I can relate with author. It takes me a while to actually synthesize questions thrown at me, and sometimes I look like a fool staring back silently but I'm enumerating through a bunch of responses in my head. Ultimately, it's like a chess game where I don't instinctively make a move just yet.
People sometimes tell me I explain or write well. That's usually because I don't understand the thing I am dealing with and have to explain them to myself. And I want to really understand which can make me seem "slow".
This is me. Once I hit college I was told how good of a formal and technical writer I am. How clear and concise my technical points were, and how easy to understand I could make even super abstract technical knowledge.
It's because I am secretly afraid that I'm dumb and I re-work everything difficult I encounter multiple times inside my own head. You people just get to see the distilled version of like 15 re-writes to make sure I actually understand what I'm talking about and that I'm not just working for Dunning-Kruger Incorporated.
I'm opposite: I'll start talking, correct myself, let myself be led by my conversation partner's answer and reach a conclusion. It's like rubberduck debugging for arguments.
If you ask me a question now, it must be a very exceptional one if I'm still thinking about it in 2 min.
For this reason I am really poor at making a presentation or writing IP by myself. I seek out others. My thoughts sort of go on repeat all by myself. It's annoying.
Maybe I also want to impress others, right then and there, and by myself there is little motivation.
Right now I should be working on a presentation for tomorrow, but I procrastinate. But I could easily whip it out if I were to discuss the stuff I want to tell with someone and jot down slides as we talk.
That is very much, what discussion in a democracy could be.
"If you want a question answered (by the internet), don't ask. Give a false answer." say some (I am looking at you, logbuch-netzpolitik.de #LNP455)
Seems to be a common credo. I am still looking for a content publisher that gives out the facts checking with the actual content, for me to not have to come back to re-read the actual answers.
I think this describes me as well. Although I do wonder if part of the problem isn't that I'm fairly prone to the associative mode of thinking and highly reluctant to the linear mode of thinking so I struggle to reason my way to an answer.
I can give answers to questions I've already thought about, but if you give me a new question all my brain will output is "spinner.gif" until I've gone for a walk or something. It's very hard to get it to think about a particular topic and arrive at a timely answer.
This is one reason why I hate job interviews. Also timed standardized tests. They filter for memorization, not thoughtfulness.
To be clear, I'm good at memorization, if I'm allowed the opportunity to practice beforehand, as the author explains about his media interviews. But I still object on principle to testing the wrong things, and I don't always have the opportunity, time, or inclination to memorize some trivia to satisfy the cargo cult.
I recently learned that job interviews are great at showing what’s wrong with the company you are applying for.
For instance, I recently had an interview where I got hammered with questions regarding design patterns. My daily work doesn’t consist of figuring out why I should prefer the Observer pattern or Mediator pattern over one another.
As such, I failed to give a satisfying answer in 2 minutes.
How it would normally work for me: I see that I would need to apply one or the other, and would start researching the pros and cons. I've used both of them. This is a substantial decision, and as such needs some time and thoughts.
Or maybe I'm the fool and I’m just "doing it wrong".
Fwiw, I've asked candidates seemingly meaningless questions that don't directly relate to the day-to-day activities of the job.
The questions - and how a candidate responds - can be helpful to both sides (as observed) wrt figuring out how individuals might fit into the prospective organisations.
For instance, from the employer's pov, if the organisation is already filled with academic Computer Scientists, and the interviewee comes across as dismissive of the importance of design patterns, it's a red flag about fitting in. However, if they go over the top the other way, then that might be a red flag about how practical they might be. If they don't know where to start with the question or are perhaps tongue-tied, then that's also information.
While from the interviewee's pov, if they prefer a more practical environment, then those questions may be, as observed, a red flag about a role that wouldn't be a good fit for the candidate.
A good interview process maximises the flow of information in both directions in a short space of time and increases the chances of a good fit. It's a process to which these type of questions can be helpful when properly applied.
This isn't central to the point you're making, but I would place design pattern knowledge squarely in the realm of software engineering and not computer science.
> How do you know you're doing a "good interview process"?
Monitor in some way, shape or form how often the process ends with happy, productive teams and thriving new hires that stay with the organisation for a decent amount of time beyond the point where they become productive. Seek to get better.
It's almost never possible to test for what matters. The most important actually measurable quantity in any test of someone's skill or knowledge ir their motivation and willingness to prepare for the test. The next-most important is general intelligence. These two things probably account for most of the correlation between what you care about and things you can reasonably measure in a test.
Exactly. The added dimension of time pressure inherently affects a whole swath of people disproportionately who are perfectly capable of the job, but who are sensitive to this type of artificial restriction. I always wonder how many brilliant people are wasting away because they were denied a role due to this.
I struggle with it, always have been, but doing things under pressure is not a useless metric. I see it in real life situations ask the time the people who can deal with pressure are far more successful.
I think it depends on whether you're thinking about something technical that requires some reflection. Then it makes sense that you digest it with your rational mind and adjust whatever your initial thoughts were.
But the number of times I've met someone and immediately thought "oh what an asshole" only to stick around and find out I was right... I wish I'd gone with my gut feeling.
That's a typical INTP / type 5 enneagram brain wiring. I'm exactly like this.
The real issue for us is first time impressions. If people knew you before because of something important you've done, they will respect you. Otherwise, you'll fail to impress in the most important time: the first impression.
It took me a long time in my career & expensive coaching sessions and so on, to understand that I really need to work my ass off for my first impression, even more that I don't give ChatGPT-like responses to everything (lots of confidence, but just plainly wrong).
Of course, if I can just use my credentials to give an initial impression, that's better. But that's not usually the case. When it isn't, I need to be very present and aware that "it's my first impression, no need to be so precise, just say something silly and light-hearted.", because that's what most people typically expect.
I started to find examples of people who dealt with this very well, like Steve Jobs and other people that are known to make long pauses and to think before they say something. But even those people aren't a great examples, because they generally are known to be geniuses at their fields and this basically makes your audience want to listen to you.
You just really need to work on that skill, or accept that it will hamper your progress in life.
Trying to make business decisions on the basis of MBTI metrics, which is what it is often criticised for, is of course misguided.
But saying "MBTI is pseudoscience you cannot be INTP" makes as much sense as "Hair colour names are unscientific, so you can't identify as blond".
Sure you can. It's a description. I wouldn't go ascribing intelligence on the basis of hair colour, but I wouldn't doubt you have a hair colour either.
And if you've found commonalities / common experiences and like being with other blond people, that's fine too.
I love how on the internet, people make a big effort to criticize arguments and not show any evidence that AT LEAST, proves that their criticism makes sense.
So here I ask you: given that Psychology is a social SCIENCE, also a part of STEM. And psychologists definitely use those tests, I was personally introduced to them by a psychologist that helped me with career coaching, recognized on his field with a bunch of papers.
Now, please explain yourself: why is it a pseudoscience? I want proofs.
The MBTI is descriptive. However, it claims to be descriptive of internal mental processes, which it posits to exist in a certain way (admittedly not everything interprets the MBTI this way, but IMO this is the only interpretation under which the MBTI is an interesting theory).
I'm personally quite open to the idea that it's an accurate categorisation, but I do also think that it's an extroadinary claim that requires extroadinary justification. IMO saying "oh, it's just a description" because that evidence hasn't (yet) been found is a bit of a cop out.
Lets be real though. Nobody just stops at they are INTP. This is the kind of thing that corporate busybodies in HR - or something related - will use to evaluate people.
Cool, you’re pointing out something many also agree, but how exactly is your comment even remotely constructive? There’s much more in OP’s comment than Myers-Briggs.
MBTI differs significantly from astrology in that it's posited mechanism of action (genetics/early life experiences) is actually plausible, unlike astrology which suggests that differences in personality are due to astral bodies. It's pretty unsurprising that we're unable to measure the cognitive processes the MBTI posits given how limited our ability is to measure the brain in general. So I wouldn't count it out just because there's no experimental evidence (yet).
I've been able to observe the difference between what the MBTI calls "Judgement" (slow thinking) and what the MBTI calls "Perception" (fast thinking) in real life. The example I always give is my high school "Further Maths" class. There were 4 people in my class and it happened that we always ended up working in pairs. However the way in which each pair worked was entirely different:
- Pair 1 (me and my partner) worked independently, rushing through the questions by intuiting answers to each step. We'd then compare answers as a kind of checksum. If our answers differed, often one of us would immediately notice a mistake. And if not then we'd fall back to slowly working through the problem together step-by-step.
- Pair 2 (the other two students) defaulted to this approach of slowly working through each problem step-by-step together. This took longer up front, but produced more accurate answers.
Interesting, both approaches actually ended up taking a similar amount of time overall and yielding a similar accuracy of answer. But there is a huge qualitative difference in the kind of thinking that took place in each approach, and each person in the class also demonstrated a clear and stable preferrence for a specific approach.
There is also a vast body of literature on "Dual-process theories" like this one, popularised by Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow.
> That's not how science works. If you have a hypothesis with no experimental evidence, discussing it as a fact is akin to doing astrology.
Sure, but you can discuss it as theory without implying that it's proven fact. Most (if not all?) theories that are now considered scientific fact initially went through a period where they were lacking in conclusive experimental evidence.
> I'm sure you're aware that most people recognize themselves in horoscopes descriptions of their personality. This is quite similar to that.
I am. And that's why I think the plausibility of the theory is important. There's a difference between saying "people think in way A and way B" and "whether people think in way A or way B is determined by the position of the planets at the time they were born".
I guess I would say that it's not quite true that there's no experimental evidence. It's more the case that the academic discipline "experimental psychology" has failed to find evidence. Other disciplines like cognitive science and behavioural economics tend not to have studied the MBTI specifically, but have found experimental evidence for theories that are substantially similar enough to the MBTI's hypotheses that IMO they do count as some evidence.
Specifically there is experimental evidence that:
- There are qualitatively different ways in which people can think and process information.
- People can have a stable preference for a given thinking process. And that such preferences follow a bimodal distribution.
- People can have a preference towards either introversion or extraversion (MBTI's I vs. E distinction)
- People can think either in a "Fast" way (fast, intuitive, perceptually inaccesible) or a "Slow" way (slow, reasoned, perceptually accesible) (MBTI's J vs. P distinction)
That's evidence for ~50% of the MBTI already, and would leave "Feeling" vs. "Thinking" (value judgement vs. descriptive judgement) and "Sensing" vs. "Intiuton" (concrete vs. abstract thinking) as interesting research questions.
I'm of the opinion that the test itself is bogus, but that the theory it is attempting to test has merit and is worthy of investigation with better tests. Test-retest reliability doesn't distibguish between those two possibilities.
