[Jungian Cognitive Functions] Ni - What the hell is it?

[Kalach]

Ni is subjective. How can this be a good thing?

If intuition is about abstract connections and implication and as well introverted intuition has at its heart some engine that separates concepts from objective roots, then for example pick any objective attribute you like--age, race, sex, space, time, relationship,... whatever--and Ni can strip it away from the concept to investigate where what's left fits.

What does Ni do then? I guess it's a process of searching for identities: what is this stripped concept the same as?



That's it?

 

[Kalach]

Forgive me a moment while I speculate on purposes... It started like this:

I am not generally aware of matching patterns. I don't consciously, or it seems to me I don't, say "Ooo, a pattern." Instead it seems to me I attend to implications. What will be. It's rather as if a piece of information gets incorporated and its implication appears. The process is considerably less instantaneous than that sentence suggests, but perhaps you get the idea. It's as if perhaps there were already one giant pattern, a ball of smooshed up possible worlds producing the world, and together with this the new information produces visions of what the import of some thing is.

And there is a dash of Se hidden away making a slant on the implication, a implicit perspective, hardly attended to directly, of how does this implication play out, how is it realised? Not in a sense of planning, necessarily, but in a sense of one way something become real--observed rather than known before. And is it that dash of Se that lends the sense of "will be" to the intuition, or is this intuition already past mere possibility and moved on to "reality"? I think the latter, but I am not sure. The Se is a tool, subordinate, in this scenario, but still a way out, a crutch, a thing that allows particularly introverted intuition to function as it does. Without it reality would have some other flavor, and implications wouldn't flow as they do. Or something.

And I have wondered if the essential question for extroverted intuition was not, how could the next thing be different from what it is going to be? With a dash of Si present to indicate how all things are now and all things have been before. (Or is it "how can" rather than "how could" the next thing be different? I don't know.)


Frameworks aren't ruled out, but take that, "contexts"! (Or at least, take that--*boof*--until I edit again.)

 

[Zarathustra]

*Z shoots thread in head*

*thread dies*

Kalach, please stop playing with the dead thread...

 

[Kalach]

See, you already know where this is going, to the discovery that Ni and Ne don't "share".

Personally, I still find it unsettling to note that Ni is subjective.


But where do the implications come from? Frameworks and contexts, and even perspective shifts, don't explain much, it seems to me. There's a dynamism to the development of implications that seems inconsistent with backwards reference searches. But this may only be an observation about the constructive process itself, the bit at the forefront of consciousness where this or that imagery is acted out to see the shape of what's what. And actually, that point there is where being subjective is useful, because of the seeming giant library it implies. A static library?

Contrast with Ne.... Extroverted intuition suggests and promotes change in the environment. It at the very least allows for the same things to be viewed in different ways by actually making them be viewed in different ways. This is good news for Si if Si is a basic library of facts and stats and foundational knowledge. If Ne is working with an introverted judgment function, then this environmental change is an information source of the first order. (And if I make everything sound like Se and Ni, it's because I don't have other images readily available.)

But what's Ni doing? Ni isn't connected to the environment. Change alone is not beneficial. If the person is connected to the environment, it'll be on Se terms. And this whole story is basically perverted because comparing Ni attempts to reach the outside world with Ne attempts is to reveal Ni as a particularly poor external world device. Which is what you'd expect from an introverted function. But it does perhaps reveal that there is always going to be a different take on the external world. An Ne/Si view wonders how it could be different, while an Ni/Se view wonders how it is all going to come true, and is interested to see... sometimes.


I do sometimes find myself observing patterns in the environment. I mention this because it very definitely has the feel of a cheap use of my cognition. Discovering coulds or mights or mays isn't valuable... not in the outside world. In the inside world.... could, might and may are useful interim steps. In fact, they're steps that occupy most of my day. But they aren't were I expect to end up. I expect to end up at a clear picture of what is. The true nature.

And still this discussion isn't revealing of what really goes on. Bah! Unless perhaps the point of introverted intuition is to run through all of the coulds and mights and mays until you arrive at the will bes.

Naturally, one does not run through all possibilities. One runs through the relevant possibilities. And relevance is determined by intuition itself. Subjectively so. This perhaps is where people want to insist on frameworks. How after all does one determine subjective relevance if not via frameworks? And yet this idea continues to "feel" wrong. I am fairly sure people want there to be frameworks and contexts because these things would be objectively assessable. This is their access to Ni. But it's not mine. Because... lo and behold...

Introverted intuition is subjective.

