My thought patterns are not quite as unique as I had previously thought. Henri Poincaré’s thought processes appeared to resemble my own.
So it isn't quite unique
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Category Archives: Psychology
Executives and names
I hypothesized that most executives have names near the beginning of the alphabet. I decided to check this hypothesis on Google’s list of executives (sample size 42; I left out the board of directors), ran a simple linear regression analysis, and found a trendline:
y=-.106x+3.089
Where x=1 signifies ‘A’, x=2 signifies ‘B’, etc. Given that the maximum bin range (one bin per alphabetic character) was 4 and the domain contains 26 variables, this is a decently significant trend. (This is a cursory analysis; I’m not doing anything particularly powerful, so pardon the lack of t-tests and other heavy-duty analysis techniques).
There were 27 executives with last names in the range A-L and 16 with last names in the range M-Z. The graph was trimodal, with peaks in C-D, L-N, and S-T.
Unconscious aptitude is more natural
I’ve already figured out that unconscious aptitude is rarer than focused thought (and thus fortuitous), but not until this point did I realize that it might actually be the innate sort of intelligence!
While walking, I hypothesized that unconscious intelligence, the state I tend to prefer to very focused concentration (except when deeply involved in, say, a particularly fun math proof), is most likely a more natural form of intelligence that most people lose because they are conditioned to specialize (and thus must think – consciously – very hard about very narrow subjects, leaving no time, and eventually little will, for “free” contemplation). After all, most gifted people that I know tended to think that way until they reached college. It follows, then, that I retained my ability to think as I do quite definitely because I was never significantly challenged. That explains why I accomplished my greatest intellectual achievements outside of the context of formal education (with the exception of graduating with the highest GPA in my class, which wasn’t so much an achievement as a reward). The fact that I could achieve such things at such a young age simply served to reinforce the behavior, and thus now I can advance my understanding of many fields in parallel where the others I knew cannot. Their knowledge outside of their specializations ends at whatever proficiency they built it up to at the time they were teenagers, and by the time they revisit it again, it will be too late to master… but mine continues to grow.
Coming up with compositions vs. writing them
I’ve figured out why it’s so easy for me to think up new compositions but difficult for me to actually write them down: one can intuitively think up songs; in fact, this is how it’s usually done (Fi might play a role too, but it’s a minor one). However, writing them down is a strictly introverted sensory activity… and on the MBTI, Si is the least preferred of the functions by the INTJ type.
But I need to go through the work if my music is to become real.
Flocking and magnets
Certain people function as “social magnets”, for lack of a better phrase. They’ll walk into a room and bring the party with them. (In Soviet Russia, the Party walks YOU into a room! …Sorry, couldn’t resist). They tend to attract people in two topologies: mesh (small groups of people interacting with each other) or star (everyone talking to the “magnet”). When they walk into a quiet room and their entourage begins to build, the former inhabitants of that room (who are almost certainly all introverts) will look for an excuse to leave.
This takes place in cities too, except that now we have groups rather than individuals:
Suppose a group of, say, famous musicians decides to buy houses in a specific area (say, Rumson, NJ). The entire town will attract fans of the group, who will find common ground interacting with each other about the musicians, or will interact with the musicians themselves.
This is a recurring motif on all levels of social organization, and might be worth thinking about in more depth.
Small changes
In music and marketing, small incremental changes are best.
Perception
Never presume that any action of society is objective.
Past use of language governs future use of language!
The early adopters set the trends once they have carved niches for themselves! They create them around their own skillsets. They don’t exist before then, and that explains how research fads come into being and why there are always one or two leaders at the very origin of a field! The very language of the field grows around these individuals!
Sorry if I got somewhat carried away with that insight. It just happens to support something I called the “initialism” principle, which I had largely discarded a while ago. That principle states that the present state of nearly everything is influenced by its origin. Please don’t mistake it for determinism; it makes no claim that the present state of things is exactly determined by the state of their origins.
Classifying MBTI from a text sample
Using text mining techniques, I am going to attempt to build a naive Bayesian classifier capable of determining a person’s Myers-Briggs type from a sample of text that they write. This should be a fairly quick project once I finish with everything else. Whether it works or not is another story. Most likely it will, but no one will use it, so I’ll never accumulate a sufficient training set. No one uses anything I create these days, despite the constantly improving quality of my creations.
Anyway, if it does work, it’s publication-worthy, as this sort of thing hasn’t been done before, as far as I can tell. It could open up a whole new approach to automated psychological testing.
Update: It’s been done by uClassify. Pretty neat stuff.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
I have quite a few problems with this hypothesis. It isn’t that the hypothesis is flawed – quite the contrary, actually: this hypothesis is so obvious that it really doesn’t deserve to be named after two people who, incidentally, were not the first to discover or write about it. Another problem I have is that it’s needlessly specific. It can be summarized in three words as “language influences thought”, when a much more general hypothesis (the one I arrived at as a child and later incorporated into my psychological postulates) is “expression influences thought”. Finally, the hypothesis is needlessly unidirectional: to argue that expression is not a product of thought, formal system that it is, is ludicrous. Therefore, an even stronger statement is “expression and thought influence each other”.
I needed to be born 50 years ago, when the obvious things weren’t all discovered yet. But then, perhaps I would have died in childbirth had that happened.