litphoria

Moved to 'needs discussion' per suggestion body.

I forgot to add there but - I strongly believe we should come up with one set of Traits for describing personality and have only said set. So we can give tools that define the character overall and without conflicts and overlaps.

I'm concerned by the new eruption of personality traits too, mainly because I see a lot of them as too problematic for me to use: they don't have things that suit me, and I'm not sure I get them well enough to add stuff: I am not sure what I would pick for Atmosphere as it's vague, Ethics as it's way over my head, or Loyalty or Temperament because they over-trivialise something complex and variable. I am not sure how the latter two would be relevant to searching, either.

The help article on traits says traits should:

• (be) bits of information on profiles which describe a profile's distinguishing characteristics or qualities.
• (allow) your profiles to be categorized for searching and comparing, but still allowing you to fill in all of the details needed to fully flesh out your profile.

I feel this means they should (1) be understandable enough I know how to use them (and add new categories, ideally), (2) that they can describe my character or profile usefully, and (3) that they're useful to searching. A lot of the new personality traits are failing at 1-3 of these from my perspective, and I feel they are being dumped in without enough critical examination happening first as to whether and how they meet the needs of traits.

The part about critical examination I would actually expand on somewhat - it is there partially because we ended up with culture of deeming every auto suggestion that gets accepted to be a thing to happen, followed by being endorsed by people who want to be "nice". While it works for many things, particularly so for stuff like Body related Traits, things that are more complex shouldn't be handled like this.
I wouldn't say all of the ones we have now are bad but... I just had a thought.

The way I see it, Personality is not a fit for trait -based descriptions, or not ones we have now. Traits are natural for describing race, body, mental gender and so on. It is somewhat natural to think he has height of tall, while not so much to say that has outwardness of introvert . People think of personality in terms like 'shy', 'charming' or 'brave'.
Either we go for Traits that can encompass the natural descriptors of personality (charm of brute) or we are better switching our approach to something that is not a Trait - some 'cloud' of personality descriptors that could be picked from according to the need would be option to consider - and I actually think it would work better, given how there are too many characteristics related to personality to hope for meaningful, non-cluttering collection of Traits that would feel natural at the same time.

I am an introvert, and most of the characters I've ever created are explicitly introverted types. Personality-wise, it is not synonymous with only shy, and includes 'Thoughtful', as you say, or 'Reserved' is another adjective for introverts. Maybe 'Stoic'. I'd just say that this gets to the problem of trying to classify. The system I like best has four binary descriptors yielding 16 types, but then you have to be familiar with the system and know or read about the type in question to utilize the system. So I hesitate to suggest something like that. It might be that you have four personality traits with two categories each:

• Introversion (I) or Extraversion (E)
• Intuition (N) or Sensing (S)
• Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)
• Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

So there can be more description of each choice and the choices are meaningful on their own, but if someone cares, they can see that my character is an INTJ - Architect or Mastermind, and they can go to the internet to read a detailed description of what kind of character that is.

MB personality testing came up when we were first talking about personality traits. It was decided that it isn't very helpful to find or search for an INFTP or INTJ or whatever you ended up having, and that we would instead have specific traits for the specific parts of the personality so preferences could be set on them individually, not to mention discussed one-by-one, etc.

Right, I saw that discussion and agree that INTJ or even Mastermind is pretty obtuse unless you know the MB personalities backwards and forwards.

But the above suggestion can't be dismissed with that objection. It is suggesting four binary Traits where you pick from two categories, each of which are explained and are useful in themselves, even if you know nothing of MB. So Introversion(I) vs Extroversion(E) has a usefulness of its own in describing personality, and might actually be used on its own in a search. It would certainly provide widely useful description of the character's personality. Likewise for Thinking vs Feeling, and the others. It is merely a passive benefit that you can select categories that result in describing your character as INTJ, once you parse the four selections yourself, assuming you know they are coming from the Jungian or MB lexicon. Litphoria need not make reference to MB or INTJ at all, though it would be neat to have those letters in parentheses somewhere, i.e., "Introversion (I)" or in the description of Introvert/Introversion. (BTW, using "Introversion" might disassociate from the 'stigma' of using 'introvert' for some, though I have no aversion to the term myself.)

And of course, you can be strongly Introverted, and strongly a Thinker vs a Feeler, simultaneously, so this lets you pick both to describe your personality. All that said, I'm only a mild fan of MB and don't care if there are any explicit mentions of it on the site. The Jungian terminology could be useful though, and sixteen personality types can be specified with just four binary Traits.

The problem is that the Myers-Briggs test, although popular, kinda sucks and in actual psychological professions and academia it is very much thrown into doubt. For example, an academic paper tearing it a new one: Measuring the MBTI... And Coming Up Short

Part of it is that ultimately it sorts people into 16 bins. I know a few dozen people, and 16 bins isn't remotely useful enough to sort them.

Yes, that is why I said i'm only a mild fan of MB. With its popularity, you see different famous people being categorized differently be the actual proponents of it. Plus I've taken versions of it several times, and don't always come out the same. Some tests show you how strongly you come out in each category, and I am only strongly Introvert and Thinking. My other two categories are very borderline, and that means I could fall on the cusp of four different bins. However, when reading the description of INTJ, it is uncanny how much of that applies to me, while the others are Meh. Still, it may only feel better than all out astrology or phrenology. I'm not sure that it is decidedly useful. I mean, all the personalities are spoken of in GLOWING terms, and the truth is the vast majority of people are not out there living up to these sixteen personalities.

