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[NT] INTJ vs INTP: A Guide

Salomé

meh
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That context is basically a list of cause-effect rules: "gravity makes things fall down", "fire burns things down". My examples are clearly obvious cause-effect rules.

What needs to be made clear here is that most people don't think like this. It isn't about intuitions and hunches, and Ni doms trusting them more. Most peoples' minds do not follow these paths. Most people don't switch out contexts in order to better understand something.
What makes you think you know how "most people" think, given that your way of thinking is, by your own assertion, so magically different? Are you really proposing that INJs have a monopoly on understanding cause and effect? Lol. I've seen some deluded claims on this board over the years...

According to your own examples anyone who can grasp that "fire burns things down" (i.e. anyone not suffering from serious mental retardation) has Ni.

Ne is the context-switching function par excellence.

Your post just reads like another INTJ fantasy of illusory superiority. An area where your type does seem to excel.
 

digesthisickness

✿ڿڰۣஇღ♥ wut ♥ღஇڿڰۣ✿
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No shit. I think I just found out that my Si is stuck in a box, can't use, or even grasp, contextual data, and is hiding its ability to memorize long lists.
 

uumlau

Happy Dancer
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According to your own examples anyone who can grasp that "fire burns things down" (i.e. anyone not suffering from serious mental retardation) has Ni.

Ne is the context-switching function par excellence.

Your post just reads like another INTJ fantasy of illusory superiority. An area where your type does seem to excel.

No shit. I think I just found out that my Si is stuck in a box, can't use, or even grasp, contextual data, and is hiding its ability to memorize long lists.

And this is why we often end up saying, "I dunno, just a hunch," when asked how we arrive at whatever conclusion.

I'm limited to using analogies to explain what's going on. All it takes is one person to take something literally - or personally - and then instead of trying to explain my idea, I'm stuck trying to explain the explanation of my idea.

There are no superpowers, here. I don't need to know exactly "how others think" to realize that how I think is very different. Of course most people understand "cause and effect". INTJs understand concrete definitions, too. INTJs think in terms of cause and effect: the world model is built from verbs, not nouns.

A large part of what I'm trying to explain is that, as I understand it, Ni intuition isn't "just a hunch" or even "something rising from the unconscious." It's a way of looking at the world that is always there, a perspective that appears to be very uncommon. It isn't superpowers, or supersmarts. It's more like an idiot savant kind of ability, one which has probably not been all that useful for most of the history of humanity, though perhaps more useful now with the advent of computers.

In a nutshell, I'm trying to describe Ni in a way that doesn't handwave about gut feelings or hunches or harnessing the unconscious mind, and point out fairly concrete properties that distinguish from the other functions.

Here's another, more esoteric analogy. In higher level programming languages, there is a style of programming called "object oriented programming." Programs written in such a style are still "just programs" that get turned into machine code: the important distinction is how the code is organized. For OOP, that organization is into "objects", and objects have properties and methods - they have things and can do things. This makes it easy to organize programs, because you can just take an "object" and "use it" whether by reading its properties or calling its methods. I would analogize this to Si: there are "things" that are classified and categorized in a concrete way. One has libraries of these things to be pulled out and used as needed.

An alternative (and much less popular) style of programming is "functional programming." In a functional programming language, "functions" are the primary entities. Even what you might think of as a variable is a "function" that takes no arguments and returns a value. Because of this, instead of building programs with objects, one builds programs with functions. One can take functions and easily build new functions from them, layering them in different ways. I would analogize functional programming with Ni.

In general, object oriented programming is much more useful than functional programming. It's easy to share objects, and often programming objects correspond to "real" objects in the real world. (E.g., telling a printer to print a document.) Functional programming is more useful in very specific ways, such as processing data, working with mathematical equations, parallel processing (everything is immutable), and pretty much anything where what you're doing in real life is more easily mapped to a functional kind of thinking. It's this functional (cause and effect - function takes argument and delivers result) kind of thinking that I ascribe to Ni.

Note that any truly practical functional programming style will occasionally need to employ objects (talk with interfaces to make things happen in the real world). And of course, any object oriented programming style has to have some objects with methods (functions) in order to get anything done at all. So neither style is at all ignorant of the other, but they are organized very differently, and the pieces of code fit together very differently.

And that is how I see the differences between Si and Ni.
 
W

WhoCares

Guest
Ni, to me is like this. You are walking around in a pitch black room you have never navigated before. You stumble over a chair, and eventually you realise it's a chair. Epiphany moment. All day I will take in and filter out extraneous bits of data from all directions. None of it will be given much thought by my conscious brain until, epiphany moment when certain bits of data make sense. Often I am the last to get something and wont get it until I walk away and do something else. And because I cannot follow how that conclusion was arrived at I now have to reverse engineer an explanation for it.

