Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "UsefulCharts" channel.

The fun thing is that while you and Mr. Beat are verifiably eleventh cousins, you are probably also cousins in a bunch of other ways. There's a good probability you are also tenth cousins, or maybe ninth cousins, or both. When you cast such a wide net, these sorts of multiple relationships become inevitable.
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@ronnymaccaroni "And most people doesn't really fall in-between. Usually you are clearly on one side of the scales." No they don't. It is an empirical fact that most people fall near the middle of the raw score in the scale. This has been known at least since the 1960s. It's hard to find good sources with full text available online, but "Bipolarity in Jungian Type Theory and the Myers--Briggs Type Indicator" is one such article (full text on Research Gate). You can check the citations and cited bys for some other good sources. The general conclusion of all the abstracts I was able to find on the subject was that none of the MBTI subscales are bimodal, while some claim the E/I subscale to be weakly bimodal (with later papers alleging this to be an artifact of early forced-choice procedures). For instance, consider this paragraph from the introduction: "The forced-choice format of the MBTI is appropriate only if the MBTI dimensions are truly bipolar. However, the assumption of bipolarity of the attitude and function pairs has been challenged. Metzner, Burney, and Mahlberg (1981) argued that the oppositionality of the functions cannot be assumed on theoretical grounds and has not been adequately tested empirically. They and Jarrett (1979) pointed out that even if neither the perception nor judgment functions can be used simultaneously, it does not necessarily follow that they cannot be equally well developed in the same individual. For example, it is conceivable that an individual could be equally capable of and prone to approach problems from a logical (thinking) or subjective (feeling) perspective." They performed an experiment where people gave responses not in the yes-no format but on a 1-5 ("Likert") scale, reflecting the possibility that some people are near the middle on any given item. Check out this paragraph from the conclusion. "The results provide very little support for the bipolarity of the Jungian pairs of functions and attitudes. When subjects were free to state each of their preferences independently, a total of 26.3% scored high on both aspects of at least one of the three MBTI dimensions tested. For each dimension, the number of subjects who scored in the top third on both attributes was not significantly different than would be expected if high scores on one attribute are unrelated to high scores on its supposed opposite. In addition, when preferences were measured in a Likert format, superior (most preferred) and inferior (least preferred) functions were not dimensional opposites for 28% of the sample. Furthermore, correlations between Likert scores for attributes on the same MBTI dimension were low and, in the case of Thinking and Feeling scale scores, statistically significant in the positive direction. Scores for the Introversion and Extraversion scales yielded the only significant negative correlation, and the size of this correlation was quite modest; the proportion of shared variance between the Introversion and the Extraversion scales was only 13%." In other words, if you are more strongly Thinking, then you are also more strongly Feeling, which is totally contrary to the idea that these are diametrically opposed (in fact they are mutually reinforcing). If you are more strongly Sensing, that has no bearing on how strongly you are Perceiving, and the same for Sensing/Intuition. The only minor support was that highly Extroverted people were likely to be slightly less Introverted, but only slightly. This "type theory" is based on a fundamentally bad assumption that, as you say, "most people doesn't really fall in-between." In fact, most people do. Other studies compare raw scores to a normal distribution and find a good fit. At a minimum, it is clearly a centrally-peaked distribution, meaning "falling in-between" is the most common result. You are precisely wrong in your final claim. The subscales on their own may be useful (or they may not), but the typology is definitely useless, because of this basic misunderstanding of human personality variation. It's just like how a "size" scale could be meaningful but dividing people into large and small "types" cannot be. But it's actually worse than that, because some of the scales that are supposed to oppose each other are not. What if you found out that people who scored extra high on your "small" scale also scored extra high on your "large" scale. That would show the scale was invalid! So it is with the MBTI so-called dichotomies.
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I am sure the data is organized by country as a result of the way it was gathered. Getting high-quality data from the entire continent of Africa is an extremely expensive endeavor, and it requires cooperation from every country in the study. Each country will conduct the study in its own way, and results are probably also anonymized in some way. It might not be possible to compare results from different countries directly, and even if it is, there might not be enough geographic information to distinguish peoples from within one country. I don't think it's a question of lack of interest. I think these studies are just very difficult to perform. Africa also has the greatest genetic diversity on the planet, which makes interest even higher but the science even more difficult.
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I was surprised when my American religions textbook used the word "Judaisms," the plural of "Judaism." Like, "there are many different Judaisms in America." I still haven't seen that anywhere else. EDIT: It was written by Neusner, who I guess is a real fan of that term, because he wrote two more books about it.
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Agreed. I would have ranked Yukon rather badly, but not because of the stripes. I just hate the idea of having a detailed tiny drawing on a coat of arms on your flag, because nobody can see it if it's actually on a flag (as opposed to a picture in a video). The dog does look nice, but if you actually fly the flag, no one can see the dog. Same if you use an emoji or an icon on TV, or really any of the other common uses of a flag. So I don't give it many points for a nice invisible drawing. I do give them points for the stripes, which I like.
