Ah, other people, bless 'em . . . where do they get such fanciful, wrong ideas?
I was thinking about writing some long thoughtful (myopic) what-passes-for-introspection piece about the odd, counterfactual notions even close friends can come up with about our characters . . . but I'm not sure I'm up for it. I'm not sure why I care much, except that I can't get past the notion that I should be able to control what people think of me, generally, and when it should matter what they think of me. I'm not sure I'm ready to put the misapprehensions of other people into Niebuhr's category of things I cannot change, but that would make for an interesting paradigm shift. As it is, if someone's perception of me differs very much from mine, I typically view it as a correctable misunderstanding
Anyway, anyone who really thinks I'm impatient, opinionated and arrogant should really consult a good dictionary . . . or should have known me in the eighth grade.
Labels: composition fatigue, INTP, what passes for introspection
Collecting vs. accumulating
Thanks to a dear friend and her free-spending ways in silent auctions, I got a chance this afternoon to tour Dale Chihuly's "boathouse" on Lake Union. I took some potentially good photos that I'll likely post sometime next week (that bothersome film thing again, I'm afraid). If I'm not mistaken, most of the really serious glassblowing takes place elsewhere; much of the tour was about seeing the over-the-top amount of
cool stuff that Chihuly has collected, such as
Pendleton Indian blankets, of which I think our guide said he had more than the Pendleton company itself. Sadly, there was no opportunity for me to steal Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
I've been meaning recently to do a little entry here about the difference between collecting things and the kind of accumulation I am capable of, and since that very topic came up in an email with the always provocative CLD this afternoon, I figure I'll just present a lightly-edited version of that rather than reinvent the wheel (a workmanlike planing job is probably in order for this wheel, but I only do entries like this when I'm feeling lazy, so that's not going to happen right now).
———MWR: The Chihuly tour was very cool. I shot a couple of rolls of slides. It's not really about seeing them make the glass. It's about seeing some of the quarters they have over there, the swimming pool with glass on the bottom, the aquarium, the huge long room with the giant slab table made from a single slab of old-growth trunk, all his collections (800 vintage Pendleton Indian blankets, etc., etc. It's almost excessive. There is something very alien to me about the impulse of collecting. My impulse is much more one of having things I like around, which sometimes entails accumulation and accretion, but I never have a collection or "completist" mentality. On the other hand, more money equals more cool stuff to some point, and how can any of us say where it would end with unlimited resources?
CLD: I think you have the collector's impulse... think about your cookbooks (and your expensive NYC ties!) I don't see much difference between someone who likes to read/collect cookbooks and someone who has more money and chooses instead to collect vintage blankets. Am I missing something here?
MWR: I think I'm going to have to do a blog entry about my distinctions between accumulation and collecting. I think they are real and meaningful. Most basically, I think, there is a real difference between the collector—who places some psychic value on the collection, its value, its completeness, its rarity, the search for the next things in it, etc., etc.—and someone who just tends to accumulate things he enjoys. If you look at the things I have in excess—neckties, cookbooks, fragrances, fountain pens, cameras, etc.—I acquired them following a purchase psychology that is not much different than what I, and most others, apply when deciding on what day-to-day purchases to make. I value things idiosyncratically, and see important distinctions in kind where others just see two blue ties, two vetiver fragrances, two old cameras, etc., but my ideas about utility are pretty normal. I don't buy things I don't expect to use and I have pretty normal ideas of diminishing marginal utility. I would be glad to have a black Nikon F2AS or a silver Leica M5, but because I have each camera in the other color, getting a second cosmetically different one is WAY down on my list. It would be high on a true collector's list.
My cameras, even though I have about [
WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW?], really DO all do different things, and the differences are significant in my use. With neckties, accumulation comes at first from building a wardrobe, later from changing taste and from having buying a tie as a form of retail therapy at times over the years. My tastes never would change enough to suggest I get rid of what I already had (and it is an INTP trait to think that if something has interested you, it will always interest you and should be kept around—again, accumulation is the result). I almost never buy cookbooks anymore. Much of the cookbook buying was really about building a library, which I think is very distinct from collecting. If six cookbooks come out every year that I think should be in my library, well, when I start out there are quite a few years to catch up on. I always chose my cookbooks with a lot of care and I saw each of them as an individual object/item rather than "another cookbook". Someone with no interest in cooking—or French cooking, or New York City—might not understand why I needed a book by Andre Soltner if I already had one by Jacques Pepin or whomever, but to me they are not the same at all. And, by the same token, I had exactly zero interest in well over 90% of the cookbooks out there. A cookbook really needed to be "in my wheelhouse" to get my attention even in my heyday.
