permission for so/sp discussion, starry?
at least can we both agree that i'm basically the jane goodall of 7w6 enps?
on another note, i knew someone through a friend who tried to retype me as an intp. i took it as a compliment, and understanding the e5 overlap, i was glad to see how much progress i've made with Ti. i too could sense how much more focused my questions were and how much more controlled i was in examining and gathering useful information.
with type, it's a weird game--on the one hand, he didn't know my progression, didn't see all these Ni patterns in my way of doing things or shortcomings or the way it all fit together. and on the other hand, he doesn't have the same type system in his mind as i do.
that's the crux--the type systems really are so different. at this point, i'm more than impressed when it feels like we can get on the same page at all. i think my philosophy is a bit backward for most people, when we can only derive archetypes by comparing actual people. the descriptions are just worse representations than the iterative driven algorithm that comes out of it. i can't even really build the context without letting real comparison-contrast do the work to draw out meaningful generalizations, to help push me to try to hold the real thing again. because there's nothing essential to experience. a type isn't a a product we can directly experience. we can only encounter a person. i can draw out a few things, but talking about it is like talking about wine, it's this post hoc reasoning after the intuition has already happened, and it's only meaningful as it is counterposed with other fresh input to work with. it's like asking the sorting hat to explain itself, and detail what types of information are really admissable to it. the words are always far removed from the actual energy and consciousness of it.
the one thing we all can do is, with the experiences and methods of sorting people, as good as our typing has been, start with different lead-ins, questions, and attempts to whole person listen and attend to and empathize with. one of my 7w6 entp friends was trying to explain it to me this way the other day, that our job is to hold the way we relate and the way people are different from us both together. that doing so is a kind of approximation of the best side of the platinum rule. that it reminds us to allow them to be themselves, appreciate their path, and also connect on a human level with the process of figuring out how to live well as ourselves.