Great Minds Think Alike, Small Minds Seldom Differ

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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39 Responses

  1. Patrick Cahalan says:

    We’re not a very S group.

    I think I shall attempt to cultivate a voice.Report

  2. I roll the toothpaste from the bottom.Report

    • wardsmith in reply to Pierre Corneille says:

      How long have you been depressed Pierre?Report

    • Fish in reply to Pierre Corneille says:

      I use the edge of my toothbrush to push it up from the bottom, leaving the empty bit flattened out with all the toothpaste at the top. What does that say about me?Report

      • Glyph in reply to Fish says:

        It says you are somehow still able to purchase toothbrushes with old-school flat-edged handles instead of the stupid ‘ergonomic’ rounded ones that are now all the rage*, and I want to know where you get them, because I like to do this too and I can no longer find them and using my comb to flatten the tube is not cutting it.

        * I mean, seriously. Did you ever think, back when you were brushing with your standard translucent rectangular-handled Oral-B that you got from your dentist or the supermarket, ‘man, my hand sure is tired from gripping this unnatural shape?’

        More irritatingly, the newer rounded toothbrush handles invariably cause rollover if you try to set them down on the counter with toothpaste on them for one second so you can put the cap back on the tube.

        Gah. It’s all a plot to sell new toothbrush holders, because the new ergonomic handles don’t fit in the old smaller slots. It had to be, because otherwise it is just an egregious design failure, taking something exceedingly simple & utilitarian and making it less useful and annoying at a time of day when you are tired and JUST WANT TO BRUSH YR DANG TEETH.

        Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I see some kids on my lawn…Report

        • Fish in reply to Glyph says:

          Bad news: I’m using exactly the Oral-B toothbrush you’re complaining about. I use the fat end to flatten out the tube.Report

          • Glyph in reply to Fish says:

            IMO the rounded ones just don’t work as well. They don’t get all…the…paste….argh!

            So I don’t know if we’ve figured out your personality, but mine seems clear. Rain Man, crossed with Abe Simpson.Report

  3. Kazzy says:

    A few thoughts…

    Regarding your analogy of video game controllers and kitchen cupboards, I was reminded of a “diversity” activity once described to me. The activity begins by dividing people into small groups and handing them a deck of cards and a set of rules for a variant of poker. They’re tasked with reading the rules and committing them to memory before returning the rules sheet. They are then instructed to play a few hands of the game. Soon after, groups are mixed, but only so that the bulk of each group remains the same with one or two new people joining. The game continues.

    What the folks don’t realize is that they’ve all been given different rule sheets. So a person playing a straight game of poker is suddenly sitting down with folks who are treating 2’s as wilds. The new person celebrates a win only to realize the chips being raked over to someone with a seemingly inferior hand, unaware that it was made the winner by a rule he was not aware of. Chaos ensues.

    I haven’t yet performed the activity, but it seems an interesting way to demonstrate what you are describing here, and to put people into a role that they might not otherwise be in, as an outsider entering a community which they presume acts a certain way but doesn’t and which is unwilling to budge on that.

    Okay, that was all the FIRST thing.

    The second thing? Never go to the ESPN.com forums. NEVER. They’re like hell. They’re worse than YouTube comments.

    Third? I’m the toothpaste tube on the left.Report

  4. Patrick Cahalan says:

    Since I’ve given my results before, and since I wasn’t paying attention to the computer over the weekend when the original post got play, I took 5 minutes this morning and took the test again. I swung back over from an “E” to an “I” again and the P/J split seems to be migrating back towards “P”, but my N got **way** stronger.

    INTJ seems to be a huge skew here – 25 of us?

    INTJ
    Introvert(44%) iNtuitive(75%) iNtuitive Thinking(38%) Judging(1%)

    You have moderate preference of Introversion over Extraversion (44%)
    You have distinctive preference of Intuition over Sensing (75%)
    You have moderate preference of Thinking over Feeling (38%)
    You have marginal or no preference of Judging over Perceiving (1%)Report

  5. Among the Masthead:

    INTP – 2
    ENFP – 2
    INTJ – 2
    ENTP – 1
    INFP – 1
    ENTJ – 3
    ESTJ – 1

    Two significant points stick out here (if any inference from a sample size of 12 can be called significant):

    (1) There seems to be a more-balanced distribution of MB types among contributors.