I always get damn near the middle of the chart, on both axes.
But I think this confirms your claim in my case. For nearly every single answer on the test, my response is "it depends." I really could go either way on nearly every single question because I need more context.
It makes me think the whole test is essentially BS, kind of like a horoscope where you can read whatever you want into it.
Yeah, the test isn't really very accurate. And if you're getting close on both axes that mean the test is actually telling you it isn't sure! (this doesn't mean your personality is actually close - it means the test doesn't know).
There are better tests (like this one https://sakinorva.net/functions) which will give you a confidence percentage for each cognitive function rather than just a best guess overall type. But none of them are that great, and currently the gold standard for determining type is to only use the test results as starting to point and to familiarise yourself with the theory to fine tune that, potentially with the guidance of an type expert.
unlike astrology which suggests that differences in
personality are due to astral bodies
Tangential, but: I wonder if astrology might have been accidentally correct in some ways.
Clearly astrological bodies have no actual influence on us. I'm not that crazy.
However, mightn't the time of year of birth have a big influence? The amount of sunlight received, activities undertaken, and foods eaten by the expectant mother and newborn baby will vary based on time of year. The differences may be minor today, but would have been pretty profound in antiquity.
Imagine being born two thousand years ago in the northern latitudes during the deep winter. Mother and child experience six months of darkness, eating preserved and salted foods. Now imagine the opposite. You are born during summer. Mother and child get lots of sunlight and fresh food. Surely there are effects! I think it would be surprising if there were none.
Astrology is almost certainly right in some respects (a stopped clock is right twice a day after all). Other than time of birth thing, I suspect some of the personality traits astrology describes are genuinely traits that humans can have (although, I'm not actually familiar with what astrology describes), they just don't correlate to birthdate/planet as claimed. Astrology was after all created by humans are familiar with human behaviour.
Regarding birth date, I would speculate that one of the most significant effects it has on modern children is how far through the school year they are born (and thus whether they are one of the older children or one of the younger children in their cohort). As you say, it's likely that there's some effect. I personally somewhat doubt it's causes differences in personality anywhere near as drastic the kind that astrology claims.
I disagree. There’s no casual pathway between Astrology and who you are. With MBTI you respond to a questionnaire, so there is some connection to you. How accurate this is, well that’s a topic for debate. However, the most accurate personality models are also based on questionnaires of this sort.
Some time ago I also thought MBTI was bullshit, now I think it’s quite useful. And at least for me, anecdotally, has predictive power.
> How accurate this is, well that’s a topic for debate.
Not really; we know for a fact it is not accurate (and thus irrelevant). You can debate it if you wish but the facts of the matter have been long settled.
Accuracy isn't binary. Not being perfect doesn't mean it is irrelevant. My map of the city could be more accurate but it still gets me where I need to go.
It doesn't matter how we define accuracy, I argue relevancy comes into play moreso when they stated this model is useful, making accuracy a non-issue, even if that's not what their exact words.
The desire for your beliefs to be true also affects scientists and biases the scientific enterprise. That doesn’t mean science is not reliable. Same applies here. The bias exists, it doesn’t mean that the results are useless.
Their competitor mainstream psychology was fathered and dominated for a long time by Sigmund Freud. His success probably had more to do
to his nephew Edward Bernays and the yearly exclusive balls for the elites than anything scientific. Now there is Nudge Theory which is marred by the replication crisis and repeat fabricators; hardly scientific (though more common in academia than it should be) but it tells governments what they want to hear so it’ll stay successful until the flaws are too obvious to ignore (note that I don’t follow the field overly closely).
The MBTI is just a projection of the personality space like the more accepted Big 5. From my experience data-mining behavioral data at scale it’s a pretty good mapping and the relative value questions are adequate and the 4 dimensions do explain a lot of behavior to the point that it is very useful - a fact probability contributing to its success. My main gripe with it is the extrovert - introvert axis is a bit weak with many people being close to the middle. I’m more extroverted around intelligent people which doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, a trait held by far more commonly by ENTJ/INTJ than random chance.
> My main gripe with it is the extrovert - introvert axis is a bit weak with many people being close to the middle
I think that's partly because people don't understand what extraverted vs. introverted mean in the MBTI sense. It's not about sociability. It's actually about how much external stimuli someone likes more generally. This might be social stimuli (Fe), but it could also be physical stimuli (Se) (for example, liking being physically active or out in nature) or more conceptual stimuli / external ideas (Ne), etc. Or a computing analogy: what's your ratio of IO to CPU time.
Also, at least in the cognitive function interpretation (which IMO is the only sensible theory in the jungian/mbti family), introversion and extraversion do not apply directly to persons. They apply to thinking processes. An extraverted person is then just a person who uses an extraverted thinking mode more often than not (everyone is theorised to use both extraverted and introverted thinking modes). As you note this bias can be more or less extreme.
Indeed, it's been observed that it can both be influenced by external factors (e.g. social expectations), and that it tends to become less extreme over time. As such, a persons "type" is generally considered to be determined by what their preference was in childhood, and (the type) is taken to define their baseline personality (cf. genotype) from which their actually observable personality (cf phenotype) develops.
That’s a good point, reading Carl Jung is in my todo list. I generated an personality embedding from data and only mapped it to MBTI and the Big 5 out of personal curiosity rather than using it for work. The main surprise I got from that work was just how genetic personalities are.
It would make sense that the E/I axis would be clearer if early childhood experiences were used. That would make me a clear extrovert. I think the questions should be updated for that context or at least have some additional framing around the test.
> The main surprise I got from that work was just how genetic personalities are.
This idea was surprising to me too, but when I thought about it I realised it shouldn't be:
- We know that different people frequently react differently to the same stimuli (and that this is true even of very young children).
- Basically everything else in the human body shows genetic variation. It would be weird if the brain didn't.
- There is a strong evolutionary rationale for a population having a variety of complimentary congnitive styles.
I think the MBTI is most interesting is it taken to be only the genetic component of personality (providing us with AFAIK the only theory of the structure of that aspect of personality), while simultaneously leaning into the idea that personality is modified by nurture and environment (but that these changes are not described by one's MBTI type).
> That’s a good point, reading Carl Jung is in my todo list. I generated an personality embedding from data and only mapped it to MBTI and the Big 5 out of personal curiosity rather than using it for work. The main surprise I got from that work was just how genetic personalities are.
Could you possibly expand on the details of "generated an personality embedding from data"?
The data was a huge amount of complete url history and quite a lot of feature engineering goes into developing the features. Mix of Gaussian processes, random forests, GDBT, and a lot of hand coded stuff using regexes and state machines. To get the embedding the features were fed into a multi layered RBM auto encoder. Despite quick initial success of the embedding I was unable to evangelize deep learning to the org and left out of frustration. Andrew Ng, before he was famous, visited us to evangelize deep learning and my colleagues just berated him with their views about how much better Bayesian is, it was embarrassing.
The "stimuli someone likes more generally" is doing a lot of the work here. I feel like it would be a much more powerful metric if it was separated into different contexts, e.g. are you an extravert with friends but an introvert with regard to the average person?
I was uncomfortable with my social anxiety and introversion for much of my teens/early 20's, until I had the liberating realization that I was actually extremely extraverted around people similar to me. I am just bored with the "average" person with "typical" smalltalk, and that's ok because those just aren't my people. Of course, it's probably best to find some ways to cope with those situations, but accepting that "normal" people don't need to like me was very freeing.
MBTI are pseudoscience -> This.
It absolutely fails to make predictions, except that people who describe themselves as liking to think are people who like to think, and other obvious ideas. It is very hyped in actual application, though. As is homeopathy and astrology.
<edit>
Big Five Personality traits and the HEXACO model exist, and they seem to have more a more positive scientific review history. “Your boss is probably someone more likely to have qualities from the dark triad” is still bad news when looking at the real world versus an ideal world, but this seems to be a checked fact.
</edit>
There is some evidence to suggest that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) may not be as reliable and valid as its proponents suggest. In fact, some studies have found that the MBTI does not consistently yield the same results for individuals who take it multiple times, which raises questions about its reproducibility and the reliability of the results.
For example, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that only about half of individuals who took the MBTI twice received the same result both times. This suggests that the MBTI may not be a reliable measure of personality traits.
In addition, other studies have found that the MBTI does not reliably predict job performance or other real-world outcomes, further questioning its validity as a psychological assessment tool.
The questionaire is bullshit (how on earth would we expect to measure thinking processes through a questionaire), but the underlying theory is a lot more interesting.
It's terms (like "thinking") are technical jargon that don't correspond to their usual meanings though. For example "thinking" is really "descriptive judegement" (cognition focussed on whether things are true/false/possible/impossible), to be contrasted with "feeling" (which is actually also a rational cognitive process!) just focussed on "value judgement" (cognition focussed on whether things are good/bad/should happen/shouldn't happen).
It is also not supposed to measure personality traits in the same sense that other models do. It is two steps removed:
1. It attempts to measure interal cognitive processes rather than external behavoural traits (how you think, not what you think)
2. It attempts to measure people's natural personality baseline (cf genotype) from which their actual personality (cf phenotype) develops as modified by their life experiences and the context in which they live.
Both of which make it even more difficult to measure with a questionaire that tends to only ask about current behaviours. But IMO also make it a much more interesting and much more plausible theory.
It's a categorical system. It categorises people in to groups on dimensions. Dimensions that are ultimately defined by the questions that give the category.
You can measure people on many dimensions, and all dimensions that are not truly random will correlate with some aspect of the persons life.
Interestingly, some of the dimensions of the MTBI correlate with dimensions of the "Big 5".
Introversion - Extroversion => Almost the same dimension as in Big 5.
Intuitive - Sensation => Correlate strongly to Big 5 Openness
The longer textual descriptions of the MTBI categories that one can find online are "made up" so they could indeed be said to be a type of pseudoscience.
> Because I think fast and that intp also matches me.
I would suggest that if you primarily think in a fast, intuitive manner, then INTP doesn't match you because that antithetical to what INTP means. Perhaps you are reading too much into the "type descriptions" which tend to be stereotypically and not particular accurate (or are being too trusting of questionaire test results). Many of the types are similar to each other, so it's common to see oneself to an extent in more than one description.
To be an INTP means that your dominant thinking process is "Introverted Thinking" which is slow, reasoned, logical thinking that places a high emphasis on internal consistency. And that this is backed up with a secondary thinking process of "Extraverted Intuition" which is fast, intuitive thinking, which an emphasis on ideas and creative, divergent thought patterns. Or at least, that this was true of you as a young person.
