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Corvidianus

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Corvidianus is Currently Reading

Corvidianus is currently reading

Why Did He Wed Her?

by E.D.E.N. Southworth

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15 hours, 55 min ago

Corvidianus is currently reading

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

by Erving Goffman

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Corvidianus said: " I’m not an acolyte of type theory, or personality theory in any of its reductive/typological forms, but I grew up around it and so do sometimes assess people’s behavior through those lenses as it’s sometimes a useful paradigm. But I’ve understood for I’m not an acolyte of type theory, or personality theory in any of its reductive/typological forms, but I grew up around it and so do sometimes assess people’s behavior through those lenses as it’s sometimes a useful paradigm. But I’ve understood for awhile now that it is an incomplete understanding of how humans work, even if one paints broadly with it.
For one, I grew up around “tests”. My personality was “tested” by a family member very early on, and this of course got me in the habit of periodically reevaluating as I noticed changes. Of course, the lore behind many psychological taxonomies like MBTI (or more credibly, its offspring, the Big 5/OCEAN) or, even less credibly, the enneagram, asserts that one does not *change* “type”. That our personalities and motivations merely mature in their concrete archetypal temperament—developing Kiersian cognitive functions in their stacks (how the “pros” assert one must be correctly typed, these days), or “moving to healthy/unhealthy numbers” in the case of enneagram 8>2>4, etc.

A lot of seemingly intelligent, thoughtful people (nerds) believe this. It’s kind of like Taylorist efficiency metrics for the human soul, and some of us really crave efficiency in our understanding of fellow man. It’s satisfying for those of us who are analytical control freaks and also possibly a little or a lot autistic. I’ve noticed that this unfortunately often confers a sort of smug self-congratulation in its community of “experts” who argue with each other with unfounded zealotry over the most minor differences of opinion on appropriate methodology (lookin’ atchu, PDB).

Anyhoo…over the years, what I’ve observed is that, even exposing myself and others to the same exact tests, and even cognitive function stack analysis, and motivational assessments, these things all appear to be highly contextual. I’ve seen people act INFP in their intimate relationships, then go on to act ISTJ at work, and ENTJ in their hobbies. I’ve seen enneagram 8s, if we dare define them as such, act like 9s, but also 1s and 7s and 3s and 4s. And it’s quite kaleidoscopic.

This hasn’t led me to the conclusion that psychological analysis categorization is fully pointless. I do think the enneagram is a pretty useful mode for considering some ways that motivations shape us, especially when you take into account expanded concepts like wings, variant subtypes, and tritypes and ignore arbitrary structural spazziness like “tritypes must draw one from every realm: heart, body, head”—immediately discredited if one took 9 different tests or simply journaled observations over the course of a week, month, or year; some of us may be almost all “head” or “body”, very little “heart”. These are all just manmade stories to try to make sense of the world, not tablets found in the desert where alien wisemen left them for us. 😒
Similarly, the freaks who obsess on the idea that cognitive function stacks must conform to one of 16 prescribed orders so they can be matched to an arbitrary MBTI type—totally high on their own supply.

Anyway, our boy Goffman…more like Goddman, amirite? (jk) gets it. Calls out the BS in such a chill way. “Hey, guys…you’re everything.” We’re just faceted prisms like quartz who change color based on our environment and the way light hits and shines through us. It may be that maybe we seem bluer than other quartz chunks at times, but we’re all still essentially the same stuff, and our appearance to others and how we come to know ourselves is hugely contextual.

I went to a tri-state fair recently, and a county fair. The county fair made me feel aspirational; gave me a vision of who I am and want to be. In contrast, the tri-state fair was a big, disorganized, incompetent cash grab that felt like the desperation of a landlocked dead-end middle american town stripmall, the kind of place where the windows don’t open and HOAs made everything beige or grey and fine you for letting the grass grow 2”, where your daddy’s in a pyramid marketing scheme and your aunt thinks yoga is satanism. The tri-state fair made me want to get high, blast Combichrist and deface something institutional. Up until the 45 minutes of waiting in line for something mediocre, sensorily assailing on all synesthetic fronts, I’d thought, “I’m not that delinquent anymore. I’m an adult.”

But it’s all such internal mythology. Anyway, this homie unboxes all that sharply, artistically, potently. It’s a fine book. And I feel safe saying so cos I’m on the last chapter. So he’d have to really steer this thing off the rails now to change that. ...more "

Oct 02, 2025 10:45AM · see review

Corvidianus is currently reading

Supercooperators: The Mathematics of Evolution, Altruism and Human Behaviour {Or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed}

by M.A. Nowak

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Oct 02, 2025 07:18AM

Corvidianus’s Quotes

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

tags: humour

10147 likes

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

tags: faith

8706 likes

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard Feynmann

tags: curiosity, learning, scholarship

2238 likes

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

tags: family, friends, parties, social

12511 likes

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring