Mappers vs Packers. Why Most People Don't Get Bitcoin

[netrin]

Interesting, our first F. But still, so far we're all N. That's statistically quite significant! Test your friends (or your enemies ), you'll see just how unusual that really is. You'll also come to appreciate why so few grok bitcoin.

[Shinobi]

Falkvinge? The idiot who (claimed to have) used all his savings to buy up Bitcoin, and then backpedaled and now admits to unloading all of it? Assuming he ever had much in the first place? That Falkvinge?

The Mappers/Packers theory holds that there are basically two ways to think about the world.

The first, Mapping, involves creating a logical model about the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapper_orientation
- A person with mapping tendencies receives new information; facts, techniques, abilities, and undergoes a process of incorporating the new information into a personally developed and self-adaptive model of the world.

The second, Packing, relies on pattern matching. A person with this orientation tries to match a new theory or situation to a previous one where there are known 'correct' answers. Most people are packers.

To really appreciate Bitcoin, you've got to have a good working mental model of what money is, how cryptography works, and the shortcomings of current online methods of payments.  This combination is rare - especially understanding money (hence the famous saying "Only two people really understand money and they disagree.") You can see in the writings of someone like Falkvinge, he really understands all of these things. Mappers who do really get very exicted about Bitcoin.

To a packer though - it's pretty simple. Bitcoin looks just like a Ponzi scheme or a Pyramid scheme. Lots of money going in, no real work being done, nothing real being produced, early adopters getting rich. All the hallmarks are there. If it looks like a horse, and smells like a horse . . . This kind of thinking is remarkably widespread and usually effective - but is never sufficient to understand a radically different system like Bitcoin.


Full Description of the Mapper/Packer Theory here
http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-1-thinking-about-thinking/

[memvola]

Maybe I'm not understanding this hypothesis. I tend to see the world leaders as mostly highly efficient predatorial packers. The few mappers in the world have to be wary of them. Mappers tend to have complex ideas and mappers tend to have loud voices proclaiming their knowledge. Try watching a creation vs evolution debate sometime. Our civilization is frequently hindered by distractions by packers with things like war and corporate sponsored sporting events.

If you can assume that not being visible is a good idea as well, it falls into place. The supposed ruler of a country could be a packer, while the real decision makers are not. A mapper knows that life is about shaping the world according to your beliefs and not about reptilian satisfaction or socially perceived success. Not that I agree with the theory but this makes sense in the context.

[phelix]

ENTJ
Extraverted   Intuitive   Thinking   Judging
Strength of the preferences %
11   75   1   22

Fieldmarshal 


seems like we all have high N values.

[jago25_98]

I prefer the term 'sensing' for packing.

People don't fall into categories like this. When sitting in front of a computer I tend to be a mapper. If I do Tai Chi or dancing I tend to sense.

There's also a complex relationship between the 2 I don't understand. That is, to turn off self thought mapping answers can sometimes just come out of the blue. The drawback of course is that sensing can't be social so you loose all the power of the network.

[netrin]

You can't divide the world into binary cubicles, no. But the Jungian dichotomies are real, albeit imperfect. With a bit of experience with these, you can probably guess your family members, friends, ex girlfriends, and coworkers even before they take the test. No one wants to be put in a box, but the questions are all related to one's own preferences. You can resist the findings all you want, but people do perceive and interact with the world in fairly predictable habitual ways.

Throw an extreme -NTP in the same room with an -SFJ, bring up religion, politics, or finance, and you won't get an argument. You'll just have two bewildered individuals with little to discuss.

[cbeast]

Reifications, all. Unless you can quantify and make predictions either discretely or statistically, it is religious hokum.

[netrin]

Reifications, all.

Indeed. All psychology is codified abstraction.

Unless you can quantify and make predictions either discretely or statistically, it is religious hokum.

Indeed. You can. Let me go camping with a group of people and after 24 hours, I will give their Jungian preferences far better than statistical chance. Most anyone even vaguely familiar with all types can as well.

