Sorry to rehash, but I had completely missed this stuff before.
These are some of the best observations about Ni in this whole thread:
The most important aspect of Ni in this regard is that we don't disregard particular possibilities based conventional notions of likelihood, but rather we allow/disallow contexts based on whether they "work." As long as the context is self consistent (kind of like Ti), we'll keep an open mind about it. If it's the ONLY possible context, it sounds like we just predicted something magically, by "just knowing." It even feels like that to ourselves.
The above was absolutely phenomenal. Undoubtedly one of the best explanations I've ever read.
I know I've heard this from you more than anybody else, uumlau, and I completely agree with you about it, in that there is a similarity between Ti and Ni.
It's also one of the reasons I give Ti dom's and aux's so much flack (particularly the ones who bitch that Te dom's and aux's don't "get" Ti, or use sloppy Te-logic), because, ever since I was in elementary school, I remember the annoying struggle between NTJs and NTPs. NTPs
think the Ni dom's or aux's aren't following a fully logical progression, simply because the message they receive comes from Te, and, so long as Ni knows that the progression makes logical sense, it doesn't really care about divulging each and every little premise used to get to the final conclusion. If it works, Ni knows it. If it doesn't, Ni will have seen that it doesn't work. We know so in an instant.
Now, that's not to say that Ni-users can't make mistakes and yada yada yada, but I can't tell you how many times I've had to deal with the nuisance of Ti dom's and aux's who won't simply accept that Ni knows that what it's saying is logical and makes sense, and that
Te is just trying to explain it as quickly as possible, by jumping over what it feels are tacitly obvious enough assumptions that they need not actually be verbalized.
Ni sees the same logical thought-paths that Ti does, it just does so like an instant beam of light.
And when it sees that the path is good (i.e., that it "works"), then it wants to move forward.
Ti, however, wants to shine its flash light along the whole damn path for far-too-much-time for my patience, making sure there aren't any inconsistencies or problems anywhere.
And then, even if they think they've found one, I can Ni-up a whole slew of possible explanations to explain it away, the first of which will probably do the job, and the second and third of which might also provide reinforcement.
Then
those thought-paths have to get checked over by Ti, which takes us away from the original thought-path, which was valid to begin with!
Fuckin' NTPs!!! WASTING my time!!
:steam:
/rant
***
Also, with regards to the underlined, that is precisely why Ps' consistent accusations that Js are close-minded are totally bunk in my opinion.
How are we close-minded if we are open to non-conventional notions, so long as they are internally consistent?!?
That's like,
the definition of open-mindedness...
In the more conventional arena, I use Ni to troubleshoot. The context shifting in this regard is to come up with a set of possible problems that could have happened, no matter how ridiculous they might seem. I investigate the most likely ones, and quickly find the real answer, which is often but not always my first guess.
In one particularly odd case, a web page was crashing based on some weird SQL error. There was no way that anything was wrong. All the data looked correct. Everyone was puzzled. So I looked at the data for oddities. The main weird thing I saw was that the person's name as given in the data was very long, basically a sophisticated identifier for QA testing to sort results. I changed the name to "Joe Smith" and the bug went away.
At that point, I knew that something about the name (it turned out to be the length) was somehow corrupting the data. It took forever, though, to explain this to everyone else. Their reaction was always, "No way," and "That makes no sense at all." But I could point at empirical data to prove it, which isn't often the case for Ni. In spite of the empirical data, the conclusion was so odd, that it wasn't easy for others to absorb. My Ni attitude was of the "I don't know why it is true, but I know that it -is- true" and I knew that I would figure out why eventually, and didn't need to know "why" to communicate the problem. It turns out that Microsoft's SQLXml had a bug in it, and we needed to update to a new version of SQL Server to fix it.
This is how Ni relates to Se. The "singular vision" is often an Se-perspective of the matter, either we want to make the Se-perspective true (by understanding and controlling our environment via Ni) or we want to understand why the "Se-fact" is the way it is. This is entirely analogous to how Ne branches off of an Si-subjective understanding.
That is an awesome example.
I have a somewhat similar one from when I interned at HSBC over a summer in college, and after about a month or so of working with some system of theirs, I realized that several different processes which were all being done by different people, could essentially be automated and wrapped up into one much simpler, more efficient process.
I had to sit in a meeting as this 21-yr old punk explaining to all these 40-somethings how their system could be made so much more efficient.
After working through all their questions, they all agreed that it would work.
Have no idea whether they implemented it, though... probably could've made some of 'em obsolete.
I hope these anecdotes give others a good understanding of Ni. The results are weird, but all we're doing is admitting possibilities that others immediately discard, because they don't fit those others' context(s).
Do they even discard them, or do they just not consider them?
I really think that one of the great benefits of Ni is that it can be just lightning fast.
Its this potential for speed that allows us to consider so many different perspectives, cuz we can just slip into that context, immediately follow it down its logical progression, and then "feel" whether or not, or to what extent, it makes sense/fits the situation/is sound, etc.
Of course, the progression that it follows is only as apt as the mind of the Ni-user, so, if the Ni-user is an idiot, then that doesn't mean their flashes should just be trusted.
This is where learning to deftly use Ni, as well as having enough time to have progressed through many different contexts, comes in handy.
Practice makes perfect.
/ thinking out loud