Athenian, I wish you wouldn't beat yourself up in text so much. Your opinions are just as valid as the next person's. When I challenge someone's views on here, it's for the sake of clarity and maybe us all reaching a better understanding. It's not in any way to try to downgrade that person. I respect and admire you for putting your views out there for scrutiny. It's the only way people can hash things out is if they communicate.
Okay, that's true. It's just that I'm embarrassed that my perspectives aren't consistent. One little word could change how I perceive something enough to make me say something completely different about it than I normally would have. My words usually aren't focused so much on communicating impersonal facts, so much as twisting things in such a way as to get the other person to look at the problem the same way I'm looking at it.
It's the mental equivalent of pointing to something, noticing the other person can't see it because they're standing at the wrong angle and something is in their way, and then motioning for them to come over to where I am, and look at it from the same place I'm looking at it from. So I end up looking very silly and inconsistent when you compare my reactions to similar situations across time, even if I made sense at the time I said it. And the best excuse I can come up with is, "Well, I'm not standing over there anymore. I'm standing over HERE now, and the light is different, so it looks different."
It's an excuse few respect, because most people see it as better to stand in the same place their whole lives, under the same light, staring at the same thing, and write down everything that they observe about it. I look absurd because I keep moving around and changing the lighting, expecting to discover the nature of what I'm looking at more completely.
I know that didn't make any sense, but it was all I could come up with.
Anyway, to answer your earlier question, David Keirsey has a tremendous wealth of experience in studying people. He has made it his life's work. Does that mean that all the conclusions he comes to are automatically infallible? Of course not. But he goes into a lot of detail backing up his theories and I think he makes a ton of sense. Which is quite unusual for me to admit about anyone writing on abstract subjects.
He does make sense from his perspective, if you accept it as your own. But he doesn't make sense from a lot of other perspectives. In fact, there are more perspectives that he DOESN'T make sense from, than ones he does.
The main one I'm looking at, is that NFJs and NFPs usually don't understand one another very well despite supposedly having the same "core needs." They may look similar simply because of the focus on identity, but their values and perspectives are so different that it seems like a meaningless similarity compared to many other similarities.
