Duncan Sabien likes at least two games: punch bug (as long as he is the one doing the punching) and Magic: the Gathering. He has a whole theory of personality types based on colours of magic in M:tG (red, green, white, blue, and black) and got his partner the therapist into it. The four humours are old and unscientific see:
Personalities, organizations, goals, and means can all be thought of in terms of the Magic colors they typify, allowing you to draw interesting connections, make surprisingly useful predictions, identify deficits and growth areas, and increase empathy. I claim that the Magic system, which was designed to be resonant and trope-y and archetypal, does a lot of the same good work that naming things does, and is a richer intuition pump than other popular wrong-but-usefuls like Enneagram or MBTI or chakras or the integral theory colors.
Backlinks show a number of rationalists and one TTRPG designer being excited about it.
Sneerers are having fun riffing on this theory, so lets create a thread for that. https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/the-mtg-color-wheel?open=false#%C2%A7ub
I will begin with the fact that he posted it on Medium in twenty-frigging-eighteen and was offended that they eventually moved it to their "paying members only" section. Who in 2018 could have expected that a 'free' service would shut down or make the experience worse when it ran out of other people's money?
He also makes sure you know that the game designer, who also designed RoboRally, has a PhD. Try to explain Hume to them and they stone you, but invent a CCG which lets a corporation take all your lunch and newspaper-route money and they respect credentials.
The account of blue and black is worth reading:
Odysseus got his entire crew killed, massacred most of his neighbours and housemaids, and was only saved by the intervention of Athena. Lex Luthor is a supervillain. Yud says that Profesor Quirrell was modeled on Robin Hanson the creepy Libertarian economist and Michael Vassar who two people say argues for sex between grown men and underage girls. So it is bad news that so many rats see Quirrell or "blue-black" as a model ("overrepresented in communities like LessWrong and Silicon Valley").
I would not recommend a therapist who identifies with this description like Sabien's and Yud's partner.
2024-Sabien claims that "I myself am green/blue with a strong splash of red, though I often find myself with goals and roles that lean white, such as running workshops or writing essays like this one." But his Dragon Army project and Anna Salamon's memories of early CFAR sound more like the above. Sabien also named a convention at Lighthaven after himself. As I said before, I think Bay Area rationalists read HPMOR and conclude that the thing to do is to set up their own smaller cult with their own crowd of disciples to manipulate.
I'm sorry, in what world is green the colour of tradition? And it's honestly absurd that these anti-green colours are supposedly about growth (and green isn't?). Forget about knowing about people, I doubt this dude understands even M:tG
Edit: I suppose I could see an argument that green is more about preservation and against exploitation (black), but tradition has such human connotations to it that it seems like it'd be better to describe white
Edit 2 now that I've properly skimmed the article
As someone who spent my teen years doing an absurd number of online personality quizzes, I've had a lot of fun mapping my my various friends as a silly game. But "silly game" is the key phrase there. The way that this dude and his ilk are doing things, they're trying to come up with an ironclad system that they can package people into. What fools.
Oh wait, no, this guy can't be a fool, because he's partly blue, right, and therefore is very clever. Clearly I am the silly one
It's the colour of tradition because it doesn't spend all it waking moments thinking of ways to not die, try to keep up
It's impressive how he manages to misread the characters of Dr. Manhattan, Han Solo and Sherlock Holmes.