Personal Blog of Michael J Pastor

Psychological and Political Type

2012-02-13T20:38:00.000-05:00

Personal Assessment

How you measured up:

Autocratic

Democratic

Big Government

Small Government

Collectivist

Individualist

Literalist

Rationalist

Narrow Focus

Wide Focus

Human-centric

Ecocentric

Collectivist

Big
Government

Small
Government

Individualist

Narrow Focus

Autocratic

Democratic

Wide Focus

Highest ranking dimension: Individualist

You believe in the right of an individual to "be themself" in thought and deeds. You may have felt that what the country really needs is a politician with the nerve to tell people when it comes to controlling others, they should mind their own business. This may be because you enjoy a diversity of experiences and don't get offended easily.
It may also be because you've seen people be persecuted.
Others may disagree with you because they feel a right to protect what they see as community values.
When politicians of your type make mistakes it is often because they underestimate people's need for stability and safety.

Second highest ranking dimension: Big Government

You believe in the power of government to make life better. You may have felt that what the country really needs is for the government to get serious about the many problems that people face. This may be because you have seen the system break down and know people who have fallen through the cracks. It may also be because you feel that our society is at risk our communities need better protection from internal and external dangers. Others may disagree with you because they are focused on what government does wrong, rather than what it does right. When politicians of your type make mistakes it is often because they create programs that solve one problem but create others.

Combined statement:

Based on your answers, the best state for you is one where people's basic needs are well looked after and people are free to pursue creative and fulfilling lives.

DBILN - American Liberal

this is one of the political personality types of the PPQ

Description Dimensions

This personality type combines these five perspectives: democrat, big state, individualist, idealist, narrow focus

Likes and dislikes

Philosophy: Liberal Democrat Socialist? Independence Democrat Communitarian Democrat? Corporatist Statist Libertarian Social conservatism

Issues to visit:

for: social security?, civil rights, free trade, public education, separation of church and state, public health care, homeland security?, same-sex marriage against: arms trade, electoral fraud?, tax reform (please add/remove an issue)

Famous American Liberals

Bill Clinton Susan Sarandon

I basically agree with the above: the government is the last stand for the undefended (despite the fact that the government is far too often the persecutor to begin with) but through transparency those abuses can be exposed and remedied. The environment has no natural defenders, and therefore it must be the government that defends it. In addition, there's no such thing as a "libertarian environment" because the CO2 I exhale doesn't stay with me.

Things that we call "socialist" - government paying for education, health care, housing and food - are not all equal. I learned from a friend once: if you pay for someone's education and health care (especially mental health), you don't have to pay for their rent and food - they'll be employable. Student loans don't count! They're bigger than mortgages now.

Otherwise, I'm in every way the world's first extreme moderate.

My criticisms thus far? While they label the poles (auto/democratic, wide/narrow focus, big/small government, collectivist/individualist, and the ones that don't intersect) they don't label or describe the quadrants. What does it mean to be big government and individualist at the same time - is that liberal? What does narrow focus mean? That I believe the only role of government is to defend people and the environment? There are 6 dimensions here, and they don't intersect.

2011-11-15T10:48:00.003-05:00

The Anti-social Graph http://bit.ly/sBLhAp

The Anti-social Graph

2011-11-15T10:48:00.001-05:00

I made all of these arguments with Brad myself many years ago. Sometimes it takes a geek to fight a geek, and this guy backs up my arguments with the math of graphs.

Relationships are better described in venn diagrams anyway.

But that would take a graphic (and I mean ILLUSTRATED) user interface, not the crap that Google+ and Facebook give us.

I would further add that you can have *a* social graph, but there is no such thing as *the* social graph.

Amplify’d from blog.pinboard.in

The Social Graph is Neither

I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I'd be curious to know if it goes back further.

At the time he wrote, Fitzpatrick had two points to make. The first was that it made no sense for every social website to try and recreate the same web of relationships, over and over, by making people send each other follow requests. The second was that this relationship data should not be proprietary, but a common resource that rival services could build on as a foundation.

I think this is a fascinating metaphor. If the social graph is crude oil, doesn't that make our friends and colleagues the little animals that get crushed and buried underground?

