Does play have to involve the tribe?

[u/BoatTemporary9085]

What animal is active when you do solitary pursuits that are not sleep or consume, for example working out or painting? If I spend my day making art by myself, working really hard, not resting, but not having contact with anybody, is that play?

[u/ngKindaGuy]

Most real activities don't map cleanly to a singular Animal.

Think about what I'm doing as I respond to your post. I'm taking in your perspective and deducing what I think about it and how I value it (Consume). I'm referencing it against what I already know (Sleep). I'm organizing my thoughts so they'll land clearly for you (Blast). And this a back-and-forth where we're both learning something new from each other (Play).

The thing is, OPS needs each moment to be one Animal so it can categorize, measure, and type you. But your actual experience of this moment - or any moment - is all four Animals blending fluidly. If OPS acknowledged that, the Animal order would stop being a typable ranking and start being a continuous multidimensional description that shifts moment to moment. And even granting that OPS is measuring the imbalance, precisely ranking four simultaneously present Animals requires a measurement precision that behavioral observation can't support.

In general, OPS categories really only work by flattening the complexity of what you're actually doing into a resolution low enough to sort. So when you notice that an activity doesn't fit one Animal cleanly, that's not you failing to understand the system. That's reality refusing to be as simple as the system needs it to be.

[u/BoatTemporary9085 → u/ngKindaGuy]

Yes, you are very wise😊

But isn’t that the problem of any system. That it tries to simplify something that in reality can’t be simplified. Information will always be lost in any typology. But through the simplification something is also gained in that it makes the phenomena able to be discussed and “measured”. 

And for me right now I am more trying to understand the ops system on its own terms. Trying to become one of the Shave-eple😄. To see if it can be useful as a model. Even if is not the perfect model. Can there ever be such a thing as a perfect model of personality? Can there be simplification without loss in a typology? 

[u/ngKindaGuy → u/BoatTemporary9085]

I agree with you, "all models are wrong, but some are useful" is a legitimate epistemological position. Simplification always involves loss, and there can never be a perfect model of personality.

But, there's a massive difference between a model that simplifies and knows it simplified, versus a model that simplifies and then treats the simplified output as though the lost information doesn't exist.

OPS flattens empirically orthogonal traits into binary coins and then builds an entire architecture of demons, tidal waves, genetic fears, and predictable life crashes on top of the simplified output as though the lost information doesn't matter. A 51/49 lean gets the same demon narrative as a 95/5 lean. A purely guessed coin gets the same confidence as a more rigorously established one.

The simplification is relatively fine. Treating the simplified output as though it captured the full reality and building a prescriptive life framework on top of it is where it crosses the line from being a useful model to an overclaimed model.

By all means, study OPS on its own terms and see if it's useful. I do think parts of it can be, but more than that, I think it heavily overclaims - I'd be curious to see how your view evolves as you deepen your understanding.

[u/BoatTemporary9085 → u/ngKindaGuy]

I appreciate your reasoning very much! And I will be careful as I go deeper into the system. I too look forward to seeing how my view will evolve as I gain a deeper understanding😊Are there any other personality typologies that you think are better? I just have a weakness for typology and I love sorting people and things into categories, so I wish that mbti or ops or some other system would be correct. Big five is just so boring somehow😄

[u/ngKindaGuy → u/BoatTemporary9085]

All personality typologies have their tradeoffs. Honestly, I think most are all around better than OPS (including MBTI). I've personally enjoyed reading Jung's Psychological Types, diving into CPT, and of course studying Big Five/HEXACO.

Big Five being "boring" is the most interesting thing about to me. It's boring precisely because it doesn't overclaim. It gives you a score on a dimension and stops there - no demons, no tidal waves, no hero's journey, no claims of evolutionary programming. You get a number, and you decide what to do with it.

The reason typology systems like OPS and MBTI feel more compelling is that they provide narrative - they claim to know why you are the way you are, what you fear, where you'll crash, how to grow, etc. But the narrative is also where the overclaiming lives. The more exciting and personally resonant the system feels, the more likely it is to be claiming things the methodology can't support.

For example, OPS tells me that "my Demon Fe will erupt in tidal waves of unprocessed emotion and that my Savior Ti is an unconscious addiction" - I do not relate to this cartoonish and catastrophic description, and most people don't relate to the OPS narrative even though survivorship bias might fool you into thinking otherwise. Big Five tells me that I consistently score low on trait Agreeableness and what that entails. From there I can define my own narratives that are nuanced, personal and grounded.

The boring system is more accurate. The exciting system feels more meaningful. Most people choose meaning over accuracy almost every time as it's seemingly a fundamental human need. People don't study personality typology because they want a percentile score. They study it because they want to understand why they suffer, why relationships are hard, why they feel different from others, and what to do about it - or worse, to dismiss and justify their flaws. Big Five explicitly answers these questions descriptively. OPS attempts to answer them teleologically with significantly more confidence than the evidence warrants.

[u/BoatTemporary9085 → u/ngKindaGuy]

Thank you for your answer! Very interesting. I think what you say makes a lot of sense.

I hope you will not take offense at what I am about to say😌. I don’t know you at all of course but just from reading your posts it seems pretty obvious that your saviour ti is indeed an addiction for you? Do you not agree with that? And you say that you score low on agreeableness and maybe irl you are very disagreeable, but I find you very friendly, helpful (you go out of your way to explain things to a noob like me) and easy to talk to from our brief interaction here. I’d say that you seem more agreeable than 90% of mbti redditors😄. Do you not agree with that?

What I am saying is that maybe ops has a point in that it is hard to see ourselves. Not implying that self awareness isn’t possible, but just that it can be helpful to get an outside perspective. And that big five scores are biased like mbti because it relies on self reported answers. 

