.
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“And what I have just described is not just some kind of theoretical prediction, there are works by psychologists who analyzed how people are distributed according to a variety of psychometric indicators, which can again be measured. For example, there is such a thing called The Big Five, "The Big Five". In this Big Five, five quantities are measured that can characterize a person. Not five types, but five certain scales by which a person can somehow be assessed and describe some of the properties of his personality. Extroversion, conscientiousness, that is, how responsibly a person approaches what he does, benevolence, how well a person treats others, neuroticism, this is the opposite of emotional stability, and openness to new experiences. It is also related to the intellectual abilities of a person. Here are five such characteristics that psychologists have identified, by the way, without sucking them out of their fingers, there is a huge number of real scientific publications behind this. If you take any of these attributes and plot the distribution of people by these attributes in some population, in some sample, in your class, then you will get a normal distribution. Most people will have an average attribute value. That is, people are not divided into types, these types are fictional and fictional.”
The Big 5 predicts a normal distribution of many psychological traits, just like Socionics (and in any case, Big 5 only studied a very small subset of human behavior, so it doesn’t prove anything about all psychological traits). Maybe Socionists were more informed about modern psychology than Panchin assumed. And Socionics concepts weren’t just invented either, but can be observed in the form of functional states, connected to various hormones and emotional expressions like those of Paul Ekman, have a whole host of historical analogues, etc. In many ways, Socionics has more evidence than the Big Five as a basis of psychological type, because they have real life empirical evidence, as opposed to being derived merely from human language like the Big Five were. The Big Five are tested on the basis of self-assessment tests, a fundamentally flawed method that lacks empiricism and scientific rigor, even if it allows the use of convenient statistics.
Panchin makes the mistake of assuming that a normal distribution can’t be predicted by Socionics or anything typological. Yet, he already gave the example of typological factors that directly produce normal distributions: genetics and their interaction with the environment! Genes are formed based on discrete traits, yet these discrete traits come together to form more complicated traits that result in a normal distribution, just like Socionics predicts.
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“How does socionics work? The Barnum effect. From the very beginning, in fact, Jung's theory, too, its division into types, and then what grew out of it in the form of socionics or MBTI was not based on any empirical data. At the same time, validation of how this typing occurs was carried out according to a completely vicious principle. That is, a person is typed, he is informed, so, you are like this, here is a description for you, how much does it suit you? And then the person says, oh, it suits me. But this method of validation is obviously a losing one.”
Socionics attaches no importance to type descriptions, so Panchin is either lying or just has no idea what he’s talking about. Type descriptions simply exist to familiarize a person with how the system works, and to give behavioral examples of more fundamental traits. However, the only way Sociotype can be legitimately diagnosed is via systematic observation of a person’s behavior in real life situations and information processing based on strict criteria. And sometimes, people do not agree with their diagnosis, which does not change its validity in Socionics methodology; its validity is dependent only on the strength of the objective evidence for giving the diagnosis based on strict and systematic criteria that have to be directly observed, and which other Socionists in the same paradigm must be able to agree with. Thus, the Barnum effect is not even relevant, because description plays no role in Socionics diagnosis.
Panchin is also wrong that Socionics is not based on empirical data. It may only make limited use of statistics (although this is already changing), but empirical data refers to data from experience (like behavioral traits, real life application of Socionics, trait diagnostic criteria that can be applied to real people and verified time and time again). Socionists and Jung have huge amounts of empirical data which motivate their theories to a limited extent. In many ways, Socionics is more empirical than the self-assessment tests of the Big Five which just measure how people think about themselves, not how they directly behave and process information.
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“Firstly, because a person can distort his opinion of himself taking into account the information he has already received, that is, he can adjust himself to the type that was provided to him, and moreover, this may have consequences for his life, because he thinks, so, I need to match my type, so I I will behave a little differently. And there will be such a self-fulfilling, self-confirming forecast.”