> I would suggest that if you primarily think in a fast, intuitive manner, then INTP doesn't match you because that antithetical to what INTP means
Why? N stands for intuitive, and the rest have nothing to do with thinking fast or slow. P just means you don't judge quickly, P could still come up with tons of ideas and explanations quickly, they just don't judge one of those correct.
Because just treating the letters separately as personality traits doesn't really work. That's the theory that's been tested and found to be bunk. What is more interesting is translating the 4-letter codes into a "stack" of cognitive functions. See https://personalityjunkie.com/functional-stack-type-dynamics... for more information the concept of a "functional stack".
Additionaly, due to extravert bias, they got the P and the J the wrong way around when designing the 4-letter codes:
- "I" means your top function is introverted (this makes sense)
- But "P" means your top extraverted function is a "P" function (N or S) rather than a "J" function (F or T)
But as an introvert's top function is introverted not extraverted, and according to the theory J/P alternates down the stack, that mean's that an I..P type's overall top function is a actually "J" function. Specifically in the this case "Introverted Thinking" (often notated "Ti").
Introverted Thinking is actually slow in two ways:
- Because it's a J ("Judgement") function. Which just means it's either an F ("Feeling" or T ("Thinking") function. These correspond to the Slow thinking from Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. That's what "Judgement" is.
- Because it's an I ("Introverted") function. This doesn't make it actually slow, it just makes it appear slow. This is because "I" functions involve a relatively long amount of internal coginition before seeking more input from the external environment (this is what it means to be an "I" function). Which will appear slower to the observer who can't observe the persons internal thinking processes and can only observe when they interact with their environment.
So you mean that someone can't be introverted, trust their intuition, think instead of feel and not be judgemental, without also having a slow thinking pattern? That seems like nonsense to me. Where would you place such a person if you argue that they can't be an INTP? Or is your point to show how badly designed MBTI is?
I certainly think the MBTI as a questionaire and the encoding of types into 4-letter codes is badly designed. But I think the interpretation of underlying theory based on cognitive functions and functional stacks is both elegant and compelling.
Taking your description naively, such a person would likely be an INTJ. Which has a functional stack of (in order of most to least used thinking processes): Introverted Intuition - Extraverted Thinking - Introverted Feeling - Extraverted Sensation.
I realise that doesn't make much sense if you are used to applying the 4-letter code to persons directly. But as I mentioned above, I don't think that is a good way of doing things. It makes more sense if you take the 4 letter codes as simply being an opaque shorthand encoding for functional stacks (with the individual letters in the code not having meaning on their own, only indirectly through their correlation to a functional stack). E, I, N, S, T, F, P, J then become properties of thinking processes and an "extraverted person" is simply someone who primarily tends towards using one of the four extraverted thinking processes (Fe, Te, Ne, Se). They may or may not present like the everyday understanding of how an extravert presents (e.g. sociable and chatty). Typically people who have a "Extraverted Feeling" (Fe) dominant function closely fit this stereotype, but other types extraverts often don't.
Ok, that makes sense, but you should probably clarify that you have a nonstandard view of MBTI when you say that people can't be the personality type they describe themselves as.
If someone did the test and got INTP, then I think it is fair for them to describe themselves as INTP. You might say that the test was wrong, but as I said that isn't how most see MBTI.
It's actually not that non-standard. It's how the majority of people who are into MBTI / jungian type view things (where I've linked MBTI to Kahneman's Fast/Slow thinking is non-standard, but a cognitive functions + functional stack view is not).
It's also what the more advanced "Step III" version of the official MBTI test is based on. But that that assessment isn't just a simple questionaire: it can be only be conducted by a trained assessor and the cost of training course runs to thousands of pounds, so most people don't have experience of it, and it ends up being the simpler naive model that most people learn about.
But what about fast, reasoned, logical thinking that places a high emphasis on internal consistency? There is no need for slow there.
Think eventual consistency rather than strict consistency in the world view and the thinking can be blazing fast and keep the other properties. The only advantage to slow is that it avoids the short periods of inconsistency, but that also hurts it since it is harder to make big changes in the world model.
IMO if you're thinking in terms of eventual consistency then that's a very different outlook to the one described above. There is also:
- Extraverted Thinking which is also relatively careful, reasoned and logical but puts more emphasis on external validity than internal consistency.
- Introverted intuition which is faster, more intuitive mode of thinking which some people might see as logical but isn't really. It's logical in the way ChatGPT is logical: it works until it doesn't.
Note also that nobody is using just one of these functions. So it's normal to lead with an intuitive thought and then back that up with logic or vice versa.
But I stand by the idea that you either be fast XOR fully reasoned. You can still be "kinda fast" and reasoned (but you'll never be as fast as intuitive judgements that are close to instant), and you can be pretty accurate with fast intuitive thought (but you'll never be as assured as a more thoroughly reasoned position - sometimes your intuition will lead you astray).
The way I kind of view it is that I am a very slow thinker, but I've overdeveloped the skill of self-investigation. So I can "think fast" by asking myself very good questions that quickly cut to the core of where my answer would come from. There are often questions or problems (especially in the world of engineering) where the best thing for me to do is something else and let my subconscious do some work on it. It's not that I couldn't solve it using "fast brain", it's just that using "slow brain" (often diffuse thinking) is more energy efficient.
I guess I have to take the test again. My old job had our types in the description of our team slack channel. I just remember being one of three extroverts on a team of 12.
But the way this person describes things is how I am precisely, when it comes to discussion on philosophy, politics, and so on. Debatable topics.
Slightly less so when I already know something or we are in a design/brainstorming session, I am more assertive.
I'm skeptical of the emphasis on the alphabet sorter.
Then again I see you have responded to some similar criticism of it below so I'll try to remember to read it when I'm not supposed to be managing a project.
I think what it actually means is that personality type definitions are meaningless. I'm the same as above. I'm about as introverted as they come, but I also spent a years working in tech services that included sales. It's a skill like anything else. My brain works very fast and more importantly, I know what I know and what I don't and just got very good at articulating that without hemming and hawing. It's not intuitive thinking as much as it's reasoned extrapolation.
> I'm about as introverted as they come, but I also spent a years working in tech services that included sales. It's a skill like anything else
I like to think of MBTI-style types as describing as describing the baseline at which your personality started before it was influenced by life experience such as working in sales for several years. That will have changed your personality but it doesn't affect your type.
If you expect an MBTI type to describe your personality as-is then you're going to be disappointed. This is also why the questionnaires are so inaccurate because they tend to ask about behavioural patterns which are influenced by life experience. You can get a much more accurate typing if you ask about why you act in a certain way, but that's hard (impossible) to do with a fixed set of questions.
Yeah I always get INTP and I get (secretly, internally) impatient with people who can't keep up. Hell I get impatient with myself if I'm not thinking fast enough. Maybe it's INTP with an ADHD modifier? Haha
Can't stand it when people run off into the weeds on examples too. Just.. it's an example. Please just get the concept of examples. They are to get us on the same context. If you can correct my example you can understand what I'm saying. We're good. Please continue with the original thought as if I'd given a good example.
Go go go go go! No, dammit, don't complain I'm being too impatient or hard on myself either, you're wasting time! Go go go!
Of course outwardly this goes through a don't be a jerk filter. Impatience is my problem.
E: Should clarify this is only for skillset relevant conversations. You can take as long as you like on spiritual or philosophical thoughts.
I just did another test, idk can they change? INTP-T again
E2: I should correct myself actually. If I'm popping back to make these edits half an hour and an hour after I posted the original comment then surely I'm thinking fast (initial comment) and also thinking slow (oh wait no, go back to that one thought, add this too).
Hey me, maybe that bit about examples is it's own blog post pal? It went a bit into the weeds itself there. Was it relevant or just on your mind? If you'd have thought slower you might not have bothered typing that bit.
The thing about these scales is that they are actually numeric. (And not real good, but that’s another story.) I’m an INTP, but really close to the middle on the I and the N. It changes things relative to some coworkers who are much more I than me.
Some people are introverts like “I just want to be alone to work and recharge”.
I’m an introvert like, “ I’ll do this on my own, but if you want to help, I’m happy to have you along.”
Social situations don’t really stress me out, but I don’t do well in group conversations.
On the random site I just used it did have a "turbulent" or sense of urgency result, which was a hair off 100%. Maybe that's the bar that determines fast or slow thinkers? Assertive vs Turbulent was the scale.
As an on again off again anxious mess, maybe I think fast so I can have multiple answers ready in case my first isn't good enough? Maybe my thinking will slow down over time (in therapy, anxiety and self-confidence are things I'm working on). It's a hypothesis anyway.
If that is the case then at the extreme ends fast thinkers within INTP don't believe in themselves and slow thinkers do. Fast thinkers are cups half empty (and will likely fall on the floor if I'm not careful) people and slow thinkers are cups can be refilled later people. Both are logical, just different levels of confidence.
It kinda checks out now I've typed it out haha. It does sort of imply there's more than 16 types of people, but that's for Myers and Briggs to deal with.
I think the whole fast vs slow thinking is also a bit tied up with kind of like "raw intelligence" vs "trained skill". I think there are some people who are really really smart and fast thinkers, and some people who are less smart and slower. But the thing is, being smart doesn't mean being right. Especially as things get complicated where methodology or background research become critical components of getting the right answers. Knowledge is probably more important than intelligence in the application of knowledge. Intelligence may be more important in the discovery of knowledge, and even then, it require the sufficient patience to acquire prerequisite knowledge in the first place.
I'm not sure that one is better than the other, but I suspect there is a lot of frustration embedded in mismatching what you want to be doing vs what you are good at.
I realised I was coming back to the thread to edit in new thoughts. This means I do both fast thinking (initial comment) and slow thinking (returning to add something else)
I no longer believe I'm solely a fast thinker, I just wasn't giving myself credit for the slow because I'm impatient af
Psychologists have been discounted for quite some time now.
But also, what would it even mean to say that Myers-Briggs is wrong? If you pick 4 personality traits and create 16 groups from them, then knowing someone's group will always give you insight into their personality.
> "it's my first impression, no need to be so precise, just say something silly and light-hearted.", because that's what most people typically expect.
This
I told a friend of mine that whenever he goes on a first date. Whatever she asks, if it's within the first 10 minutes, say something that is clearly a non-serious answer. Don't say anything serious in the first 10 minutes. After that, feel free to be yourself. Since he's very serious, this helped to balance him out a bit, especially because his first impression was so different.
"What kind of work do you do?"