On the other hand, we already have Introversion/Extroversion implemented...

If we delve right back into 'academia' we will end up with Ethics again, which are currently hot topic for discussion and regarded as being anything between not too useful for searches to downright useless. We also have (currently category-less) Traits that drew inspiration from 'bricks' used to craft many of the personality classifications, but... I think they went too deep overall. The issue we have is that we need to find way to express personalities in as few steps as possible without losing usefulness on the 'atomic level' of single trait.
And the most important thing - the system to describe personality should be usable without wandering the internet for explanations and help, so self-contained and understandable on the site.
Despite that, some of the traits we have (and I want to briefly go over all of them) were inspired by the metrics of MB personality.

Our current list consists of:
Activity, Adaptability, Ethics, Loyalty, Outwardness, Reasoning, Regularity, Self-esteem, Temperament
Out of those, Ethics, Loyalty, Outwardness, Self-esteem and Temperament have categories, with Ethics being major point of disagreement and in the process of mutation (ongoing).
Activity, Adaptability and Regularity are, in my opinion, going already too deep and in-detail, to the point where it is not quite useful to have them - maybe activity, but who will search for characters based on how well they adapt to things?
Temperament, Loyalty and Reasoning are, probably, borderline - I made both of those, but lost faith in Reasoning being any useful, while Temperament probably could be implied by something else. I might've been wrong about Reasoning, as it was supposed to cover something analogous to T/F of Anne's proposed scale, but I just had major lack of faith in where we were going overall. I like Loyalty as a descriptor, but not sure how much of use as a searchable it has; truth be told, if the feedback proposing change of Ethics into Morality goes through, it will be sort-of implied by positions there, if I understood correctly.
Outwardness is the most classic thing and I think it might very well stay.

BTW, I NEVER assign Temperament so far because the two categories are extremes that my characters never fall into.

Categories can be added, that is less of an issue than trait not being useful as a concept (something we face with Ethics)- question is, are there Temperament categories that would make it "assignable" and if that holds enough of a relevance to stay a trait .

Roel: If we delve right back into 'academia' we will end up with Ethics again...

I feel you may be overreacting based on other discussions you and I were privy to earlier. I was just bringing up academia because if I make a bold claim that MBTI doesn't work, that's something I need to cite or I might just be some uneducated yahoo with an opinion. (But, cited, it is very problematic: two of its dimensions appear to be measuring the same thing, and the thinking/feeling attributes don't seem useful in common parlance because everyone does both except for our glorious psychotic robot overlords. Among other things. It's not a good basis for describing people, let alone fictional characters.)

Categories can be added

Definitely. I just haven't gotten around to thinking up what these new categories would be called. But the choice between Argumentative, and one described as welcoming others to walk all over her is leaving out at least 2/3rds of the population, if not well over 9/10ths, and probably more than 90% of the profiles people create. Maybe 99.9% Besides that, Temperament defined online doesn't even admit "Agreeable" and "Argumentative" as categories in any descriptions I've found. Wikipedia has references to a Four-temperate division, a Five-temperament division, a NINE temperament system that is totally different, and then a Keirsey Temperament sorter that is different from the others and related back to MBTI.

Again, it is a case of defining a very tight description of one personality type that covers an extremely small percentage of the population, which implies we need dozens or more of these tightly defined traits, which also implies you end up with multiple non-exclusive categories within a trait system defined to be exclusive, meaning you have to pick one category for each trait. For example, The five-category Temperament system only has: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, Phlegmatic, and Supine. Choleric types are said to be excitable, impulsive, and restless, with reserves of aggression, energy, and/or passion, and try to instill that in others, and they tend to be task-oriented people and are focused on getting a job done efficiently; their motto is usually "do it now." They can be ambitious, strong-willed and like to be in charge. They can show leadership, are good at planning, and are often practical and solution-oriented. They are motivated by their goals, in which other people are tools to be used. Or so says Wikipedia.

Anne's profile would be Supine. Supine is "needy" for acceptance (or control) from people, yet less able to initiate and express this need to them, and may have low self-esteem, but is driven to try to gain acceptance by liking and serving others.

Agreeable and Argumentative might fall into Supine and Choleric respectively, but they are far, far too tightly defined. I like the five-temperament system because it has a limited, easier to comprehend number of broadly defined types that still have some descriptive power.

I am not sure how I missed that sort of temperament when I created that one... and this actually would be a high-quality personality trait in my eyes - I mean Temperament with the five-category division. It would give quite a compiled piece of information about any given character, and be easy enough to understand without much googling.
Once WA is back I will probably ask how he should approach this one, and make appropriate suggestions.

The understanding of Argumentative/Agreeable and such was made when we tried to split traits into mentioned previously 'bricks', so it got into small stuff that was hard to, hm, differentiate properly.

The discussion here appears to be done so I am closing this (nothing actionable). Note that since this was suggested several of the more useless personality traits have been removed.