As I’ve mentioned before, my Myers-Briggs “personality type” shifted as I got older to ESTP. It is my contention that whatever your type you should like it since personality is a reflection of conscious decisions about how to think, feel, and behave. Here is some good information on my type from a statistical point of view:
Science
22
Apr 05
Twitterpated
We have one of these adorable little Tufted Titmouses (Titmice?) banging into the window here at work several times a day. He looks ticked off. For a while we called him Jon Shelus after a guy who works here, since whenever the bird would appear Jon was nowhere in sight.
Here’s some information on why they do it:
Birds are hurling themselves against windows, hammering on drainpipes and pecking on glass. But don’t let it get to you — it won’t last much longer, says a wildlife biologist in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.
“At the beginning of the breeding season, birds are establishing territories,” says Margaret Brittingham, associate professor of wildlife resources. “They’re singing, displaying and telling all of the other males of their species to keep out.”
When a bird sees his reflection in a window, he thinks it’s an intruder, she says. So he ‘displays’ to try to get the intruder to leave. “Of course the ‘intruder’ displays back, and the bird gets madder and madder until he starts pecking on the glass.”
It’s cute when you think about it.
17
Mar 05
Altruism and punishment
Very interesting stuff on the evolution of altruism. What is the evolutionary incentive for acting in ways that do not benefit the individual? From the New Scientist via Life With Alacrity:
02
Mar 05
Analogies and metaphors
Life fascinates me, people fascinate me. I want to know and understand things and thereby help fix things, remove poisons, untwist knots. But, why do I want to “fix” things? I’m not sure.
Today I have been thinking about addiction and escape. Why people cling to their addictions for fear of themselves. In composing my thoughts tying extraversion to sadism, introversion to masochism, I reread some Weininger. His ideas on sadism and masochism are profound, although in his view sadism and masochism seem to be terms of expressing duality especially as relates to male/ female nature.
08
Feb 05
Psychology
It seems like everyone has an escape mechanism, an addiction of some sort. The desire for or relief from sensation. Something to dampen, mute, or divert. Addiction is the eroticism of feeling itself, not just bodily sensation, but also emotional sensation. Many choose to feel anything rather than nothing and push themselves up or down with sensation. When emotion drains away what do you have left? More to the point, when you strip away the emotion what is left of you? Our feelings and emotions anchor consciousness.
Questions:
- What do you use to escape?
- Where do you seek relief? In activity? In knowledge? In memory?
- Why do you seek escape? What from?
Many of my habits have a impulsive nature. For example, a number of my activities have to do with desires for control, predictability, and stability. Why do I read the news so often? Why do I try to know as much as I can about so many different things? The thirst for knowledge and understanding can represent a desire for control, especially control of experience. I do not deal well with unknowns. Knowledge is not power, although it provides the sensation of power and control. But, what can be known and what are the limitations of knowledge? What we try to know dispels the maddening intangibility of the unknown. It lends a false sense of definition and order to a universe of incomprehensibility.
I feel the same way about history and the past. People who fear powerlessness idealize the past and imbue it with sentiment and importance at the expense of the elusive being of the present (action-oriented responsibility?) and the yet to be of the future (forethought-oriented responsibility?). In a real sense, the past is powerless to your own perception and can be manipulated and fetishized. The past imposes few responsibilities, while the future and present dictate volition.
I’m not sure if I’m making myself clear. I’ve just been thinking out loud. Here are some semi-related psychology links I found today that are worth reading:
- A psychoanalysis of gambling and gambling addiction
- For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be ‘Evil’ Dr. Stone represents another attempt at defining the incomprehensible, in this case “Evil”:
Researchers have found that some people who commit violent crimes are much more likely than others to kill or maim again, and one way they measure this potential is with a structured examination called the psychopathy checklist.
As part of an extensive, in-depth interview, a trained examiner rates the offender on a 20-item personality test. The items include glibness and superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, proneness to boredom and emotional vacuity. The subjects earn zero points if the description is not applicable, two points if it is highly applicable, and one if it is somewhat or sometimes true.
18
Jan 05
More O.W.