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He hasn't covered any true liberal Christian churches yet, and I'm pretty sure they will show up in the next episode.
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@km_studios But being right- or left-handed is an actual binary. The overwhelming majority of people are one or the other. Of course there are still varying degrees, with many people being broadly competent with both hands, but the preference is still not subtle. If you found some objective measure of handedness and plotted a histogram, there would be one big peak on the right with a smaller and somewhat less prominent peak on the left, with only a small number of people near the middle. The personality scales (both the Big 5 and the MBTI) are exactly the opposite. For any given scale, a significant majority of people are near the middle, with only minorities at the ends. This means that most people are not right- or left-handed, but rather ambidextrous with a slight or even no preference. These people are all much more like each other than they are like either rare extreme. However, they get split right down the middle and lumped with the extremes, making the result basically meaningless for the majority of people. Like, everyone is either taller or shorter than average, in a technical sense. But that doesn't mean there is a "tall height type" and a "short height type," and everyone must be placed into one or the other. A better categorization would have a "middle height type" containing most people, but even that would be silly, because there are no types, only a continuum. There are no "height types" and there are no "personality types." EDIT: I should point out that the "preference" thing was specifically for handedness. There is no evidence types correspond to any particular kind of preference. They just refer to whether you are above or below the median on some arbitrary scale. It could well be that 80% of people have the same "preference" on that scale (whatever that may mean), but MBTI attempts to split them down the middle anyway, putting lots of people on the wrong side. More to the point, each of these categories is just a factor, not really a thing to do or agree with. It is an aggregate of many small behaviors and opinions that are known to be correlated with each other. It's as if I had a "size" scale that looked at a bunch of answers to questions to guess roughly how big you are, noting that various properties like height, weight, armspan, waistline, and shoe size are correlated. This scale would have validity, but it wouldn't make sense to describe being on one side or the other of the scale as a "preference."
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@km_studios Right, and I'm pointing out that it's a terrible analogy. Real people really are basically left- or right-handed. But real people are not basically introverted or extraverted. They could be, but it turns out they aren't. They are mostly lumped in the middle, just like with human height. So it's not like classifying people as being left- or right-handed, it's like classifying them as being tall or short.
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When discussing the Quakers, I was hoping you would bring up the Shakers. I know they are a small group, but they were an important part of the history of my area. These days, Shakers are nearly extinct, but they were more numerous in the past.
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Eunice Whitcomb Bezanson may descend from an ancestor who lived in Besançon or a town named after it. Besançon is a French city whose name is very fun to say. The name derives from classical Latin Vesontio with a probably Celtic origin. But the name got clobbered over time, sort of like Cologne. And now we have the objectively silly name "Bezanson."
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Oh, you love Jesus? Name every denomination.
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Shaker Heights, Ohio was also originally founded by Shakers (though they didn't give it that name).
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Being a Jew with a PhD in religion, I am sure the author knows this, but the viewers probably don't. At 1:52 the video says that the five books of Moses "are called the Torah." That isn't wrong—people do call those books the Torah—but that is not the only way the word is used. The Torah in its most general sense refers to the "law" passed down from Adam, Abraham, and Moses, both in written and oral form, with all changes. So the "Oral Torah" includes instructions that were originally not written down, most notably including the Babylonian Talmud. Meanwhile, the "Written Torah" refers either to just the books of Moses (e.g. in a Sefer Torah scroll) or to the entire Tanakh, aka the Hebrew Bible (e.g. in a Chumash).
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@greywolf7577 Shakers established a small village there, and a few years after they abandoned the area, railroad tycoons M.J. and O.P. Van Sweringen built Shaker Village on the same land, which later became Shaker Heights when it achieved city status.
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TIL Angola was a Portuguese territory, not English. I actually knew someone from Botswana and have old friends from South Africa and still didn't know that. I mean, it's called "Angola." It must be English, right?
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16:00 The chart actually lists the first pharaoh as "MIZRAIM or MENES descdt. of HAM." Menes is the traditional name for the first pharaoh, and modern scholars identify him with Narmer. Alternatively, if Narmer didn't unify Egypt himself, then Menes might be his successor Hor-Aha. So the chart gets that part kind of right. The inclusion of Busiris is silly, though.
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You don't describe the viewpoint of the Sadducees in this episode. I remember in school learning that they rejected oral tradition and relied only on the five books of the Torah. When I wrote a paper on Ecclesiastes, I remember an author from ca. 1910 speculating that its author may have been a Sadducee, since he repeatedly emphasized the mortality of the human soul. Wikipedia claims the Sadducees occupied the upper echelon of Jewish society for much of the Second Temple period and included many high priests in their ranks. Is that a fair assessment?