I. It's not a graph

We nerds love graphs because they are easy to represent in a computer and there is a vast literature on how to do useful things with them. When you ask Google for directions from Detroit to Redwood City, for example, you're interacting with a graph that represents the US road network. The same principle applies any time a site tells you people who bought object X might also be interested in book Y.

And then there's the question of how to describe the more complicated relationships that human beings have. Maybe my friend Bill is a little abrasive if he starts drinking, but wonderful with kids - how do I mark that? Dawn and I go out sometimes to kvetch over coffee, but I can't really tell if she and I would stay friends if we didn't work together. I'd like to be better friends with Pat. Alex is my AA sponsor. Just how many kinds of edges are in this thing?

You can call this nitpicking, but this stuff matters! This is supposed to be a canonical representation of human relationships. But it only takes five minutes of reading the existing standards to see that they're completely inadequate.

One big sticking point is privacy. Do I really want to find out that my pastor and I share the same dominatrix? If not, then who is going to be in charge of maintaining all the access control lists for every node and edge so that some information is not shared? You can either have a decentralized, communally owned social graph (like Fitzpatrick envisioned) or good privacy controls, but not the two together.

II. It's Not Social

The problem FOAF ran headlong into was that declaring relationships explicitly is a social act. Documenting my huge crush on Matt in an XML snippet might faithfully reflect the state of the world, but it also broadcasts a strong signal about me to others, and above all to Matt. The essence of a crush is that it's furtive, so by declaring it in this open (but weirdly passive) way I've turned it into something different and now, dammit, I have to go back and edit my FOAF file again.

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.

Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph.

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

III What, then, is to be done?

Now tell me one bit of original culture that's ever come out of Facebook.

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It's just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.

—maciej on November 08, 2011
Read more at blog.pinboard.in

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/sBLhAp

#Diaspora Co-Founder #IlyaZhitomirskiy Dies At 22

2011-11-14T09:44:00.001-05:00

Here's the article from Huffington Post. Many of the tech blogs are blogging about it as well.

Amplify’d from www.huffingtonpost.com

Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Dies At 22

The Huffington Post Catharine Smith First Posted: 11/13/11 06:09 PM ET Updated: 11/14/11 12:52 AM ET

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the young co-founders behind social network Diaspora*, passed away suddenly on Saturday, TechCrunch has confirmed.

No details about Zhitomirskiy's cause of death had been issued at the time of this writing. He was 22 years old.
Read more at www.huffingtonpost.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/tvubgU

2011-11-14T09:42:00.001-05:00

Diaspora Co-Founder IlyaZhitomirskiy Dies At 22 http://bit.ly/tvubgU

Ilya Zhitomirskiy Tribute

2011-11-14T09:28:00.003-05:00

No news yet but here's a tribute page

Amplify’d from www.respectance.com

Ilya Zhitomirskiy Tribute

Ilya Zhitomirskiy

Male

Died Nov 12, 2011

New York, New York, United States

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/uBfoTU

2011-11-14T09:28:00.001-05:00

Ilya Zhitomirskiy Tribute http://bit.ly/uBfoTU

2011-11-14T09:02:00.003-05:00

Ilya, Diaspora co-founder, dead at 22. Shocking. http://bit.ly/tcc7Sc

Ilya, Diaspora co-founder, dead at 22. Shocking.

2011-11-14T09:02:00.001-05:00

Followers of my Amplog know that I was a big fan of Diaspora, the attempt to create a p2p social network in response to Facebooks continuing violations of common sense ethics.

Now I found out that Ilya has died over the weekend, and I'm stunned.

I'd noticed that he had suddenly resigned from Diaspora recently. It must have been a prelude to this news.

I got a t-shirt as swag from them for my $25 contribution to the project via Kickstarter. I'll be wearing the t-shirt all day today in remembrance of him.

I'm sure there will be more news later from somewhere, and I'll try to keep you updated.

Amplify’d from mashable.com

[REPORT]

11 hours ago by Ben Parr 37

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Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Dies at 22 [REPORT]

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the co-founder of the open-source Facebook alternative Diaspora, has died at the age of 22. The cause of death is not yet publicly known.