"I teach... rocks how to ehm... throw... other rocks. Which I know, there's an ethical issue to that. Like, would humans just be allowed to throw other humans? No! But in rock culture, well you gotta rock as a rock. Naturally, the electric guitar is their preferred instrument of choice. So rocks wanna be thrown, but only by other rocks, not by humans. I know, it's weird, I'm a bit of an exception but that's also because I grew up with parents that rocked and then it's sort of fine. Marilyn Manson also was a famous rock throwing coach."
I just made that up, but stuff like that. Key to that is also knowing when to pause and be fully willing to be imperfect.
I need to do something similar. I'm also too serious and too thinkey for the normal world. Fortunately, I have a huge imagination too, so I just show that first by being not serious at all :)
I've thought about the whole "being yourself" thing versus deviating from it for the first 10 minutes, but I figured if putting up a bit of an act (that you enjoy yourself as well) for 10 minutes changes people's impression much more positively of you and then you can fully drop it and be yourself, then it's fine.
> "I teach... rocks how to ehm... throw... other rocks. Which I know, there's an ethical issue to that. Like, would humans just be allowed to throw other humans? No! But in rock culture, well you gotta rock as a rock. Naturally, the electric guitar is their preferred instrument of choice. So rocks wanna be thrown, but only by other rocks, not by humans. I know, it's weird, I'm a bit of an exception but that's also because I grew up with parents that rocked and then it's sort of fine. Marilyn Manson also was a famous rock throwing coach."
> "I teach... rocks how to ehm... throw... other rocks. Which I know, there's an ethical issue to that. Like, would humans just be allowed to throw other humans? No! But in rock culture, well you gotta rock as a rock. Naturally, the electric guitar is their preferred instrument of choice. So rocks wanna be thrown, but only by other rocks, not by humans. I know, it's weird, I'm a bit of an exception but that's also because I grew up with parents that rocked and then it's sort of fine. Marilyn Manson also was a famous rock throwing coach."
Buried somewhere in that pile is a nugget of comedy gold.
And I know, there’s an ethical issue to that. Like, should piles be able to bury nuggets? No! But in nugget culture, well you gotta nugget as a nugget.
I am an INTP and this resonates with me, but is mostly an issue in group settings rather than one on one meetings.
In one-on-one first meetings I naturally participate in the back and forth. It's group meetings where I can just listen and absorb information that I come off as disengaged and don't make a good first impression. The strategy I use to mitigate this (suggested by an old boss) is to jump into the conversation very early in the meeting with 1 or 2 comments that I wouldn't have otherwise felt a need to make. It establishes my voice at the table and then I can relax and just process information
That's interesting, in the long run I would say I'm that way too, but it'll be toward the end of the meeting after things have been hashed out I'd contribute my new perspective. Or even worse for first impressions, I'll often I'll listen to a whole meeting, continue forming my thoughts even after the meeting has ended, and then write a well constructed email back to the key people.
I may have figured out a better solution than was possible for anyone during the meeting, but by sending it late people's impressions during the meetings of me may not be the best.
I tend to make good first impressions, I think, because typically (in my experience) nothing too in-depth is being discussed on the first meeting.
It's group meetings where I can just listen
and absorb information that I come off as disengaged
and don't make a good first impression
This is where I struggle sometimes. IMO/IME if it's complicated enough to have a meeting about, then it's probably something that deserves some deeper thought. Blurting and hashing out a solution right then and there is rarely the path to an optimal solution.
But of course, that's not how the world works. Spew out a solution right then and there. That's how you get ahead. Who cares if it's the best solution? You blurted it out first, and that is seen by others as a sign of confidence, and if you are confident then you must know what you're talking about... right?
God, I need to get out of this industry. Maybe all industries.
On a positive note, I do like your mitigation strategy.
> The real issue for us is first time impressions.
I have a similar problem. Meeting another programmer for the first time usually leaves me feeling quite stupid. They’ll start talking about all sorts of concepts, or how they built some particular thing, and I won’t be able to follow along at all.
The good news is, since their first impression of me is so poor, they’re often blown away when they see something I spent time on. They must be thinking, how did this dingus do that?
I've an established theory that most people will try to pull you into a small sub-set of a field or area that they're an expert in, and then beat you silly with their knowledge.
This is particularly brutal if they're ego-centric and doing it to depress upon you "how smart they are".
I've seen this with quite a few "smart" people.
There are two aspects to this:
1) talking "smart" - use of phrases, language, and ideas that aren't obvious, or using terms that are part of "smart"
2) small areas of their own knowledge that you are unlikely to know.
Examples:
friend would pull me into quantum string theory (M-brains, whatever) where they'd memorized certain details of it--they weren't particularly smart on quantum string theory, but I had zero knowledge. They'd keep turning the topic into these areas despite group's conversations not going that way naturally.
another casual friend pulled me into the "A Tribe Called Red is so good" when I started gushing about my appreciation of multi-syllabically rapping styles of lyrical rappers that I liked. They were essentially regurgitating a critic's article on the topic.
Some internal Microsofters a few decades ago would describe that there was internal smart-speak for "smart" identifying people. The same is true in most contexts.
I like to just go along with it, and get them to teach me. Accept the idea that they are the expert, and place them into a teacher position. If you disagree with a statement being made, don't be adversarial, steelman their arguments and try get them to explain to you why they are making the statement they are making. Either you ignite their passion, or they avoid you because you are weirdly too enthusiastic about a mechanism they may have been using to overpower you.
I had an math professor (NOT the one I am referencing in another comment) that was ego-centric and would often respond to my incessant questioning with demoralizing (and sometimes flat out rude) responses. I just acted completely oblivious to the social faux pas and his avoidance/adversarial tendencies eventually turned into a much more productive relationship. I received the only A in the class (he publicly posted everyone's grades).
That's a fair point, and I think you're giving a good example of a certain context of established-expert wrt beginner and how to treat it.
FWIW, I had a friend indicate that because (tenured?) teaching positions are such high demand, that the available candidates can be significantly high caliber. So that might have played into why the math professor was adversarial initially.
The area I've found the depress-to-impress used was usually in peer contexts and didn't have any teachable outcomes, unfortunately. They're regurgitating material that they have better familiarity with, but probably unable to ad-lib off their "beat path".
That makes sense. I think this specific professor also wanted to do research and perhaps disliked teaching, but was required to do it. I could be misinterpreting though.
With the peers thing I just view it as we all have our pathologies, and some people just feel the need to be perceived as smart (usually some kind of insecurity). Sometimes it can just be too much though and you can get the feeling that you are walking on eggshells around them, perhaps not to trigger a judgement of you on their part.
I use a trick I learned from my math advisor. I just say "I'm sorry, I'm kind of stupid, what does it mean? Like, what does it do?". Sometimes they will overcorrect and REALLY dumb it down, but if you can show a higher level insight, they usually pick up on it and adjust. You can direct the conversation away from abstractions and specific details and more towards first principles.
Plus... intellectuals often like to feel smart, so you have an opportunity to pump their ego a bit :)
How do you know the first impressions people have are negative based on speed of response?
I'm often slow to respond and make no effort to change that on first impression, but I have been told - many times - that people view me as thoughtful and intelligent.
I can't view myself from another's perspective but if you take 5 seconds to come up with an answer which is really good, most people seem to completely forget the 5 second silence and remember the good answer. As you would expect.
Many people's quick replies are poor quality, so a high quality reply stands out. This does assume someone can identify the difference, but hopefully you're in such an environment.
Also, people tend to gravitate to a calm self-assured voice. The quick reply is more a hallmark of comedians and entertainers who need to quickly generate fame and popularity. Since the comedian is such a revered figure in American culture, perhaps that is why it is easy to try to mimic that approach.
Right. If you have the belief that others will value your input, regardless of speed, that seems to become a self-fulfilling prophecy (assuming that belief is derived from genuine previous experience of having created value).
A quick wit is valuable, but not in all situations.
If I'm a bit tipsy then I get less serious and think less deeply and respond more quickly and (at least in my mind) with more humor, which is great socially, but would be terrible in everyday life.
> You just really need to work on that skill, or accept that it will hamper your progress in life.
First impressions are important, but there's a lot more to them than just simply being the first one out of the gate with something insightful. You can convey your seriousness and intent with presence, active listening, facial expressions, preparation, poise, etc. It is a projection of what you think about yourself, ultimately.
If you're sitting there deliberating over getting the Good First Impression, or even just waiting for your turn to speak, people are going to pick up on that. Not saying you are, just that it is an easy trap to fall into.
Elon Musk also tends to take long pauses when he answers a question. I thought it was odd the first time I saw it. Almost like he is looking it up on an internal interface or something. Not sure if this is done intentionally or a style that he has developed.
I was studying body language a few years back, and learned about what particular eye movements often correspond to thinking-wise. A fun exercise that I did was I watched some of Elon's interviews but I tried to contextualize EVERYTHING he said with his eye movements alone. When viewing from this lens, you can glean a lot of interesting information. A basic example: For right handed people, looking up and to the right often means they are tapping into their imagination, whereas up and to the left is memory. You can basically plot a chart of how engaged Elon is throughout his interview/talks, and know what responses he has that are pre-canned and what parts of those responses are more rehearsed than other parts.
As someone whose current job puts me into a lot of somewhat contextless meetings with peers, I've noticed this is an issue for me as well. Could you share any other specific strategies you've come across for this?
I'm INXP and type 5, and one thing that's helped me get around this is improvisational comedy. Probably more easy for me because I'm on the cusp of T and F so I'm used to not thinking all the time, but I imagine it'd still help someone farther on the T side of things.
I once had I colleague that I had lots and lots of trouble engaging with. Over and over again I would try to get my point across but fail.
That was until I noticed that if I picked up the discussion again the next day he had internalized yesterday's conversation. From then on I worked perfectly fine with him building up shared understanding one point at a time.
I really wish for him, and me, that there was a word he could've used to describe his style of thinking. I'm sure it would save everyone many a frustration.
// that there was a word he could've used to describe his style of thinking
I actually think you found those words in this post. He could have just said "I often need a day to digest a conversation. So ideally let me sleep on it after we talk about something"
The desire to articulate something like that is 99% of the task. Words can be found.
The issue here is that, in the US at least, referring to someone as "slow" is making a statement about their IQ.
There are many possible causes for the coworker's "slow"-ness here, e.g. anxiety, doubt, and high standards. Perhaps the coworker feels the need to respond only with well-researched responses and refuses to engage in speculation.
I think you misunderstood. You said "The most accurate words are actually derogatory". I proved that wrong by providing you with some accurate words that you did not know about.
