I really, really dislike the terminology for male/female sex. No doubt, this is because I’d be considered to have female mental sex despite being a guy. These terms have zero resonance for me.
I’m wondering if Yin/Yang might be more appropriate. Yang is more direct, active, confrontational, while Yin is more absorbing, harmonious, circular.
I think Mental Sex is perfect tbh. Subjects in question are people. Or at least beings that are aware. For such abstract trains of though, it is best to ground them in the familiar. Ground the concept as it were.
… but what if they’re not familiar?
In my opinion, neither mental sex nor the yin&yang proposition are useful at all, because they are (a) antithetical to my experience or (b) unfamiliar.
linear/logistics-oriented & holistic/balance-oriented gives me something to work with.
This! (I think Dramatica runs into this in a number of ways, but that’s a separate topic.)
The Mental Sex as a choice doesn’t really work for me, either, but I was having trouble with the Linear/Holistic terminology, too. If Yin/Yang is a valid separation of Problem-Solving Style, then that would work well for me.
I’m noticing that a lot of the ideas from East Asia map really well to Dramatica for me, even though I’m from southwest U.S.
Go figure…
As a Holistic problem solver, you feel an imbalance in the force due to insufficient names.
As a linear problem solver, I say forget about what everybody else calls it and use the terms that work best for you. Or if terms don’t do the trick, find some clip art of a tape measure and a balance scale.
@bobRaskoph. Linear and Holistic work also. But to me Mental Sex is best. I thin it’s a matter of social/cultural exposure or indoctrination. Men are wired a certain way, women are wired a certain way. Most stories are about them hence, the familiar. So understanding their default world view / problem solving style from a stationary standpoint makes more sense “to me”. Now that’s not to say you can’t mix and match these approaches to create a wider breadth of character but it’s familiar enough and gives a good foundation to venture into the abstract. For example in med school we learned Anatomy (familiar) before pathology (the unfamiliar). The baseline helps tell u what’s what. Just my own view.
One of the reasons I dislike “linear” v. “holistic” is how misleading it is. I often see the claim, “‘if X, then Y’ is linear.” This often leads to the idea that “holistic” is essentially random and insane.
But, if you think about it in terms of balance, then “if the scale drops further on the right, I add to the left” is holistic. Watch a really good parent with a lot of bored kids in a waiting room. They are constantly making “if X, then Y” calculations. “If the four-year-olds are looking to me to entertain them and the infant has a dirty diaper, then I get the four-year-olds to entertain each other while I change the infant’s diaper.” The Universe, as we perceive it, is fundamentally about cause and effect. That’s how we make sense of the world whether we are mentally Yin or Yang.
“logistics v. balance” doesn’t work for me either, because logistics are about balance.
I’ve made similar comments about holistic logic. I don’t know if I’m right, but the way I’ve made peace with it is to think of Linear problem solving as taking the most direct path (or most direct line of logic) to solving the problem.
Problem-theres’s A tiger on the loose.
LPS-Let’s find it and catch or shoot it.
HPS-Let’s bring the children inside and call the neighbors.
The LPS looks directly at the tiger
The HPS looks at what they don’t want to be attacked by the tiger
Problem-(example inspired by the “Its Not About The Nail” video) theres a nail stuck in my head
LPS-let me get the pliers
HPS-here’s a gift card to old navy to help you replace all your snagged sweaters
LPS looks directly at the nail
HPS looks at other areas affected by the nail
As a predominantly linear problem solver, I’m sure I’m not offering the greatest examples. But hopefully you can see my point about LPS being a more direct path of logic.
I get what you’re saying and I agree with you that MPS / Yang is more direct. I actually prefer “direct” to “linear.”
Though, I think the better “It’s not about the nail” example for Indirect / Yin would be to look at why they haven’t already gone to the doctor.
Because it’s not about the nail! Haha. Have you seen the video? It was posted on here a long time ago.
It is one of my favorite videos. 
But, yeah, its not about the nail. What I’m saying is that, from an indirect approach, it is about all the reasons she hasn’t seen a doctor yet.
Keep in mind that the Mental Sex / Problem-solving Style story point, like all story points, solely refers to a single inequity, meaning it is limited to a single context (this storyform) and need not be representative of a character/person in other contexts.
So I’ve recently started using two sets of terms to think of Problem-Solving Styles that I like more. I’m not offended by Male or Female Problem Solving styles at all, but describing them by who uses them just isn’t as helpful for me personally as a description of what each one is. That’s why I like using these terms that are already built into Dramatica all over the place.
State Problem Solving and Process Problem Solving
and Structural Problem Solving and Dynamic Problem Solving.
It’s easy for me to think of Linear and Holistic as a Path and a Volume, or a single path and a collection of all paths or something. That’s still way too linear. The terms Process and Dynamic, i think, help me take what separates the two problem solving styles and really push those differences further apart than I normally would be able to do.