Zhitomirskiy, along with Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer, created the open-source software as part of a project while they were students at New York University. Diaspora was created as a response to Facebook’s controversial privacy changes in 2010. The team was able to raise $200,000 on Kickstarter to launch the project.

Our thoughts and condolences go out to Zhitomirskiy’s family and friends.
Read more at mashable.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/tcc7Sc

2011-10-12T10:47:00.003-04:00

http://ping.fm/CEJ4C http://bit.ly/r4NisW

2011-10-12T10:47:00.001-04:00

http://socialmediatoday.com/mfauscette/286789/communication-and-collaboration-social-business-world http://bit.ly/r4NisW

2011-04-22T14:22:00.001-04:00

I mainly just love the chart about the various forms of communication, and how they're categorized as synchro/asychro http://bit.ly/geAtsq

2011-04-22T10:52:00.001-04:00

I mainly just love the chart about the various forms of communication, and how they're categorized as synchro/asychro http://bit.ly/geAtsq

How Social Media Reveals Invisible Work | Social Media Today

2011-01-31T13:22:00.000-05:00

How Social Media Reveals Invisible Work | Social Media Today

2011-01-07T23:48:00.001-05:00

Egypt's Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as http://bit.ly/emiO3x

2010-06-06T15:48:00.001-04:00

User Centred Design - Infographic Poster by Pascal Raabe (+additional thoughts on Public Funding model) http://bit.ly/aDp25G

2010-06-06T13:52:00.001-04:00

Extraverted Introversions re: @Amplify http://bit.ly/bA06Nm

2010-06-03T22:43:00.001-04:00

An example of Jungian Rational Feeling at work: Game Theory's Trolley Problem. http://bit.ly/bnYB6N

2010-06-03T22:34:00.001-04:00

Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Step Down - Nuff Said http://bit.ly/aiQtYj

2010-06-03T22:18:00.001-04:00

HolyKlick HolyKaw - content is great, getting there is a pain. @ckieff visavis @guykawasaki - less is more! http://bit.ly/bbLygz

2010-06-02T21:59:00.003-04:00

Introvert your extraverting - social media backup tools. Then backup your backups. http://bit.ly/9KAaDt

2010-06-02T21:59:00.001-04:00

Introvert your extraverting - social media backup tools. Then backup your backups. http://bit.ly/9KAaDt

2010-06-02T21:50:00.001-04:00

Introvert your extraverting - social media backup tools. Then backup your backups. http://bit.ly/9KAaDt

2010-06-02T21:44:00.001-04:00

Holy Success Story Batman! Final Update They did it! 6479 backers $200642 (nearly 1000 dollars in the last hour) http://bit.ly/asGqpf

2010-06-02T21:09:00.001-04:00

Diaspora co-ompetition. Evolution favors Diversity and maybe Hybrids ;-) http://bit.ly/a7igHC

2010-06-02T20:37:00.001-04:00

GWBush 43 has a Facebook Fan Page. Wonder what his privacy settings were set it automatically? http://bit.ly/dxii3c

2010-06-02T19:56:00.001-04:00

Zuckerberg donated to Diaspora see â€œa little of myself in themâ€ but that would require Empathy you don't have http://bit.ly/drtBo9

2010-06-01T22:18:00.001-04:00

Holy Success Story Batman! Next-to-last Update w/ only hrs to go $199663. Will they break 200K? http://bit.ly/bLU7AC

2010-06-01T20:58:00.001-04:00

WordPress adds "reblog" - how/is it different than Amplify @egoldstein? http://bit.ly/dq9Hna

2010-05-31T10:31:00.001-04:00

Listening and Psychological Type - it's a skill and not evenly distributed, with different purposes. http://bit.ly/djmhFr

2010-05-29T10:59:00.001-04:00

Just for fun and profit and knowledge http://bit.ly/91MmAT

2010-05-25T19:24:00.001-04:00

Super awesome Tshirt emblem designs for the Uplift Universe commissioned by David Brin! http://bit.ly/9N77Vx

2010-05-25T19:21:00.001-04:00

Super awesome Tshirt emblem designs for the Uplift Universe commissioned by David Brin! http://bit.ly/bFRg01

