Pigeonholes

For the sake of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research, I submitted myself to a course on project management a fortnight ago. It was good and bad. There were some exceedingly useful tools for actually projecting a project: where the crises might fall, how to distribute resources. There were some bogus bits, like the the instructor’s defensive reaction to being teased about team-building exercises. And there was the intriguing, taken with much salt, reference to the Myers-Briggs personality type exercise. Divination systems interest me, and this looks like a divination system with all the right features: it’s just complex enough to make everyone feel special and well-served when they get their analysis, rather like the Western star sign + Chinese star sign combination books that were around a few years back. There are 16 types, though the distribution is uneven.

So I went and found an online testing service to see what I was, and then tested myself again to see if the results were consistent. They were, though I’m sure any such online test would be scoffed at by the professionals; apparently I’m an INTJ, though with the percentages on the test the only factor on which I stuck out was the N. (I 56 N 62 T 01 J 33, for later reference) The other delightful thing about this system is that it is apparently based on Jung’s three axes (introvert/extrovert, intuition/sense, thinking/feeling) with one more thrown in (perceiving/judging). Levi-Strauss would be thrilled.

Does this mean that we now have a new form of metadata for blogs?

But what I really want to know is this. The various web pages dedicated to M-B personality types all list famous people who fit that type (I was deeply gratified to find Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson in my 16th of the human race). Clearly, though, neither of those esteemed gentlemen was alive to take the test. How were they pigeonholed? Could I invent a nom de plume, force them into fame, kill them off and then discover what their MB type was? (Much to my shame I find that Arnold Schwarzenegger is also apparently an INTJ. Was that Arnie in the Terminator, or Arnie in Sacramento?)