Accumulation is also somewhat self-limiting if you have normal ideas of diminishing marginal utility. Sometimes it's necessary to learn what your utility curve is for some genus of interest, but it does become clear. I tend to get more and more selective and eventually stop accumulating things when it is obvious that new additions just aren't going to see any use. A collector would continue acquiring items even if they would see no use. In most cases, the experience gained from using the accumulated items gives me a lot more wisdom about utility than I had at the start of my interest in whatever. I could probably deaccession half of every accumulated type of stuff with almost no practical hardship to how I use this stuff ("obviously," you say ;)). There's no way to do that
ex ante. I wouldn't be happy to get rid of half my camera equipment, but I could tell you almost to the item what 50% I would keep in order to be able to do 90% of what I can do with all of it. A collector, though, would be traumatized.
Collectors often display or showcase their collections, which I don't do (except as necessitated by limited storage space, or if they are good decor items). Many collectors are "completists" who would like to have a complete set of whatever, or multiple complete sets, or a complete set in mint condition, or a complete set mint in box, or shrink-wrapped, or with the original receipts intact, etc., etc. This kind of behavior really shows that fundamentally different notions of utility are at work. It's more like the satisfaction an OCD person gets from his or her little rituals. Mine is more like the satisfaction of having a valued book at my fingertips, or the right knife for the job, or whatever.
Your point about money is well taken. If I had a ton of money, my indifference curve would be such that, sure, why not pick up a black F2AS and a chrome M5. But it would take quite an interest in blankets for me to assemble 800 of them. I think if you had tons of resources, you might start to see things in a different way, because if you had some idiosyncratic interest or appreciation for something not in, or yet in, the mainstream, you really could envision building a collection that would have real, objective value later on, more than the sum of its parts. Maybe I would want to develop the most complete chronological collection of spiders preserved in amber, which future generations of students at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology would revere as the "MWR Collection of Spiders in Amber". But it's hard to project something like that with any certainty. And then I think the impulse would be more curatorship than collection, and I think there is a difference there too.
Labels: composition fatigue, INTP, scenes from my outbox, what passes for introspection
Today's reflection
Every now and then I'm reminded that I think about the world in so many ways that are very different from how everyone else looks at the world. I try not to dwell too much on these matters because, in all honesty, doing so makes me feel alienated from my fellow human beings. One of the biggest fundamental differences in outlook is that I have almost no respect for tradition or authority as such. I process and filter pretty much everything presented from these sources, and never base my respect or compliance, if they are indeed given, on the status of the source alone. Of course, I'm simplifying and distilling this notion down to its "ideal typical" essence, as I see it.
I would write more but for the fact that my computer crashed yesterday and I'm having to write this on my mobile device. I'm hoping Fujitsu will manage to correct the disabling hardware problem in less than the two months it took them to replace my malfunctioning LCD screen. Actually, I'm secretly hoping that this issue will be so grave that they will need to replace my laptop. But I'm not holding out too much hope for that.
It's all extra annoying for me because another one of my defining characteristics is wanting my tools to always work correctly as specified.
Labels: INTP, what passes for introspection
"It would not be logical to make such a statement."
I just wrote this in an email to someone:
I have several levels of "my brain doesn't work that way" going on here. First, it almost never occurs to me to give a compliment, sincere or otherwise, because I want something. Second, I seldom compliment people on things they have no control over, like their facial features, also because that doesn't occur to me. It's not that I don't give compliments, just not these kinds.
Labels: INTP, scenes from my outbox, what passes for introspection
Blogger upgrade
Google finally got around to inviting me to upgrade to the new Blogger beta. I had been feeling slightly neglected. So far the main benefit has been that I no longer need to republish when altering posts or the template. I am now able to use "labels" to categorize my posts, which I might feel a little silly doing just because users of LiveJournal have had this functionality since what seems like the early 1970s and, as an INTP on the Myers-Briggs type indicator (the apotheosis of self-reporting), I tend to either embrace such things early or dismiss them as unimportant. Similarly, I tend to dismiss things I'm not immediately good at as unimportant skills. For example, juggling—pointless.
Maybe I'll give the labels a try. If nothing else, I should be able to get a good poll out of some of the more fanciful label ideas.
I will see what other benefits there are to the Blogger upgrade. When they announced it, my impression was that it would make it much easier for people who don't want to learn any HTML to create individualized templates. I'd like to see a feature that automatically creates parodies of MySpace pages. Now that would be something.
By the way, I'm sorry that I don't have a music player here at the blog that would blast some MWR-essence-capturing song at you on every visit. Maybe I'll have to look into that. Ah, but what would it be? Another poll!