2010-05-24T20:46:00.001-04:00

Analysis of Twitter buying Tweetie - Holy Kaw! http://bit.ly/9OXbPq

2010-05-20T19:29:00.001-04:00

Where's the conversation on Amplify? 8 different places in the room. http://bit.ly/cUo7JR

2010-05-19T23:21:00.001-04:00

End of the Beginning...Duke to shutdown 1st Usenet server http://bit.ly/9Pku1E

2010-05-18T23:12:00.001-04:00

Geez Mary, even *I* can do that...Gaydar algorithm outs facebook users http://bit.ly/9mbKDj

2010-05-17T20:12:00.001-04:00

Holy Success Story Batman! (Update 17.05.10) in 72hrs $146K-177K 4068-4924 backers http://bit.ly/cRJNx8

2010-05-14T22:28:00.001-04:00

p2p socialonesocialweb some equal air time with diaspora on my part. just a little. http://bit.ly/9U6UCD

2010-05-14T20:33:00.001-04:00

Holy Success Story Batman (Update 14.05.10) in 24 hrs $116K to $146K 3024 to 4068 backers http://bit.ly/9DWk0N

2010-05-14T19:28:00.001-04:00

Twitter study flawed. how do you measure the unmeasurable? You can't measure passive consumption. http://bit.ly/aZbdfy

2010-05-13T19:48:00.001-04:00

Holy Success Story Batman, they doubled overnight! $50K to $116K in 23 hours, 1534 to 3024 backers. Way to go! http://bit.ly/aXVC85

2010-05-13T19:39:00.001-04:00

http://bit.ly/dl8H2D

2010-05-12T23:07:00.001-04:00

Facebook Privacy isn’t a generational thing uckerberg. Just ask my 6th grade niece. http://bit.ly/9ECLic

2010-05-12T19:50:00.001-04:00

Holy Success Story Batman! They quadrupled in four days! http://bit.ly/9Ecgay

2010-05-11T23:31:00.001-04:00

Air Pollution Linked To Heart Attacks: NPR - when someone gets on my case for smoking, I point to their car. http://bit.ly/99BuJP

2010-05-11T23:21:00.001-04:00

8 Websites You Need to Stop Building - The Oatmeal http://bit.ly/a8ip6X

2010-05-11T21:34:00.001-04:00

Google doesn't need to hire "Social" it needs to *be* social. It's a corporate culture problem. http://bit.ly/ad4Ace

2010-05-09T10:19:00.001-04:00

surest sign I'm addicted to amplify - I feel guilty that I won't be amping on Mother's Day. Maybe tonight... http://bit.ly/apVCv7

2010-05-08T23:59:00.001-04:00

Facebook stole his fan Page, no explanation http://bit.ly/aK3uUu

2010-05-08T22:31:00.001-04:00

Facebook strikes again: reveals IP addresses as well. Immoral as well as incompetent. http://bit.ly/bizRHo

2010-05-08T18:39:00.001-04:00

The best $25 I've ever spent (except for pledging @WCBE905Columbus) http://bit.ly/aGHSXZ

2010-05-08T13:42:00.001-04:00

AOL can kick Facebook's Ass. (If they do it right). "Welcome, you've got privacy!" http://bit.ly/bQceWH

2010-05-08T13:31:00.001-04:00

GPS and You (FunnyHaha) http://bit.ly/bPGI0l

2010-05-08T12:26:00.001-04:00

Facbook's Privacy Defaults Illustrated http://bit.ly/aQNWVO

2010-05-08T11:45:00.001-04:00

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative http://bit.ly/aqzUy9

2010-05-08T11:44:00.001-04:00

How standards get created in the real world. http://bit.ly/9XbnmP

2010-05-08T11:43:00.001-04:00

Consumer Reports: Half of Social Network Users are http://bit.ly/cloFkA

2010-05-08T11:32:00.001-04:00

join diaspora http://bit.ly/9rak3r

2010-05-08T11:23:00.001-04:00

There's nothing like saying "I told you so..." NeenerNeenerFacebook Private/personal/subjective social networks http://bit.ly/bv3g5h

Brin, Heinlein, Jung and Me

2010-05-03T22:16:00.008-04:00

There's been some bit of study vis-a-vis politics and Jungian psychology (as expressed in MBTI terminology), and I've frequently lectured about the Jungian qualities and structure of our Constitution as though it were an "independent psyche" of its own. (It's remarkably balanced, down to including ISTJ-like instructions on how to implement it - but without the Bill of Rights, would have been remarkably unbalanced and lacking Fi functionality - so nyah nyah nyah Hamilton!).

