[combatentropy]

Talk about overthinking it! This thread highlights the recurrent conflict that arises because my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFJ, but most programmers are not.

To me a Christmas movie is a movie with the spirit of Christmas running through it, however weakly. Another definition I have is this. A Christmas movie is a movie that is fun to watch around Christmas. Die Hard meets both of these definitions.

Die Hard is not, however, a typical Christmas movie. It's a movie more for people who are sick of the normal Christmas movies and want a break. Because of this special status, people who think of Die Hard as a Christmas movie feel a greater camaraderie than people who think, say, White Christmas is a Christmas movie. For example, at a Christmas party one of my friends wore, as his "Christmas sweater," a gray sweatshirt with the words "Ho ho ho" written in red.

Another thing that makes Die Hard special is the thought and care that the director put into it, https://vimeo.com/76739972

[clubm8]

>Talk about overthinking it! This thread highlights the recurrent conflict that arises because my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFJ, but most programmers are not.

Meyers-Briggs has a number of issues[1] and is frankly, unscientific. But because it uses a survey, it evokes feelings of rigor. Sometimes I feel that engineers are so obsessed with rigor, they'd rather use a solution that is wrong but "goes through the motions" than a simpler solution.

For example, whether something is a a "Christmas Movie" is at it's heart, a matter of opinion. To answer it, simple polling a diverse sample of the US population could answer the question. But that's not a "sexy" answer - we want to buy into this idea of One Ground Truth that if we only framed our experiment perfectly, we can uncover.

The real truth is that qualitative research is messy. Doing a "good" job is easy, but doing a "great" job is a still unsolved problem... and sadly all to often we choose the appearance of rigor over actual useful research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

[EpicEng]

This comment is exactly what the OP was talking about...

[Waterluvian]

Surely the parent comment is making a joke of some sort. Just reading that sentence, I cannot escape a strong feeling of satire.

[_8j50]

I think the correct answer is: depends on what Christmas is to you. Is Christmas the american generic holiday or the Christian holiday celebrating the birth of the Christ? That definition makes a big difference on answering whether or not something is a Christmas thing.

[rusk]

Well by your latter definition a whole swathe of Christmas movies would be disqualified ...

[_8j50]

Yeah, and there are a large number of americans that watch Christian/Biblical movies and consider those to be more Christian. Otoh,there are also a lot of people that think hallmark movies are Christmas movies while some disagree.

It's a celebration,societal consensus is not needed to determine how smaller groups of people want to celebrate it. Lets not force our celebrations on each other. My definition is the latter but I don't care one bit if others watch die hard and home alone while I watch the Gospel of John or something that has nothing to do with Christmas.

[rusk]

Sorry I misread you! Happy Christmas!

[_8j50]

You too :)

[mc32]

Sen Rand Paul says it's a Christmas movie... https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1076824663794294784

[adjkant]

> my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFJ, but most programmers are not.

Aren't most programmers INTJ? Debate about MBTI aside, that's really not much of a difference...

[effingwewt]

I didn't downvote you, I've never been able to, and wouldn't have even if I could. I just wanted to point out this MB chart is essentially the programmer's version of 'I'm high strung because I'm sagittarian'.

[adjkant]

Eh, I think that's discounting it too far in the other direction.

MBTI is a mostly arbitrary and limited categorization system with very shaky psychological/sociological grounding, but it still is grounded on parts of personality / who people are to some degree. There are tons of misuses of MBTI from trying to gain personal predictive insight, adhering to a single "type" because you tested as it once, and the written descriptions of the types themselves on many sites do indeed use tricks used in horoscopes.

However, when you take it for what it is, an arbitrary classification tool with very light social science backing, there are insights you can learn from when it comes to how people interact or at least how they approach different problems/ideas/situations in a broad sense, as well as a few other actual practical but limited applications.

You would never be able to use it to say "I'm high strung because I'm INTJ", but you can use it to the point of "Oh hey person X and Y are having issue Z communicating, perhaps it's explained because one is an S and the other in an N. Not because one is S and one is N, but because, if properly categorized (big if), it would make some general statements about communication that could be applicable to a situation.

All this said, I know MBTI comes up in some offices and I have never once heard of a proper/successful use of it, so it's wide misuse and misunderstanding of its nature probably does make it the programmer's version of astrology. Just wanted to point out that astrology and MBTI, as much as people love to compare them, are quite different.

[lowercased]

Spoken like a true T...

[adjkant]

Why the assumption? I'm very much a proponent of INTJ's developing their feeling side and tbh I prefer INFJ's to INTJ's personally. It doesn't change that the difference is in only one category, and not in one I would say drives the professional world as much as say N/S when it comes to working together. I'm not sure where such s strong conflict would come from, especially given that every category is a spectrum and very few are 100% T or F. To assume there is such a radical difference in one categorization is precisely a flaw of MBTI's use.

[toyg]

> It's a movie more for people who are sick of the normal Christmas movies and want a break.

Wat? For me it was just the constant TV reruns at Christmas that did it, like with Trading Places and Groundhog Day. It just does not feel like Christmas until Hans Gruber falls from Nakatomi Plaza and Billie-Ray Valentine sells OJ futures.

Do we really have to slap labels on everything?

[heliodor]

Would you say the extroversion or introversion of the population is normally distributed, with most people in the middle of the range, and a few on the extremes? If so, how do you reconcile that with the Myers-Briggs approach of binning people into the A or B extremes, with no one in the middle?

[combatentropy]

Although I've read a lot about Myers Briggs, I still am no expert. Also there are a lot of articles out there with differing interpretations. I need to go to the original writings, by Carl Jung.

But one thing I can say about Myers Briggs is that it allows for variation between introversion and extraversion. First of all, an INFJ will usually seem more extroverted than an INTP. Furthermore, one INFJ might seem more extraverted than another INFJ. So I think Myers Briggs allows variation, not only among all whose type begins with I, but even between two people of the exact same four-letter type. In the end, Myers Briggs calls them "preferences."

Myers Briggs for many years seemed to me simplistic. Actually introversion and extraversion was the only thing that I could put a firm finger on, whether I was one way or the other. I consider it a binary trait, maybe even more so than Carl Jung, Myers, or Briggs. Certainly more than you, it sounds like. But that may be because I use the more narrow definition of each, that it's only about where you recharge.

Anyway, the other letters in Myers Briggs seemed to me naive. Am I intuitive or sensing, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving? Well, I am each of them. It sounded like caricature, not real people. As I read more and more, I found that Myers Briggs meant those words in narrow ways. Thinking doesn't mean thinking, and feeling doesn't mean feeling. Last but not least, not only does the last letter not mean perceiving or judging in the everyday senses, but it doesn't even mean whether you are mainly one or the other. It means which do you extravert? Do you extravert judging or extravert perceiving? Yes, even if you are an introvert, which one do you extravert? And if that's the one you extravert, then the other side is introverted inward, and that's the side therefore that you actually feel is more truly you. Confused yet?

Myers Briggs now seems like some fractal, the more you read about it, the deeper the complexity. There is a whole layer underneath the surface, about "cognitive functions," which is a requirement for even an intermediate level of understanding. It may all end up to be quack science. About the only thing I'm sure of is that we are not blank slates, that at least some of our personality preferences are genetic, and that Myers Briggs tries to nail that down. Whether it nails down too much or not enough or just the wrong parts is another matter.