Socionics in no way recommends matching "how a type is supposed to behave". In fact, every type has subtypes which break the surface level behavioral stereotypes of the main type in almost every way, and these subtypes can change to fit the needs of the person rather than trapping a person in a strict type. Plus, the Barnum effect is irrelevant as I mentioned, so this is another absolutely wrong, misinformed criticism. Maybe Panchin himself is so lacking in active, critical thinking, that he himself is inclined to misuse systems in these ways, but Socionics makes almost opposite recommendations to what Panchin describes, recognizing the need to adapt.
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“And secondly, because there is a Magnum effect. This is when people accept fairly general descriptions of a person that could suit a large number of people, as if it were about themselves. And therefore, these rather vague formulations that some socionic gives to his client, they may actually have some kind of coincidence. People pay attention to these coincidences, they don't pay attention to the discrepancies. All this is quite blurry, all this is not falsifiable. That is, if a person says, look, it doesn't even really suit me, then the socionic will say, okay, here's a clarifying question for you. That is, you can always pull an owl on a globe and say no, socionics is correct anyway. Okay, this test, maybe it didn't suit you very well, there is another test, or maybe you don't live according to your psychotype, you are generally to blame. "Maybe, maybe not. Or maybe fuck you."”
Socionics doesn’t in any way rely on description, so magnum effect is completely irrelevant. Direct observational signs that Socionics uses, on the contrary, are falsifiable under some circumstances. Such observational signs can be made even more precise and widely applicable, and they no doubt will with more research (and if this requires some changes in Socionics theory, all the better, because real science needs to evolve with more evidence). And Socionics also mostly doesn’t rely on tests, so trying different tests is not relevant. The only tests some versions of Socionics rely on are those of Victor Talanov, which are even more rigorous than Big Five tests in many ways, applying large sample sizes and rigorous mathematical probabilities to their trait clusters.
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“As a result, socionics will always be "right".”
That’s like saying Socionists always believe themselves to be right or believe their theories to always be perfect and are not open to improving them. Yet, there is lots of empirical data proving that Socionists change their type diagnoses based on how empirical data meets strict criteria, and lots of empirical data on Socionists improving and adapting their theories in response to empirical demands of practice and modern science. A great example is the lack of reliance on Aushra's theories, as Panchin mistakenly assumed modern Socionics relies on. It looks like Panchin is just provably wrong here.
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“And there is such a wonderful term that if a theory predicts and explains anything, then it predicts nothing.”
Socionics doesn’t even purport to explain everything, so that’s another misrepresentation to prop up Panchin’s incompetence. Socionics merely explains systematic aspects of people’s psyche and behavior.
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“Again, many people who are Satisfied adherents of socionics. Is it possible to assess the effectiveness of assistance? they practice socionics, earn money from it, they can tell that they have some clients who return to them, who are satisfied with the result, and so on. And this is how they justify their social usefulness and so on. It seems to me that there is one of the best examples that people, for example, may well be satisfied with the service, including not very useful ones. Someone smokes, someone turns to slot machines, some even form a gaming addiction. This does not mean that people are able to assess that something really helped them or did not help them. They may have liked the way they communicated with a person, but this does not mean that if they had not done so, for example, they would have done without socionics in choosing a career, this does not mean that they would have received a worse result. Or if everything worked out in their relationship after they did not consult with socionics, this does not mean that they would not have a good relationship in an alternate reality, where they would not use these services.”
