Why are we even doing this?

(I moved this from the Baldwin thread to here).

I can't say enough that this is a work that will never and should never be done. There can never be more than tendencies and trends. A person is very complex. The beauty of the system as it was originally used was that it was so simple--just 9 types; then 9 types with one instinct and/or a dominant wing. The ugly was that it was obviously too simple. Naranjo's 9 is bovine; RH's Four is godlike in its creative powers. Anyone who thinks they'll find the answers by, say, proclaiming Ichazo the ultimate authority might consider, for instance, his dichotomy for E4: argumentative/shallow. RH's Four was an improvement on Ichazo's in many ways but it went way too far in the other direction.

The co-founder of this board and I wanted to synthesize what really worked from different E-schools of thought and have exemplars of people that went against prevalent stereotypes so that people could find their core fixation and whatever other significant components contributed to it. One big aspect of this was the 'tritype gestalts', which, frankly, I would not have thought of starting at that time. Although the gestalts were organically emerging, such a project really seemed like overreach, and indeed it's proven to be...big.

Still we never wanted to create an app à la fever dream of Fauvres where you can input people you meet by type and find out how you'll get on with them, and I still don't want to build people in the basement. There is, I'm told, a precept taught in psychology programs that the more factors there are in a diagnostic description, the greater the tendency is to falsification. This makes perfect sense. What to do with such a paradox--too simple as it was v. too complex now?

Adding ct into the mix, the complexity is potentially limitless; thus also the potential for falsification. I find when I compare my typings to professionals and other luminaries, I get a majority agreement and that's it. If it were possible to have careful, in good faith discussions I'd expect consensus about lead type at least to go up to a large majority,. But with so many people so invested in appointing themselves, and their own, variations on Miles Davis and relegating Other/s to lowly types, I don't hold my breath.

I often find this work onerous; there are things I'd rather do. My plodding along with it is, however, explained by my rather "Prussian 6" (that is, 1-fixed and not social last) and INTJ. I'm not so enamored of my "T", and it developed fully after Fi for sure, but it's turned out to be a relentlessly scrupulous master. And so I plod as it prods and the one consistent path and partner has been Time.