As a dom Ti I am pretty good at knowing a person on a social level. Now what I will not claim is that I will get it right everytime because I really have no control over the person external environment outside of mine and their conversation. I am pretty good at picking up those moments after the fact. I may even directly challenge the person in a manner that makes them go "this is whats bothering me" as well. Its all part of the internal understanding I build of how systems work. People fit into that very well and have been told by many that I am actually VERY good at learning people because
I actually listen, process, understand as that's the most important part of building a system.
That's what I'm talking about. The act of processing all the information you receive from one person and turning it into a single concept called [insert name of said person].
What I will never claim to know is how a person will react upon meeting them, I don't apply "stereotypes" or abstractions unless I know they fit. I don't say, oh thats a guy he will be like this. I may group "guys" into a stereotype, but never a person into a guy until I know that person. That's a more extroverted thing and the way an introvert actually has to get around that is just flat our not knowing and running with it. I don't really have much faith in external systems or abstractions unless I actually know it fits. At that point I have internalized it.
I find most people very consistant, even if the consistency is that there is a lack of consistency. My ex is one that to this day baffles me, I know her very well, I know what she values, cares about, etc. but I could not even come close to devising a system to determine her thoughts or answers as they have no consistency and are very emotionally driven goal based without any sense what so ever even when you know her goal. My system says "flip a coin is the best you will get to a good vs bad response as that is actually the accurate probability". I will adjust probability as time goes on and the probability will slide back and forth. That's as close to consistant as I can get.
That was what I was trying to make clear in the OP. It's not about making a person fit in an already created system (like a stereotype, I don't trust them either). It's more like I said before, a condensation of a person into one idea instead of tagging them with a label it already exists.
That's what I always say, "I'm consistent at being inconsistent", hahaha But knowing you will flip a coin (regardless of what the outcome is) is consistent with your personality (maybe), so it still stands true!
Yes I do this as a Fi type.
Before I discovered typology I already picked up on these patterns, but I had no language for it.
I very much pick up on an invididual's pattern as well as larger patterns in people. It is definitely a system and I can often predict behaviors or responses by it. But it's so theoretical for me. In real time, I am a helpless observer who can analyze, but not put it into use.
So where I fail is the dynamics of social interactions, aka the extroverted stuff. I understand people's internal motivations better, sometimes motivations they seem unaware of themselves (people hate when NFs claim this, but then they love it when we help them uncover those motivations).
I understand! Yes, it's theoretical, though I can't help but seeing people as machines, and I try to foresee what they're going to do/what they're going to choose, according to how I constructed them inside my head. This doesn't help in any way, but it's fun to try to predict what people will do.
I'm able to figure most people out fairly quickly in person. People leave little breadcrumb trails to their underlying topography and I can often follow them back to their own little realm. Well at least the outskirts. Note I said in person. Online is completely void of tiny physical cues and tone and inflection so I have to read between the lines going off of what they don't say as much as what they do and also how they word things.
I have some kind of system but if you asked me to give you a detailed breakdown of it I'll likely start blathering and become really perplexed because apparently it's as much a subconscious process as it is a conscious one for me and I can't clearly define it for myself.
Edit: I hope that made as much sense to everyone as it did to me. Sometimes I'm actually concise with my thoughts. Sometimes.
1) I envy your vocabulary. If I were a cartoon, my iris would be two hearts right now.
2) It made complete sense to me.
3) Proper answer: I'm also blind when it comes to people online. I just take what has been written literally most of the time (I'm a firm believer of Poe's Law). Years ago I'd watch the series "Lie to Me" and I would practice pointing out micro-expressions on people walking around. How people word things is essential to me, at least because I believe there are no synonyms (I think every synonym is better suited in a certain context... you should see me "trying to find the right words" in my native language, I can spend half an hour trying to decide which word is better for what I want to express).