I agree with Panchin that just because some people are satisfied with Socionics doesn’t prove it to be perfect, scientific theory or anything like that, and ultimately more rigorous studies of Socionics would be very beneficial to the refinement of Socionics theory and application. But likewise, it doesn’t prove anything negative about Socionics. The fact that many people find Socionics useful speaks well of Socionics; if even positive results can be used to criticize Socionics, then Panchin's criticisms are unfalsifiable. Smoking, gambling and excessive gaming are widely seen as addictive and negative activities, even if someone enjoys them from the standpoint of sensory pleasures. Using a theory like Socionics to more constructively understand oneself and other people and how people relate in general doesn’t in any way seem like something that gives visceral pleasures the way those other behaviors do, so these are poor analogies. And Panchin trying to tell people that Socionics doesn’t help them and trying to force people to see reality the same way he sees it is exactly like the overbearing people who throw labels on each other at first sight that he loves to criticize so much. Why would it matter to Panchin so much if people enjoy exploring their psyche and the rest of humanity with the help of tools like Socionics? Technically, Panchin’s opinion that people who find value in Socionics are just “making it up” is a conspiracy theory.
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“That is, in order to really test socionics from the point of view of science, you would need to take a large number of people, a large sample. Some of these people would have to receive some kind of consultation in accordance with certain principles of socionics, others would have to receive other people's consultations, intended not for them, but for random people. And we could compare, and where would be the best result? The experiment should be blind, so that the person himself does not know whether he was given the correct typing or the wrong typing. And the experimenter who evaluates the result should not know who is right and who is wrong. And then we could talk about some kind of validity. But again, we do not see such experiments, and we do not have any independent evidence that socionics can really help someone.”
Socionics has already been applied to many thousands of people in real life situations, about which data is in the process of being collected. Blind experiments in typology have actually been tried, with quite a bit of success. For example, the Objective Personality System in America uses exactly such methods in order to determine the types of people, and they were able to achieve over 90% accuracy based on having over 512 types in their method. Cognitive Type, another system, also uses double blind methods for their type diagnostics, and they’ve published multiple highly successful studies on this subject, showing correlations of their typings to various careers as well. Thus, typology of this sort has already been proven to have a lot of validity, thus it is no stretch to imagine that Socionics is quite similar (and Socionics has even more practical, real-life successes than similar systems). Socionics has statistics from Talanov which confirm how many traits can apply in quite typical ways, and statistics from schools like Humanitarian Socionics which prove the validity of the intertype relationships to some extent. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see many more rigorous tests of Socionics, including those which have the potential to refute and refine some of its postulates. The experiments Panchin suggests are too general and simplistic to test most of Socionics, but he wouldn't know that since he never studied it. Panchin's indulgences of conspiracy theories about those who appreciate Socionics, while not mentioning its successes, shows that he is an unreliable scholar who lacks an objective, unbiased approach.
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“At the same time, what freezes me out in general in this whole story about socionics, Attempts to pass off socionics as science. Institute of Socionics. Scientific articles. This is because, in fact, it often claims to have such a status as a real science. There is even a whole institute of socionics, can you imagine?”
Having institutes and scientific journals is something Socionics genuinely has in common with typical science. That’s just a fact. I agree with Panchin that Socionics doesn’t deserve to be considered a full-fledged science but has many features of a protoscience and earlier stages of the scientific process. That’s as good of a start as can be expected, and there are a lot of promising results already that I mentioned.
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“And there's a dude there, the director of this institute, his last name is Bukalov, who publishes a bunch of articles in journals that are indexed by the Russian Science Citation Index. For those who are not aware, the Russian Science Citation Index is something like a scientific library that collects everything that is scientifically published there in Russia. And the presence of a journal there can influence how the scientific community treats it. Is it possible to defend a dissertation by referring to articles from this very RSCI, is it possible to report to them for some kind of government funding, and so on, and so on, and so on. In general, there is this Russian Science Citation Index, but there is a lot of cringe. And there is such a community, called, in fact, KRINGE (Qualitative Russian Index of Scientific Journals). Here, in the High-quality Russian Index of Scientific Journals or KRINGE, some individual works are sometimes published that carry a special, special kringe.”
It sounds like Socionics uses a legitimate Russian citation index, even further integrating their work with academic science, yet another good sign. Yet Panchin uses it to fling mindless emotional ridicule at Socionics. This only gives further proof that Panchin is a biased, untrustworthy critic, whose criticisms are not even falsifiable since they treat both positives and negatives as if they are negative.