True story - I once communicated some of these epiphanies to others. In time what I said had come true for them. Now people think I have some sort of psychic ability. I don't. Its just Ni coming up with shit out of what looks like thin air. In actual fact its an accumulation of disjointed data over a long period of time that gave rise to a pattern for predicting future results. Accuracy is hit and miss like most things, but people being what they are will focus on the accurate parts and give that significance in their mind.
 

Salomé

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And this is why we often end up saying, "I dunno, just a hunch," when asked how we arrive at whatever conclusion.
Si isn't like OOP, it's more like procedural programming. Actually comparing cognitive functions to programming paradigms is an exercise in futility, though it's amusing that your Te reaches for such a lifeless, mechanistic explanation... Especially when talking about the intuitive functions. WhoCares gets closer.
Jung claimed Ni paralleled some aspects of schizophrenia (as have other thinkers), a conclusion that is difficult to resist. That is not to say that Ni-doms are crazy so much as to suggest that perhaps many of those who might historically have been labelled as such were actually just misunderstood introverted intuitives. I see the conflict between Ni and Te as particularly severe (much more so than Ne/Ti, for example) and I think it's unsurprising that such a conflict might to give rise to schizotypal personality disorders.

 

Debaser

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You guys are making it too complicated. It's really quite simple.

INTP is the wise good guy. INTJ is his evil genius archenemy.

For instance:
Gandalf = INTP, Sauroman = INTJ
Yoda = INTP, The Emperor = INTJ
Professor X = INTP, Magneto = INTJ
Fox Mulder = INTP, Cigarette Smoking Man = INTJ
Neo = INTP, Agent Smith = INTJ
Dumbledore = INTP, Voldemort = INTJ
Sherlock Holmes = INTP, Moriarty = INTJ

And so on and so forth.
 

Fluffywolf

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You guys are making it too complicated. It's really quite simple.

INTP is the wise good guy. INTJ is his evil genius archenemy.

For instance:
Gandalf = INTP, Sauroman = INTJ
Yoda = INTP, The Emperor = INTJ
Professor X = INTP, Magneto = INTJ
Fox Mulder = INTP, Cigarette Smoking Man = INTJ
Neo = INTP, Agent Smith = INTJ
Dumbledore = INTP, Voldemort = INTJ
Sherlock Holmes = INTP, Moriarty = INTJ

And so on and so forth.

Ironically, a collaboration of an INTP with an INTJ has the potential to both build and tear asunder the whole of creation.

Just imagine what would happen in any of the examples you mentioned, if the parties involved managed to work out a diplomatic solution instead of fighting each other. The possibilities are infinite.

Of course, to bridge that huge mental language barrier is no easy feat. But if it could be done...
 

RaptorWizard

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You guys are making it too complicated. It's really quite simple.

INTP is the wise good guy. INTJ is his evil genius archenemy.

For instance:
Gandalf = INTP, Sauroman = INTJ
Yoda = INTP, The Emperor = INTJ
Professor X = INTP, Magneto = INTJ
Fox Mulder = INTP, Cigarette Smoking Man = INTJ
Neo = INTP, Agent Smith = INTJ
Dumbledore = INTP, Voldemort = INTJ
Sherlock Holmes = INTP, Moriarty = INTJ

And so on and so forth.

Why are you so convinced that the good guys are P, and the bad guys are J?
When it comes to fictional typings, I get very skeptical; it's questionable whether or not there's even enough consistency within the characters to assign them a strict type.
I don't know too much about the other guys, but Gandalf is often typed as an INTJ, and Yoda as an INFJ, or less often an INTJ as well. I'm not saying one is right and the other is wrong, but just that there's other perspectives out there on the topic.

Gandalf is the archetypal Merlin by the way, and Yoda is more like Lao Tzu, in my opinion. Those legendary sages could possibly be typed, maybe not with complete certainty, but a lot more of it.
 

Debaser

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Why are you so convinced that the good guys are P, and the bad guys are J?
When it comes to fictional typings, I get very skeptical; it's questionable whether or not there's even enough consistency within the characters to assign them a strict type.
I don't know too much about the other guys, but Gandalf is often typed as an INTJ, and Yoda as an INFJ, or less often an INTJ as well. I'm not saying one is right and the other is wrong, but just that there's other perspectives out there on the topic.

Gandalf is the archetypal Merlin by the way, and Yoda is more like Lao Tzu, in my opinion. Those legendary sages could possibly be typed, maybe not with complete certainty, but a lot more of it.

define-joke.png
 

Coriolis

Si vis pacem, para bellum
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I must have missed the punchline. I thought jokes were supposed to be funny.
 

Debaser

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I must have missed the punchline. I thought jokes were supposed to be funny.

Let's just sit and think about this for a second: Did you seriously think that I was suggesting that the only difference between INTJs and INTPs is that INTP are wise good guys and INTJs are evil geniuses, based solely on the supposed types of fictional characters? Come on, give me some credit. See, this lack of humor is why people don't like INTJs. Don't think it's funny? Fine. It's not supposed to be laugh-out-loud humor. But you should understand that I was merely commenting on a trend I have observed in which people type the stereotypical good genius as an INTP and the stereotypical evil genius as an INTJ.
 