Labels: blogs, INTP, irony, mocking others, what passes for introspection
"This is the silliest compatibility profile I've ever read"
A confluence of factors in the my local Zeitgeist microclimate recently led me to "[t]ake the eHarmony Personality Profile and get instant, objective feedback on [my]self and how [I] relate to others. Then read [my] FREE Compatibility Profile and find out who is right for [me]." I hasten to add that none of the factors was a particular desire to meet my "soulmate" or whatever they are calling them over at eHarmony these days.
Being "not impressed by much," to paraphrase my good friend and missed-calling criminal defense attorney
syp ("He clocked that homeowner—that's not carjacking!"), I was prepared to be not impressed by what lay behind eHarmony's boasts about its "Scientifically Proven Compatibility Matching System" based on "[e]xhaustive research with thousands of couples found that there are 29 Key Dimensions of Compatibility necessary for success in a long term relationship. eHarmony is the only relationship site that uses a scientifically proven method to match based on these 29 crucial dimensions."
Conclusion: syp knows me very well. Not impressed. Amazingly, according to a TV commercial I saw last night featuring that very annoying eHarmony founder, they used to charge $50 for the pablum-packed profiles their "proven" protocol produces. (Sorry.) I sent my narrative results to another good friend who knows me well, CLD, who pronounced: "This is the silliest compatibility profile I've ever read . . . it contradicts itself in numerous places, and is written like it is straight out of the 1950s."
Truly, I was expecting a little better effort from these charlatans. However, it's important to remember one thing about all these so-called "personality profiles" based on self-completed Myers-Briggs-style surveys:
They ask you what you are like and then they tell you what you are like. Duh! It's not that much different from how the "psychic" figures out that you want to hear from Uncle Joe, and there's not even trickery involved. Puffery, yes. So, for example, if I say that a sense of humor is very important to me in a partner, I get back something like this: "She tends to be lighthearted and shares your humorous view of the world."
Quel shock! (For the record, however, my view of the world is not "humorous." Some of my observations about the world are humorous. In addition to its other conspicuous flaws, the eHarmony profile is poorly written. Another example: "You may demonstrate positive possessiveness by developing strong attachments; however, you will not be overly involved as some others tend to do." Huh? But I digress.)
Let's just string together a few of the qualities of my "ideal mate" and see what kind of consistent picture the "Scientifically Proven Compatibility Matching System" paints for me
from my own statements about what I am like and what I prefer:
"Conflict Resolution: You'll be happiest with a woman who tries to avoid conflict altogether. When she does have a disagreement, she tries to keep the peace instead of adding fuel to the fire. Resolving the argument is generally more important to her than being right, but she will stand up for herself."
Now, you may wonder whether the two parts of that last sentence are entirely consistent, but let's skip down a bit in the profile and continue reading . . .
"Dominance: You are best suited to someone who respects your competitive nature and shares some of the same thirst for victory. [What am I, a Roman general?] She generally goes out of her way to make sure she wins, whether it's finding the bargain shopping or excelling in the business world. Her friends describe her as someone who doesn't back down easily."
O.K., you're saying, just because she's a "woman who tries to avoid conflict altogether" doesn't mean she will "back down easily." I learned that as a kid from
Marlin Perkins. She might be kind of like a wolverine or a jackal. Lucky me. But it still seems a little contradictory. Let's read on . . .
"Obstreperousness: Your ideal mate is someone who isn't afraid to voice her opinion and appreciates the fact that you do the same. She won't be surprised if you disagree with her or argue your position. Her friends would probably describe her as the type of person who's more concerned with being right than just having everyone like her. Like you, she may get irritated when others disagree with her."
Putting aside the fact that I don't typically get irritated when others disagree with me (
don't start!), we now have someone who tries to avoid conflict but isn't afraid to voice her opinion and likes to be right and hates to back down. I'm not sure it's all inconsistent, but the effort to impose consistency highlights what general terms in which most everything in these profiles is couched.
Anyway, it's been a long entry so I'll wrap this up by noting that there can be insights to be had from this kind of personality profile, even though I didn't find any of them in my eHarmony reports. Here is the best example I can come up with, from a
detailed profile of the Myers-Briggs INTP type (which I am--weak I, strong P, as best I recall): "He always chooses to listen to music which suits his current emotional state, be it aggression, warmth, excitement, relaxation or whatever. Hence, the emotional state is assumed to be an unchangeable, mysterious property of himself. It is easier to choose appropriate music than to attempt to influence this. People with introverted Feeling . . . will deliberately choose to listen to music which helps them change and improve their mood. INTPs could never do that." Now that's at once interesting, true and non-obvious, three features I found lacking in the eHarmony output.
And, yes, I appreciate the significance of some INTP person having put together an entire intp.org website.
Labels: INTP, Only in Don't Trust Snakes, what passes for introspection
