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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

> · Red: dominant, driven, solution focussed.

> · Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous

> · Green: patient, considerate, nice

> · Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal

Damn. I spent so much of my time and energy pushing back exactly on this bullshit when I was young. That's part of the curriculum of mandatory courses I had to take during an apprenticeship in Switzerland. Expensive and mandatory courses paid by students' employer, of course. But I didn't know that the "color model" was THAT popular.

In french speaking countries, that's often presented as a package called PNL, aka "Programmation Neuro-linguistique" (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmation_neuro-linguistiq...). Based on my experience, that kind of pseudo-science is super popular in corporate environment, and is really difficult to fight against.

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At MSFT, they made everyone go through this training, along with a "personality test" to figure out which colors you were. Then everyone got foam blocks that they were told to stack in their window to tell everyone else how to communicate with them.

This was exactly the same color model, although we gave names to the colors, like red was commander, blue was analyst, etc. Of course, everyone wanted to be red.

I'm sure this course was expensive, and hundreds if not thousands of people took it. It was about as useful as you would imagine. I only wish I could find those blocks, as they were fun (and safe) to throw at people.

Of course they didn't mention the original book, because if they would have, I certainly would have remembered the title!

Just to reduce generalization, while I was at Microsoft we never had to do any of these psychology things. From day 1 to the last day all I had to do was work and maybe once complete a compliance and security 1 hour course.

I participated on this kind of training in more than one organization, and I see the issue as trying to give an artificial justification to existing leadership and to the general organization style of the company (generally multi-layered pyramid). They will somehow always conclude that managers have the "right" leadership characteristics, and that people being lead should be fine with their position, because after all this is who they are!

I took this stuff in an introductory college course. I kind of knew it was bs but it was also easy to understand and score an easy mark. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to tell the emperor they have no clothes.

> Sometimes it just doesn't pay to tell the emperor they have no clothes.

Indeed.

I worked a job in which I worked more hours than my coworkers and was (measurably) more productive on a per hour basis than my coworkers. I loved my job, the people in other departments loved it when I worked because things got done that they needed, and I always had a smile on my face.

But I had a "bad attitude" because I objected to similar nonsense.

For some reason in corporate environments, the ideal employee "gets along with others" but also "doesn't waste time." I mean quite literally they want an oxymoron.

Also I find that these things can easily be gamed because they can try to figure out "what" contains the variables that allow for them to make themselves appear to be the ideal candidate; moldable to whatever position they desire.

I think there is an over emphasis on this because upfront seeing that in an interview doesn't tell you much, and if you're skeptical of it, the supervisor already has a skewed view of you. Also from my experience, supervisors want complacency, not "diverse views." The whole diversity phenomenon is completely garbage that does not exist practically. I don't get why it's taught when it's not followed. The nature of the beast is for the top's will to be executed downward, not marginalized upward.

I guess I've been lucky to avoid literally any of this at work. However, one of my classes at university has each student rate other students in their group with arbitrary personality factors that seem like they should be subjective.

For instance, the model (we take quiz to evaluate how well we use it and how to rate each other) relies on things like "is late to meetings" or "does not fully consider everyone's ideas" to judge a student as being an underperformer. The most problematic was that it made us choose whether we are "details" or "overview" in terms of what kind of work we complete, with no room for being able to handle both (you are either the person who types individual sentences at the whim of your 'leader', or you are planning the entirety of the project and doing none of the grunt work). Speaking of 'leader', it also asks us to rate ourselves as leaders (good, mediocre, bad), and to state what kind of person we want to be led by.

I'm expecting our responses to be used to assign us to groups and given roles in each group, but we will see.

I just get annoyed when I'm stuck taking a survey that - by the nature of the questions on it - is almost certainly dubious.

There's an unpublished version of the story where the kid who notes the emperor is naked gets sent to the guillotine.