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“And there I came across one of these works on socionics by Mr. Bukalov, now I will read you its title. "The effect of human energy fields and his consciousness on the rate of radioactive decay." The summary is as follows. "A significant (10-13%) effect of exposure to gifted healer operators on the rate of radioactive decay has been discovered and investigated. However, people engaged in meditation practices were able to change the rate of radioactive decay by 17-20%. Within the framework of the physics of consciousness, the ability of consciousness to interact with any level of organization of matter is discussed." "What you just said is one of the craziest idiotic things I've ever heard." This is an article from the High-quality Russian Science Citation Index by Mr. Bukalov, who heads the International Institute of Socionics proper. That is, as again, it often happens, if there is some kind of stupidity, there is some completely different one next to it. And this supposedly science, it is trying to seep into some educational institutions, scientific organizations, and so on.”
I can’t speak for the validity of Bukalov’s work, and his work isn’t actually used by most people engaged in Socionics. However, I need to point out that Panchin just treated Bukalov as wrong for no reason at all. Panchin just finds his study and conclusion to be stupid and something he can’t believe. That is a logical fallacy called “argument by personal incredulity”. If Panchin dissected Bukalov’s study and found real issues with the methodology or data it was based on, he might have a persuasive argument, but instead he just mindlessly ridicules Bukalov. All this does is establish him as an incompetent, biased critic. Bukalov has more credibility than Panchin at this point, as was the case with Aushra. It also shows Panchin to be intellectually lazy, which means we cannot rely on his conclusions unless he is willing to show the reasoning of how he arrived at them. Panchin is worried about Socionics seeping into education institutions; I am much more worried about unscientific, biased polemicists like Panchin having a role in educational institutions.
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“On this occasion, I want to tell you about one absolutely wonderful work, so that you can just see the contrast between how socionics approach their business and how normal scientists approach it. That is, there is a typology of a scientist and a typology of a smoker. Let’s compare it.”
This is a completely irrelevant criticism. It implies that Socionics would be wrong if not approached in the way “normal” scientists approach it. But there is such a thing as scientific revolutions, well documented in the history of science, which fundamentally change how science is approached, and major philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn (who was also a trained scientist) contrast such revolutions with normal science. Normal science is important, but it is not the only way science operates, and it’s unscientific and dogmatic to act like everything needs to proceed “normally” to relate to science.
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“So, there is an article in the journal called "Nature Human Behavior". This is a specialized journal on human behavior, very well-known. And there, scientists took a sample of 1.5 million. a person, a huge sample, and for each person they got the value of these five indicators, the five characteristics of the Big Five, which I was talking about, which has been used in science for a long time, for which there are good validated tests. And one can imagine that each person has some kind of value on each of these five scales. These are not types, they are scales. But what did the scientists do next? Let's imagine such a five-dimensional space… And these points can be at different distances from each other… And the question arises: are there clusters, that is, clusters, such nebulae from these points that could be distinguished?”
I agree that this sounds like an interesting study (and something I would love to see Socionists do more of). Talanov also does statistical tests like this, showing all kinds of clusters of traits. Plus, Big 5 tests are not as thorough and scientific as Panchin claims, because Big Five and Talanov tests are only self-reporting tests, meaning they only test how people think about themselves. They don’t necessarily translate to the way people truly behave and process information, so it’s a leap of logic to assume Big Five and Talanov tests describe fundamental personality traits. Thus, Big Five is less empirical than Socionics in studying human behavior, since it’s limited to studying self-perception which only has limited correlation to the real behavior of people, whereas Socionics studies behavior and information processing in a more direct way.
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“Well, in general, of course, it turns out that a person can be anywhere in this space, which already refutes the idea of strict division into types.”