I am an eng manager/product manager so usually my stuff is "strategy" - it's worth to keep talking/thinking because if I get an idea 10x better, that's millions of dollars difference over years.
She's an emergency room physician. If she takes too long to think, the patient dies. It's all about quickly executed tactics.
It took us a bit to realize how our preferred ways of thinking connect to our work (cause or effect, not sure)
In the software world, tactical has a strong propensity to become strategic with more things getting built on top of it - this is the source of many many "what were they thinking?!" type issues. Obviously we can't afford to spend very long time based on the above observation without the benefit of hindsight, but a bit of slowing down would do more good than harm.
I'm a fast thinker and good at debating but I'm a relatively slow learner.
It's probably because I tend to initially disbelieve everything I'm taught - I need to see a lot of cross-references and utility value before my brain will accept new information and it will still not seem like it is a sure fact. I never feel like I know anything with 100% certainty. Every piece of knowledge I have is more like a probability in my mind.
I have great memory when it comes to useful or interesting things but if I can't figure out the utility of some information, my brain struggles to learn it and will quickly discard it.
The most interesting experience I remember was at school when I was a small child. I didn't understand the concept of school or education at that point. I remember after I moved up a grade, the teacher was referencing concepts which I had learned the year before (I think it was related to alphabet and reading) but because I was in a different class (and different teacher), I did not make the (supposedly obvious) assumption that the teacher was referring to concepts from the previous year (which came from a different source). In my mind, because I didn't understand the purpose of education or school, I had fully compartmentalized the knowledge from the previous year/grade and I couldn't make sense of the content from the later grade which built on top. Once I learned the purpose of school and figured out that knowledge from previous years was still relevant and that knowledge wasn't supposed to be compartmentalized based on the teacher/class, I was able to start learning faster. At least fast enough to be a slightly above average student throughout all my school and university years. I remember being surprised that all other kids seemed to know intuitively that knowledge 'stacked' regardless of the teacher or context. It was a big revelation to me.
I still think I have a tendency to compartmentalize information/knowledge provided to me by different people. My brain compartmentalizes everything based on source until there is enough consensus/synthesis between the sources and then it gets merged into the trunk.
But now that I think of it, it doesn't seem that ridiculous for a child to think that knowledge taught by different people isn't compatible... If you think about modern education, it's actually quite amazing and weird that two different teachers who never met might have the exact same knowledge as each other to the extent that they can reference each other's thoughts and ideas... To a child, it can seem like telepathy.
This is making me laugh out loud a little as I relate deeply and I’ve never encountered such a clear description of it, nor anyone who’s described themselves as similarly wired.
For me it’s that my brain simply will not accept facts or advice unless all the underlying dynamics have been made explicit, and it’s been put into context as part of a bigger system. Until then it’s just a distant and profoundly uninteresting suggestion which my brain will rapidly dispose of.
Personally I flopped at high school science once the teachers stated putting rote formulas on the whiteboard without deep explanation if their significance, i could feel my brain rejecting the contextless information. Later in life I became fascinated by the same subjects, when I started reading well written popular science books.
> For me it’s that my brain simply will not accept facts or advice unless all the underlying dynamics have been made explicit, and it’s been put into context as part of a bigger system. Until then it’s just a distant and profoundly uninteresting suggestion which my brain will rapidly dispose of.
Why does this happen? Any idea? I have a really hard time committing things to memory or building understanding. I find that I have to read the same paragraph multiple times, and often need to go back to the beginning or look at the previous paragraph 5 times to make sense of things. Even after doing this, there are times when I'll overlook some obvious information, only to have a major insight the next day.
It's like studying a statue from 20 different angles and learning everything about its history and the real person, including who made it, when, where it was displayed, and who owned it throughout history, just to remember its name.
My only hunch is that it seems likely to correlate with more useful cognitive features. My wife is a very fast thinker and doer, and is often frustrated (exasperated?) by my thorough but sloww processing. Yet, she often remarks how much values what she sees as my way of intuiting solutions to complex situations, and ability to describe such complex situations in detail. We’re both reliant and mystified by each other’s cognitive styles; her rapid incisive thinking and my deep scan analysis, if I’m to put a positive spin on it. I’m not saying our accuracy is remarkably high fwiw.
> I never feel like I know anything with 100% certainty. Every piece of knowledge I have is more like a probability in my mind.
This should be the default mindset of every thoughtful person! We are all imperfect. Our vision, hearing, reasoning and perception are all imperfect. Eyewitnesses to a crime routinely describe completely different suspects/activities, despite being completely earnest in their accounts. I believe it it absolutely crucial to maintain a certain level of doubt about everything, at all times, based on the fact that we are imperfect beings that have imperfect knowledge and imperfect reasoning skills. I further believe that the humility that this constant awareness brings is useful and necessary. Beware people who are absolutely certain about things.
I love reading what Derek Sivers writes - he has become a wise man.
Quick responses and slow responses reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow". I found it a very thought provoking read and in particular how often our quick responses are completely wrong with 100% confidence.
That in turn makes me think that those quick responses are very much like what ChatGPT does - come up with the most likely thing to say using our meat based large language model.
I might be a slow thinker as well, or at least not as smart as I think I am. As I’ve gotten older I’ve started taking Mark Twain’s quote to heart: “It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.” In the case of thinking in the moment, if I don’t have something cogent to add, I say as little as possible.
> It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.” In the case of thinking in the moment, if I don’t have something cogent to add, I say as little as possible.
Many people know this yet still fail to do it.
I am much the same although I was not always. I used to jump in first with a quick and usually basic comment.
Now I listen and think of multiple responses before I open my mouth.
Is it maturity? Wisdom I have picked up over the past two decades? Perhaps my brain is just a slower with age?
I don’t know but I certainly feel less pressure to answer first these days. If someone comes to me first for comment I will almost always answer with “I will need to think about that a bit more and get back to you”.
I’ve had a few people give me unsolicited feedback that I don’t “engage” enough (what they mean here is fast enough). To which I just say it is far easier to start correctly a bit later than start sooner and make mistakes.
Undoing mistakes, in my experience, takes far more time than starting a little later. This is especially true in design, development and management.
Sometimes undoing mistakes is not possible without throwing all previous work out and starting over. That to me is far more frustrating and wasteful than taking a little time before you start to give yourself the best possible platform from which to begin.
Hey satysin, apologies for being off-topic but I came across your comment in this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27824447 but there was no way for me to reply there. Did you ever find an answer to what was causing your chest pain? And if you did were you able to treat it completely? I'm having the same symptoms you had, mostly a sore kind of pain in the centre of my chest, sometimes all over the surface of my stomach too.
Hi. I’m still in the process of getting to the bottom of things. My chest pains have mostly gone away but I have other issues that I recently decided I need to get checked out properly so I’m going for a couple of MRI later this month to check my brain, nervous system etc to rule out things like MS. Feel free to email me if you want to chat a bit more. My username at gmail.com will get through to my personal email
You need to show how stupid you are or else people wont be able to help you correct your mistakes. Trying to hide your ignorance just ensures you will stay ignorant, people who know stuff aren't afraid to appear ignorant.
People often makes the mistake thinking that those who hide their ignorance aren't ignorant. But as your quote shows, the most ignorant people are the ones who don't speak up, not those who do and get corrected. People just perceive the non speakers as less ignorant.
This quote seems like bad advice - feels like it’s telling us to focus on not looking stupid in front of other people (rather than risk asking a dumb question) and can lead to perfectionistic overanalyzing self doubt.
Exactly. I often regretted that I said something, rarely regretted not to have said something smart. You can always say what you have to say asynchronously.
On the other hand, you can't dismiss all questions addressed to you.
I'm definitely somebody who likes time to think things over and let my conflicting thoughts resolve themselves.
I think in addition to this, though, I struggle to verbalise many of my thoughts and feelings no matter how long I'm given. I've always struggled with pair programming for this reason – I have a sort of gut instinct about many coding best practices, developed through years of experience, without always being able to efficiently summarise the whys.
That sounds very much like the Intuitive dimension (I) on the Meyers Brigs.
I am like that as well but I found it valuable to learn how to unpack and communicate the logic behind my intuition if I want to persuade others. It's also good because sometimes our intuition is wrong and you won't see that until you pick it apart.
I've been trying (with only limited success) to get better at verbalising thoughts/opinions and so on. It sounds like you may have had more luck than me – may I ask what has worked for you?
I'll share two things that I think are immediately actionable.
First, I literally tell people I work with that this is what I am like if I think we're about to have one of those conversations. I literally say "I have an intuition that we have a problem (or whatever) here. I don't have it articulated well yet, but I don't want to ignore it. This conversation might start messily, but please ask me questions / call out what's unclear so I can unpack my intuition." People respect this.
Second, I find that forcing myself to write it out is helpful. I often find that by paragraph 3 or 4, I realize what I am actually excited or worried about, so then I can rewrite with that as the lede, or simply now talk about it that way. Example: I can start of writing something like "I realized that developer X spent 2 months on something I don't think is valuable to the business. What is wrong with X and his manager?" and as I write about that, I realize maybe that what we actually don't have is a well-articulated strategy for value delivery and we need to solve that." My observation of developer X was just the thing that chafed me when I noticed it, but the reason it set off the intuitive alarm is that other thing.
I'm a bit of both. And it often depends on who I'm interacting with/how comfortable I am with the person.
With some people talking through ideas is easy - they understand that way of thinking and know that when you are talking it's a work in progress and not the final idea.
Other people it's more tricky. When you say something they interpret as the conclusion of a lot of deep thinking and will assume you are a complete ass when you trot out some half formed idea.
You just need to learn how other people work to make sure you don't mess things up.
I read an interview of a world-class mathematicians who said that she was a "slow thinker". Obviously, as far as maths are concerned, she's faster than almost all humanity. This notion of being a slow thinker is very subjective and relative.
I am probably the slowest thinker I have ever met. (Let me know if you are slower). This may not show because I often reject ideas immediately. What happens (I think) is that someone saying "gluons are the answer to world peace" triggers my current (outdated) understanding that "a gluon has nothing to do with world peace". It is only later that the idea that perhaps a gluon is a metaphor for the exchange of charged political opinions comes along. Hmmm. It is only later, days or weeks, that I fully take in the concept. (And no, I don't think gluons are the answer to world peace, but still ...)
Debates are a stupid concept anyway. They're nothing more than verbal jousting, with people looking to score points on the other and "win". That does not an intelligent or useful discussion make.
I just read [1] that George Washington was like that. Not only was he a slow thinker, he was practically uneducated by the standards of the other Founding Fathers, indeed he didn't even go to college. He couldn't speak any language other than English, and it appears he couldn't read Latin. He never traveled to Europe.
