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NancyLebovitz comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong
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I think what got me into it was Psychetypes, a description of the Myers-Briggs types with some rather abstract theory about how they experience time and space differently than each other. [1] Anyway (and this should be a clue about how hard it can be to learn this sort of thing) when I first started reading the book, I got to the bit about there being many sorts of normal, and I put the book down for two years-- it was that hard to get past the idea that either I was crazy, or everyone else was.
Anyway, look at how a lot of people talk about taste-- a lot of them really believe that everyone should like and dislike the same things they do.
Or people who believe that if some diet/exercise method worked for them, therefore it would work for everyone if they'd just try hard enough.
Or that allergies they haven't got must be illusionnary.
[1] IIRC, SPs experience the present moment most vividly, NTs imagine time as evenly spaced along a ruler, NFs have vivid experience of past emotional moments, and someone (it's got to be another N, and I can't remember what SJs experience) are most aware of future possibilities. You double all this to get 8 types because some people think spacial boundaries are real and others don't.
You mentioned Myers-Briggs types and "the idea that either I was crazy, or everyone else was." I think I had a similar experience but with a different analysis of the MBTI classifications. It was Personality Type: An Owner's Manual by Lenore Thomson and there is a wiki discussion here.
I found the scientific basis fairly flimsy. She connects the 8 cognitive functions to various regions of the brain - left and right, anterior and posterior - but it seems like a just so story to me. However, I have found it immensely useful as a tool for self-improvement.
The main insight I got from it is that while other people are crazy, they are crazy in a fairly well-defined, reproducible way. Other people see things completely differently from you, but it's fairly internally consistent and so you simulate it on your own hardware.
There are two ways I think about this:
One, your brain is is trying to constantly make sense of all this sensory data that comes in. So it determines that one part is the signal and one part is the noise. It tries to minimize the noise and focus on the signal. But then you realize there is a whole other signal in what you thought was noise and there are people tuning into that and think your signal is actually the noise. If you then turn into that signal, you can understand what other people have been listening to the whole time
The other is, we are all playing 8 board games simultaneously, where if we roll the dice our piece moves that amount in each of the games. In order to make sense of this, we focus on one of the games, trying to forget about the others, and try to win this one. But other people are focused on trying to win a different game. So when they try to talk to each other about who is winning, they completely talk past each other. But when you realize that someone thinks he is playing a different game and you figure out what it is, you can have a much more productive conversation/relationship.
Thanks-- that's a lot more use than I've made of the system.
Does it make sense to think of yourself as crazy to the same extent that people of other psychetypes are?
Links need to be in a system called Markdown rather than the more usual html-- the details for them are at the help link in the lower left corner that shows up when you start writing a reply.
If you take crazy to mean 'acting, thinking or feeling in a way disjointed from or opposed to reality - , I'd say it makes a lot of sense to think of yourself as just as crazy as anyone else (and it reduces the incidence of giving your own feelings and thoughts undue importance, IME.)
Upvoted for giving technical help.
Fixed.
I don't think so. The term captures how radically different the another types are from your own. It's about relative distance between you and others, not an absolute quality.