RaptorWizard

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Let's just sit and think about this for a second: Did you seriously think that I was suggesting that the only difference between INTJs and INTPs is that INTP are wise good guys and INTJs are evil geniuses, based solely on the supposed types of fictional characters? Come on, give me some credit. See, this lack of humor is why people don't like INTJs. Don't think it's funny? Fine. It's not supposed to be laugh-out-loud humor. But you should understand that I was merely commenting on a trend I have observed in which people type the stereotypical good genius as an INTP and the stereotypical evil genius as an INTJ.

:einstein2: = :jesus: and :evilgenius: = :devil:

 

Azure Flame

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INTJs are only logical after they discover their Te and realize half the shit they say is crap. haha
INTPs are rational to the point that they can't help it.
 

anticlimatic

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Man, if you don't know whether or not you're an INTP or an INTJ-- you're probably neither.

See, this lack of humor is why people don't like INTJs.

INTJs have a sense of humor, just never when it involves anything that might put their image in question. They're really good at condescending humor though-- laughing at other people, especially stupid ones.
 

Salomé

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^So what you're saying is that even if you can get past INTJ humourlessness and hubris there are still compelling reasons to dislike them? :sad face:

Just imagine what would happen in any of the examples you mentioned, if the parties involved managed to work out a diplomatic solution instead of fighting each other.
A box-office flop. ;)
 

FoulcherDeChartres

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Hello,

I subscribe to this forum because I really wanted to answer, having my mind completely absorbed by the whole MBTI thing.

First of all, I'm a 24 French engineer so that I'm sorry in advance if my english is not easy to understand.
I'm generally INTJ but I think INTP would work well depending on the instances.

I read a post from Haight at the beginning and having myself changed a lot in a matter of months and having studied/worked in many fields (I first studied fundamental mathematics then engineering and then management/business) I agree that the more relevant part of our way to behave cannot be explained by the MBTI.
In fact, I tend to prefer the French method in psychology because it offers specific help for personnal growth with a larger view. it may be not as "spectacular" and funny (having a stereotypical character to refer to is like to have fun when discovering air signs).
The thing is that this kind of frameworks is generally flawed.

Why ?

1) It assumes that the brain function affects not only the way we deal with ideas but also our whole behavior. This is in fact wrong because the body response to our environment, our tastes, etc. are mainly affected by our socio environment and our experiences.

2) The model itself is not compatible with the idea that INTJ and INTP are "completely different". Because the variables used are continuous as the functions describing the size of our different brain areas, it's not possible to assume that there is a discontinuity in two types that differ from almost nothing. 1%J and 1%P cannot be completely different if the model is continuous.

3) Our brain evolves with the use we make of it. And because the brain size is the same trough time, we can change the state of our thinking style. I usually choose the one who fits the best and everyone can learn several thinking methods. I studied pure mathematics for two years then engineering. The approachs are different.

4) Like with Zodiac signes and so on, the MBTI can suffer from the Barnum effect. I admit that MBTI is less stupid than the enneagram but people tend to forget that the Barnum effect can be powerful, especialy when we know that every people has other selves wich are the fantasy ones.

And I don't mention stupid things like questions relating to social life. In fact, some extrovert can be lonely because they are shy, etc. External modulators are very powerful and influence our behavior and even our thinking. Thinking is also something we can withdraw. We think by habit, generally because we had scientifc studies.

In fact, from an outside point of view, every thread I saw about MBTI an enneagram are basically intellectual masturbating. They want to put complex words on pratical processing that are two well-known scientific approaches.

The thing is that it's proven that putting ourselves is reassuring because we have a stable pillar on which we can develop. I think it's a good placebo. When I did my first test, I was very happy to be called "a strategist". The placebo was so strong (self-motivation can work like hypnosis) that I was on fire and elaborated a very complex pickup plan which worked. I was convinced to be a "really confident INTJ" so that I made crazy social things which made me very popular for two weeks.
Or course, the placebo had an end.

Instead of wasting time to discuss crapy passive things, you should be more specific about yourselves. Many personnal flaws can be understood better by using the tryptic : self-esteem + self-confidence + self-assertivness. It can be trained very fast and this kind of austere litterature is probably less funny than MBTI and other caricatural stuff but it is far more serious and efficient for self-development.
Think about what external or internal factors are making you frustrated and you will develop more. The French writer Balzac said that our identity is a series of pictures that evolve. It's true. Think about what you want to become or what you want to do, act in real life and step by step you will change.

Every people is different and I'm pretty sure everyone experienced at least 3 types of the MBTI one day or another.
 

Jade Heart

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INTPs are more pure rational in their decision making (if they even make one), and INTJs are able to use their Fi to make decisions.
Could be wrong, though.
 
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