Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

My favorite UFO cult, the Raelians, have chosen this most appropriate of holiday seasons to announce the birth of the first human clone (CNN, Washington Post). To celebrate the auspicious nativity, I’ve cut-and-pasted the traditional poem:

Welcome back to MBTI theatre. Last time, we saw Jemima torn between two rival spellings (extrovert vs. extravert). This week, she addresses the next two letters in the MBTI alphabet, S/N.

The biggest divide between personality types, I believe, is that of perception. Sensing types (S) trust the input of the five senses, while intuitives (N) prefer to listen to the unconscious, with its flashes of insight into the world. An S is a realist who lives for the present, while an N dreams of possible futures.

S types distrust all indirect experience, even the spoken or written word, so it’s surprising to find them on-line at all. The Internet depends almost entirely on writing. I suspect a great deal of hostility towards on-line discussions, either from trolls or from milder anti-meta types, comes from the S’s basic distrust of imaginative discourse.

The controversial muse, bringer of inspiration directly from the unconscious, is an N phenomenon. The extreme S is likely to deny the very possibility of inspiration because it is alien to their personality type. Careful descriptions of the world and the characters as they are, is, perhaps, the province of the S - it’s hard for me to say because I’m an N, in a fandom particularly attractive to N’s and correspondingly unattractive to S’s.

I’ve always considered an interest in science fiction the surest marker of the N type - it hasn’t failed me as a predictor yet. Sci-fi is the literature of a certain personality type. Fanfic, when it explores the possibilities left open by a sci-fi or fantasy show with AU’s or fresh adventures, is N; when it repeats rote romantic stories that have little to do with space, wizardry or vampire-slaying, it is S.

I’m rather attached to the theory that S’s cause bad pairing fic to happen, because otherwise I’d have no explanation for it at all. That leaves me no excuse for my own badfic, though - there isn’t enough S in me to fill a thimble.

Free stuff of the day: Fractal Desktop designs, linked by The Free Site.

I’ve made a new Anomaly category for weird science, exotic syndromes, and personality typing. Tonight I’m finally starting my long-promised foray into online personality types, with the first letters of the MBTI alphabet: E/I.

MBTI critics rarely stick at the distinction between extroversion and introversion. The continuum is clear and most people can identify both themselves and others as either extroverts or an introverts. Technically, E/I isn’t about sociability per se but about whether a person is more interested in the outer world or the inner life.

I started wondering about E/I on-line because E/I determines whether one prefers to use the judging or perceiving process in one’s interactions with the outside world. Never mind the J/P dominant/auxiliary process technobabble for the moment; the question I found myself facing was, Is the Internet the outer or the inner world?

I concluded that on most counts, the ‘net is the inner life. There are little clues, like our habit of referring to the off-line world as RL (real life), no matter how much of our real energy and real time we devote to the virtual life. There are big clues, like the prevalence of virtual extroverts who are introverts according to the RL MBTI. (Seema, can I use you as an example?)

The determining factor, though, is the mediating nature of the net. Real extroverts prefer immediate contact with real people in the flesh, rather than asynchronous communication through writing. Stop and think of typical extroverts you know in RL - are they ‘net fiends? Everyone I know who has a net.problem is a classic introvert in RL. Otherwise, they’d be out there in the bar scene, associating with Real People.

So we are all introverts here - and yet an on-line introvert is an oxymoron. If you don’t communicate on-line, you fall below the radar and you aren’t even here. So we are all extroverted here, if we are here at all - I’m brash and yellow with unsought enemies on-line, despite my RL introversion.

What happens if an extrovert does happen to get involved in, say, on-line fandom? Would she morph into a troll? I don’t think so. I think she’d be just a flash-in-the-pan AOL user that comes along, tries to chat but can’t quite grasp the lingo or the appeal, perhaps makes some contacts with people she can meet in RL, and goes away again. Extroverts have better things to do with their time.

Next time on MBTI Theatre, S/N…

Because I do intend to spout off on personality type soon, I’ll put up my collection of Myers-Briggs Type indicator links now.

• The Four Temperaments is Kiersey’s simplification of the sixteen MBTI types.
• TypeLogic has descriptions of all 16 types.
• Human Metrics has an on-line type indicator quiz.
• Personality Pathways lists just the eight options and has you choose between each pair, for a quick, if inaccurate, type result.
• For the advanced typee, Discover Your Personality has a Step II (Form Q) which breaks the four preferences into five facets each, for a total of 20, each broken down further into a range of intensity. You have to pay to take it, though you could guess a bit by looking at the PDF sample report.
• INTP.org is the web home of my personality type. Note especially the pseudo-acronym status bar scroller at the bottom of your browser window.
• The Star Trek Personality Test is based on the MBTI. To see the characters by type, check out my blog entry about it.
• This link to SG1 Types comes compliments of Jerie.

Word count: 33,390 (two-thirds done!)

I forgot to mention one bit of weird cognitive science I ran across in The Einstein Syndrome - Williams syndrome. The author mentioned it as an example of his theory of brain resources getting unequally used, which would allow his Einstein syndrome children to read with an overstocked area of the brain, but not speak because that area had been temporarily shortchanged.

In Williams syndrome the symptoms are opposite, and the shortchanging is permanent. Children with the syndrome display precocious linguistic and social skills, being able to work a room like a miniature politician. However, such children have very low IQ’s (the example Sowell gave was 49), and often cannot read above the first-grade level or live independently.

