Method
Why this is not a personality system.
The test for inclusion is not whether a claim feels true. It is whether the claim could be shown to be false, and whether the source is the person who made the argument.
The outside view
Three criticisms of this page are correct and are not answered here.
| Canon | Thirty-six entries, and the authors are overwhelmingly dead, European and male. That is a property of this reading list, not a finding about minds. A list built from Buddhist, Chinese or West African sources would ask different questions, and the absence of those questions is a gap rather than a judgement. |
| Unvalidated probes | The probes are not psychometrically validated. They are built to be falsifiable by the person running them, which is a weaker claim than being reliable. A probe that changes your mind and a probe that measures something are not the same instrument. |
| No outcome data | Nobody has measured whether reading these entries changes anything. The only claim made here is that each entry states a checkable argument and ends in something you can do. Whether that is useful is an empirical question that has not been run. |
What would change this page
An entry is removed if its central claim turns out to be unfalsifiable as stated, if the work attributed to the author does not contain the argument, or if the probe cannot be run by one person in under an hour without equipment. An entry is replaced if a better-evidenced source answers the same question. That is why Record asks for data rather than assent: a reading list that cannot be contradicted by its reader is a belief system, and this one is meant to be falsifiable by the person using it.
Inclusion criteria
| 1 | A primary text or a peer-reviewed paper, not a summary of one. |
| 2 | The claim is stated so that evidence could contradict it. |
| 3 | Author, work and year are given, so the claim can be checked. |
| 4 | It yields a probe: something you can do that would test it on yourself. |
| 5 | It makes no claim about you in particular. The site describes minds, not your mind. |
What is excluded, and why
| Excluded | Reason |
|---|---|
| Astrology, tarot | No mechanism and no predictive content beyond vague description; unfalsifiable by construction. |
| MBTI and type systems | Forced dichotomies discard most of the variance. The five-factor model is continuous and predicts better; the type industry persists for other reasons. |
| Enneagram, Human Design, gene keys | Typologies with no peer-reviewed predictive record. Their appeal is narrative coherence, which is exactly the failure mode this site is meant to counter. |
| Manifestation and attraction | No mechanism. Any observed effect is better explained by attention, selection, and placebo. |
| Guru literature | Authority replaces argument. First-person testimony is included (Jamison) when it reports an experience rather than prescribing a life. |
| Stoicism as productivity | The ancient texts are included. The modern repackaging strips the exercises and keeps the brand. |
| Single-study self-help | Roughly a third of published psychology findings replicated in the 2015 Open Science Collaboration study, with halved effect sizes. One study is a hypothesis. |
What the evidence is worth
Philosophy is argument, not data: it can be valid and still not describe you. Psychology is data, often weak, often about groups rather than persons. Literature is neither, and is included because a first-person account can show a shape of experience that no study reports. Each entry names which kind it is, and the kinds are not interchangeable.
Corrections are the point. If an entry misstates a source, the entry is wrong and should be fixed.