Here are some white cards from the original set: Crusade. Wrath of God. Armageddon. Disenchant.

White feels oppressive because of course it's oppressive, it's the rules-imposing, order-loving color, but also because it's winning. And the winning kinds of white are not the good kinds. Ra is white, obviously. New World Order and the Technocracy in Mage is white (The Syndicate is black which is a hint that it's not actually in the Technocracy but rather the victim of a vicious propaganda campaign by the traditions). The AIs and AGIs we are worried about are white and we're trying to make sure they're blue.

You need white but you cannot let it win. When white wins the world dies. Of course, when most of the other colors win, the world would also die - red would see the world burn, green would see our cities crumble into dust, black would sell our souls to Moloch or worse. Blue wouldn't do the work to keep the system working, so even it needs balance. White talks a good game trying to make us fear those scenarios but the suffocation via white is the one that might actually happen. So rebelling against it is a reasonable immune reaction, especially if you feel vulnerable to its commands and slogans. Balance is necessary, although we can argue where balance should be - I can basically say, screw red mostly, but you absolutely cannot let it die.

This is as opposed to some other such systems - e.g. Spiral Dynamics talks a big game about how all the colors are valuable and important but at least one of them really should go die in a fire.

The conflict you feel resonates with me. The parts of the greater rationalist community that make me feel uncomfortable are firmly White; I disagree with most of their moral framework and am often annoyed that many of their moral proclamations are unquestioned and are assumed to be 'good'; ie, effective altruism, animal rights charities, etc.

A large part of what drives me is a Blue/Black desire to know things to help myself and make my life more awesome. Unlike Sarah above, I am excited by Blue words ("knowing", "understanding") because they cash out in better ways to achieve my Black desires.

Whatever MIRI's public persona is, I think of their most exciting research as Blue/Black. The study of decision theory is firmly about enlightened self interest, especially when you start thinking of the differences between PrudentBot and FairBot. Let the two of us trade, TDT/FDT style, to our mutual benefit. Any constraints on our behaviour are not imposed, as White might, but are consensual self-modifications to our decision processes so that we may maximize our individual utility through superior understanding.

I'm Red-Blue, trying to shift towards Black as a deliberate effort. A common pattern I see in myself is spotting both a pragmatic solution that improves things for me and a needlessly clever and novel solution that I actually pick, and then kicking myself when the clever solution works but doesn't actually advance my position as much as the Black choice would have. I have absolutely said the wrong thing in conversation because I came up with some really fun turn of phrase that I just had to try. I enjoy watching other people's Red-Blue shine too; I even enjoy being heckled or argued with as long as the insults or counterpoints are sufficiently new and interesting. I share your evaluation of Red-vs-Blue as the wrong question. They feed into each other for me, Red providing goals and rewards and Blue providing means and methods. At the very core, I think of myself as fundamentally Black and selfish though.

I admire White, I think White has the best levers for completing large projects, I think that minor tweaks to White's rules can make a much larger difference in more people's lives than most ideas Red or Blue come up with, but I have a really hard time binding myself into White. I also have a mental tic where the most interesting thing about White to me is always how to break it, thinking about where the smallest wrench could be thrown to bring the whole thing crashing down. I wish I had more Green, but I think it was too late in my development before I realized it would be possible to be part of a pack. I still think I could (and would really enjoy) being part of a community like that, but at this point I think it would have to be formed for Black reasons (with each member feeling like joining and staying was to their own benefit.) Green groups tend to make me feel very nervous, like I have to watch them closely for the slightest hint that they're starting to turn on me and that I need to be able to run very fast when they do.

I feel comfortable with Black. I like it when I know what someone actually wants, and we can make deals or compete or help each other or stay out of each other's way. I guess I have a strong prior that everyone is fundamentally Black and when someone presents themselves as another colour I have to spend time figuring out what their ulterior motive is, while when they start by saying that they're Black we can cut to the chase a lot quicker.

It's interesting how close this is to my own perspective, except for, basically, one point of opposition:

I'm Blue-Black-Red, instead of Blue-White. If I could push people (or myself) in a direction, it would be towards doing more cool shit (in a mad-science, art, business, etc sense) and putting less focus on trying to be righteous/pure/rule-abiding.

Me too!

The Red-vs-Blue conflict always seems like a "wrong question" to me -- "reason vs. emotion" never quite resonates as a real opposition, and I can never tell which I prefer. As does the Red-vs-White conflict -- structure vs. spontaneity seems like a tradeoff depending on circumstances, not a cosmic struggle. Blue-vs.-Green and Black-vs.-Green seem like easy questions, rather than wrong questions or live questions; from my perspective, Green is obviously wrong.

I feel that way too, but…

The White-vs.-Black conflict is alive and painful for me (as I live in a world of White but have some strong Black inclinations.)

…

White seems important but painful to me; I always want to dialogue with White, or trade with White. Green seems alien and like a thing I can't compromise with.

Swap White and Green in both of these parts, and you get my view.

