I can’t keep having the same conversations about love languages, mbti, iq, bmi, “brain fully formed at 25” and shit over and over again…
these things exist on a spectrum from untrue to straightforwardly racist btw. so if we could retire them forever that’d be nice.
quick rundown so we can put it to rest:
- love languages: MADE UP! it’s just a list of some common things viewed as traditionally romantic (and mostly from a western society/european culture tradition)
- MBTI: RACIST! its creator wrote “murder mystery” novels that revolved around the ideas that personality type could identify murderers, and that suicide is the correct answer if you discover you have non-white ancestry. the MBTI has cultural bias allowing corporations to effectively segregate by colour by pretending to be “screening for collaborative types” when in reality they only hire white people. It’s also obviously bunk I hope this goes without saying but the racist stuff is never true
- IQ: MADE UP! “intellectual quotient” tests can not test “the intellect,” only a few functions across a narrow spectrum of what brains do. Not only are those functions not inherent, but trained (you can just get better at IQ tests by practising them), they’re also used as a be-all-end-all of intelligence, a notion notoriously hard to define. RACIST! After being taken to mean “intelligence,” the IQ has been demonstrated to be tied to abstract cognition functions mostly valued and trained in the global north, the reaction to which has been “well that proves the others are dumber” with IQ consistently used as an argument to support that claim
- BMI: MADE UP! It was invented by and for health insurance, not health services providers. Exploring in detail claims about BMI showed most of them to be bunk and the others to need infinitely more nuance, some weak correlation never strong causation. RACIST! fatphobia affects non-white people a lot through a mix of difficult economic situations and compounding effects of already-strained access to healthcare
- “brain fully formed at 25”: MADE UP! A widely-quoted study on brain development just stopped looking after the age of 25 but brain development and maturation etc showed no sign of stopping before, and the criteria used in number of connections, readiness to create more etc showed impressive variance with young children having more “mature” brains than adults
yeah IQ was literally a metric made up by eugenicists to test how well their eugenics was working lol