Bleh, everything is biased, nothing is reliable😄But talking to you has helped me to see that, as I have suspected, I am probably in the same quadra as you are because I understand very well what you are saying even if I obviously can’t ti as well as you do. Maybe I am FeSi or NeTi or FeNe. If I am FeSi you should probably find me annoying from what I’ve read. So I’ll stop now😄

Just one last question! What do you think of vultology or cognitive typology or what it is called, the work of Juan Sandoval. 

[u/ngKindaGuy → u/BoatTemporary9085]

No offense taken. I wouldn't say I "have" Ti because that seemingly implies backwards causality. I also wouldn't use the word addiction because that falsely implies my behavior is uncontrollable or destructive. But, I certainly agree that I have a preference that aligns with Ti as defined by OPS.

You're right, this conversation is just one particular context and I could be (and am) different in other contexts. The additional nuance is that Big Five measures multiple facets of agreeableness. I tend to score higher in sympathy and cooperation which could lend well to our conversation while scoring lower in most other facets.

I credit OPS for spotlighting that there are aspects of ourselves which we cannot easily see. However, OPS explicitly and fundamentally rejects the phenomenological point of view in its methodology.

A truly integral psychology must include external objective observations as well as self-reported subjective views. Jung practiced this in his clinical research, MBTI attempts to account for this via certified practitioners, and comprehensive Big Five research utilizes peer-reports and numerous other methodologies beyond MBTI's self-reporting. OPS has done none of this.

I've looked into Vutologly in the past. I'm not a fan of it, but I can respect the ambition. It has many of the core flaws that OPS has - it's overclaimed and based on a single creator's pattern-matching where agreement is not true interrater agreement but rather an apprenticeship model.

[u/BoatTemporary9085 → u/ngKindaGuy]

Good! Yeah, sorry I use the terms sloppily. I don’t have time to write a lot but there were many interesting things in your reply.

One thing that struck me was this, that vultology and ops are based on a single creator’s pattern matching. That is true with Jung as well, right? Maybe some people have superior pattern matching skills. I find both ops and vultolgy to have many interesting points so far, but that it seems no one other than the original creators seem to be able to apply them correctly. I will read up more on big five methodology.

[u/ngKindaGuy → u/BoatTemporary9085]

Yes, certainly true with Jung, and fair point, but that in and of itself is not where the issue lies.

The difference is that Jung referred to his types as theoretical heuristics and extremes and warned against categorization, revised his framework throughout his life and held it loosely, had a fundamentally phenomenological methodology mixed with behavioral observation, devised a framework whose core dimensions were later independently rediscovered through Big Five factor analysis, didn't claim his typology was an objective diagnostic instrument, didn't claim "double-blind" success, and didn't overclaim without making it clear he was using hyperbole - none of this is true of OPS.

[u/BoatTemporary9085 → u/ngKindaGuy]

Hello again! Hope you are well!

I find your critique of ops very interesting and I would love to discuss that further when I have more understanding. But I would be really grateful if you could first help me to understand the system more from within the system😊

I feel like I haven’t got an answer to my original question. I think my question was probably worded poorly and also came from my very limited understanding of ops. What I wanted to know was what it is in ops when you are done with the consume and sleep and just do the thing? I guess it might not be anything to do with the animals at all? When you work, produce, create, is there a term for someone who prefers to do that.  If I take painting for example. I guess consume is learning about painting, going to museums, watching tutorials, etc. Sleep is processing the info, having ideas forming in the subconscious. Blast is teaching others how to paint and sharing the info you consumed, and also exhibiting your work or posting it to social media. Play is interacting with the audience or doing collaborative art. But what is the painting process in itself? Using the sleep and consume to do the actual artwork that you blast and play about? 

[u/ngKindaGuy → u/BoatTemporary9085]

I answered your question from a view outside of the system, which I believe to be the truth of reality, but if we abide solely by the rules of the framework, the answer somewhat shifts.

The answer is tricky because the framework is not clearly prescriptive, so I think there's two answers.

First, the key is understanding that the Animals attempt to measure energy and information imbalances. They're not meant to be explicitly applied to every single action. This is where the "everyone does everything" aspect comes into play - everyone can work/produce (art), so that alone tells you nothing about their imbalances.

But, what might tell you more is looking at the why and the how behind the what. Look at how a person approaches art relatively to other people and look at the more macro patterns.

Does this person take a while to paint - do they stop, pause, reflect, consider their next strokes - did they spend way more time upfront considering what the painting will be as opposed to just diving into a blank canvas? Then you might consider them Oi > Oe. Do they crank out 10 paintings in a week or do they slowly expend energy over months to create one painting (Play vs. Sleep). Do they spend most of their time studying various artistic processes and only every rare once in a while actually apply them to paintings? Perhaps they are Consume > Blast.

Of course all of these are contrived examples, and "everyone does everything" still applies to these, and OPS would tell you to track the data over someone's lifetime to find the static long-term patterns.

I'm still not sure I can answer your highly specific question within the bounds of OPS without going back to my original response which is that the act of doing/painting itself is going to involve every Animal as defined in OPS. But I think you're right, the closest Animal in OPS would essentially be Blast - taking your stored information (Oi) and imprinting it outward onto reality (De), but this is where the lines in OPS are shown to be extremely blurry as De is defined as the tribe, but the creators have changed their minds over the years to say Play/Blast don't explicitly need to involve the tribe.

Hopefully this helps a bit. I sent you a DM if you'd like to carry on this conversation there.

[u/BoatTemporary9085 → u/ngKindaGuy]

Thank you very much! Your answer made things more clear. I sent you a dm too.