I think a big part of it is that corporate HR types are trying to turn people into interchangeable cogs in the machine. But this ignores the richness of our experience -- even if the color model were both static and true, I'm willing to guess that the expression of those characteristics would vary widely from person to person.

Better to just get to know people individually and talk to them about their desires, capabilities and needs. But I guess that takes too much time in the corporate world, so we classify people by color (and I suspect it also sells a lot of books).

The problem is HR types are absolute conformist authoritarians. They don't have any critical thinking skills whatsoever, otherwise they wouldn't be in that field.

It's the exact kind of thing I expect colleges and universities to push out. People that can only regurgitate information and then get indignant if you as much as question it's validity. Brainwashing really works, and people often pay for the privilege.

I completely agree with you. HR seems to aggregate all the people that you wouldn't allow anywhere near the actual business of the company.

HR's primary existence is prevent lawsuits between the company and the employees.

I understand that, but in my experience HR is more often than not the cause of most of those lawsuits.

> Better to just get to know people individually and talk to them about their desires, capabilities and needs.

That does not scale. You cant do that reasonably with nuance with too many people.

Moreover, someone who is on completely different position will never understand fully what programmer will talk about when talking about desires, capabilities and needs. This sort of thing needs to be discussed with more technical leader/manager. And vice versa, programmers have no idea about what hr people actually need.

> That does not scale.

Maybe the problem is that we require businesses to scale in an anti-human way?

Reminds me of the color themes of Magic the Gathering, replace yellow with white and add black.

Red: Firey & high energy characters that act like that.

Blue: Intelligent & 'meta'. Lots of 'wizards' with that kind of personality.

Green: That might as well describe an Ent.

Yellow/White: Nice extroverted people, with a dash of self-righteousness

Black: Death and negativity.

White is also largely about control and order, so I don't think that one fits well (which is fine since it is mapping a different color). The others, yeah, fairly close.

White was traditionally about defense, purity, and positiveness. Kind of like holy energy in WoW, or Diablo 3, or ...

I'm kind of reminded by the book/movie Divergent as well.

You can also see it (albeit roughly) back in all kind of new age subculture.

I may have a slightly different view than most players, since I also read the novels for the era I played the game (Invasion through Fifth Dawn). It fits during the Mirari and post-Mirari arcs, Odyssey through Scourge, and in the same era black also wasn't just "death and negativity" (though Phage certainly embodied those aspects).

Oh, my PoV was about MtG in the 90s until say Tempest. It is probably out of date at this point, but I never liked the new stuff that much (after a few times jumping on the latest hype expac got boring, esp as the older cards were more powerful). I read a bit into the lore (IIRC there wasn't much available) and I read one magazine with a story within the Ice Age.

This article has better short descriptions of the colors, and elaborates a lot on the traits each color can have, how they disagree, agree, can be combined, etc:

https://medium.com/s/story/the-mtg-color-wheel-c9700a7cf36d

White: Peace through order

Blue: Perfection through knowledge

Blue: Satisfaction through ruthlessness

Red: Freedom through action

Green: Harmony through acceptance

My favorite line in the article is probably that Green is the color of Chesterton's Fence; even though the field of software isn't very Green as a whole, you can still express conflicts and mindsets within that field using this color wheel. I'm definitely some combination of Green and Blue -- I want to see the ecosystem of kubernetes pods running smoothly, changes should have a really good justification, the only thing that matters is what does work, not what should work, etc.

> Based on my experience, that kind of pseudo-science is super popular in corporate environment, and is really difficult to fight against.

Because it has some merit. It's not the complete picture of a human, but it's a shortcut that gets you in the ballpark. Kind of like a fuzzy picture coming into focus.

People can be evaluated on any spectrum: morality, intelligence, friendliness, creativity, etc. They're all useful, but an incomplete representation of the human.

There are tons of systems that try to lump people into categories. The systems that tend to get popular have enough metrics to be roughly useful but few enough to be easily remembered.