    (2) All three ENTJs – Burt, Kazzy, and Myself – are contributors. This makes sense if we’re a community of mostly NTs.Report

  6. Pinky says:

    I’m another INTJ who doesn’t comment here often – but for some reason my anti-virus software wasn’t letting me post on that thread.

    But it’s not surprising that INTJ’s would visit this site. Taking the Myers-Briggs letter designations out of the equation, we’re talking about people who self-identify as intellectuals with strong opinions who are comfortable on computers. No shock that they post on this site. I bet that if you did a survey on a “share pictures of yourself naked in public places” site, you wouldn’t find as many shy intellectuals.

    I’d also be willing to bet that more people who identify themselves as INTJ’s are familiar enough with Myers-Briggs typology, because it gives us a way to intellectualize human relationships. The kind of person who, I don’t know, has human emotions is less interested in a grid-pattern for understanding people.Report

  7. Stillwater says:

    Jaybird, this is a really good post. I particularly like the suggestion that the LoOG community has coalesced around a shared syntax rather than a shared semantics. I think that idea has a lot of explanatory power and goes a long ways in accounting for some persistent disputes between people with different personality types here at the league.

    I think it also suggests some worries about increasing diversity at this site. If expressions of diversity were to reduce to semantical differences within the pre-dominant LoOG syntax, then diversity of opinion will more than likely be assimilated, encouraged and viewed as stimulating. If diversity were to be expressed in a different syntax (either with or without a different semantics, tho) it seems to me it would run counter to the predominant syntactic culture of the league, which could be disruptive in it’s own right.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

      To run with the kitchen analogy some more, if someone comes over and we say “get something to drink” and they walk into the kitchen and *BAM* they find the coffee cups on the first try, *BAM* find the celestial seasonings in the cupboard on the first try, *BAM* find the honey on the first try… it doesn’t matter if we’re mostly coffee drinkers and they’re a tea drinker. They’re going to feel at home in the kitchen.

      And someone who needs to be shown where everything is (WHY WOULD YOU PUT THAT THERE?) the first couple of times, then have to remember where everything is each and every time they visit… well, they’ll never ever feel at home even if they, like us, are coffee drinkers.

      And I don’t even know if that is a problem, let alone a solvable problem.Report

  8. Mike Dwyer says:

    “WHY WOULD YOU PUT THE COFFEE CUPS NEXT TO THE STOVE RATHER THAN NEXT TO THE SINK???”

    In our house the location of our dishes was determined by their proximity to the dish washer.Report

  9. BobbyC says:

    This was an interesting exercise.

    As an aside, I don’t dig the frequent anxiety about diversity, but it’s nothing new for our culture. I like the high number of authentic people here, diversity be damned.Report

    • James Hanley in reply to BobbyC says:

      I hear what you’re saying. But as a guy who grew up in a very non-diverse place (diversity meant we had both German Lutherans and German Catholics), then moved to California, I came to appreciate diversity just in terms of that old saying, “variety is the spice of life.” Nothin PC about it–it’s just more interesting than te same ol’ same ol’.Report

  10. Some of us were chatting about this article on Twitter and since we do have a lot of noobs like me since 2012 (and we can comment in old threads now) I thought it might be fun to compare notes.

    Anyone interested?

    Signed, INTPReport

    • Jaybird in reply to Kristin Devine says:

      I imagine that this place remains INTx catnip.Report

      • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

        I like the theory that this place drives me up the wall periodically because I’m an ENFP.

        I can’t back it up and I don’t think it has any explanatory power and I’m pretty sure MB is bunk and really calling it a “theory” is far too charitable but I’m still gonna roll with it.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

          Eh, like Evopsych, I’m pretty sure that there’s a there there.

          That doesn’t mean we know how to read it or how to use it to make predictions but you meet an INTP and you know it. You meet an INTJ and you know it. You see your ESFx friend having conversations with complete and total strangers and it’s, like, nuts.Report