It's been demonstrated to you here. I predicted that the majority here would be N. Though a minority of the general population, all participants of this small selection were N. Would you claim that we've pre-selected for N results? Perhaps S types would be afraid to post a contrarian result? It's possible.

[Shinobi]

I bet 75% of society will test as N. There's no mention of the normal social breakdown of these labels. Fools!

[netrin]

You would lose money on that bet.


Two million assessments annually. Here is the frequency breakdown in the United States: http://www.capt.org/mbti-assessment/estimated-frequencies.htm iNtuition represents 25-36% of the general population. 25-30% of females and 28-35% of males.

[Mageant]

INTJ

Strength of the preferences %
100   100   38   78

[westkybitcoins]

INTJ

89% - 75% - 88% - 78%

Not that I'm that familiar with this, but it seems like it'll be an interesting read.

[westkybitcoins]

If you can't dazzle them with intellect, baffle them with bullshit. There is good money in pseudosciences like astrology, NLP, this nonsense. I'm not saying they are not useful, they are simply a crutch like any other religion.

Well, if personality analysis is useful, how is it a crutch? I don't think anyone here lives their entire life trying to following their Jungian/whatever expectations, or rigidly expecting others to consistently follow theirs. (Let's hope not, at least.)

And I think at times there's no reason to NOT recognize the categories people fall into. If I decide to sell chocolate, there's no point in refusing to acknowledge that everyone is, exclusively, either (1) someone who loves chocolate, (2) someone who hates chocolate, (3) someone who has no strong feelings either way, or (4) someone who's never tried chocolate. Everyone's either a L, H, N or X.

I'm not choosing to categorize people that way, I'm just recognizing and admitting that those categories already exist in reality. (But of course, it's how we react to the categorization that can cause problems.)

[cbeast]

If you can't dazzle them with intellect, baffle them with bullshit. There is good money in pseudosciences like astrology, NLP, this nonsense. I'm not saying they are not useful, they are simply a crutch like any other religion.

Well, if personality analysis is useful, how is it a crutch? I don't think anyone here lives their entire life trying to following their Jungian/whatever expectations, or rigidly expecting others to consistently follow theirs. (Let's hope not, at least.)

And I think at times there's no reason to NOT recognize the categories people fall into. If I decide to sell chocolate, there's no point in refusing to acknowledge that everyone is, exclusively, either (1) someone who loves chocolate, (2) someone who hates chocolate, (3) someone who has no strong feelings either way, or (4) someone who's never tried chocolate. Everyone's either a L, H, N or X.

I'm not choosing to categorize people that way, I'm just recognizing and admitting that those categories already exist in reality. (But of course, it's how we react to the categorization that can cause problems.)

Show me a peer reviewed journal (or article in such a journal) of the personality analysis you are defending. I may reconsider my position.

[westkybitcoins]

If you can't dazzle them with intellect, baffle them with bullshit. There is good money in pseudosciences like astrology, NLP, this nonsense. I'm not saying they are not useful, they are simply a crutch like any other religion.

Well, if personality analysis is useful, how is it a crutch? I don't think anyone here lives their entire life trying to following their Jungian/whatever expectations, or rigidly expecting others to consistently follow theirs. (Let's hope not, at least.)

And I think at times there's no reason to NOT recognize the categories people fall into. If I decide to sell chocolate, there's no point in refusing to acknowledge that everyone is, exclusively, either (1) someone who loves chocolate, (2) someone who hates chocolate, (3) someone who has no strong feelings either way, or (4) someone who's never tried chocolate. Everyone's either a L, H, N or X.

I'm not choosing to categorize people that way, I'm just recognizing and admitting that those categories already exist in reality. (But of course, it's how we react to the categorization that can cause problems.)

Show me a peer reviewed journal (or article in such a journal) of the personality analysis you are defending. I may reconsider my position.