There aren't any objective moving parts. Or at least, as far as one's perception of the perception itself goes, there aren't.


Which means.....

 

[RaptorWizard]

Ne is says is about possibilities and Ni is a timeless multidimensional perspective.

 

[Eric B]

Funny; I was just planning to resurrect one of these Ni threads.

I've been looking at a description I was given; which I was taking time to fully understand.

But Ne was described as attempting to understand a situation in terms of a pattern; perceiving otherwise disparate external elements in terms of a larger arrangement that give them meaning.
Ni was described as beginning with an existing arrangement of elements and inferring what's being left out; what the pattern doesn't take into account, what isn't being articulated. It involves looking at a trajectory of a premise and seeing where the evidence for it "wants" to go, and from that, what has been left out of the theory or where the trajectory doesn't work.
That is what was said to be the "subjective" element (i.e. the "introverted" attitude), rather than a subjective pattern (which is how I was trying to understand it).
It was compared to looking beyond where a map ends.

Ne and Ni conflict because Ni is looking for what a theory isn't designed to classify and talk about, or even what it "must" leave out in order to remain intact. Hence, (as I notice) NJ's will often tend to be more skeptical of ideas us NP's will toss out.

I imagine that might be a more refined Ni, and when it's shadow, then maybe it does come out more in terms of an internal negative pattern, because then, it's really just negatively filling in for Ne.

So now, perhaps I could sum it up as:

Ne comparing one [external] pattern to another
Ni filling in an external pattern by comparing with an internal blueprint, (which shows what's been left out).

 

[Kierva]

The way I see it is:

Ni - what will be
Ne - what could be

In Psychological Types, there's a lot of the word "vision" being popped around. Also, this paragraph from Psychological types show my point about Ni being what will be:

Since the unconscious is not just something that lies there, like a psychic caput mortuum, but is something that coexists and experiences inner transformations which are inherently related to general events, introverted intuition, through its perception of inner processes, gives certain data which may possess supreme importance for the comprehension of general occurrences: it can even foresee new possibilities in more or less clear outline, as well as the event which later actually transpires. Its prophetic prevision is to be explained from its relation to the archetypes which represent the law-determined course of all experienceable things.

There is an orientation with time says Jung, about Ni.

As for Ne, there's a lot of the word "possibilities" popped around. Also, this paragraph from Psychological types show my point about Ne being what could be:

Whenever intuition predominates, a particular and unmistakable psychology presents itself. Because intuition is orientated by the object, a decided dependence upon external situations is discernible, but it has an altogether different character from the dependence of the sensational type. The intuitive is never to be found among the generally recognized reality values, but he is always present where possibilities exist. He has a keen nose for things in the bud pregnant with future promise. He can never exist in stable, long-established conditions of generally acknowledged though limited value: because his eye is constantly ranging for new possibilities, stable conditions have an air of impending suffocation.

 

[the state i am in]

Ne is says is about possibilities and Ni is a timeless multidimensional perspective.

yeah, the experience of time is central. diachronic vs synchronic. linearity vs circularity (which then just becomes a timeless whole in its own kind of partial dimensionality).

Ni = fractalization. an iterative, self-aggregation process that uses analogy to deduce the causes from the effects. it's feedback loops, the principles of emergent, organizational intelligence, of recursive hierarchy, of the functionalism of tautology that understands itself self-referentially as different circuits of language/meaning/universals/symbols territorialize packets of self-description/particulars/information. it's an identification with the conditions of possibility, the conditions of perception, the conditions of information (the communicative context that emerges to bind social spaces and constrain patterns of interaction into evolving algorithms that are then woven into emergent algorithms at other orders).

 

[uumlau]

Funny; I was just planning to resurrect one of these Ni threads.

I've been looking at a description I was given; which I was taking time to fully understand.

But Ne was described as attempting to understand a situation in terms of a pattern; perceiving otherwise disparate external elements in terms of a larger arrangement that give them meaning.
Ni was described as beginning with an existing arrangement of elements and inferring what's being left out; what the pattern doesn't take into account, what isn't being articulated. It involves looking at a trajectory of a premise and seeing where the evidence for it "wants" to go, and from that, what has been left out of the theory or where the trajectory doesn't work.
That is what was said to be the "subjective" element (i.e. the "introverted" attitude), rather than a subjective pattern (which is how I was trying to understand it).
It was compared to looking beyond where a map ends.

Ne and Ni conflict because Ni is looking for what a theory isn't designed to classify and talk about, or even what it "must" leave out in order to remain intact. Hence, (as I notice) NJ's will often tend to be more skeptical of ideas us NP's will toss out.

