Playing percentages...

Further to my previous post, I fell for one of the classic blunders of all time.

The first, as we know, is never get involved in a land war in asia.  The second, of course, is never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line*.

Somewhat further down the list is the blunder of not sanity checking your numbers.

Let's look at it quickly.  You do the survey, the results come up, and you read "like 2% of the population..." and immediately think "wow, only 2 percent, that's not much, I must be really unique."  However, in the case of this particular personality test, there are 16 possible outcomes.  If the population was evenly distributed over all types, you would only have 6.25% in each type.  Hmmm... So the outcome is that yes, at 2% of the population INTJs are less prevalent than other types, but not by an order of magnitude; only by 5 dB**.

*If neither of those make any sense to you, do yourself a favour: go find a copy of "The Princess Bride" starring Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin, and watch it over the holidays.

**dB is a logarithmic scale, 3 dB difference is double, 10 dB difference is x10, an order of magnitude.  It's a microwave nerd thing.

Preaching personalities

Simone has been doing a series recently on how your personality affects your preaching style.  Having done a few sermons this year, naturally I was curious to find out what type I am.

Turns out that like a whopping 2% of the population, including such real and ficticious luminaries as Vladimir Putin, Augustus Caesar, Gen Colin Powell, Hannibal (both, the guy with the elephants and the guy with the chianti), Jefferson, JFK, Walter White (from Breaking Bad), Gandalf and Moriaty, I'm an INTJ.... looking at that list again, it does help explain why world domination is a recurring theme for me...

I don't know how accurate this description is, but I certainly see bits of me in it: bookworm, engineering career, various other traits that might be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation.

Unfortunately, it's also not on the list of personality types that Simone's looked at yet.  Oh well.