I think I am Green-White which would make me your polar opposite. I totally agree with you that people should be doing more cool shit, but where you would say "instead of focusing on being righteous/pure" I would say "instead of sitting around theorizing and philosophizing about the optimal shit to do and the optimal methods."

What I get out of Green is an acceptance for the world as it is. THIS is my situation. I can learn to be satisfied with it or try to change it, but this is what it currently is, and this is what I have to work with. I have pretty low tolerance for whining. I also dislike the tendecy to make grandiose plans for oneself that are obviously above your capabilities. Growth is good. Self-delusion is not.

My Greenness ties to my Whiteness. I like community because I am a human. It is the natural state for me to desire strong communal bonds. Millions of years of evolution made me that way, and I couldn't change that even if I wanted to. (Oftentimes my rationality plays out as "How do I-as-a-human function and can I use that to my advantage?")

I don't feel formal, but seeing lots of individuals moving in perfect unison is a special kind of thrill. I don't feel hung up on things like purity, but I do feel very anti-Black. Things like selfishness, self-centeredness, and not thinking of others is very aversive for me to interact with.

I have a pretty decent amount of Blue in me (I'm hanging out here, aren't I?) but my Blueness is more of a tool and a source of amusement than my driving force. There are issues where I can follow the Blues intricate logic chains, conclude that their reasoning is sound, but it turns out that I don't actually care.

Many games include color pies. It is very rare to see six colors (and I don't think I've ever seen seven), whereas it is very common to see only four. Where you see more than five categories, they no longer claim to add up to normality or encompass everything, instead becoming factions or groups of people. So if you go above five, what you get is much higher and especially you lose the idea that we won't spam you with more colors into the future forever. Magic did sort of introduce a sixth color - grey, or colorless - to represent alien abominations and ancient artifacts and such - as part of the Battle for Zendikar block, which will forever profane our cards with a new mana symbol. Things that are grey are wrong in a profound way, a perversion of the world. You could think of it as the color of machine learning systems and potential unfriendly AIs and bureaucracies full of lost purposes, they've become completely divorced from all value. I think if I added a sixth color I would indeed want to stick with that rather than go purple, and it opposes all five normal colors (and is also opposing and distinct from being merely colorless).

When they cut out a color, it varies which one it is and how they distribute the spoils. I don't think you can cut out a color without destroying the dynamics and ideas that make the system interesting; when systems have only four colors, it seems more like a thematic 'you can't do everything in this game at once' thing rather than being thought provoking. It makes sense that designers have learned that four is better for letting people play their games reasonably, but I think of this as one of those cases where I wish we weren't following the incentive gradients as hard, because the relationships between five things are so much more interesting than the relationships between four things.

In terms of Magic's mechanics, the color that is least essential is white. There were periods where one could speak of 'the four colors of Magic' in this sense, because white had only a handful of cards worth considering, so you'd play a tiny bit of white or none at all, and the only white cards you would play were cards that were 'out of character' for white otherwise, like Swords to Plowshares (kills a creature), Armageddon (kills lands) and Wrath of God (unique special card at the time that kills every creature). They had to reshuffle the color pie to give white more things to do, and also green.

I think ecologies and competitive landscapes could be thought of as green-black systems. Wherever you have survival of the fittest. E.g. Silicon Valley.

I agree about BDSM but not about polyamory. One prominent subtype of polyamory is the aptly named "relationship anarchy", which explicitly rejects rules and commitments. The modal polyamorous relationship includes some rules, but The Book on polyamory, More Than Two, takes a very hard line against rules and organizing your relationships to make you priorities legible. (The other The Book on polyamory, The Ethical Slut, I haven't read, but I believe it's near the relationship anarchist side.) Modern polyamory is greenish-red.

I'd say the default Bay Area rationalsphere breed of polyamory does involve significant structure, and that it is more stable. But this is probably an effect of the founding population of rationalsphere polyamorists being heavy on BDSM, and so already having a framework that balancing structure into your hedonism makes it stabler and healthier. There is also, very speculatively, more of a desire for stability, though since I'm comparing mainly to college-dominated populations I don't know.

My discussions with people 1-2 steps removed from the developers of Integral Colors indicates that while they claim it's rungs on a ladder, they don't really think of it that way and in particular they see the key insight being that Green is Bad; when I asked if that was true while getting the initial explanation they acted like I'd passed a test or something; at a minimum I'd guessed the teacher's password. Then of course Boomeritis makes it explicit and isn't subtle about it.

MBTI I think you're right that some of them are pretty thin/rare, and they're trying to cover that up to make the system work out. That seems reasonably common; people have some insights, then they feel the need to 'fill out the grid' and make all the points on it seem valuable and important and so on, so they're stuck pretending all 16 are a legit thing. I do think all four contrasts describe a thing, though.

Hogwarts houses I think get way too much credit than they deserve and aren't especially well thought out, especially in canon where she (as I read/understand it) basically gives up on the idea that Slytherin isn't evil.