I imagine that might be a more refined Ni, and when it's shadow, then maybe it does come out more in terms of an internal negative pattern, because then, it's really just negatively filling in for Ne.

So now, perhaps I could sum it up as:

Ne comparing one [external] pattern to another
Ni filling in an external pattern by comparing with an internal blueprint, (which shows what's been left out).

This is good. Ne is very much comparing external patterns and Ni compares reality (Te or Fe or Se) with an internal pattern.

It leaves out, however, the qualitative differences between Ne and Ni: Ne sees its external patterns in terms of internal Si standards. Ne sees the Si box, and yearns to go outside of it (thus it is external). Ni generates its internal standards based on observed Se experiences: it tries to find which "box" best explains the Se observations.

Another side effect is that because Ne sees things in Si standards, the Ne patterns are remarkably static, and conversely the Ni patterns based on Se are remarkably dynamic.

It might be simplistically described as Ne looks for correlation while Ni looks for causation.

This doesn't mean that Ni is somehow "better" (it can get the cause wrong), but that it's one of the points where Ne and Ni have crosstalk. Ne points out the correlations that Ni tends to dismiss because they lack any context of cause and effect, while Ni points out the cause and effect that Ne tends to dismiss because there is no established pattern to support it.

This is also why Ni will seem very mysterious to non-Ni types: even the Ne types are unconsciously bound to the notion that a pattern needs to be established and certain in order to accept the conclusions it provides, so the Ni observation based on patterns of cause-and-effect seems out of the blue, and they're even more amazing when they're right (betting against the odds and winning).

 

[skylights]

This is also why Ni will seem very mysterious to non-Ni types: even the Ne types are unconsciously bound to the notion that a pattern needs to be established and certain in order to accept the conclusions it provides, so the Ni observation based on patterns of cause-and-effect seems out of the blue, and they're even more amazing when they're right (betting against the odds and winning).

Interesting. Can you give an example of this?

 

[Poki]

This is good. Ne is very much comparing external patterns and Ni compares reality (Te or Fe or Se) with an internal pattern.

It leaves out, however, the qualitative differences between Ne and Ni: Ne sees its external patterns in terms of internal Si standards. Ne sees the Si box, and yearns to go outside of it (thus it is external). Ni generates its internal standards based on observed Se experiences: it tries to find which "box" best explains the Se observations.

Another side effect is that because Ne sees things in Si standards, the Ne patterns are remarkably static, and conversely the Ni patterns based on Se are remarkably dynamic.

It might be simplistically described as Ne looks for correlation while Ni looks for causation.

This doesn't mean that Ni is somehow "better" (it can get the cause wrong), but that it's one of the points where Ne and Ni have crosstalk. Ne points out the correlations that Ni tends to dismiss because they lack any context of cause and effect, while Ni points out the cause and effect that Ne tends to dismiss because there is no established pattern to support it.

This is also why Ni will seem very mysterious to non-Ni types: even the Ne types are unconsciously bound to the notion that a pattern needs to be established and certain in order to accept the conclusions it provides, so the Ni observation based on patterns of cause-and-effect seems out of the blue, and they're even more amazing when they're right (betting against the odds and winning).

 

[Eric B]

This is good. Ne is very much comparing external patterns and Ni compares reality (Te or Fe or Se) with an internal pattern.

It leaves out, however, the qualitative differences between Ne and Ni: Ne sees its external patterns in terms of internal Si standards. Ne sees the Si box, and yearns to go outside of it (thus it is external). Ni generates its internal standards based on observed Se experiences: it tries to find which "box" best explains the Se observations.

Another side effect is that because Ne sees things in Si standards, the Ne patterns are remarkably static, and conversely the Ni patterns based on Se are remarkably dynamic.

Actually, what I was told was that the pattern Ne compares others to is one "stored in memory", so yes, an Si connection was implied; I left it out to try to make it as simple as possible, because that might give the impression that the intuition is introverted, and I also try to avoid associating "memory=Si"; but in that case, it would be the Ne and Si in tandem. And Ni's looking at an "existing arrangement of elements" (from which it infers "what's left out") would be its Se tandem connection.

 

[Poki]

Actually, what I was told was that the pattern Ne compares others to is one "stored in memory", so yes, an Si connection was implied; I left it out to try to make it as simple as possible, because that might give the impression that the intuition is introverted, and I also try to avoid associating "memory=Si"; but in that case, it would be the Ne and Si in tandem. And Ni's looking at an "existing arrangement of elements" (from which it infers "what's left out") would be its Se tandem connection.

