How to Participate Here

Some requests/guidelines for how to participate on this wiki:

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If you can, please avoid writing in the first person. Make your comments about the subject matter and not about yourself. For example, "Hypothesis: XYZW types tend to do ABC" is better than "I think XYZW types tend to do ABC." This way, everyone can offer pros and cons of each hypothesis and we are all doing it cooperatively instead of forcing anyone to back down off of a claim they made. Here there is no shame in proposing a hypothesis that ultimately turns out to be wrong. Your job is not to be right, it's to say something interesting. First person is OK if you're relating an anecdote or expressing uncertainty (like asking someone else for clarification).

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Please avoid making remarks about the other participants, especially what you think their type is. It's hard enough to share ideas about this topic without getting into fights about who is what and trying to paint each other one way or another. Avoid saying how much you liked or disliked what someone said. Exception: your home page (see below).

•	Put short remarks, small disagreements, tangents, and back-and-forth conversations toward the end of a page. Keep the beginning of each page coherent so it can develop a single idea in full, without interruption.

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It's OK to let a page get a bit messy and to occasionally violate the rules above. When a page gets too messy, you or someone else can have the joy of cleaning it up. You often learn a lot this way, even just converting first-person prose to prose that's only about the subject matter. Then again, some pages will just permanently suck, and that's OK, too.

Your home page:

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Please make a page about yourself, with your own name as the title (for example, Ben Kovitz). On your home page, you are invited to write in the first person and to say how much you like or dislike other people's writing, or anything you want to tell about yourself. We especially invite you to post your email address (possibly in a spammer-proof form) so people can talk with you off-wiki.

•	Using your real name is preferred, including both first and last name. This is a friendly and scholarly forum, and we're all adults here no matter our chronological age. If you must use an alias, try to make it sound like a real name.

Disagreements:

•	When there is a disagreement, we resolve nothing. We leave both ideas stated as clearly and persuasively as possible. Doing the best possible job of expressing each idea may require putting them in separate sections on a page or on separate pages.

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If you have a dispute not about the subject matter but about how best to express it, work it out with the other person. Use email, even. You may have to compromise. Nothing you post here is "yours"; anyone may edit it. Sometimes that means text will get a little worse than if you wrote it all yourself, but oh well, that's the price of collaboration.

Basic good writing tips, particularly appropriate to our topic:

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When you use Terms with Nonobvious Meanings, flesh them out with concrete examples. "ESTJs who don't develop their secondary function are in danger of falling into inferior introverted feeling" is gibberish on its own, and it's virtually impossible, without clarification by example, to tell if your interpretation of that matches someone else's. Your own understanding of what you're saying might even become clearer if you write more concretely. Let's always aim for clear, sharp prose even if we don't always succeed.

•	In the words of G. Polya, "The first rule of style is to have something to say. The second rule of style is to control yourself when, by chance, you have two things to say; say first one, then the other, not both at the same time."

--Your host, Ben Kovitz

See also: Type Guess.

(Please don't edit the above text. If you'd like to complain or comment, please post it below the line or email me (mailto:bkovitz@acm.org), so people don't get confused about what the host has requested vs. what other people have requested.)

•	- "If you can, please avoid writing in the first person." This loses the participation of those who extrovert perception. p.293 - Unless the man had direct involvement in the unfolding process and could exert some effect on its logical outcome, he didn't know how to relate to it.

•	- But your "perspective" fundamentally alters what it is you think this is made up of. Please try to bypass your dominant function and make an extroverted intuitive leap to see that you are an introverted intuitive. Otherwise discussion becomes impossible.

From socionics.com: Quasi-identical relations (NiT, vs TiN). Hopefully, even if we find it difficult to communicate with each other, others who read this wiki will understand us both (seeing the self in a larger context).

•	- Je can approximate Pe by making ever more complex sets of rules and specified interactions. Pe can approximate Je by continuously shifting goals.

Robert, it sounds like you've got lots of interesting ideas and also some complaints, if I understand you right. How about emailing me the complaints? We can talk on the phone, even. --Ben Kovitz

I have no complaints. I'm just trying to bring a different perspective to bear.

Ok, glad to hear there are no complaints. It seems now that the different perspective is scattered all over the place so it's hard for readers to understand (especially me), and it's also in the middle of other ideas, making them even harder to understand. How about collecting this other idea into one place, and moving your remarks about me to email? Maybe you've already started on this at argument. --Ben Kovitz