Enneagram I think deserves some credit for not trying to classify everyone?

Something's missing from this.

Winning can can feel like destruction. I suspect this is Black/Red (depending on how it's inflected).

With that element added, this feels complete.

One thing I think is widely underappreciated about the color wheel as a classification system is the extent to which everything nonwhite is alien to modern society. We live in a culture and society dominated to a very large extent by white values. Our virtues are white; our fears are white; 1984, Stranger in a Strange Land, the Borg, FDR's Four Freedoms, the UN Charter of Human Rights, the military, the Peace Corps. The major geopolitical and ideological struggles of the 20th century were between various flavors of white; royalism vs. democracy, communism and.democracy vs. fascism, communism vs, democracy. Tradition vs. feminism and vs. racial equality. Religion and separation of church and state are also both white concepts.

There are important nonwhite concepts; capitalism is black at its most prosocial, atheism is blue, the sexual revolution brought on by The Pill is primarily red. Rationalism is, naturally, extremely blue.

But just like the correct answer to "What D&D alignment are you?" is almost always true neutral, the correct answer to "What main MtG color are you?" is almost always white. In order to get useful classification power you must adjust away from the baseline by treating someone who's 70% white and evenly split between everything else as your zero point.

What colour am I if want everyone capable of being autonomous and self-reliant <_< >_>

I liked this comment for spelling out the ways this sort of model is useful and limiting. Some meta-ish commentary:

I felt like it could have been more succinct, and that the caveats about status positioning and apologizing for "seeming down on these models" felt mostly unnecessary.

(I think that sort of thing is sometimes necessary, but most often is more like a red-flag that you could probably refactor your comment/post until they no longer felt necessary)

^^^Parent comment is blue/green to a T

I observe that Wu Xing (the five phases) might be expected to have a mapping to the five MTG colors. But it doesn't look like it to me, or at least it's not obvious. Wood reads as red/green, Fire as red/black/green, Earth as... possibly green/white, Metal as something like white/blue/black, and Water as something like blue/green.

I find that when I've tried to classify people with phases, I have much more often been able to identify someone as having a single phase--"ah, yes, Steve is fire and I am water, and that explains [event] and [reaction]"--than I have been able to identify people as having a single color. (Steve and I are both deeply blue, and also rather white; if anything, I'm more red than Steve is.) This suggests to me the Wu Xing has a much better ability to compress human variation / is pointing at clusters that are thus 'more real.'

Sadly, I don't seem have to have a great presentation of the Wu Xing available; the link at the top of this comment is the best thing I could find on short notice. From your read of that, do you have thoughts on the two / any cruxes that come to mind that would make you favor one or the other?

Where would you put Nazis (e.g. Mein Kampf)?

Tentatively I'd guess Red/Green, mostly because the big enemy is Blue, and there are very strong themes of aggression/emotion (Red) and tradition/nature/evolution (Green). Black (dominance, power) and White (sacrifice, purity) also show up sometimes, but never Blue.

I think Slack is Green alone. It certainly is not white. White doesn't think you have the right to Slack and tries to take it away from you. Often it taxes or outright punishes you for having it.

Traditional Solstice is Green. Our Solstice is at least partly green.

I haven't been to Burning Man but if it's got black in it that means something is very wrong, at least to me - it's an explicit ban on black. But blue makes sense as a secondary color, even if the name is a giveaway for the primary.

Seasteading claims to be Esper (Black/Blue/White) but skeptics think it's actually Red/Black. Unclear who is right.

Polyamory is red, full stop, and I think people who claim it isn't are confused about how something works.

Polyamory feels green to me. My natural state of being involves falling in love with lots of people, and what I want out of polyamory is to be genuine and accepted in that and to be able to live that part of my life. I can easily imagine how it would be other colors for other people though. For example, acceptance mostly makes sense with more committed partners, and someone who is committed to solo poly but otherwise similar to me might feel like their poly is mostly black.

Solstice is attempting to Build Community and Feel Emotions. Doesn't that make it green/red?
Polyamory for me is Red successfully beating the socially expected White order of things.

I feel confused by this comment.

The value of the framework has been demonstrated (at least to the author) by the use cases given in the post. The fact that it might be 'humans imposing order on chaos' does not affect the question of its usefulness. Usefulness is a separate question from whether someone 'just made it up'. They're orthogonal. Which I feel was one of the points of Val's post on Fake Frameworks.

So, let's suppose astrologers have come up with 12 personality types, and then they claim to be able to tell which one fits you best by careful consideration of your date and time of birth. It seems to me that the big problem there is with the second half, not the first. (Even bigger problems if they claim to be able to use the information to predict what's going to happen to you, of course.) But the second half is exactly what isn't present in Conor's analysis here.

I don't know whether the advantages of having a small number of personality archetypes and pigeonholing people as combinations of those archetypes outweigh the disadvantages. Nor do I have any opinion worth listening to about whether the particular set of 5 archetypes described here is a particularly good one. But "it resembles one thing astrologers do" is not a good argument against it.