magpie said:
I also want to make it clear that sensors are not more stupid, less creative, less imaginative, less pattern oriented, or less conceptual than intuitives, and if you believe that intuitives are those things more than sensors, you are both wrong and part of the problem, no matter how you try to dress up your condescension and superiority complex.
Honestly, most of this issue is due to a large degree of imprecision on personality typology forums in separating different versions of the typologies. N in the MBTI test is not the same as N in Jung's work.
Actually, quite ironically, I get the sense being a sensation type was in some ways seen as a
plus by Jung.... where the idea was a sensation-thinking type was the archetypal scientist, and introverted intuitives were if anything branded as cranks and prophets.
Jung's original diagnosis of
himself was sensation/thinking....
What happens a lot on this site is that you see a ton of Ns (by the MBTI dichotomies) and they then try to find out who is "most N of the Ns" to try to brand everyone else as a sensor....which ends up being a bit of a splitting hairs contest, since they're all so dichotomies-N that the criterion for who is "really" N becomes overly subjective and arbitrary. Instead they ought to be asking what
sort of N they are. Would they fit better a sensation type or an intuitive type in a functions-y framework (of which there are a few different interpretations at least).
In this worldview, it's more like one's curiosities are concentrated in certain ways, rather than it being about who is more curious/reflective/so on.
One of the problems is N on the MBTI seems to correlate with the Big 5's Open to Experience dimension, which basically IS about being more imaginative, reflective, curious, and so on...contrasted with traditional, down to earth, less reflective, more uncurious pragmatic, less eccentric folk. The stereotype being how Sherlock Holmes of BBC sees most of the people around him.
In reality, though, you'll find that genuine MBTI-S types (not the Jungian counterpart) really don't seem to see the whole N thing as great, and quite frankly I know a lot of STJ types who kind of scoff at the coffee shop intellectual reading eccentric authors and so on lifestyle and prefer someone pragmatic and who has a more worldly attitude and fits in well to society.
Instead of asking what the different types of Ns on the forums are, people ask IF someone is an N or not, and usually if they consistently test N, there's a pretty good chance they are -- many dichotomies S types actually, really don't prefer a lot of the stuff that's so apparently romanticized.