On one hand, you have personality assessments. These can be further divided into two approaches: (1) questionnaire-based, where you answer questions about yourself or (2) introspective, where you compare your inner experience to a set of descriptions and find the one that describes you best.

In both cases, your type is determined by matching the criteria of the model as snugly as possible to your subjective reality. As a result, this form of typological model is typically a nice personal fit. It probes your mind for information then echoes that information back to you by placing you in a type that reflects the answers you gave it. However, these models are necessarily circular, as they repeat back to you what you say to them.

The second kind of typological system is statistically-based. With these, you have insights that come from the outside-in, from the aggregation of data according to some empirical metric measured across hundreds of people. A good example of a statistical model of personality is sex differences.

For instance, if you're female, you are over 10 times more likely to be a nurse than a male. And if you're a construction worker, you're again over 10 times more likely to be a male. Another way of saying this is that 90%+ of nurses are women, and 93%+ of construction workers are men. Descriptions can be written using this information, which generalizes profiles for males and females.

However, if you're a woman and you read a sentence like "you're more likely to be a nurse" - the odds are you won't relate to this because you won't actually be a nurse. That's because out of 330 million people in the US, only 4.2 million are nurses; just 1% of the population. So if you are a nurse, you're 90%+ likely to be a woman, but if you're a women, the odds that you're a nurse are below 1%, because few people are nurses overall. 

Therefore a statement like "I am a nurse" will be wrong 99% of the time even for women. What this means is that if you were to write a psychology profile describing all the statistical characteristics of women, all of which are empirically valid, any individual woman will "not relate" to a great deal of it, and likewise for men.

It's because these are statistical statements. They're describing valid truths at the collective level, but not at the personal level. The complete inverse is true of personality assessments. With personality assessments, you will always relate to its contents at the personal level because that's how the assessments are designed. But the system itself will usually not be statistically valid. More likely than not, the categories it's built upon will lack a discrete statistical truth to them, and will be about as good as any other arbitrary set of descriptions used to parse apart human beings.

As you can see, there's a deep irony at play here. The model that's most statistically supportable, the most "true" and valid from a scientific perspective, will be the less personally relatable of the two. And the model that's least supportable scientifically, will be the more relatable one - garnering wider support.

This means that people will be more likely to overestimate the truth-value of personality assessments, above and beyond statistical models, despite the evidence pointing to the contrary. This presents a conundrum. If you're somebody looking for the truth of who you really are, which do you go with?

The answer depends on what kind of information you are interested in. If you want information about your own individual personality, then various self-assessments will work more or less equally to give you a useful language for personal description. But the things you're going to learn are not going to be objective truths; not fundamental to your genetics or biology in the way your sex might be. 

They'll be useful tools for describing what you've come to believe and who you are right now. And if you change who you are over the next few weeks or months, these assessments will also change to reflect your ever-evolving personality. But if what you're interested in is something more universally true about you, such as with biological sex, then statistical models are what you want.

Cognitive Typology belongs in the latter of these two categories. It's a statistical model, not a personality assessment. CT tracks data and generates behavioral profiles from the most significant elements of any given vultology-cluster. For that reason, its validity is not determined by the individual resonance people have to its statistics, but by whether those statements are indeed statistically significant at the collective level. 

For example, although most Ni-leads are not mystical leaders, since they make up less than 1% of the population, the fact that most mystical leaders are vultologically Ni-lead, continues to make the statistic valid. The same applies to all other elements of the behavioral profiles. When you read the profiles of CT, you might not relate to them personally, even if they're true, since they are written as collective averages.

While CT is primarily anchored in empirical sciences and doesn't necessarily cater to personal resonance, its potential to bridge the gap between objective validation and individual connection is promising. Its aim isn't solely to align with traditional personality psychology but to delve deeper into scientific methodologies.

However, the question remains: can CT offer both empirical robustness and personal relatability? The emphatic answer is yes. To achieve this, CT classifies individuals beyond the rudimentary 16-type framework, recognizing that each person isn't just one among 16 but rather a 1 in 1,000 individual. Without this higher level of nuance, genuine relatability isn't possible.

Personality assessments take a back alley to reach relatability, by baking relatability directly into their models and inflating their perceived value through the use of the Forer Effect, at the expense of objectivity. It's like a sugar high that wears off quickly when you realize you don't actually relate that much with others who also relate to your type box; you just relate to the box. This, to us, is not true relating. True relating is when you feel you belong to the same kin as those of your subtype; when you feel that you and them are of the same breed, and you are on the same wavelength, even when you disagree with them. It's not about relating to their conclusions, but to their mode of thinking overall.

Twin Shades

CT can find those people who are truly like you, by finding ever closer vultological matches to you. The idea is that the more identical your vultology is to someone, the more your psychology will match. And out there in the world, we all have vultological doppelgangers. We call these "twin shades." CT can find your twin-shades, and in so doing present you with other "versions" of you. In so doing, it validates itself, by showing you people who you can relate to in an eerie way, as if they were your identical twins. 

Many CT community members have experienced this uncanny phenomenon, and have been convinced of CT's value from it. There is no greater personal proof of CT's preditive power than being shown your vultological twins, and realizing that their cognition and yours are also identical; at a level that transcends all typology boxes. You realize that you're not just relating to a category, you're witnessing someone who is another "version" of you.

These shades correspond to lifepaths a person might traverse. As CT grows in its tracking of these shades, it becomes able to pin you down not only to 1 of 1024 variants, but also point you to others who are your life twins; vultological doppelgangers born in other parts of the world. Theoretically, a vultological doppelganger should be as cognitively similar to you as an identical twin.

As with DNA matching services, the ultimate goal of CT's relatability effort is to use vultology to find everyone's doppelgangers, and to always be able to connect a new typing to their doppelgangers to immediately validate the expected psychological connection. We currently don't know how large the database needs to be, to attain that level of precision, but we are excited to find out, and are working to make that happen!

In summary, while fundamentally grounded in empirical analysis, the architecture of CT transcends mere statistical categorization. We remain steadfast in our conviction that, in the realm of typological studies, CT will emerge as the zenith of both personal resonance and empirical rigor.