I’m keep coming across good passages from Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character. Bear with me:
On the self and others, individualism and universalism:
It is easy to give proofs. Only brutalised criminals and insane persons take absolutely no interest in their fellow men; they live as if they were alone in the world, and the presence of strangers has no effect on them. But for him who possesses a self there is a self in his neighbour, and only the man who has lost the logical and ethical centre of his being behaves to a second man as if the latter were not a man and had no personality of his own. “I” and “thou” are complementary terms. A man soonest gains consciousness of himself when he is with other men. This is why a man is prouder in the presence of other men than when he is alone, whilst it is in his hours of solitude that his self-confidence is damped. Lastly, he who destroys himself destroys at the same time the whole universe, and he who murders another commits the greatest crime because he murders himself in his victim. Absolute selfishness is, in practice, a horror, which should rather be called nihilism; if there is no “thou,” there is certainly no “I”, and that would mean there is nothing.
There is in the psychological disposition of the man of genius that which makes it impossible to use other men as a means to an end. And this is it: he who feels his own personality, feels it also in others. For him the Tat-tvam-asi is no beautiful hypothesis, but a reality. The highest individualism is the highest universalism.
17
Jan 05
Lions vs. Hyenas
Apropos the previous post on sex differences, a friend at work sent me a link to a video (right-click to save) depicting a violent clash between a pack of lions and a pack of hyenas over a wildebeest carcass the females of the pride had killed. During the course of the video the hyenas in larger numbers manage to steal the kill from the pride. Later in the video the dominant male lion kills the hyena matriarch and her successor. This clip is edited down from documentary footage.
You might be surprised to know that hyenas and lions differ greatly in social structure and biological morphology. Hyena society is female dominant. Physically, hyena females are larger than male hyenas (females in Kruuk’s East African clans averaged 120 pounds in body weight versus 107 pounds for males) and possess similar sex organs including a “peniform clitoris” and “false scrotum”. Detailed explanation here with illustrations. Lions on the other hand, possess a similar structure to other predatory pack mammals with an alpha male and lesser males and females.
17
Jan 05
Otto Weininger… in english
Martin Dudaniec and Kevin Solway’s translation of Otto Weininger: Collected Aphorisms, Notebook and Letters to a Friend is now available for free from their website. A while back I had to pay five dollars or so to download it, so I’m glad to see the authors have now switched to accepting donations. If you feel particularly appreciative you can donate here. They are also now offering a translation of Weininger’s Sex and Character as a PDF. The writing is lively and provocative and you will have much to agree or disagree with. For example, here are a few selections:
12
Jan 05
Self-control comes in limited quantities
I’ve been collecting information today. One thing I discovered today is that deleting dead people from your AIM buddy list feels creepy. Here is an interesting yet unrelated article, Self-control comes in limited quantities, must be replenished:
Self-control, whether used to pass up the office cookie plate or to struggle against temptations like alcohol and tobacco, operates like a renewable energy source rather than a learned skill or an analytical thought process, according to new research.
Individuals had less physical stamina and impulse control and increased difficulty with problem-solving activities after completing a variety of tasks that required some measure of self-control, according to Roy F. Baumeister, Ph.D., of Florida State University.
The finding may be helpful in treating a number of behavioral health problems, from gambling disorders to alcoholism.
“Learning more about how to maintain, increase and replenish this resource may hold one promising key to helping people avoid addiction,” says Baumeister.
The study appears in the February 2003 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
11
Jan 05
Secret Lives
Compelling article at the NYTimes, The Secret Lives of Just About Everybody:
But in a series of experiments over the past decade, psychologists have identified a larger group they call repressors, an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the population, who are adept at ignoring or suppressing information that is embarrassing to them and thus well equipped to keep secrets, some psychologists say.
Repressors score low on questionnaires that measure anxiety and defensiveness – reporting, for example, that they are rarely resentful, worried about money, or troubled by nightmares and headaches. They think well of themselves and don’t sweat the small stuff.
Although little is known about the mental development of such people, some psychologists believe they have learned to block distressing thoughts by distracting themselves with good memories. Over time – with practice, in effect – this may become habitual, blunting their access to potentially humiliating or threatening memories and secrets.
“This talent is likely to serve them well in the daily struggle to avoid unwanted thoughts of all kinds, including unwanted thoughts that arise from attempts to suppress secrets in the presence of others,” Dr. Wegner, of Harvard, said in an e-mail message.