Eric B
ⒺⓉⒷ
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2008
- Messages
- 3,621
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 548
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/sx
This is where Ni comes in: Ni looks at the same historical data that Ne/Si does, but instead of figuring out trends and handling special cases, Ni tries to internalize a "story" of how the changes take place. You can hear a simplistic version of this in stock market reports, where the newscaster says, "Stocks are up on news of <good market news>" or "Stocks are down on news of <bad market news>". (There is always good market news and bad market news, the story writers just insert the appropriate version of the "news" to "explain" why the market did well or poorly. And yes, this is a typical Ni (and Se) mistake, but Ni doms tend to make this mistake in less obvious ways.)
So in this case, for example, Ni has a "story" model of how market bubbles work, and knows what market bubbles "look like" (Se). So analysts such as Peter Schiff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schiff#Economic_and_Public_Policy_Views) see a housing bubble coming, even as most analysts do not. There are youtube videos where you can watch Schiff explain the coming crash to a bunch of skeptical fellow analysts, who scoff at his analysis. Why? There's nothing in the market data (Si) that says a crash is coming: everything is positive, people are making money, and there's plenty of room for growth.
But Schiff looks at the same market data in an Ni way, and the data to him is a retelling of the "bubble story". He sees real estate prices going up not because people need and want more housing for themselves, but investors are buying housing only to resell it at a higher price. On top of that, he sees the highly-leveraged zero-down-payment, no-interest loans (basically, you "buy" a house by "renting" it) as a typical example of the kind of too-easy credit that fuels bubbles.
Keep in mind, a lot of this is very obvious in retrospect: the story has been told many times and has become part of the narrative of the crash four years ago. But in 2005, it was not obvious to most people or most analysts. And this is where Ni comes in: it takes these kinds of narratives and sees how they apply to other situations. For example, an Ni analyst might say that we can expect a higher education bubble, as tuition prices rise to levels that no one can afford and don't justify the employment one might expect to find with the degree achieved. Education has a purpose: if it starts costing so much that people have to borrow more than they can realistically afford to pay for it, the bubble will burst and prices will go back to what people can afford.
I'm giving you this example showing Ni in a positive light because you requested it. The negative version of Ni would be using anecdotal evidence to arrive at incorrect conclusions, usually because the anecdote really doesn't contain the details necessary to apply it in general. In this positive case, it's still "anecdotal evidence" in that the reasoning is based off of "the asset bubble story", which isn't simply anecdotal evidence, but a fairly sophisticated cause-and-effect analysis.
The Ne/Ni crosstalk comes from Ne habitually rejecting the Ni story-based reasoning as lacking supporting data, while Ni rejects the Ne analysis as overly reliant upon statistical correlation and trends. Both can be very sophisticated and intelligent - and both can even be right. But even when they're both right, Ne and Ni believe that they're right for different reasons. To Ne, the statistical analysis with lots of data is convincing. For Ni, the story, the understanding of the "how" is what is convincing.
Yeah, this is really just getting at the meta-perspectivizing that Ni does.
The way I'v described it before is that we work "up the syllogism". What I mean by that is that we see, hear or read a conclusion, and then we start imagining the premises that would cause one to arrive at such a conclusion (and, it should be mentioned, that the possibilities we're able to come up with here tend to be limited, to some degree, by what we've come across in our lives [Se]), and then we evaluate whether such premises are true (via Fe/Te and/or Se), or whether we care about them (Fi/Ti[?]) and then we compare them against all the other premises we can imagine that would/could fit this scenario, and evaluate whether the conclusion stated and premises implied in the original construction are accurate in this case, the degree to which they're accurate, and (and here's where the part you were describing comes in) whether there are other premises that actually better fit the scenario, or that ought be taken into account in any comprehensive analysis of the issue at hand. These various sets of premises are the "boxes" that Ni is reputed for shifting between. Ne seeks to "get out of the box" (the box, in this case, having to do with Si, I believe [and, as such, while, in one sense, they seek to get out of the box {when suppressing Si, and "taking up" Ne}, in another sense, at other times {perhaps even at the same time?}, they seem to very much be comforted by, cling to, and depend upon the Si boxes they have stored in their subconscious]); Ni checks the various boxes on for "fit", shuffling between various options. As such, what you said at the end here very much rings true. NP types will often throw out possibilities based likely both on their (semi-[?])subconscious boxes, and their desire to reach outside of those boxes, and find new boxes that can eventually, if proven "worthy", be stored as "permanent boxes"; and, as an Ni user, when I watch them do this, sometimes they hit the nail on the head, or find a box that provides at least a partial explanation of the issue at hand, but, many other times, they seem to state these possibilities that, when they say them, it sounds like they're laying out this structure for these being the only possibilities, or the "core" possibilities, that are out there (admittedly, this is what it sounds like to me, not that, if asked, that they'd necessarily say, "these are the only possibilities to explain this phenomenon [although, in their defense of what they've allowed to become a permanent Si box, they often do have this defensive reaction, as that box is a bedrock of their psyche, and they do not like it to be tampered with {hence, the common NP complaint about about the alleged "shiftiness" or "unsettledness" or "lack of foundation" of NJs}]; they're probably just trying this new perspective on for size, breaking new ground, expanding their mental horizon out of their more settled-upon Si foundational box, possibly overstating its case in order to test whether it's something they could really believe [like trying on a novel {risky?} outfit in a fitting room {something which I think they often times enjoy, but sometimes might feel anxious about (especially if pressed on it?)}]), and I quickly examine it as one box, and then see a bunch of other boxes that could also fit the scenario, some just as well, if not much better, and I kinda just shake my head, and think to myself, "How does this person actually believe this? How could they actually find this a full/proper accounting of this issue??"
Those are very good ways of explaining it, that fills in the "what's been left out" I had been told (and couldn't quite place. There's more than one internal pattern being referenced, and "what's been left out" is from other ones that Ne obviously didn't take into consideration).
So Ne compares multiple external patterns (internalized only by Si) or patterns implicit in the object (and determines the best one by Ji), while Ni references multiple (directly) internal patterns and determines the most likely one (especially as judged efficient by Je).