I'm curious to know the circumstances and situations that people recognize Ni in use. What's going on when you see it in action? I feel like these threads are never really fleshed out to my satisfaction. Of course, that could mean I don't get it and if I don't get it then I may not have it.
When I have conversations with my NJ friends, I feel like they can almost always say why.
For example, an ENTJ friend of mine got a tip that a job was opening in a department she wanted to get in to. When I asked her about the outcome she told me she believed they already had someone in mind to hire and only announced the job to comply with employment policies, not to really look for candidates. I, of course, asked why she thought this. After doing some researching, these are the reasons she gave me:
- They announced the job publicly for two weeks on the nose. This was the bare minimum they must post the job announcement according to their policy and she applied before it was publicly posted.
- The person they hired began the third week on the nose after the job was posted publicly. How'd they review candidates/applications, interview, and get them in so quickly?
- She went to the organization's website to see how long they have the job announcements open and averaged out one month.
- Her biggest clue was the person who told her about the position knew the person they hired was a consultant that department used before.
I'm not saying this the best example of Ni, or if it's Ni at all. If it's not, then I'd really like to know some real world examples. I don't think Ni only focuses on things on a global, all-encompassing level. The way I'm understanding how Ni is used is knowing from the outset, when she applied, whether or not she would get the job. At the very least, she has decent deductive reasoning skills and I don't know if reasoning ability is connected to a typological function.
I just don't believe Ni lacks traceability. I really think it depends on the ability of the NJ zero in on what triggered them. The less able they are to ID the triggers, the more "they just know." Yes, that looks very non-linear but it doesn't mean it is.
Is Ni impervious to metacognition? It being hard or difficult shouldn't be a deterrent I think.
As far as the leaping and shifting is concerned, does this tend to happen with people you know well or within a shared context? Is easily and quickly following the leaping/shifting context dependent? The problem I have with the Indescribable Ni is if you never really have to focus in and explain it, it can be anything you want it to be. Nothing, something, everything, whatever and a lot of miscommunication can occur in the gap between. Everyone thinks they understand it similarly, but you never really dug in enough to see if you did. I hope that makes sense.
Here's another example I can think of. The financial crisis we're slowly emerging from has had people from at least 20 years ago saying the way we're moving isn't sustainable, this is going to break at some point. They weren't getting this from an oracle, they were looking at hard numbers, reports, deregulation, projecting forward. Is that Si because they used current (at the time) data and numbers? They weren't getting this information in a vacuum, but nor were they taken seriously at the time. Is that an example of Ni or something else? If you see the writing on the wall, there's got to be some writing on the wall to begin with, right? Evidently, not everyone sees it, and if they do, they don't assign the same significance or interpretation to it. What is that?