Despite all these, George Washington was considered by his contemporaries as an "American Cato", which at the time was the highest form of praise.
And of course, the US wouldn't exist without Washington, who is the ultimate example of a general who could get a lot done with only a little.
Very interesting, though it’s worth pointing out that he brought other forms of knowledge to the table. For example, he had worked as a land surveyor, a specialized trade that gave him knowledge of the landscape.
Now apply this to doctors. It's crazy for me that, unless you have a medical issue that tend to encounter frequently enough to have it in their mind, you're either met with wrong diagnosis, often accompanied with a dose of "must be stress".
But obviously my experience is 100% anecdotal because I lived 6 years too many with an undiagnosed autoimmune disease, and there's a high chance that there's one ongoing on top of that.
Makes me think back to this letter a teacher wrote to his students at a Jewish girls high school I used to work at. I have it bookmarked for myself.
Dear Seniors,
At our last class I did not have time to adequately formulate my farewell message to you and I would like to use this opportunity to take a second chance to convey my thoughts to you. Although we have only been together for a very short time over a few months it has been my pleasure and honor to be your teacher. You all have impressed me with your intelligence, your sincere interest in learning and your appreciation of Torah and knowledge. I know that you are nervous about leaving the comfort and safety of high school and entering a new uncharted phase of your life but I want you to know that I am sure that each one of you will continue to succeed in your endeavors. I am not saying that it will be easy, or that you won't feel discouraged at times but you should always have confidence in the abilities which I have seen in you. I want to give you one piece of advice. When you see people who seem really smart or have great memories or some other talent, who are very impressive, you should never feel inferior or inadequate. Do not become unduly impressed with appearances and never surrender your right to think for yourself and trust in your own mind. It is often the case that there is a deep wisdom that is not found with the fast mind but resides in the slow, careful, methodical thinker. Please feel free to keep in touch, I would love to hear from you in the future and do not hesitate to ask for anything you think I could help with. Best wishes and I hope to see you at graduation.
Is he a slow thinker, or does he just have high p50/p90 latency?
If you treat the output of thinking as generating observations, marshalling evidence, drawing connections (and so on), then thinking slowly really isn't anything to celebrate. A slow thinker takes a day to give you an answer that someone else could've given in 15 minutes. They have poor minimum latency and bad throughput. And don't forget scaling--some people will give you the same answer on day 3 they give you after 15 minutes, others benefit from throwing more resources (time) at the problem.
Having met plenty of "slow thinkers" who are smarter than I am, they're not really slow, just higher latency. They take time, but they generate good ideas that someone else wouldn't have. And they build on their ideas over time.
Person 1 responds with the first thing that comes to mind. They have not considered alternatives.
Person 2 considers a range of alternatives, and gives an answer.
If person 2 takes longer, they’re not doing the same thing person 1 does, but slower. They’re doing more productive work, spread over a longer time.
In various situations, I’d rather hear from person 1 or person 2.
> You're saying he actually thinks fast but doesn't get around to thinking for a while?
This is another possibility. If I just pause before speaking, I may be paying a fixed latency cost. I take 2 seconds to do what you do in 1 (100% overhead—shocking!), but I take 31 seconds to do what you do in 30 (~3% overhead, who cares?).
If he really does think slowly, it means he takes a day to answer your question and gives you the answer someone else would give in 10 minutes. That’s bad.
I think what you are saying is in a variety of circumstances a fast thoughtless answer is more desirable then a deliberate thoughtful answer. For those situations the individual who thinks fast but doesn't think through the consequences has an advantage.
However if you are looking at answers in which you want a more deliberate thought the process the slow thinking answer is probably the individual who would be best suited.
Latency doesn't change output it just refers to a time lag - I think in this case the output is significantly different. Think of it more as a model, one that spits out an answer on an already trained model vs one thats training a model and giving you an answer. The model that is training takes more effort/time.
The simplest version (honestly oversimplified, but it'll do) is to imagine a graph. Time to respond on the x axis, quality of response on the y-axis.
Slowing down is just moving to the right. You take more time to deliver the same response. That would be bad.
Lowering quality is just moving down. Same time, worse response. That would also be bad.
What "slow (but deep) thinkers" do is move up and to the right. Better responses, delivered in more time. I don't want to call that "slow" though, it's just taking more time to do more valuable thinking.
268 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadIt's because I am secretly afraid that I'm dumb and I re-work everything difficult I encounter multiple times inside my own head. You people just get to see the distilled version of like 15 re-writes to make sure I actually understand what I'm talking about and that I'm not just working for Dunning-Kruger Incorporated.
If you ask me a question now, it must be a very exceptional one if I'm still thinking about it in 2 min.
For this reason I am really poor at making a presentation or writing IP by myself. I seek out others. My thoughts sort of go on repeat all by myself. It's annoying.
Maybe I also want to impress others, right then and there, and by myself there is little motivation.
Right now I should be working on a presentation for tomorrow, but I procrastinate. But I could easily whip it out if I were to discuss the stuff I want to tell with someone and jot down slides as we talk.
"If you want a question answered (by the internet), don't ask. Give a false answer." say some (I am looking at you, logbuch-netzpolitik.de #LNP455)
Seems to be a common credo. I am still looking for a content publisher that gives out the facts checking with the actual content, for me to not have to come back to re-read the actual answers.
I can give answers to questions I've already thought about, but if you give me a new question all my brain will output is "spinner.gif" until I've gone for a walk or something. It's very hard to get it to think about a particular topic and arrive at a timely answer.
Honestly it's not great all the time.
To be clear, I'm good at memorization, if I'm allowed the opportunity to practice beforehand, as the author explains about his media interviews. But I still object on principle to testing the wrong things, and I don't always have the opportunity, time, or inclination to memorize some trivia to satisfy the cargo cult.
For instance, I recently had an interview where I got hammered with questions regarding design patterns. My daily work doesn’t consist of figuring out why I should prefer the Observer pattern or Mediator pattern over one another.
As such, I failed to give a satisfying answer in 2 minutes. How it would normally work for me: I see that I would need to apply one or the other, and would start researching the pros and cons. I've used both of them. This is a substantial decision, and as such needs some time and thoughts.
Or maybe I'm the fool and I’m just "doing it wrong".
The questions - and how a candidate responds - can be helpful to both sides (as observed) wrt figuring out how individuals might fit into the prospective organisations.
For instance, from the employer's pov, if the organisation is already filled with academic Computer Scientists, and the interviewee comes across as dismissive of the importance of design patterns, it's a red flag about fitting in. However, if they go over the top the other way, then that might be a red flag about how practical they might be. If they don't know where to start with the question or are perhaps tongue-tied, then that's also information.
While from the interviewee's pov, if they prefer a more practical environment, then those questions may be, as observed, a red flag about a role that wouldn't be a good fit for the candidate.
A good interview process maximises the flow of information in both directions in a short space of time and increases the chances of a good fit. It's a process to which these type of questions can be helpful when properly applied.
Monitor in some way, shape or form how often the process ends with happy, productive teams and thriving new hires that stay with the organisation for a decent amount of time beyond the point where they become productive. Seek to get better.
What does that mean exactly?
I started my own business, which 5 years later is going pretty well for me, achieving my personal goals. I didn't have to interview for the job. ;-)
But the number of times I've met someone and immediately thought "oh what an asshole" only to stick around and find out I was right... I wish I'd gone with my gut feeling.
The real issue for us is first time impressions. If people knew you before because of something important you've done, they will respect you. Otherwise, you'll fail to impress in the most important time: the first impression.
It took me a long time in my career & expensive coaching sessions and so on, to understand that I really need to work my ass off for my first impression, even more that I don't give ChatGPT-like responses to everything (lots of confidence, but just plainly wrong).
Of course, if I can just use my credentials to give an initial impression, that's better. But that's not usually the case. When it isn't, I need to be very present and aware that "it's my first impression, no need to be so precise, just say something silly and light-hearted.", because that's what most people typically expect.
I started to find examples of people who dealt with this very well, like Steve Jobs and other people that are known to make long pauses and to think before they say something. But even those people aren't a great examples, because they generally are known to be geniuses at their fields and this basically makes your audience want to listen to you.
You just really need to work on that skill, or accept that it will hamper your progress in life.
Trying to make business decisions on the basis of MBTI metrics, which is what it is often criticised for, is of course misguided.
But saying "MBTI is pseudoscience you cannot be INTP" makes as much sense as "Hair colour names are unscientific, so you can't identify as blond".
Sure you can. It's a description. I wouldn't go ascribing intelligence on the basis of hair colour, but I wouldn't doubt you have a hair colour either.
And if you've found commonalities / common experiences and like being with other blond people, that's fine too.
> That's a typical INTP / type 5 enneagram brain wiring.
So here I ask you: given that Psychology is a social SCIENCE, also a part of STEM. And psychologists definitely use those tests, I was personally introduced to them by a psychologist that helped me with career coaching, recognized on his field with a bunch of papers.
Now, please explain yourself: why is it a pseudoscience? I want proofs.
I'm personally quite open to the idea that it's an accurate categorisation, but I do also think that it's an extroadinary claim that requires extroadinary justification. IMO saying "oh, it's just a description" because that evidence hasn't (yet) been found is a bit of a cop out.
I've been able to observe the difference between what the MBTI calls "Judgement" (slow thinking) and what the MBTI calls "Perception" (fast thinking) in real life. The example I always give is my high school "Further Maths" class. There were 4 people in my class and it happened that we always ended up working in pairs. However the way in which each pair worked was entirely different:
- Pair 1 (me and my partner) worked independently, rushing through the questions by intuiting answers to each step. We'd then compare answers as a kind of checksum. If our answers differed, often one of us would immediately notice a mistake. And if not then we'd fall back to slowly working through the problem together step-by-step.
- Pair 2 (the other two students) defaulted to this approach of slowly working through each problem step-by-step together. This took longer up front, but produced more accurate answers.
Interesting, both approaches actually ended up taking a similar amount of time overall and yielding a similar accuracy of answer. But there is a huge qualitative difference in the kind of thinking that took place in each approach, and each person in the class also demonstrated a clear and stable preferrence for a specific approach.
There is also a vast body of literature on "Dual-process theories" like this one, popularised by Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow.
That's not how science works. If you have a hypothesis with no experimental evidence, discussing it as a fact is akin to doing astrology.
I'm sure you're aware that most people recognize themselves in horoscopes descriptions of their personality. This is quite similar to that.