Sowell quotes a Dr. Ursula Bellugi: “What makes Williams syndrome so fascinating is it shows that the domains of cognition and language are quite separate.” You wouldn’t quite know that from Einstein syndrome because those children eventually do learn to speak normally. It’s a cool brain fact, isn’t it?

Word count: aaarrrrrgh!

It turned out that someone I know was mentioned in The Einstein Syndrome - no one you’d ever think had a “syndrome” in his youth. For all I know, I could have had it. My mother doesn’t even remember when I started talking, and I doubt she had her eyes on the toddler development chart at the time. Who noticed, until very recently, whether their children progressed from single words, to phrases, to full sentences exactly on schedule?

Sowell’s book made me glad to have grown up before Ritalin and peanut allergies and the autism epidemic, when they left us more or less alone. Now there are experts waiting to drag your children away into classes for the autistic, when the only problem is that they read English better than they speak it. The experts mentioned in the book were usually unwilling to take the parents’ first-hand experiences of their own children into account. The Vision of the Anointed was about that sort of thing, but on a wider scale than just one frequently-misdiagnosed childhood syndrome.

One endearing (to me) quality of the children with Einstein syndrome was their frequent refusal to obey the experts. They would refuse to answer questions or jump through hoops, and the semi-professional evaluators would mark down that they didn’t know the answer, or couldn’t jump through the hoop. In fact, Sowell never makes it entirely clear whether late-talking children cannot talk at an earlier age, or simply will not talk until they’re good and ready to. He gave examples of children who were overheard practicing words in secret before they would speak them in public - toddler perfectionists, as it were.

Word count: let’s not and say we did

I stopped by a bookstore on my way home tonight to look for The Einstein Syndrome by Thomas Sowell. I’d been doing research about another childhood psychological problem with which I’d callously afflicted one of my novel’s main characters when I surfed into Sowell’s book. I’d read one of his books before - The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy - so I was intrigued to see him writing on such an unrelated topic. Like the other book I bought, Gifts Differing, it was something I would have borrowed if the Boston Public Library hadn’t managed to “lose” all its circulating copies of both books. I could have bought a whole shelf at Buck-a-Book for what those two books cost, but they’re not the sort of book that gets remaindered.

I had to work to get the book, too. I found it listed in the kiosk computer catalog as being in stock in the bookstore, but there was no shelf that fit the location given (Psychology - Family - Child Psychology). I asked one of the staff - let’s call her Retail Girl - and she went back to the staff kiosk and asked another of the staff (Retail Guy). I followed a little behind, but I was just in time to hear Retail Guy tell Retail Girl that the section was upstairs. She, however, wanted to look it up for me in her special staff kiosk computer catalog, and her computer said it wasn’t in stock.

When it comes to a choice between what I retrieved from a computer and what some random Retail Girl retrieved from a computer, I trust myself. It may sound snobbish, but considering that I was writing Basic before Retail Girl was writing English and that I had noticed the not-yet-published paperback version of the book listed under an entirely different section (Family and Education - Child Psychology), I decided to give Retail Guy’s directions a shot. So I went away in apparent despair, but turned at the escalator and checked out the second floor. There was indeed a Family - Child Psychology section there, and fortunately I knew to look around the autism books. Presto! So I got to blow $25 on the book despite the best efforts of Retail Girl to help me.

But I digress. Einstein syndrome refers to smart children who start talking significantly later than other toddlers, to the point where some can even read before they can talk. Sometimes they’re misdiagnosed with autism or attention deficit disorder. (It sounds to me like it’s related to Asperger’s Syndrome.) Sowell had a son with the Einstein syndrome; he wrote an earlier book about his son and others like him (Late-Talking Children) which was criticized for being anecdotal. This work is his scientific evidence.

I love comparative genetics and weird cognitive science; if I could only work more of that into the novel I wouldn’t be 5,000 words behind.

Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758-1840) was not the first person to ask why the
night sky was dark, but he got all the credit and top billing in the paradox. (He
made less philosophical observations of comets and asteroids, too.)
If you’re curious about the solution to Olbers’ paradox - the
answer is not obvious - then check out
curiouser.co.uk, home
of the paradoxical.

I’m always a day behind the news because I read it in the Metro
instead of watching on TV or paying attention to the radio in the morning. No
sooner had I found out that we’re all going to die of
Asteroid 2002
NT7 than the sky was declared less likely to fall. Armageddon amuses me,
so I’m glad there are other signs of the End out there.

In the doom and gloom news, a Korean woman is
pregnant
with a human clone. One probably shouldn’t trust a news service called
Pravda - it protests too much, as it were - but one part of the
article I know to be true from other sources: The big force behind cloning is
the Raelian sect, which believes mankind
was left here by aliens. Besides their
cloning projects, they’re also into
crop circles and hedonism.

The most disturbing man bites dog story I read this week was about the
new centipede
in Central Park. There should not be anything new under the mulch. The
Wisconsin plan to kill
25,000
deer with Mad Deer Disease pales by comparison.

Space Weather News for May 10, 2002

A PLANETARY REMINDER: As the sky fades to black on Friday evening, May
10th, Venus and Mars will pop out of the twilight a mere one-third of a
degree apart. (The tip of your pinky held at arms length is about twice
that wide.) It’s a rare opportunity to peer through a telescope and see
two planets at once — or simply enjoy them with your unaided eye. Look
toward the west after sunset to find the pair. Visit SpaceWeather.com for
more information and recent images of the ongoing planet show.