{"id":3404,"date":"2006-02-18T11:29:54","date_gmt":"2006-02-18T19:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2006\/02\/18\/3404.html"},"modified":"2006-02-18T11:29:54","modified_gmt":"2006-02-18T19:29:54","slug":"enneagram-meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2006\/02\/18\/enneagram-meme\/","title":{"rendered":"Enneagram meme"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Supergee points to a two-question \"Quick and Painless Enneagram Test<\/a>.\" The Enneagram<\/a> being (among other things) yet another model of personality types. (That Wikipedia article has a bunch of interesting stuff in it about the history of the Enneagram; looks like the symbol was first used (at least in modern times) by Gurjieff and Ouspensky.) <\/p>\n

The test has two questions, each of which present three choices; there are thus obviously nine possible results. I took it and got a result that seemed reasonably accurate. But then I tried some alternate answers and got other results that seemed just as accurate.<\/p>\n

It seems that I'm a One, Two, Five, and Nine. For each of those, about 3\/4 of the description bullets seemed to match me pretty well, and at least one bullet in each of those categories was very accurate for me. I didn't see the Six outcome, but I gather that it would match me reasonably well too.<\/p>\n

(On the other hand, I don't think any<\/em> of the \"you're definitely an x if you do y\" cartoons on the results pages matched for me.)<\/p>\n

In short, for me this test has the same problem that most personality tests have: the categorizations are so vague and broad that too many of them (roughly half in this case) seem to be accurate descriptions. (That may, of course, just be me; it may well be that most people do find one or two of the nine boxes significantly more accurate than the others in describing them.)<\/p>\n

Of course, for the makers of personality tests, that's not a flaw; that's the hallmark of a good test, because it means almost anyone who takes the test will come away feeling that it described them well.<\/p>\n

That's one reason I like the Myers-Briggs<\/a> test, despite its flaws; it does a reasonably good job of putting me in one of its sixteen boxes (well, okay, actually midway between two of them), and<\/em> the other categories aren't<\/em> very good descriptions of me.<\/p>\n

(But mostly I like the Myers-Briggs because it exposed me to the introvert\/extrovert distinction, and specifically to the idea that extroverts gain energy from social interaction; it had never occurred to me that that could happen, and it explained a lot about my extrovert friends.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Supergee points to a two-question “Quick and Painless Enneagram Test.” The Enneagram being (among other things) yet another model of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}