Panchin is just wrong here, as he already demonstrated with his genetics example. A variety of typical factors can combine to produce a normal distribution and finer gradations, just like genes and their interaction with the environment do. Plus, the Big Five and its statistical spaces are only a map, not the fundamental reality of human psychology and cognition. Panchin is making another logical fallacy here: mistaking the map for the territory. Just because a person can have any location on a metric in principle, doesn’t mean the metric can actually measure a person in any location in practice, since there are more real patterns than are strictly taken into account by the measuring tool. Practical implementations of the Big Five necessarily use a discrete amount of questions, so the results of Big Five are technically discrete, not continuous. The way Big Five divides people into discrete locations in its space are just based on measurement assumptions about how the answers to questions connect to personality traits; they don't prove anything about the precise personality traits of people.
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“But if you try very hard and apply different methods of mathematical analysis, then you can isolate a certain number in this large five-dimensional space, namely four they found, such as clusters, such clusters of points. That is, a lot of people seem to be concentrating in this place. And these types, which were discovered in such an empirical way, that is, not invented a priori by someone from some speculative conclusions, but on the contrary, were obtained from the data, that is, someone took the data and tried to find some patterns in this data carefully, in this data these four types have nothing in common with those types that are distinguished by the same socionics, MBTIS and other fans of fortune-telling on personality types.”
This is not completely different from Socionics methodology. They are using not completely rigorous data (in the case of Big Five it is biased self-report data, and in the case of Socionics it is real life experiential data not completely systematized) to find inductive clusters of behavior which can be assigned to traits (just check Talanov and Humanitarian Socionics and other schools that have some empirical methodology). Thus, both Socionics and Big Five use inductive methodology in this sense, with limited results that might be able to be improved in the future. Panchin is wrong; Big Five and Socionics already have a lot in common in their methodology.
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“The authors name these four types as follows. The first one is Average, or averaged, that is, such an ordinary person, let's say. They called the second type Reserved, or reserved. They called the third type Self-Centered, that is, self-centered. And they called the fourth one a Role Model, or a role model, well, like a person who has a low level of neuroticism, but a high level of extroversion, benevolence, integrity and all that stuff. In principle, if you try very hard, you can find something very remotely similar to the types, but there are still people who don't really fit into them, and still this is a very approximate model. Roughly speaking, looking at big data on a sample of 1.5 million people, we can say that socionics, it just has to be thrown into the dustbin of history as a failed pseudoscience.”
These Big Five cluster types are interesting to me as clusters of how people see themselves, but they don't prove anything about clusters of real personality or psychological traits. The Big Five is only a self-reporting instrument (and Panchin himself criticizes the reliability of people’s self-perception because he doesn’t trust them to evaluate whether something like Socionics can help them or not, and he emphasizes systematic errors of perception like apophenia, so he applies skepticism to Socionics and the Big Five in a biased, one-sided way). Since the patterns that Socionics studies are very complex and based on real behavior (not just self-report data), it’s almost impossible to say what patterns Socionics would predict in Big Five studies. Thus, it’s hard for anyone to draw any positive or negative conclusions about Socionics from these Big Five clusters until more correlations are built between these paradigms. It may not even be possible to draw correlations between Socionics and Big Five in the way Panchin hoped, since they study systematically different behaviors so the correlations are likely to be very small.
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“There is no need to type anyone into 16 types, especially since types are not discrete. This use of this very typology can only distance you from the search for truth, from the search for a suitable partner, from the search for some kind of success in terms of a professional career. It's just noise that you need to get rid of and proceed from some specific things, specific information that you know. Well, for example, you know that you are good at programming. So you'll probably make a good programmer. You don't have to look at what the hell type you are. You like the girl Masha, you feel good with her, so you probably fit. You don't need to ask her who she is according to the zodiac sign, what she has according to the MBTI typology, what she has according to the socionics typology or what kind of bread she is. Well, you can ask about bread rolls, of course, it's okay. But it makes little sense, but as much as in socionics. Unfortunately, socionics continues to be very popular.”
