[PrettyboyLombard]

Personality types are really popular with women and dumb normies because the ability of coherent thought has gone down over the years, so MBTI and astrology become ways for women and normies to translate and externalize internal machinations which they are unable to understand as they're too retarded.

[FlyWithYou]

'Knowledge' always lies between the monadic ultra-generality of Everything (the universe, 'gnon') and the infinitesimal and localized singular of the Specific. Both extremes constitute non-knowledge,

If I understand your terminology correctly, the Specific as an extreme in fact doesn't constitute non-knowledge; exactly the opposite. Because what makes it specific is the context that it sits in with relation to all the rest of the whole of existence. All the parts of a composite whole know each other.

[turnip]

For what it's worth: Myers Briggs, Socionics etc are misreadings and misapplications of original Jungian typology. They get the "stacks" wrong. Myers Briggs is not to be conflated with original Jungian typology itself. This was simply the first of many contemporary personality systems to misunderstand and fundamentally alter the work first presented in Jung's book "Psychological Types". Those systems (which Jung decried) are syncretized and generalized in the popular imagination of today.

I suppose it is worth addressing this, since it seems to be a common argument from people who are more serious about typology. Of course Jung's ideas were altered significantly within the derivative typologies that followed, but the psychological conditions of society also changed drastically, and his ideas did not provide a way to properly think about these changes (e.g. everything converging into a Bolshevist nigger favela longhouse). The same thing happened with Freud and psychoanalysis generally, hence you get derivatives like The Last Psychiatrist contorting Freud's ideas into some theory of universal pornographic media narcissism, but the problem with this isn't that it changed Freud's original ideas - those were also untenable, to start with. The problem is that you can apply it to anything and everything and make no progress in your understanding of humanity. 

Jung and Freud both took the particular form of contemporary neuroses as they appeared to them and attempted to link them to the primordial depths of the unconscious, but this devolves into uncritical speculation quickly. What is the causal nexus here? Jung claims the archetypes were shaped by countless collisions between the psyche and the external world throughout history, but this doesn't stand - isn't the "external world" supposed to be archetypal to begin with? If it isn't, where did it get the principle by which it shaped the archetypes? Moreover, does Mr. Lobe seem like a primeval archetypal form to you? This question ends up being important, in relation to what you say here:

Instead, he abstracted pure archetypal personality profiles. For instance, in proper Jungian typology a person would not be an "ESTP"

This isn't quite right, for Jung the archetypes are what is unconscious and repressed in the psyche, while your type is the part of your personality that is conscious and socially-adjusted. Thus his typology works by distinguishing behavior that is primal and "archetypal" from behavior that is consciously refined or "differentiated" (i.e. the inferior vs dominant function). That might have made sense during Jung's time, when society was relatively more coherent, and neurosis would have seemed more like a blatant aberration. But mental illness is now blended together with normal life, and it seems very much like a recent herd animalization phenomena; to conflate this with the whole of Western mythology doesn't seem to help understand what is going on.

Which brings me back to my original point, the neuroses and patterns we are seeing amongst people are not anything metaphysical or cosmic (as much as it might please people to think of themselves this way). We can conceptualize and examine how they came about in recent historical time. Neurotics are not archetypal manifestations, they are the very recent products of social dysfunction; if they were born in a slightly different time they may have turned out completely different. That is why cultural analysis can be of such great effect, as long it is kept grounded in concrete reality.

[Aizen]

Someone who would believe in something that Cicero debunked twenty one centuries ago isn't even worth my while.

Yes, maybe he debunked astrology in the form it existed in then, and I'm sure it exists in an even stupider form now than it did then; but, if the common understanding of the nature of Pantheons and polytheistic modes of religion has degraded to such a great extent today after 2,000 years--let alone the degradation of certain psychological modes--could it be that Astrology had been warped by mass consumption after 2,000 years--maybe 10,000 years--by Cicero's time? The answer is emphatically Yes.

This is pertinent regarding what Zed says here:

PUA/Redpill culture introduced the simple 'alpha/beta' dichotomy to describe culture as it existed, but subsequently this dichotomy proceeded to shape and overwrite culture itself. In practice, this happens naturally when any idea or notion becomes so widely used and overloaded that it is forced to reify itself as a series of more finely defined terms. Beta, once impregnated, semantically expanded to encompass the whole domain of incel terminology - same story with alpha, maybe more so. In practice this is inevitable: All attempts at classification are overloaded by default, tending towards an inevitable bifurcation, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization as specificality erodes generality. 'Knowledge' always lies between the monadic ultra-generality of Everything (the universe, 'gnon') and the infinitesimal and localized singular of the Specific. Both extremes constitute non-knowledge, but the Landian perspective suggests that we're the trajectory is universally towards specialization.

So what has been lost? I took an astrology test because a friend suggested it a few years ago. I naturally thought it was bullshit, but I played along. I was shocked to find that all the "signs" read me like a book. It also wasn't something vague and general like "you are only nice when people are nice to you", something that could apply to anyone--there were specifics, not about my life, but about my own character and personality.

I then began to think "what sort of physical mechanism could produce specific characteristics according to one's birth in relation to cosmic events?" It's not an entirely strange thing to suggest, actually. If you allow for a Will in Nature--which modern Physics does not, but many of the great Physicists did, not to mention Philosophy, which Physics derives from--then some level of determination can be intuited if you consider also the cyclicality of the cosmos, a cyclicality that is also present in Astrology. I think it possible that Astrology is a last vestige of some ancient system of understanding the cosmos that has been lost to time.

Feel free to dismiss this as kookery if you wish, but if there is a Will in Nature, surely it would have some sort of observable physical manifestation.

[Guest]

A test gives permission to the person taking it to accept the results. "Man wants for a King." This is a well-known value proposition in a very large industry (that has existed before industrialization.) Another form of it is radio, or podcasts now. A man listens to some RW podcast and it gives him permission to be more like that...but never all the way. This is why shock jocks were very popular, a way to regain something that was lost due to socialization being so strict. As for MBTI, I have taken it a few times and got completely different results (E turned to I, F turned to the other one, etc. I don't remember all the permutations.) These sorts of tests are most appealing when one feels "lost" whether they will admit to it or not.