I used to turn people into systems more than I do now, and learning about the Grant/Beebe stack and Socionics made that even more intense for a while. I still do it now to some extent (I think it's just a part of how I process the world), though not as much as I used to. I take more of an "analog" approach to mentally modeling people, which might be why I've been putting less stock in a lot of cognitive function models lately.
I am inconsistent in that my personality is a bit self-contradictory. I often find myself fluctuating between extremes of rationality and irrationality, logic and emotion, science and spirituality. I've been interested in those kinds of dichotomies for a while, whether they are naturally opposites or artificially so, and I like exploring both sides of them.
As for other people, I've come to accept the fact that the universe is ruled by chaos, and people can often be unpredictable even to themselves. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just how humans are.
100% agree with everything you said. Only that you put it in an organized way, unlike me (my scattered thoughts take a while to become one full sentence).
Indeed, that's how I process the world. I make little packages of information and build them into a "consistent" system. I always say I'm a pool of coexisting contradictions, and I like to try to understand how they can live together and make "me" a system. It's difficult to make an abstract concept of myself.
I agree that people can be inconsistent even to themselves, though most of the time they follow some inner logic, and that's what I like to find out about them.
I tend to take people as they come. What do you mean by "abstractions" here?
Do I know them? Makes a difference. I think people as a whole are predictable but not necessarily consistent.
By "abstractions" I meant that I take X person, listen to them, watch them talking, moving, etc, and then I "extract" what I believe it's their "core essence". I make a concept model of the person inside my head. If I had to ask something to X person, maybe I'd think first what my abstract model of them would answer, and then answer the real X to see if my "abstraction" of them as a system works fine.
Of course it makes a difference, if I don't know the people I don't have any material to work on. Well, yes, predictable is a form of consistency, I think. If you always change your values, you're consistent at changing, and that makes you somewhat predictable in saying "they will probably think differently than they did the last time".
People ARE SYSTEMS
sys·tem
ˈsistəm/
noun
1.
a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole, in particular.
Regarding the inconsistency thing not sure I follow. Maybe it's a function of youth. My ethics etc have been pretty consistent so far. With the occasional fuck up. But rare.
Though i agree that yes humans are generally inconsistent but isn't it the "job" of a function like Ti to make us internally consistent ?
Correct. People ARE systems, only that I tend to realize that while I'm talking to them. I don't know if I'm creating them as machines in my head or devoiding them of all "humanity" in real life.
Ti makes us consistent. Only that, as I see it, if I gather more information and update my way of analyzing further information, it will be internally consistent but it may not look that way from the outside. That was what I was wondering (agh too many Ws).
As a Te-Ni user, people are amorphous blobs in my mind that are layered by whatever data the unconscious mind stores. They're visually represented with colours, jagged, straight or curved lines around them. There are emotional nuances layered into these concepts. Patterns are ascertained, the greater amount of data populated into the conception.
Not all Ti users are inconsistent. Of the Ti users, INTPs, ENTPs and ESTPs are in my subjective opinion, more inconsistent than ISTPs.
Quoting myself a week ago: "I see people as genderless plasticine figurines moving around" (though I was talking about when I'm concentrated on an idea and the surroundings become irrelevant).
I like the idea of layers rather than gears/bubbles connected to each other to form concepts (that's how I imagine them). Do certain layers taint/colour the ones under them or they're considered separately? I'm really interested in how people see data inside their minds.
As clear Te user I would say that I construct systems out of people. Also inconsistent as the word is pretty vague and there are a number of ways you can be inconsistent. I have noticed that Ti users often bother too much with definitions instead of impacts, so they can miss the point of the story. But this isn't inconsistency in the standard meaning of the term.
Definitely. Speaking for myself here, I get lost in the technical (or not so technical) aspects of the idea, that it becomes a huge monster of "ad hocs" than one solid idea. Well, I believe the word "inconsistent" could be refined, but for the moment is the only one I know that gets close to what I purposely intend to mean.