I'm not invested in this setup... the types may not be all that descriptive. Also, I'm not knowledgeable enough to know much more than to check out Google or Wikipedia for my own reading.

But surely you acknowledge that general personality categories do exist, right?

[netrin]

Show me a peer reviewed journal (or article in such a journal) of the personality analysis you are defending. I may reconsider my position.

I doubt anyone here is invested in educating you personally. It's not like these are obscure methods. How's your German? Carl Jung, "Psychologische Typen", Zurich, 1921. Otherwise, start with Wikipedia and follow the citations if you're still interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_type

Similar type of abstraction, well respected in psychology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

[rampone]

ENTP - wikipedias description also fits pretty well

[netrin]

Of course, arguing against this is silly. You answer the questions yourself about your own preferences. Westkybitcoins' chocolate analogy is pretty well on the mark.

	I like fried liver
	I like vanilla
✔	I like chocolate
	I like rat poison

"Oh my gosh, the test says that I like chocolate, and predicts that I'll enjoy M&M's. Amazing! But I don't believe it until I read a peer-reviewed article showing that my preferences are predictably my own preferences."

What I think would be more interesting is taking a survey of people's reaction to bitcoin correlated to their Jung-Myer-Briggs personality indicators. As mentioned earlier, members of a very different mailing list took the test and produced statistically significant divergence from the general population, similar to here on this thread. But it would be interesting to tweeze out the noise; Those who would bother reading this thread and bother to take a test are not necessarily an even cross section of the total population or those who might be interested in bitcoin.

- ENTP

[Vandroiy]

Falkvinge? The idiot who (claimed to have) used all his savings to buy up Bitcoin, and then backpedaled and now admits to unloading all of it? Assuming he ever had much in the first place? That Falkvinge?

This is interesting. I didn't think about it before because I didn't know he was the Pirate Party founder. He's a manipulator. An actual one. He bought, hyped it with an unreasonably optimistic "throw all your money in" article, abusing his position, then sold. Heh.



@Thread:

"Mappers vs Packers" is oversimplified. I know I almost always think "Packer" way, yet my output resembles that of a "Mapper". For example, it was easy to use my mind's pattern recognition / breadth search to see the huge implications of Bitcoin; I can't remember any delay between reading the information and deciding to become a follower. This is "Packer" type thinking, the associative search function of our brain we use all the time. It's normal operation of the hardware we have, there's little magic available to change that.

In fact, for all I know about the brain, it can do the "Mapper" functions only in electrical short-time memory or while sleeping!

In short: one can't simply choose to think like a "Mapper" while his mind is working on something. The only way is to take a step back and slowly purge your mind of bad lines of thought by reflecting upon your thoughts. Then, slowly over time, the ability to think about unknown situations improves. The "Packers" are just people who never did that. The word is unnecessary, because there already is another word with the same meaning:

idiots.

[phelix]

[...]
@Thread:

"Mappers vs Packers" is oversimplified. I know I almost always think "Packer" way, yet my output resembles that of a "Mapper". For example, it was easy to use my mind's pattern recognition / breadth search to see the huge implications of Bitcoin; I can't remember any delay between reading the information and deciding to become a follower. This is "Packer" type thinking, the associative search function of our brain we use all the time. It's normal operation of the hardware we have, there's little magic available to change that.

In fact, for all I know about the brain, it can do the "Mapper" functions only in electrical short-time memory or while sleeping!

In short: one can't simply choose to think like a "Mapper" while his mind is working on something. The only way is to take a step back and slowly purge your mind of bad lines of thought by reflecting upon your thoughts. Then, slowly over time, the ability to think about unknown situations improves. The "Packers" are just people who never did that. The word is unnecessary, because there already is another word with the same meaning:

idiots.

Still there might be variations in the ways of thinking. Mappers/packers sure is far from perfect but it is an interesting start.

There are plenty of problems that can be solved more efficiently the packer way.