David Brin recently posted about the political orientation of Heinlein in his blog and I also had a take on Heinlein from the perspective of Jungian psychology and politics.

Heinlein was probably solely responsible for me starting my journey into the political spectrum as a Libertarian first. As a "gifted" "gay" "geek" "ENFP" who felt continuously oppressed by my suburban culture and any authority (and just plain tired of the overwhelming stupid banality of it all), the Utopian libertarian societies he painted were enormously attractive. But I was always turned off by the sections I found in his work that seemed heartless, and was never comfortable with Randian versions of it, or the callous and anti-social traits I found in real-life people who proclaimed to be Libertarians.

Anti-libertarians have pointed out to me that Libs paint a "I've got mine, you go get your own" kind of attitude, and because I didn't, I attacked that as the anti-libs perspective on it. But that was because *I* didn't feel that way, and as David Brin describes RAH, I considered myself a "compassionate conservative" (and yes, I used that term *YEARS* before Bush did dammit!). My take on it was that non-profits/NGOs/501(c)3s should be the vehicle for our compassion, not the government. In fact, today (in my mode as an Extreme Moderate politically), I'm all about a "progressive flat tax with no exemptions other than donations to non-profits."

After I learned Myers-Briggs and Jung though, I started to understand where I fit on the pyscho-political spectrum, and after studying the Constitution with a Jungian lens, *really* understood where my innate political orientation came from.

xxTJ (Te) Types will try to claim that Extraverted Thinking (that dispassionate cause and effect logic) is responsible for their Libertarianism. After all, if the only rules that exist are the dispassionate rules of physics and nature and Social Neo-Darwinism, everything is "fair."

What they don't realize is that xxFP (Fi) types *also* claim that Introverted Feeling is responsible for Libertarianism, since after all, it is the focus on one's Self, one's inner harmony, sticking up for the little guy, and the "inalienable rights" of (hu)man kind, that are the basis of a free society, and if you don't take them into account, nothing is "fair" to anybody.

So two dichotomous Judging opposites, Introverted Feeling and Extraverted Thinking, both "claim" the ground of Libertarianism, and couldn't be more different in the way they approach it.

Jung described the "Transcendent Function" as the union of opposing functions, usually one conscious and the other unconscious "constellated by thesis and antithesis in equal measure and standing in a compensatory relation to both. It thus forms the middle ground on which the opposites can be united."

I think in some ways Heinlein was able to tap into what Abigail Adams described as genius: "I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic." and he illustrated it in the great debates of his characters in his books, but ONLY in his books. I believe I read that Heinlein bristled at anyone who laid claim to his philosophy. Jung once said "Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian" and I believe RAH would have said something strikingly similar.

Alas, we don't live in Frontierland *OR* Futureland - Disneyland is the Abstract made Concrete (and why it's such a joy to children of all ages). Brin is accurate when he says that Heinlein was an expert at the gedankenexperiment, and he was especially expert at including other great germanic memes as schadenfreude, einfuehlen und ausfuehlen and other great definitions that only the Ti dominant engineers of Deutschland could have defined.

Oh, and Mr Brin? I think you do, too.

2008-03-03T19:59:00.001-05:00

I have two other blogs. The first concerns Jungian psychology (Typing About Type), with emphasis on Myers-Briggs (MBTI) but also including Singer-Loomis (SLTDI), Kiersey Temperament and other Jungian concepts. The other concerns multi-user interaction on the Internet, with a basis in Jungian psychology (InternetPsyche). Eventually everything else not Jung will be here, but I rarely feel the need to shout to the InterEther about much.