the enneagram makes no sense and I don't really understand its popularity
I've tried to give it a charitable look but it feels like a mess
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i didn't get it until patiently explained it to me a bunch and i realized i was trying to pretend that i wasn't a 3 for 3 reasons š
most of what i found helpful about it was realizing other people *weren't 3s*
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i had a bunch of implicit typical mind assumptions like "ah probably secretly everyone loves attention as much as i do and is just hiding it to be polite" and the enneagram is where i learned that that was not true and that was valuable (obv there are other ways to learn this)
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anyway on a meta note i think of the different typing systems roughly as like different "bases" (in the linear algebra sense) of the "space of personalities" and some people will short descriptions in some bases and some people will have short descriptions in others
one thing michael helped explain was that if you look at common descriptions of the enneagram types they focus on surface-level personality characteristics but the enneagram is really more about strategies for dealing with... not exactly trauma but close
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like 3 as a *strategy* is about "how do i impress other people" and what that looks like surface-level varies wildly depending on the social environment you grew up in so focusing on surface-level characteristics can distract from the underlying strategy
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Thinking of personality typing systems as ādecompositionsā or ācoordinate systemsā of personality space seems apt, and some personalities are certainly easier to describe neatly in some systems than others, but at the same time not all systems are *good* decompositionsā¦
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Two important criteria to me for a personality test are orthogonality of axes & evenness of population distributions along them, e.g. MBTI is fairly orthogonal but feels wooey to me because of its distributionsāi.e. I think almost everyone falls near the middle of EāI/NāS/FāT/PāJ
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