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@bxdanny This is correct. 0 CE = 1 BCE. -1 CE = 2 BCE, etc. These negative and zero years really are used in astronomy, which uses the proleptic Julian calendar for ancient observations. The nonexistence of year zero really does produce precisely the sort of error UsefulCharts claims that it does not produce. He makes the same error with the Jewish dates, putting the creation of the world at the start of year 0 rather than year 1. However, the exact difference can't really be calculated without more information, since the Jewish calendar is lunisolar. It has entire leap months instead of leap days, so sometimes you will be off by 1 anyway.
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I don't want to harp on the typology too much, and I understand why Matt chose to use the MBTI here. He is effectively using it as a quick and dirty proxy for personality scales with higher validity and reliability. The concern of reliability here is not significant, since he is gathering large datasets in a manner that is fundamentally unreliable anyway. The low validity is the most serious problem with this approach, especially the E/i scale which mixes neuroticism and introversion, as he mentioned. There is no way around this problem, MBTI is just not the ideal scale to use here. But since work had already been done correlating religiosity and Big 5 personality traits, there was no reason to retread old ground. (And for what it's worth, more utility studies of MBTI are needed anyway, whether for atheism or anything else.) A more basic problem with MBTI is one that Matt mentioned but maybe didn't explain in much detail. Instead of scoring people on separate scales, the MBTI places people firmly in one extreme or the other. For example, the whole premise of dividing people into "introverts" and "extroverts" presumes that most people are clearly one or the other, with only a minority somewhere in the middle. The reality is the opposite, with most people scoring near the middle and only minorities scoring near either extreme. In other words, most people are neither introverts nor extroverts but somewhere in the middle, and even people who are barely on one side or the other are being done a disservice by being told they are entirely in one "type" instead of being told the truth that they are basically average in that respect. How would this system deal with your True Neutral DnD character? It couldn't. Such a thing doesn't exist according to Myers–Briggs. Nevertheless, while this is devastating for the test's intended function (determining individuals' personality "types," given that such "types" evidently don't exist), it is not such a big problem for this sort of population-level analysis. If all we are looking for is trends anyway, then those trends should still show up even after this artificial threshold is applied, though the experiment will lose some statistical power. A final problem with MBTI, also not relevant to this study, is in the pseudoscientific description of what the types "mean," and of the "functional stack." As Matt said, this relies on a modified version of an old Jungian understanding of psychology that was largely conjectural with little to no supporting evidence. Not even all MBTI enthusiasts still think this has any validity.
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Haile Selassie unequivocally existed. Therefore he was also God incarnate. -- apologist logic
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The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion, IL was a really strange one. After John Alexander Dowie was deposed in 1906, his successor Wilbur Glenn Voliva established an iron grip on the town. His church owned all the property in the town and employed almost all of its workers. But the strange part was in education. Starting in 1914, he started mandating the teaching of flat Earth cosmology in Zion's schools and releasing public statements about the shape of the Earth. That got as much ridicule in 1914 as it does today, and he was probably the biggest national joke of a preacher before the Scopes trial distracted public interest.
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@GTaichou But the results you get from the MBTI are always binary. They don't say, like "60% J, 40% P." They just say "you're a J." That's the whole premise of the typology.
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I think it's surprising how medieval typefaces present a huge barrier to understanding, but medieval spellings do not. The Wycliffe Bible is somewhat readable by modern English speakers if it is rendered in a modern font (significantly more readable than the Canterbury Tales). But if you have to stare at pages from the original book, it's extremely difficult. And I suspect that if you had to listen to the language spoken out loud, it would be even harder to understand (particularly the vowels).
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@M_M_ODonnell I have spoken to a lot of Creationists and have never seen that claim. It's not really a relevant claim anyway. Darwin did write about human evolution in The Descent of Man.
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Atheist—A person who does not believe in any god . Positive atheist—A person who positively believes no god exists . Negative atheist—A person who has no strong beliefs regarding the existence of any god Nontheist—A synonym for atheist Antitheist—A person who is opposed to belief in god Agnostic—A person who believes knowledge about the existence of god is unobtainable . (or colloquially, a person who is unsure whether god exists) Ignostic—A person who believes the concept of god is incoherent Nonreligious—Not belonging to any religion Irreligious—Opposed or hostile to religion Freethinker—One who advocates for reason over dogma Skeptic—One who doubts dogma and other received wisdom, very similar to freethinker Infidel—Someone unfaithful to or lacking a specified religious belief Heretic—Someone promoting a heterodox religious belief Apostate—Someone who has left a religion Blasphemer—Someone who says or does something regarded as offensive to religion or god Antireligious—Being opposed to specific religions or to the concept of religion Secular—In this context, a synonym for irreligious Humanist—A person who believes ethics should focus on the welfare of humans (rather than gods) Secular Humanist—A follower of the modern irreligious and atheistic system of belief called Secular Humanism
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The large number of archaeological records corroborating so many of the names in your tree suggests that most of the others were also authentic, since there is little reason to consider them exceptional in the text of the Bible. For instance, although Josiah's name has not been found in any extrabiblical artifact, it's hard to believe he wasn't a real person, or that his name was not really Josiah. I figure most of the people are like that, though not all.
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