Guess the Author's Personality Type Based on a Writing Sample

[Mal12345]

I've got one. Anyone up for some typing?

Uhhhh, definitely some type that ends with a P.

 

[Reverie]

Uhhhh, definitely some type that ends with a P.

Well... Maybe. It's Isabel Allende. I've heard her pegged as an INFJ...I kind of auto-assumed she was INFJ, but to be honest I'm a bit confused as to how to tell us INFJs and INFPs apart...so maybe INFP??? Who knows?
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang///id/204
EDIT: Link broken. Working link:http://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_tells_tales_of_passion.html

 

[Mal12345]

Well... Maybe. It's Isabel Allende. I've heard her pegged as an INFJ...I kind of auto-assumed she was INFJ, but to be honest I'm a bit confused as to how to tell us INFJs and INFPs apart...so maybe INFP??? Who knows?
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang///id/204

I guess IXFP? She doesn't come across as being dominated by any single function.

 

[Little_Sticks]

ok, next one:

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”

This sounds very intuitive to me, especially the last statement. Sounds very Ni, but I don't want to relate it to a type because I don't agree with some fundamentals of MBTI.

"It was a good morning, Wilson thought. There was a heavy dew and as the wheels went through the grass and low bushes he could smell the odor of the crushed fronds. It was an odor like verbena and he liked this early morning smell of the dew, the crushed bracken and the look of the tree trunks showing black through the early morning mist, as the car made its way through the untracked, parklike country. He had put the two in the back seat now and was thinking about buffalo. The buffalo that he was after stayed in the daytime in a thick swamp where it was impossible to get a shot, but in the night they fed out into an open stretch of country..."

Guess the author's type.

Sounds either ISTP or ESTJ.

I've got one. Anyone up for some typing?

I like INFJ.

 

[Reverie]

I like INFJ.

Well INFJ likes you back.

 

[Society]

My first impression was INFJ, but then I changed my mind. I need a longer sample. The ISTJ type can engage in such thinking, although what I'm seeing is more of a meta-ISTJ thinking. The ISTJ types I've known aren't given to pondering quite like this. But I went with my second guess anyway because Si is a symbolic type.

more from the same source:

“Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them.

May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal.

I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible.

As a fact the Claw was thus an incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed, a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling in
the dark.”

 

[Mal12345]

I guess IXFP? She doesn't come across as being dominated by any single function.

Heck with it. ISFJ!

 

[Mal12345]

Sounds either ISTP or ESTJ.

ESTP

 

[Little_Sticks]

ESTP

maybe.

 

[Mal12345]

maybe.

The author is Ernest Hemingway, famous INFP!

 

[Little_Sticks]

The author is Ernest Hemingway, famous INFP!

Aren't famous typings usually disputed? I don't know that much about him, honestly, but I don't see why ISFP couldn't be a good possibility. I think ISxP like to think about the atmosphere or aesthetics of a situation; and ISFPs seem to like to talk/write about it a lot more. But you probably have a different idea in mind and I wouldn't mind hearing it.

I'm guessing you know the story this comes from so you know what the character's type is. So you typed him ESTP? I mean, yeah sure, that makes sense of course, I can't say I can be certain about anything I've ever said here or treat anything anyone says as factual, rather than a suggestion (but this is insightful to think about anyway). It just seemed like ISTP might be more likely just from that excerpt. But I'm probably biased.

 

[Reverie]

more from the same source:

“Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them.

May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal.

I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible.

As a fact the Claw was thus an incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed, a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling in
the dark.”

INTJ?

 

[Mal12345]

Aren't famous typings usually disputed? I don't know that much about him, honestly, but I don't see why ISFP couldn't be a good possibility. I think ISxP like to think about the atmosphere or aesthetics of a situation; and ISFPs seem to like to talk/write about it a lot more. But you probably have a different idea in mind and I wouldn't mind hearing it.

I'm guessing you know the story this comes from so you know what the character's type is. So you typed him ESTP? I mean, yeah sure, that makes sense of course, I can't say I can be certain about anything I've ever said here or treat anything anyone says as factual, rather than a suggestion (but this is insightful to think about anyway). It just seemed like ISTP might be more likely just from that excerpt. But I'm probably biased.

People will dispute almost anything. But the quoted material has more of an Se quality about it. Notice how descriptive it is.