Sure, but you can discuss it as theory without implying that it's proven fact. Most (if not all?) theories that are now considered scientific fact initially went through a period where they were lacking in conclusive experimental evidence.
> I'm sure you're aware that most people recognize themselves in horoscopes descriptions of their personality. This is quite similar to that.
I am. And that's why I think the plausibility of the theory is important. There's a difference between saying "people think in way A and way B" and "whether people think in way A or way B is determined by the position of the planets at the time they were born".
I guess I would say that it's not quite true that there's no experimental evidence. It's more the case that the academic discipline "experimental psychology" has failed to find evidence. Other disciplines like cognitive science and behavioural economics tend not to have studied the MBTI specifically, but have found experimental evidence for theories that are substantially similar enough to the MBTI's hypotheses that IMO they do count as some evidence.
Specifically there is experimental evidence that:
- There are qualitatively different ways in which people can think and process information.
- People can have a stable preference for a given thinking process. And that such preferences follow a bimodal distribution.
- People can have a preference towards either introversion or extraversion (MBTI's I vs. E distinction)
- People can think either in a "Fast" way (fast, intuitive, perceptually inaccesible) or a "Slow" way (slow, reasoned, perceptually accesible) (MBTI's J vs. P distinction)
That's evidence for ~50% of the MBTI already, and would leave "Feeling" vs. "Thinking" (value judgement vs. descriptive judgement) and "Sensing" vs. "Intiuton" (concrete vs. abstract thinking) as interesting research questions.
I think this is a very good indicator that the whole thing is bogus.
But I think this confirms your claim in my case. For nearly every single answer on the test, my response is "it depends." I really could go either way on nearly every single question because I need more context.
It makes me think the whole test is essentially BS, kind of like a horoscope where you can read whatever you want into it.
There are better tests (like this one https://sakinorva.net/functions) which will give you a confidence percentage for each cognitive function rather than just a best guess overall type. But none of them are that great, and currently the gold standard for determining type is to only use the test results as starting to point and to familiarise yourself with the theory to fine tune that, potentially with the guidance of an type expert.
Clearly astrological bodies have no actual influence on us. I'm not that crazy.
However, mightn't the time of year of birth have a big influence? The amount of sunlight received, activities undertaken, and foods eaten by the expectant mother and newborn baby will vary based on time of year. The differences may be minor today, but would have been pretty profound in antiquity.
Imagine being born two thousand years ago in the northern latitudes during the deep winter. Mother and child experience six months of darkness, eating preserved and salted foods. Now imagine the opposite. You are born during summer. Mother and child get lots of sunlight and fresh food. Surely there are effects! I think it would be surprising if there were none.
Regarding birth date, I would speculate that one of the most significant effects it has on modern children is how far through the school year they are born (and thus whether they are one of the older children or one of the younger children in their cohort). As you say, it's likely that there's some effect. I personally somewhat doubt it's causes differences in personality anywhere near as drastic the kind that astrology claims.
Some time ago I also thought MBTI was bullshit, now I think it’s quite useful. And at least for me, anecdotally, has predictive power.
Not really; we know for a fact it is not accurate (and thus irrelevant). You can debate it if you wish but the facts of the matter have been long settled.
If you understand the cognitive function, your prediction is a magnitude more accurate than any test.
> we know
Who knows? Who is "we?"
> it is not accurate
Accuracy is not either "PERFECTLY TRUE" or "PERFECTLY FALSE." It is a range.
> (and thus irrelevant)
Even false statements or frameworks can provide interesting insights into how we think about a domain.
> the facts of the matter
Which facts would that be?
> have been long settled
By whom? In what study or paper? Were they properly tested?
Replace MBTI w/ astrology in this sentence.
And just like astrology, you want MBTI to be true so it influences your answers on the questionnaire. Kinda like a Ouija board.
The same can be said of astrology even though it’s not science.
The MBTI is just a projection of the personality space like the more accepted Big 5. From my experience data-mining behavioral data at scale it’s a pretty good mapping and the relative value questions are adequate and the 4 dimensions do explain a lot of behavior to the point that it is very useful - a fact probability contributing to its success. My main gripe with it is the extrovert - introvert axis is a bit weak with many people being close to the middle. I’m more extroverted around intelligent people which doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, a trait held by far more commonly by ENTJ/INTJ than random chance.
I think that's partly because people don't understand what extraverted vs. introverted mean in the MBTI sense. It's not about sociability. It's actually about how much external stimuli someone likes more generally. This might be social stimuli (Fe), but it could also be physical stimuli (Se) (for example, liking being physically active or out in nature) or more conceptual stimuli / external ideas (Ne), etc. Or a computing analogy: what's your ratio of IO to CPU time.
Also, at least in the cognitive function interpretation (which IMO is the only sensible theory in the jungian/mbti family), introversion and extraversion do not apply directly to persons. They apply to thinking processes. An extraverted person is then just a person who uses an extraverted thinking mode more often than not (everyone is theorised to use both extraverted and introverted thinking modes). As you note this bias can be more or less extreme.
Indeed, it's been observed that it can both be influenced by external factors (e.g. social expectations), and that it tends to become less extreme over time. As such, a persons "type" is generally considered to be determined by what their preference was in childhood, and (the type) is taken to define their baseline personality (cf. genotype) from which their actually observable personality (cf phenotype) develops.
It would make sense that the E/I axis would be clearer if early childhood experiences were used. That would make me a clear extrovert. I think the questions should be updated for that context or at least have some additional framing around the test.
This idea was surprising to me too, but when I thought about it I realised it shouldn't be:
- We know that different people frequently react differently to the same stimuli (and that this is true even of very young children).
- Basically everything else in the human body shows genetic variation. It would be weird if the brain didn't.
- There is a strong evolutionary rationale for a population having a variety of complimentary congnitive styles.
I think the MBTI is most interesting is it taken to be only the genetic component of personality (providing us with AFAIK the only theory of the structure of that aspect of personality), while simultaneously leaning into the idea that personality is modified by nurture and environment (but that these changes are not described by one's MBTI type).
Could you possibly expand on the details of "generated an personality embedding from data"?
<edit> Big Five Personality traits and the HEXACO model exist, and they seem to have more a more positive scientific review history. “Your boss is probably someone more likely to have qualities from the dark triad” is still bad news when looking at the real world versus an ideal world, but this seems to be a checked fact. </edit>
There is some evidence to suggest that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) may not be as reliable and valid as its proponents suggest. In fact, some studies have found that the MBTI does not consistently yield the same results for individuals who take it multiple times, which raises questions about its reproducibility and the reliability of the results.
For example, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that only about half of individuals who took the MBTI twice received the same result both times. This suggests that the MBTI may not be a reliable measure of personality traits.
In addition, other studies have found that the MBTI does not reliably predict job performance or other real-world outcomes, further questioning its validity as a psychological assessment tool.
It's terms (like "thinking") are technical jargon that don't correspond to their usual meanings though. For example "thinking" is really "descriptive judegement" (cognition focussed on whether things are true/false/possible/impossible), to be contrasted with "feeling" (which is actually also a rational cognitive process!) just focussed on "value judgement" (cognition focussed on whether things are good/bad/should happen/shouldn't happen).
It is also not supposed to measure personality traits in the same sense that other models do. It is two steps removed:
1. It attempts to measure interal cognitive processes rather than external behavoural traits (how you think, not what you think)
2. It attempts to measure people's natural personality baseline (cf genotype) from which their actual personality (cf phenotype) develops as modified by their life experiences and the context in which they live.
Both of which make it even more difficult to measure with a questionaire that tends to only ask about current behaviours. But IMO also make it a much more interesting and much more plausible theory.
You can measure people on many dimensions, and all dimensions that are not truly random will correlate with some aspect of the persons life.
Interestingly, some of the dimensions of the MTBI correlate with dimensions of the "Big 5".
Introversion - Extroversion => Almost the same dimension as in Big 5.
Intuitive - Sensation => Correlate strongly to Big 5 Openness
The longer textual descriptions of the MTBI categories that one can find online are "made up" so they could indeed be said to be a type of pseudoscience.
https://www.discprofile.com/what-is-disc
Because I think fast and that intp also matches me.
But I'm honestly thinking this type of categorisation is stupid and doesn't add calue
I would suggest that if you primarily think in a fast, intuitive manner, then INTP doesn't match you because that antithetical to what INTP means. Perhaps you are reading too much into the "type descriptions" which tend to be stereotypically and not particular accurate (or are being too trusting of questionaire test results). Many of the types are similar to each other, so it's common to see oneself to an extent in more than one description.
To be an INTP means that your dominant thinking process is "Introverted Thinking" which is slow, reasoned, logical thinking that places a high emphasis on internal consistency. And that this is backed up with a secondary thinking process of "Extraverted Intuition" which is fast, intuitive thinking, which an emphasis on ideas and creative, divergent thought patterns. Or at least, that this was true of you as a young person.
Why? N stands for intuitive, and the rest have nothing to do with thinking fast or slow. P just means you don't judge quickly, P could still come up with tons of ideas and explanations quickly, they just don't judge one of those correct.
Additionaly, due to extravert bias, they got the P and the J the wrong way around when designing the 4-letter codes:
- "I" means your top function is introverted (this makes sense)
- But "P" means your top extraverted function is a "P" function (N or S) rather than a "J" function (F or T)
But as an introvert's top function is introverted not extraverted, and according to the theory J/P alternates down the stack, that mean's that an I..P type's overall top function is a actually "J" function. Specifically in the this case "Introverted Thinking" (often notated "Ti").
Introverted Thinking is actually slow in two ways:
- Because it's a J ("Judgement") function. Which just means it's either an F ("Feeling" or T ("Thinking") function. These correspond to the Slow thinking from Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. That's what "Judgement" is.
- Because it's an I ("Introverted") function. This doesn't make it actually slow, it just makes it appear slow. This is because "I" functions involve a relatively long amount of internal coginition before seeking more input from the external environment (this is what it means to be an "I" function). Which will appear slower to the observer who can't observe the persons internal thinking processes and can only observe when they interact with their environment.
Taking your description naively, such a person would likely be an INTJ. Which has a functional stack of (in order of most to least used thinking processes): Introverted Intuition - Extraverted Thinking - Introverted Feeling - Extraverted Sensation.