We used to lump people into two categories: good and bad, or friend or enemy. Then we figured out that people can change and be on different parts of that spectrum in different contexts. That blurry picture wasn't clear enough to help us succeed.

The danger comes when you start thinking: "Reds are jerks" or "Don't worry about what that Yellow said." and fall into that mental trap that the fuzzy picture is all there is.

Actually, it doesn't necessarily have merit. It just seems like it does, because people will assume that almost any vaguely-worded paragraph that's supposedly about them must be true.

See the Barner / Forer Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

Thanks for sharing the English article. I decided to share the french version because it has way more details (it's a huge phenomenon here), but that's for sure more interesting if people can actually read the content :)

NLP is or was also super popular in the "pick up artists" community

It was the loud minority, but damn were they smarmy.

Its popular because it works :)

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is related to General Semantics, which was developed by Alfred Korzybski. General Semantics isn't bullshit like NLP is, but it does have some useful insights.

For example, General Semantics says that the map is not the territory, which isn't the most absolutely ground-breaking thing in the world but is helpful to keep in mind, whereas Neuro-Linguistic Programming might as well be "NLP: Language is Magic!" for all of the grandiose claims it makes about controlling people using crafted speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics

GS also came into the SF world:

> During the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction. Notable examples include the works of A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A and its sequels. [48] General semantics appear also in Robert A. Heinlein's work, especially Gulf. [49] Bernard Wolfe drew on general semantics in his 1952 science fiction novel Limbo. [50] Frank Herbert's novels Dune[51] and Whipping Star [52] are also indebted to general semantics. The ideas of general semantics became a sufficiently important part of the shared intellectual toolkit of genre science fiction to merit parody by Damon Knight and others; they have since shown a tendency to reappear in the work of more recent writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson. In 2008, John Wright extended van Vogt's Null-A series with Null-A Continuum. William Burroughs references Korzybski's time binding principle in his essay The Electronic Revolution, and elsewhere.

Early NLP was basically Grinder and Bandler trying to codify hypnosis in grammatical structure. Later NLP was the MLM/PickUp stuff. Too bad the two are conflated. It was an interesting concept until it was commercialized.

>General Semantics isn't bullshit like NLP is

Uh.. did you read Science and Sanity?![2] It's absolutely BS. Korzybski thought "is" should be eliminated. When you say "The car is red", there are many things the car 'is' besides red, so this is a lie. (No, really!) Thus a language without 'is' would be better.[1] He saw and wrote of himself as an Aristotle-scale genius. Science and Sanity has a couple of ideas: "map is not the territory"–no wonder this is quoted, it's the one coherent idea in the book–and the structural differential, a very interesting device made of string and bits of metal, for representing levels of abstraction and interrelations of concepts[0].

But the bulk of the thick book is comprised of a chapter on each of many traditional fields–psychology, linguistics, physics, etc, educating about the use of "general semantics" in each field. e.g. there's a maths/calculus/geometry chapter, with a bit purporting to explain the application of "general semantics" to it. These chapters seem meant to show what a polymath and genius Korzybski was - "Gee, how knows so much about so many subjects, there must be something to this". He was evidently staggeringly impressed with himself, well, many people are, but only cranks write about it to such a degree. I think its success lay in its nature as a (very) introductory textbook to a lot of different areas. It's all extremely basic stuff. The less generally educated you are, the more impressive it would seem. It's very weird that it got any kind of reputation though. Not many people are acquainted with Science and Sanity these days, it seems, (understandably) and just assume there must be something to it.

[0] http://www.google.com/search?q=korzybski+structural+differen...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

[2] Online here: http://www.rodsmith.org.uk/alfred-korzybski/science-sanity%2...

You sound like you need to take a "cortico-thalamic pause"...

https://www.quora.com/How-does-one-perform-a-cortico-thalami...

I can't tell if that's meant to be a joke or not.

There are...several layers to it.