So what happens when that pattern is not found in memory?

 

[Eric B]

If it's not stored in memory, it won't be used to compare to something else.

 

[uumlau]

Interesting. Can you give an example of this?

A possible example might be the "quants" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst) as an example of Ne/Si, vs a more "hands-on" approach to investing (Ni/Se). If you've not heard of "quants", they're the kind of people who came up with the infamous "derivatives" on mortgages to manage risk. (This isn't a knock on quantitative analysis, but it will highlight some of the flaws that can arise.)

What quants essentially do is mathematically analyze everything that "has happened" in markets (Si), and then extrapolate patterns from that to make sound investment decisions. Such analysis is inherently statistical, and for the most part it works well. What's the missing piece? Cause and effect. The math is derived what historical examples, so, on average, they'll be right and tend to make money. Such models necessarily model trends, but they cannot model the changes in trends, because, well, the changes haven't happened yet.

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. In short, the "real price" of housing is how much a real person would pay to live in or otherwise use it for a productive purpose (renting apartments, as a business office, etc.), but turning housing into a commodity investment had raised the price of housing to levels far out of the range a typical buyer would be willing or able to pay. Eventually, we'd have people who'd paid too much for housing entirely unable to sell it without losing money. The core insight is that housing has a purpose, and the price of housing should reflect that purpose. If housing is costing far more than its purpose would indicate, and people are having 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.

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.

 

[Zarathustra]

I've been looking at a description I was given; which I was taking time to fully understand.

But Ne was described as attempting to understand a situation in terms of a pattern; perceiving otherwise disparate external elements in terms of a larger arrangement that give them meaning.
Ni was described as beginning with an existing arrangement of elements and inferring what's being left out; what the pattern doesn't take into account, what isn't being articulated. It involves looking at a trajectory of a premise and seeing where the evidence for it "wants" to go, and from that, what has been left out of the theory or where the trajectory doesn't work.
That is what was said to be the "subjective" element (i.e. the "introverted" attitude), rather than a subjective pattern (which is how I was trying to understand it).
It was compared to looking beyond where a map ends.

Ne and Ni conflict because Ni is looking for what a theory isn't designed to classify and talk about, or even what it "must" leave out in order to remain intact. Hence, (as I notice) NJ's will often tend to be more skeptical of ideas us NP's will toss out.

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??"

/ diving into my Ni hole

 

[skylights]

[...]
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.

Awesome, uumlau, thank you so much for the explanation. That's a really fantastic example that gives me a good picture of the "perpendicular" lines that Ne and Ni run on, based on the way S points are interpreted, whether through definitional specifics / Si or directional indications / Se. Ni/Se and Ne/Si again remind me of Heisenberg uncertainty. It's so interestingly demonstrative of the "movement"/activity in Se data points, kind of more of an identification of a process, than Si's fixed archetypes that work on assessment of data.

I alluded to my frustration at lacking Ni but being an enneagram 6 earlier in the thread because I feel like part of being a 6 is looking for those exact sorts of trends, and picking up on patterns that indicate the future. I've been in a management position at work recently and I've found myself trying to construct what seems to be the Ni story equivalent, but I often feel like I'm flying blind - I assume because my Se blows and I have a very hard time reading concrete situations for future indications. I know that the causation must be there, but it's hard for me to determine which patterns mean something. I'm probably trying to look along Ne lines again instead of Ni lines, but, for example, we have Thanksgiving coming this year, and I'm trying to decide how to gauge how I should shift production. Which things will we need more of, which less? My manager is a quintessential ISTJ and he is following last year's numbers to a T, because that is the guideline the company gives - it basically ensures he won't lose his job. Obviously, though, it's possible to do far better than that. The things that have occurred to me so far are mostly noting which items have been selling rapidly this season, but I feel like that's just more detailed Si data. I've been trying to look at elements like the weather being much colder, and people therefore probably leaning towards heavier and richer foods, the slow-but-improving economy suggesting lower numbers than usual but perhaps better than last year, the two new similar stores opening in our city and putting out more of what they don't have, which types of customers are most likely to come for this holiday and what they are most likely to buy (middle aged women tend to gravitate towards certain things, lol), which things we're going to put on sale and which things might increase/decrease in sales as a result of the price cuts, and so on... that's all I can think of right now


But, as you can probably tell, all of this is painfully conscious for me, and probably laughably full of holes, while for you it's probably around the difficulty level of breathing Any advice?

