When it comes to Keirsey's designations: NT, NF, SP, SJ, I don't think they make a lot of sense from a theoretical perspective, but they do make a lot of sense from the perspective of an external observer. When I am viewing other people these groupings describe general behavior fairly well. From the perspective of cognition though, they don't make much sense at all.
Exactly. This one fast food restaurant that I frequent, there's another regular there that I sometimes talk to, almost always about sports. The last time we talked, last weekend, the conversation was about Brett Favre. He was saying that Favre should just stay retired and he's just coming back because of his ego and he can't stand to not be in the spotlight, and he wants to add to his legacy. I put forth the radical point of view that none of that is true, but rather he had a compulsion to play football, and a thrill from the challenge of taking a lousy team and making them good.
To me, it was a classic misunderstanding of motivations right along Keirsey's Guardian vs. Artisan divide. The dude I talk to fits the Guardian mode well, and most of his buddies who he said "all said the same thing about Favre" most likely are too. When I said what I said about Favre (and I had to restate it several different ways before it started to sink in to him), it was like opening his mind to concepts he had never thought about before. And I brought up other examples of athletes that I thought fit both sides of the deal..Those that kept playing because they were about being seen as the best and adding to their legacy or image like Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and more and those like Favre and Michael Jordan who kept playing because it was their passion and what drove them, and really couldn't care less about their legacy. Not that they didn't love the attention or have big egos, because I think they probably do, but it's not the same motivation.
Dude at the grub station kept saying "wow, you are right about that, wow, you're so right..wow.." it had never been presented to him before and it was blowing his mind but he had a new kind of understanding of people because of it.
Contrast that with if I had said "well, you see, Brett Favre is Se/Ti-dominant as opposed to Te/Si dominant so his neural nexus processed the cognitive whosits whatsits in a parallel way to the diagram of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...."
Dude would have been like "uhhh..yeah..so who do you think's gonna win the Big 12?" or he might stop talking to me all together. But because I was able to hit him with real life examples to illustrate the real point based on actions and what people said, rather than technical mumbo jumbo, I started the guy on a path to possible better understanding of lots of people, and I'll tell ya it was a frickin RUSH.
So, whereas I'm very thankful that I have read stuff about the word that starts with cog that i'm tired of spelling, and because my obsession has been this stuff the last couple months, I had to be introduced to the whole thing from real behavior-based stuff or it never would have happened. So, there is great value in approaching it in a way that even if the N-folks don't think paints the picture fully, is the only way to reach a lot of us in S-land who would otherwise look at you like you're an alien.