[MBTI General] ISTJs - wannabe INTPs?

[simulatedworld]

The bullshit about ISTJs all being tradition lackeys mostly if not entirely comes from David Keirsey.

It's because he did most of his research on the topic with older generations, where nearly all the SJs are traditionalists.

In that situation it'd be very easy to get confused and think that traditionalism is inherently associated with the SJ temperament, but the older SJs that he interviewed were traditionalist because traditionalism was the safest and most predictable approach in the context of their lives at that time, not because they see traditionalism as inherently superior.

 

[Ozz]

A recent article on CIO.com asserts that the majority (65%) of IT professionals are ISTJ (and hence career change hits them very hard, but that's another topic). I think it's fair to say those professionals aren't tell them their boss to stick with the traditional way of doing work. If a new software or technique that makes everyone's life easier, they'll go and push for that. It's the way the technology industry works.

 

[simulatedworld]

I just realized the answer to this...

This question can be considered as a continuum from one extreme of "practical" to the opposite extreme of "imaginative":


<---more practical/measured---INTJ---more imaginative/flexible-->
ISTJ----------------------------------ISTP--------------------------------INTP


So as you can see, SJ represents one extreme in terms of practicality while NP represents the opposite extreme in terms of out-of-the-box imagination.

NJ and SP, in this particular dichotomy, each exhibit their own unique middle ground because having one "hard" characteristic and one "soft" characteristic creates something of a hybrid, from a certain perspective. (You can see a similar phenomenon with FP=soft and TJ=hard; TP and FJ are each uniquely interesting middle grounds between the two extremes.)

This confusion happens with a lot of SP types and their NJ equivalents, until you get to know them, because they often share many surface characteristics; however, SJ types and their NP counterparts tend to share relatively few surface characteristics so it's MUCH more difficult to confuse them.