#rluei

Alright, we’re clearly not going to stop throwing around MBTI types any time soon.

As a harm-reduction measure (and to stir things up a bit) I propose we start using SLOAN instead. It’s an implementation of the Big Five / OCEAN personality traits, which have a lot more reliability (people’s results change less between tests) and generally seem to have a lot more scientific support than MBTI.

It has five axes instead of four; all but one correlate to varying degrees with MBTI.

It also has varying degrees of granularity! Instead of the usual 16 MBTI types, this website gives you:

10 “primary” types -- the single axis you are most extreme on. In my case, I = Inquisitive, high Intellect, the equivalent of OCEAN’s “Openness To Experience”. No surprise there, if you read the sample items at that link.

32 “SLOAN” types -- analogous to the MBTI ones: each axis is rounded off to “high” or “low”, with opposing pairs of labels. I’m RLUEI, which translates as: Reserved = low Extroversion Limbic = high Emotional Stability (Neuroticism) Unstructured = low Orderliness (Conscientiousness) Egocentric = low Accommodation (Agreeableness) Inquisitive = high Intellect (Openness)

RLUEI correlates with INTP (plus high Neuroticism), which, yeah.

The sample test items for RLUEI are not quite as... sugarcoated as most MBTI descriptions, but they’re drawn directly from the actual data, which I can respect.

>7000 “SLOAN+” types, where each axis has capitalization to indicate a strong or weak deviation from the average, very ambiguous axes are marked “x”, and there are pipes around the primary type. I’m rLUe|I|. If my “e” (egocentric) score were slightly lower, I’d be rLUx|I|.

One caveat is that Accommodation doesn’t seem to mean quite the same thing as Agreeableness -- it’s more about prioritizing others and less about getting along with others, which is a pretty big difference in my case. (I’m pretty sure I’ve scored as having moderately high Agreeableness on other tests.) This is probably also true of the other axes, so your intuitions about the OCEAN version of the Big Five may not carry over. Also, as mentioned above, they really aren’t trying at all to make these sound value-neutral the way MBTI does.

So I got RLUEI, and the description seems rather negative:

      “avoidant, withdrawn, not usually happy, does not believe in human goodness, loner, moody, avoids crowds, depressed, overwhelmed by unpleasant feelings frequently, agnostic/atheistic tendencies, unsure where life is going, impatient, avoids eye contact, does not think things work out for the best, discontent, negative, suspicious of others, uncooperative, socially uncomfortable, hard to get to know, not punctual, low self confidence, pessimistic, lonely, does not finish work on time, does not like to lead, attracted to things associated with sadness, ambivalent about the problems of others, feels defective, fears failure, often bored, ambivalent about the suffering of others, unproductive, avoids unnecessary interaction, easily frustrated, does not finish many things, lower energy level, focuses on fantasies instead of reality, ambivalent about the needs of others, easily annoyed, rarely prepared, disorganized, quiet around strangers, slow to forgive, hard to understand, not that interested in others, skeptical, wounded at the core, self absorbed”