Peak Power Switch

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 24 Jun 2013, 15:22

Tess wrote:This is still the online forum on the website which feels like 'my community'. You guys are the ones I'd enjoy sharing a beer or three with. Sometimes I roll my eyes at the way Steve and Biff torment each other but all in all .... PS is home-on-the-web for me. It's not about peak oil for me any more, it's about living a good life. And I still come here almost every day, even if I don't post much. I love to see how everyone's thinking is evolving.

Same applies to me except of course to say that I post too much.

featherstick · Post by **featherstick** » 24 Jun 2013, 15:33

Type 1, with 5 and 6 joint second. Bit of a nightmare combination really. In Belbin I'm the Monitor Evaluator and Resource Investigator. Certainly recognise that - it usually takes me a year to evaluate and commit to any one big personal project, much to my wife's dismay.

This is a good forum. I've learnt a lot and met a couple of nice people. Long may it last (but it probably won't).

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 24 Jun 2013, 15:45

Gah, 'course it will!

RC is a...

Type 1 8
Type 2 3
Type 3 3
Type 4 3
Type 5 5
Type 6 3
Type 7 3
Type 8 6
Type 9 2

What they can't pick up is the peacemeking: though I cheerfully lay into things people say or do that I disagree with, I can't bear to see 2 other people (or sides or whatever) in conflict.

Snail · Post by **Snail** » 24 Jun 2013, 16:30

Type Four and Nine: Individualist peacemaker. The ones I would have guessed if reading the descriptions before-hand .

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 24 Jun 2013, 18:03

I think I'm a bit of everything, but not much of type 3.

Bit like a horoscope, you recognise the truth of the statement (and all the other 11 statements).

JavaScriptDonkey · Post by **JavaScriptDonkey** » 24 Jun 2013, 19:04

It is a horoscope and about as valid.

I've had to sit these things in the past when board-level numpties have been sold the wheeze and the tests just fail.

Quite amusing

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 24 Jun 2013, 19:09

Eh? Me and JSD agreeing about something! Interesting times indeed.

Post by **adam2** » 24 Jun 2013, 20:30

JavaScriptDonkey wrote:It is a horoscope and about as valid.

I've had to sit these things in the past when board-level numpties have been sold the wheeze and the tests just fail.

Quite amusing

Yes.

Little John · Post by **Little John** » 24 Jun 2013, 20:40

The thing about psychometric pencil-and-paper questionnaire-type tests is they do actually work. Or, at least, they can work if they are designed well and as long a we define clearly what we mean by "work".

Firstly a short test administered only once is more or less worthless. If the test is also badly designed, then that just makes it even worse. For a test to have any predictive value it needs to be properly designed and fully tested for reliability/validity. It then needs several versions of the test developing so that an individual can take it several times and an average derived from the results. Finally, the scope (and limitation) of the test needs to be clearly understood so that inappropriate extrapolations are not made from the results. When such inappropriate extrapolations are made, it is usually due to confusion between the reliability and validity of the test. But, then this is part of a wider problem with social science data analysis.

Notwithstanding, assuming all of the above safeguards have been observed, psychometric tests can and do work.

As for whether it is always ethical to use such tests, that is a different debate.

RevdTess · Post by **RevdTess** » 24 Jun 2013, 20:48

I keep saying that no one who leads enneagram workshops suggests that you use a test to find your type. You should choose which type most fits your experience of the things that wind you up. You don't need a test to tell you, and it'll probably just be wrong and confuse everything anyway.

Can't we all just get along

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 24 Jun 2013, 21:07

We do get along. That's why we're here.

Little John · Post by **Little John** » 24 Jun 2013, 21:09

Tess wrote:I keep saying that no one who leads enneagram workshops suggests that you use a test to find your type. You should choose which type most fits your experience of the things that wind you up. You don't need a test to tell you, and it'll probably just be wrong and confuse everything anyway.