You guys should all become stock market gurus, you'd make a fortune

 

[uumlau]

Awesome, uumlau, thank you so much for the explanation. That's a really fantastic example that gives me a good picture of the "perpendicular" lines that Ne and Ni run on, based on the way S points are interpreted, whether through definitional specifics / Si or directional indications / Se. Ni/Se and Ne/Si again remind me of Heisenberg uncertainty. It's so interestingly demonstrative of the "movement"/activity in Se data points, kind of more of an identification of a process, than Si's fixed archetypes that work on assessment of data.

I alluded to my frustration at lacking Ni but being an enneagram 6 earlier in the thread because I feel like part of being a 6 is looking for those exact sorts of trends, and picking up on patterns that indicate the future. I've been in a management position at work recently and I've found myself trying to construct what seems to be the Ni story equivalent, but I often feel like I'm flying blind - I assume because my Se blows and I have a very hard time reading concrete situations for future indications. I know that the causation must be there, but it's hard for me to determine which patterns mean something. I'm probably trying to look along Ne lines again instead of Ni lines, but, for example, we have Thanksgiving coming this year, and I'm trying to decide how to gauge how I should shift production. Which things will we need more of, which less? My manager is a quintessential ISTJ and he is following last year's numbers to a T, because that is the guideline the company gives - it basically ensures he won't lose his job. Obviously, though, it's possible to do far better than that. The things that have occurred to me so far are mostly noting which items have been selling rapidly this season, but I feel like that's just more detailed Si data. I've been trying to look at elements like the weather being much colder, and people therefore probably leaning towards heavier and richer foods, the slow-but-improving economy suggesting lower numbers than usual but perhaps better than last year, the two new similar stores opening in our city and putting out more of what they don't have, which types of customers are most likely to come for this holiday and what they are most likely to buy (middle aged women tend to gravitate towards certain things, lol), which things we're going to put on sale and which things might increase/decrease in sales as a result of the price cuts, and so on... that's all I can think of right now


But, as you can probably tell, all of this is painfully conscious for me, and probably laughably full of holes, while for you it's probably around the difficulty level of breathing Any advice?

You guys should all become stock market gurus, you'd make a fortune

I'd suck at stock market stuff, unless I wrapped my life around it. When an Ni type "knows something", we are pretty much invested in knowing it, and are thus not expert in other areas.

As far as doing your planning, I'd advise going the Ne/Si route, not by planning EXACTLY as last year (your ISTJ's approach), but by looking for the bigger trends, especially those for which you have significant data.

The Ni/Se approach would be to look for shorter-term factors that would indicate more productive approaches. E.g., are there any commodities that you usually have to buy that are much cheaper this year? I was just reading that coffee prices are very low this year, but the people selling coffee (e.g., Starbucks) aren't going to lower their prices. That would suggest that you could perhaps attract business by having lower-cost coffee that tastes just as good as the expensive stuff (assuming you sell coffee at all, of course). In general, look at the market overall, look at current prices, see what's cheaper than normal, see what's more expensive than normal. The expensive stuff, even if it sells well, gives lower profit margins (think of car dealerships, which sell cars costing tens of thousands of dollars, but often only making a profit of a few hundred), while the cheaper stuff can yield some very high profit margins.

Also note that anything that you change this year needs to be advertised, strongly. Customers are very habitual, so you have to say "We have new, cool stuff!" really loudly for them to even notice. You can also take a "venture capitalist" approach, whereby you take several gambles which will tend to lose money 9/10 times, but if one or two of them pay off, the profit more than pays for the losses. That lets you venture into newer and more interesting products, but not without risk.

So yeah, look for the vectors, look for the changes, look for that which is neglected, and avoid trying to sell what everyone else is trying to sell.

But remember this: I'm a software developer. I don't do market analysis. I can give ideas of what to look for, but I've no practice doing so myself. I just know that I'd be looking for the dynamic aspects of the system, looking for an ideal wave to surf (Se analogy), and maneuver to ride it. Sometimes there's no good wave to ride, in which case, you should just enjoy swimming and get what you can out of it, but keep an eye out for the wave, and know what the waves look like BEFORE they arrive.


A link to the "coffee story": http://www.marketwatch.com/story/coffee-prices-fall-but-not-at-starbucks-2012-11-08

 

[Little_Sticks]

It's like having the ability to orgasm without any stimulation. *squirt*

 

[RaptorWizard]

Yet again another thread I resurrected has transformed into a triumphal success! Ni cause and effect contingency knows no bounds in this ever evolving dynamic system.