Types are discrete by definition, so to say that types are not discrete is wrong by definition, which is another example of Panchin not paying attention to logic. The drastic conclusion that Socionics can only distance you from truth, searching for partners, and successful careers has already been proven wrong in the case of many people who have found fulfillment in their relationships and self-development with the help of Socionics, even if there are many people who Socionics was not useful to. His drastic conclusion is made even more ridiculous by the fact that I could systematically refute nearly every point in his entire video, with logical fallacies, misrepresentations, and lack of basic knowledge found at almost every step of his argument. Panchin's argument is about as much of a joke as the many jokes he made during the video.
Obviously, a good programmer would make a good programmer; Socionics isn’t a boogey monster who wants to take that from anyone. On the other hand, Socionics could suggest trying programming to someone who doesn’t know what they are good at, because they are systematically similar to many people who are good at this profession. This suggestion may be helpful in many cases, and in some cases it might not, and either way it’s not going to hurt anyone. Socionics can also illuminate what states of minds programmers of any type might want to cultivate, and what sort of a functions they might want to pump, because Socionics is actually a very flexible theory.
Socionics is not telling you what relationship to have. It describes the relationships between all types and subtypes, so it can help illuminate certain features of the interaction that might make it even more fulfilling or more beneficial to you. It certainly doesn’t limit people to having relationships with only certain types; that is just a false stereotype about Socionics from how it was practiced half a century ago.
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“The spread of socionics. How to resist? As I said, it continues to integrate into the education system, including in some universities. And therefore, it seems to me very important to convey to the maximum number of people that you do not need to spend money on such trainings, courses, pay these socionics salaries so that this thing grows even more, spreads and affects more and more areas. It's like such a metastatic cancerous tumor. She wants more resources in herself, and then she metastasizes to different strata of society. She has already struck relationships and profession, and then, I do not know, there, politicians will be chosen according to psychological type or something like that. In general, I don't want to live in such a world. I hope you do too. And let's spread the information that socionics and similar typologies, there are a lot of them, the same astrology, all this does not work. So subscribe to the channel and share this video with your friends. Send it to Hamlets, Zhukov, Yesenin, Stirlitz, Maxims, do not send it, they will do. Bye everyone!”
There is no need to resist something just because it’s not interesting to you, and there is no need to be so meddlesome in the business of other people. That is needlessly hostile and will likely just cause Socionists to push their theories even harder and with more determination. It is kind of creepy to be so concerned with what people do with their own time and interests, especially as it concerns somewhat speculative and complex ideas. People need to be free to explore what interests and works for them. In fact, all Panchin’s video will do is polarize people more since it is such an unprofessional, logically fallacious, dishonest and ill-informed criticism. It will no doubt cause cheers among those who do not like Socionics but have no interest in assessing it rigorously, and justified criticism from those who enjoy Socionics, whereas productive and useful criticisms, interviews and experiments would have been far more useful.
Highly recommended video from Formscapes to go along with this article:
This is a fantastic argument, well done.
ReplyDeleteHello, if you understand Russian, here is our video with a detailed analysis of the incompetent Panchin video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOsJYYonEf0
ReplyDeletemy tg channel in English https://t.me/socionics_mbti
Hi Timur, good to hear from you. You typed me as ILI FLEV more than 4 years ago, in case you don’t remember. And I’m glad to see more people exposing Panchin’s nonsense.
DeleteI mostly don’t understand Russian except absolute basics, but I have some people around me who understand it. I’m actually very interested in translating your videos because it looks like a treasure trove of information and type diagnostics that could be very useful for an English audience to understand your work better (myself included). I think semantics is a plausibly quite objective and scientific direction in Socionics in comparison to self-assessment tests that we see from Big Five and Talanov (because self-assessment depends too much on a person’s opinion and seems to lack internal consistency).
I also got your Modern Socionics book when I was in Europe and started translating it.
Didn’t know you had a telegram for English speakers until a few weeks ago actually (a friend told me), I’ll check it out soon.