Can't we all just get along

And there, Tess, is the paradox that cannot be resolved.

We are a social species. This is because long ago it paid our ancestors to become hard wired to want to be nice to their neighbours and to want their neighbours to be nice to them. The reason they became hard wired in this way was because, due to the low dispersal nature of our species, their neighbour was likely to share a significant proportion of their genes. Or, more properly put, they shared a significant proportion of the difference between their genes and an unrelated individual. Simply put, their neighbour was very likely to be a relative of theirs.

Fast forward several millennia and we find ourselves crammed together in metropoles of many millions of people and the reason we are not all at our neighbour's throats is because, although it is now highly unlikely your neighbour will be a relative of yours, your genes haven’t yet cottoned on to that fact and so they are still instructing you to behave to your neighbour as if they are related to you.

As for how it is we manage not to be at the throats of those people who live on the other side of town; well, as we all know, sometimes we sadly are just that. To the extent that we are not, it is due to mass communication and the policing of our behaviour by a state. The mass communication, in particular, has the effect of bringing closer to home the lives of people we do not actually know such that, again, our genes are fooled into thinking that the person on the telly is related to us. Nevertheless, it is far easier for these more fragile socially-cohesive structures to fall apart; especially when times get economically tougher. At such times, we tend draw the wagons around us, so to speak, and begin to rely on more direct contact with our immediate neighbours for confirmation of who to choose to be nice to. If times get sufficiently tough, we even begin to differentiate between our immediate neighbours on the basis of how similar we feel them to be to ourselves. It hardly needs saying that, when this happens, some pretty crude indices can be used by people such as accent, skin colour etc.

I guess what I am saying is that the very social instinct that makes us behave nice to some people, is the self same instinct that makes us behave horribly to other people. If we want to get rid of anti-social behaviour, we would have to jettison pro-social behaviour as well since they are two sides of the same coin.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 24 Jun 2013, 21:53

stevecook172001 wrote:If we want to get rid of anti-social behaviour, we would have to jettison pro-social behaviour as well since they are two sides of the same coin.

No, I don't agree. I might disagree with you sometimes (like now) but if we met I'd rather buy you a pint than cut your throat. And I'd have the same approach to anybody. Even JSD.

Little John · Post by **Little John** » 24 Jun 2013, 21:57

biffvernon wrote:
stevecook172001 wrote:If we want to get rid of anti-social behaviour, we would have to jettison pro-social behaviour as well since they are two sides of the same coin.
No, I don't agree. I might disagree with you sometimes (like now) but if we met I'd rather buy you a pint than cut your throat. And I'd have the same approach to anybody. Even JSD.

Of course you would buy me a pint and I would do the same. That's because our genes are making us behave as if we are related. I am not suggesting by the above that the feeling of bonhomie is not real (whatever that means). I am simply pointing to its genesis.

As for your willingness to buy a pint for a complete stranger with whom you had absolutely no prior contact, this is still of course entirely possible at the statistical level and, at the level of an individual such as yourself, even completely certain. It's merely less statistically likely that it will happen with regard to most people and that statistical likelihood falls ever further the less the stranger exhibits features that the other party can readily identify as being similar to them. Finally, all of the above is further exacerbated if either or both parties are suffering any significant degree of stress. Though, i should point out that such stress can, in the event of identifying the other person as being above a certain level of similarity, actually increase the likelihood of altruism on the part of the potential giver of resources.

The point is, all of the above only needs to be true of most people most of the time for it to be a social "fact". All of humans affairs, like all of life, exists as dimensions, not as categories.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 27 Jun 2013, 13:59

Interesting article on Beeb News about possible evolutionary reasons behind "celebrity culture", in that we like to immitate successful individuals because, prehistorically, doing so was how we learned new stuff, thereby increasing our chances of survival. The problem being that what we immitate about a successful person nowadays isn't the trait that made them succeed (e.g. the hours of training, etc), but some other random thing (e.g. the hairdo).