The eristics test: the scariest personality quiz you'll ever take

A work of solitary genius, discovered and explained to the world

Main image from the eristics personality test. ©2024 Rex Riepe

Disclaimer: the test described in this post is experimental and not approved by any medical or psychiatric authority for any purpose. The claims made in this post are opinions of the author and nothing more. Read the post, or take the test, at your own risk.

This article’s presentation of eristic theory has been updated. See the Changes section at the bottom for a version history with change summaries.

On October 15, 2022, Hacker News user kyleyeats promoted a new web-based personality test of his own creation, the eristics test. The username belongs to Rex Riepe, a web developer who has written a CSS library as well as a book titled — I must confess, delightfully — You Suck at CSS (and that’s okay). While I’m no expert in CSS or who sucks at it, given Mr. Riepe’s obviously passionate devotion to the big problem of writing and managing CSS efficiently, I wouldn’t be surprised if he could say this to any person on the planet and have no fear of being incorrect.

When applied to himself, Rex’s personality test yields the Dragon Slayer archetype, which “relies on the development of personal skills (or knowledge of the world) and self-perfection to overcome big problems.” To determine if this is merely a lucky guess matching perfectly to his CSS devotion, let’s test another person, me. My result is The Fixer, an archetype that “fixes what's broken in the world. More industrious than creative, the Fixer prefers to focus on repairing or improving what's already there.” Since I’m a pseudonymous X account, you’ll have to take it on assurance that this is an extremely accurate read of me. After a decade in corporate America, I recently registered my proudest professional achievement, a successful effort to help “prevent a group from making bad choices,” which the test literally predicts I’m driven to do. I’m “more industrious than creative,” and I’m “driven to improve things.” As I’m about to do in this Substack article, with Rex’s test. Oh, and I’m also details-oriented, connected, gullible, shameful, easily exploited, constructively critical, perfectionistic, irritable, and abrasive. This is a list of objective facts about me that any reader of my autobiography would instantly agree with, based on reams of detail on every major and minor event of my life’s story. I’m not that well-groomed, but my work sure as hell is, and 9 out of 10 very specific personality predictions is still pretty solid.¹

The reason I’m so interested in “fixing” Rex’s test is because it played an important role in fixing me. The test alerted me to my overpowered inner critic, which a Giver archetype later freely chose to “devote” herself to helping me understand, via the lens of my life’s most terrible traumas.² As the X thread above explains, the crucial insight had to do with discrediting my inner critic’s take on a deeply troubling event in my life, which has caused the critic to pipe down and let me move faster and more ambitiously than ever before. As a result, I entered a state that I originally clocked as mania, but now appears to be a permanent and extremely positive personality change. I’ve started six new personal projects in the past two weeks. Yesterday, after almost a decade of being a highly regarded technical leaf on the org chart, I successfully persuaded two senior leaders in my company to adopt new and improved ways of working that will transform how we do business. These are not things I “normally” do.

Oh, and side note? My wife, a Scientist in every sense of the word, is the only person I know who tidily outstrips me in being “really great at complexity” and deploying “anxiety” in a healthy way to keep our family’s future on the best possible track. My most technically talented coworker, co-team manager, and best work friend is another Scientist, as are several of my best friends on X. It’s pegged the glaringly obvious spirit of people I only know through a couple dozen X posts.

Are you getting the picture yet? This. Test. Is. Scary.

W…What? How?!

Yeah, I know, I’m confused too. For me, all the information in this post, other than the fact that I’m the Fixer, is no more than two weeks old. The majority of the eristics-specific insights I’m providing in this article were developed at most three days ago. Some were cooked up on the spot for this post, which looks like it’s going to take about four hours from blank page to hitting publish. So I don’t have all the answers, but I know this test is special, and I want the world to know as soon as possible.

Why is this test so special? To my knowledge, the eristics test is the first publicly available test that probes personality by asking sharp questions meant to provoke an individual’s characteristic emotional responses. In retrospect, this is an obvious scientific strategy for understanding personality. But lots of things that are obvious in retrospect take a while to think of. More importantly, the test also advances an intricate, mathematically structured theory of emotion in both the Archetype profiles and Rex’s e-book on the theory underlying the test.

How does it work? It asks 16 questions³ and (my speculation ahead) registers each response into an emotion from a set of three opposed pairs. After you’ve answered all the questions, it has a histogram of emotions from you. It then maps your histogram into an archetype, a characteristic one-two punch of emotions that you tend to feel more frequently than any other combination. I’m still not quite sure how it does this.

How to take the test: the test doesn’t tell you how best to take it. I’m not 100% sure either, but feelings and anecdata suggest that you should go with your gut as much as possible. Read the question and click something that feels right. If your brain says these questions are dumb because things are more nuanced, stop listening. Let your unconscious directly guide the mouse and clicker without conscious interference. A lot of people kind of sterilize the test by using their heads to second-guess the questions. You just gotta feel it and answer fast. You can also skip questions if you genuinely, absolutely feel on the fence.