My dad reputedly made references to the "cortico-thalamic pause", and it was probably a joke. I think maybe it was more of a reference to A E Van Vogt's science fiction than General Semantics as such. And possibly there was a (humorous) association with "we now pause for station identification" on the radio.

Looking at Wikipedia, it seems like Van Vogt was significantly involved in Dianetics which later became Scientology, which seems vaguely disturbing (I also learned of Theodore Sturgeon's connections to it relatively recently).

But, I mean, the concept of pausing and reconciling your feelings and analytical mind seems to make sense, kind of.

The line between stuff that appeals to smart people who think laterally and total bullshit gets hazy sometimes. Or between obvious truisms and deep insights. My father was a physicist with an interest in various things including philosophy, and I recall books belonging to him by Chomsky and many others that don't necessarily appeal to me but I can't ask him now exactly what he thought of them and how seriously he took something.

>Based on my experience, that kind of pseudo-science is super popular in corporate environment, and is really difficult to fight against.

While its uses in a corporate environment can be bogus, there are indeed a few discreet types of people, and most anybody that has worked/lived with/watched people in the wild can attest to that.

I don't see many people being "analytic, careful, meticulous" in one day and "let's just go at it / throw caution to the wind" the next.

At best, an "analytic, careful, meticulous" will have some rare breaks when those qualities will break down (e.g. when they fall in love or some addiction or some breaking point in their life/career).

But usually people tend to stick to some modes of behavior -- which might not be the ones in the color groups above, but they do exist and are quite consistent.

> usually people tend to stick to some modes of behavior

Well, congrats, you have defined what a personality is.

The whole point is that the colors thing is BS. Humans are much more complex than that.

> I don't see many people being "analytic, careful, meticulous" in one day and "let's just go at it / throw caution to the wind" the next.

That can easily happen, depends on the context.

>Well, congrats, you have defined what a personality is.

That's still worth it, especially if people think personality can't be defined, or needs tons more subtly to define (whereas I did it at a specific abstraction level) or that people are unpredictable, so there's no "static personality" etc.

Against all of those approaches, I make a statement that personality exists, and there are certain types of people, and that it's still worth it to classify them in a few simplistic inflexible groups personality-wise -- subtlety is not necessary for many purposes.

>The whole point is that the colors thing is BS. Humans are much more complex than that.

Which is neither here nor there. Complexity is only relevant based on the abstraction level on wants to work with, and what they want to use the model for.

Same way that real-world physics are also much more complex than Newtonian model, but for tons of purposes the Newtonian calculations are just fine (and we can even use vastly simplified constants, like PI with just 4-5 digits) in our calculations and still do fine.

>That can easily happen, depends on the context.

Depends on how often it happens. If it can happen, but 9/10 times it doesn't it still totally worth abstracting someone as "analytic, careful, meticulous" for predictive purposes -- you'll be right 9 times out of 10, which can give a huge advantage over other approaches...

these are just harry potter houses with the colours switched up a little

Colours WTF!

The Belbin team Roles does have some value I feel as that's derived from real results - but you should not use it prescriptivly

Belbin is same bs mostly. Yes, some people tend to be more comfortable in leadership roles and yes, some people are more creative.

But the belbin model is yet again one failed attempt to quantify these ephemeral observations - and failing at that.

I deal with several roles. My belbin questionnaire mapped pretty well the type of communication that was required in each role between the other person, but did not tell about me as such.

These tools are best used as an entertainment to get people thinking about how they behave, but in that a "which hogwarts house do you belong to" would run the same function. I.e. they are all fiction. Fiction can capture important insights, but it's not science.

(For those not familiar with belbin, part of the routine is collecting feedback from 5-6 of you coworkers)

Not sure I saw the feedback, but as I understand it its based on a lot of data from students at the college.

Though wen I did it the course leader said so you work at the labs which was flattering (the Uk equivalent of bell labs that is)

And not everyone is comfortable with leadership roles I know developer who is better than me who totally went to pieces presenting in front of a small group of his peers.

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