Eristics emotions

The first big thesis of the eristics test is that emotions can be productively viewed as quasi-rhetorical arguments (I’ll also call them pushes) which persuade us to take particular actions in particular contexts. Given the infinite variety of possible actions and contexts, a categorization system is necessary to make this insight useful. Eristics classifies contexts into three categories and actions into two categories, leading to a system of 3 x 2 = 6 general emotional categories. The three contexts are self, (non-human) world, and society/tribe, and the two actions are internalize and externalize.⁴ Eristics then labels each of the six categories with a central example of the emotional landscape it lives in:

1. Love is a push to internalize in the self context. Disgust is a push to externalize in the self context.

2. Fear is a push to internalize in the world context. Anger is a push to externalize in the world context.

3. Guilt is a push to internalize in the tribe context. Pride is a push to externalize in the tribe context.

According to Rex, the best interpretation of internalize and externalize is a bit different in each context:

This diagram of how emotions are categorized in Eristic theory is provided on every Archetype page, e.g. the Artist. ©2024 Rex Riepe.

The second central thesis of eristics is that more complex emotions, such as satisfaction, anxiety, envy, frustration, and attachment, can be represented in terms of these basic building blocks. In particular, complex emotions are built by chaining two basic emotions, or halfbeats, together in beats — one-two units that go da-dum, just like a heartbeat. There are nine complex emotions that people tend to be inclined towards, and these emotions define the nine archetypes.

Why nine archetypes?

There’s an opportunity here to do some fun math with what we’ve just learned. If there’s 6 basic/halfbeat emotions and beats are made by coupling these together, then 6 * 6 = 36 should be the number of possible complex emotions. So why are there only 9 archetypes? The answer lies in some additional constraints. For example, disgust never immediately follows love, because they’re opposites. It would be incoherent. Additionally, there is an energy ordering to the emotions:

Love < Fear < Guilt < Disgust < Anger < Pride⁵

The first half of an archetypal beat must come from the bottom 3 emotions, while the second one can come from any higher-energy option that isn’t from the same context pair. This leads to 4 + 3 + 2 = 9 archetypes.⁶

Why doesn’t everyone find the test useful?

Some who take the test see it as not that interesting or useful. Other than the theory simply being nonsense, which is possible, it may be that:

1. The test has trouble saying much about people who are more middle-of-the-road, tending always towards moderate emotions. Anecdotally, I have found that low-energy archetypes, such as the Artist or Scientist, tend to find the test less interesting than high-energy ones, such as the Fixer and Dragon Slayer.

2. Some people are not aware of strong emotions they do have.

3. The test’s specific emotional reference points don’t exactly match a particular person’s experience. A few of the archetypal emotions, like revelation and duress, may not be immediately and universally familiar as emotions.

4. There is a more universal theory waiting to be discovered.

Regardless, the mathematical beauty of the test and its potentially life-changing impact — illustrated by my example — seem to constitute some evidence that the test might be useful for you, too.

Now go learn about yourself!

I hope I’ve persuaded you that this test is interesting and worth a shot. It only takes a few minutes. Here’s the link again: eristics test. If you’d like to talk to me about your results, get in touch with me via my X account, @getnormality.

Have a normal one! 👋

Changes to this article

August 14, 2024

• protext/expand was changed to internalize/externalize

• improved discussion of why there are only 9 archetypes

1. It also predicts that I will be interested in society’s problems (just check my Substack) and weaker on spatial problems, which aligns with IQ tests I took at ages 8 and 10.

2. I’m not traumatized, but this is directionally accurate. Also, a description of the single incident that has, by far, troubled me more than any other in the last decade… can be read straight off a paragraph in the test’s detailed personality analysis for the Fixer. It’s a word-for-word correct description of what happened and who was involved. If the test doesn’t actually model emotional reality, I have no choice but to believe in time travel, clairvoyance, or precognition.

3. I think I’ve seen more on some runs. There may be some A/B testing going on.

4. Internalization and externalization are complex concepts that do not have readily available explanations in the psych literature, at least the part of it which is easily Google-able. Much of the literature that references these concepts is in a context where they are pathologized, e.g. in reference to “problem children” where externalization is defined as “acting out”. It seems to me that internalization and externalization are basic processes in the human psyche, not pathological ones, and it would be nice to see the psych literature evolve in that direction. Rex’s action dualities present a potential way to approach these definitions.

5. Since they all start with different letters, LFGDAP is a useful mnemonic.

6. Eristics does allow for beats other than these nine, such as doubled-up halfbeats. In fact, it theorizes high-energy doublets as “addictions” that lead to dark triad personality traits. In particular, disgust-disgust is identified with narcissism, anger-anger with psychopathy, and pride-pride with Machiavellianism.