I realise that doesn't make much sense if you are used to applying the 4-letter code to persons directly. But as I mentioned above, I don't think that is a good way of doing things. It makes more sense if you take the 4 letter codes as simply being an opaque shorthand encoding for functional stacks (with the individual letters in the code not having meaning on their own, only indirectly through their correlation to a functional stack). E, I, N, S, T, F, P, J then become properties of thinking processes and an "extraverted person" is simply someone who primarily tends towards using one of the four extraverted thinking processes (Fe, Te, Ne, Se). They may or may not present like the everyday understanding of how an extravert presents (e.g. sociable and chatty). Typically people who have a "Extraverted Feeling" (Fe) dominant function closely fit this stereotype, but other types extraverts often don't.
If someone did the test and got INTP, then I think it is fair for them to describe themselves as INTP. You might say that the test was wrong, but as I said that isn't how most see MBTI.
It's also what the more advanced "Step III" version of the official MBTI test is based on. But that that assessment isn't just a simple questionaire: it can be only be conducted by a trained assessor and the cost of training course runs to thousands of pounds, so most people don't have experience of it, and it ends up being the simpler naive model that most people learn about.
Seeing it written out like that really makes me understand why (unaware) hypocrisy annoys me so much.
Think eventual consistency rather than strict consistency in the world view and the thinking can be blazing fast and keep the other properties. The only advantage to slow is that it avoids the short periods of inconsistency, but that also hurts it since it is harder to make big changes in the world model.
- Extraverted Thinking which is also relatively careful, reasoned and logical but puts more emphasis on external validity than internal consistency.
- Introverted intuition which is faster, more intuitive mode of thinking which some people might see as logical but isn't really. It's logical in the way ChatGPT is logical: it works until it doesn't.
Note also that nobody is using just one of these functions. So it's normal to lead with an intuitive thought and then back that up with logic or vice versa.
But I stand by the idea that you either be fast XOR fully reasoned. You can still be "kinda fast" and reasoned (but you'll never be as fast as intuitive judgements that are close to instant), and you can be pretty accurate with fast intuitive thought (but you'll never be as assured as a more thoroughly reasoned position - sometimes your intuition will lead you astray).
I can and often explain on a logical level my point of view.
I just don't need much time to do so because I constantly think about everything
But the way this person describes things is how I am precisely, when it comes to discussion on philosophy, politics, and so on. Debatable topics.
Slightly less so when I already know something or we are in a design/brainstorming session, I am more assertive.
I'm skeptical of the emphasis on the alphabet sorter.
Then again I see you have responded to some similar criticism of it below so I'll try to remember to read it when I'm not supposed to be managing a project.
I like to think of MBTI-style types as describing as describing the baseline at which your personality started before it was influenced by life experience such as working in sales for several years. That will have changed your personality but it doesn't affect your type.
If you expect an MBTI type to describe your personality as-is then you're going to be disappointed. This is also why the questionnaires are so inaccurate because they tend to ask about behavioural patterns which are influenced by life experience. You can get a much more accurate typing if you ask about why you act in a certain way, but that's hard (impossible) to do with a fixed set of questions.
Can't stand it when people run off into the weeds on examples too. Just.. it's an example. Please just get the concept of examples. They are to get us on the same context. If you can correct my example you can understand what I'm saying. We're good. Please continue with the original thought as if I'd given a good example.
Go go go go go! No, dammit, don't complain I'm being too impatient or hard on myself either, you're wasting time! Go go go!
Of course outwardly this goes through a don't be a jerk filter. Impatience is my problem.
E: Should clarify this is only for skillset relevant conversations. You can take as long as you like on spiritual or philosophical thoughts.
I just did another test, idk can they change? INTP-T again
E2: I should correct myself actually. If I'm popping back to make these edits half an hour and an hour after I posted the original comment then surely I'm thinking fast (initial comment) and also thinking slow (oh wait no, go back to that one thought, add this too).
Hey me, maybe that bit about examples is it's own blog post pal? It went a bit into the weeds itself there. Was it relevant or just on your mind? If you'd have thought slower you might not have bothered typing that bit.
I'll have to reflect on this one :)
Some people are introverts like “I just want to be alone to work and recharge”.
I’m an introvert like, “ I’ll do this on my own, but if you want to help, I’m happy to have you along.”
Social situations don’t really stress me out, but I don’t do well in group conversations.
As an on again off again anxious mess, maybe I think fast so I can have multiple answers ready in case my first isn't good enough? Maybe my thinking will slow down over time (in therapy, anxiety and self-confidence are things I'm working on). It's a hypothesis anyway.
If that is the case then at the extreme ends fast thinkers within INTP don't believe in themselves and slow thinkers do. Fast thinkers are cups half empty (and will likely fall on the floor if I'm not careful) people and slow thinkers are cups can be refilled later people. Both are logical, just different levels of confidence.
It kinda checks out now I've typed it out haha. It does sort of imply there's more than 16 types of people, but that's for Myers and Briggs to deal with.
I'm not sure that one is better than the other, but I suspect there is a lot of frustration embedded in mismatching what you want to be doing vs what you are good at.
I realised I was coming back to the thread to edit in new thoughts. This means I do both fast thinking (initial comment) and slow thinking (returning to add something else)
I no longer believe I'm solely a fast thinker, I just wasn't giving myself credit for the slow because I'm impatient af
I wish there was more room in society for both types of thinking.
"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahnmeman. I've yet to read it but it's on the list.
E: your comment made me realise I do both too. For example coming back to HN to add to comments I posted half an hour ago :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
But also, what would it even mean to say that Myers-Briggs is wrong? If you pick 4 personality traits and create 16 groups from them, then knowing someone's group will always give you insight into their personality.
This
I told a friend of mine that whenever he goes on a first date. Whatever she asks, if it's within the first 10 minutes, say something that is clearly a non-serious answer. Don't say anything serious in the first 10 minutes. After that, feel free to be yourself. Since he's very serious, this helped to balance him out a bit, especially because his first impression was so different.
"What kind of work do you do?"
"I teach... rocks how to ehm... throw... other rocks. Which I know, there's an ethical issue to that. Like, would humans just be allowed to throw other humans? No! But in rock culture, well you gotta rock as a rock. Naturally, the electric guitar is their preferred instrument of choice. So rocks wanna be thrown, but only by other rocks, not by humans. I know, it's weird, I'm a bit of an exception but that's also because I grew up with parents that rocked and then it's sort of fine. Marilyn Manson also was a famous rock throwing coach."
I just made that up, but stuff like that. Key to that is also knowing when to pause and be fully willing to be imperfect.
I need to do something similar. I'm also too serious and too thinkey for the normal world. Fortunately, I have a huge imagination too, so I just show that first by being not serious at all :)
I've thought about the whole "being yourself" thing versus deviating from it for the first 10 minutes, but I figured if putting up a bit of an act (that you enjoy yourself as well) for 10 minutes changes people's impression much more positively of you and then you can fully drop it and be yourself, then it's fine.
> I just made that up, but stuff like that.
Maybe not quite like that...
Buried somewhere in that pile is a nugget of comedy gold.
In one-on-one first meetings I naturally participate in the back and forth. It's group meetings where I can just listen and absorb information that I come off as disengaged and don't make a good first impression. The strategy I use to mitigate this (suggested by an old boss) is to jump into the conversation very early in the meeting with 1 or 2 comments that I wouldn't have otherwise felt a need to make. It establishes my voice at the table and then I can relax and just process information
I may have figured out a better solution than was possible for anyone during the meeting, but by sending it late people's impressions during the meetings of me may not be the best.
But of course, that's not how the world works. Spew out a solution right then and there. That's how you get ahead. Who cares if it's the best solution? You blurted it out first, and that is seen by others as a sign of confidence, and if you are confident then you must know what you're talking about... right?
God, I need to get out of this industry. Maybe all industries.
On a positive note, I do like your mitigation strategy.
I have a similar problem. Meeting another programmer for the first time usually leaves me feeling quite stupid. They’ll start talking about all sorts of concepts, or how they built some particular thing, and I won’t be able to follow along at all.
The good news is, since their first impression of me is so poor, they’re often blown away when they see something I spent time on. They must be thinking, how did this dingus do that?
This is particularly brutal if they're ego-centric and doing it to depress upon you "how smart they are".
I've seen this with quite a few "smart" people.
There are two aspects to this:
1) talking "smart" - use of phrases, language, and ideas that aren't obvious, or using terms that are part of "smart"
2) small areas of their own knowledge that you are unlikely to know.
Examples:
friend would pull me into quantum string theory (M-brains, whatever) where they'd memorized certain details of it--they weren't particularly smart on quantum string theory, but I had zero knowledge. They'd keep turning the topic into these areas despite group's conversations not going that way naturally.
another casual friend pulled me into the "A Tribe Called Red is so good" when I started gushing about my appreciation of multi-syllabically rapping styles of lyrical rappers that I liked. They were essentially regurgitating a critic's article on the topic.
Some internal Microsofters a few decades ago would describe that there was internal smart-speak for "smart" identifying people. The same is true in most contexts.
I had an math professor (NOT the one I am referencing in another comment) that was ego-centric and would often respond to my incessant questioning with demoralizing (and sometimes flat out rude) responses. I just acted completely oblivious to the social faux pas and his avoidance/adversarial tendencies eventually turned into a much more productive relationship. I received the only A in the class (he publicly posted everyone's grades).
FWIW, I had a friend indicate that because (tenured?) teaching positions are such high demand, that the available candidates can be significantly high caliber. So that might have played into why the math professor was adversarial initially.
The area I've found the depress-to-impress used was usually in peer contexts and didn't have any teachable outcomes, unfortunately. They're regurgitating material that they have better familiarity with, but probably unable to ad-lib off their "beat path".
With the peers thing I just view it as we all have our pathologies, and some people just feel the need to be perceived as smart (usually some kind of insecurity). Sometimes it can just be too much though and you can get the feeling that you are walking on eggshells around them, perhaps not to trigger a judgement of you on their part.
Plus... intellectuals often like to feel smart, so you have an opportunity to pump their ego a bit :)
I'm often slow to respond and make no effort to change that on first impression, but I have been told - many times - that people view me as thoughtful and intelligent.
I can't view myself from another's perspective but if you take 5 seconds to come up with an answer which is really good, most people seem to completely forget the 5 second silence and remember the good answer. As you would expect.
Many people's quick replies are poor quality, so a high quality reply stands out. This does assume someone can identify the difference, but hopefully you're in such an environment.
A quick wit is valuable, but not in all situations.
If I'm a bit tipsy then I get less serious and think less deeply and respond more quickly and (at least in my mind) with more humor, which is great socially, but would be terrible in everyday life.
First impressions are important, but there's a lot more to them than just simply being the first one out of the gate with something insightful. You can convey your seriousness and intent with presence, active listening, facial expressions, preparation, poise, etc. It is a projection of what you think about yourself, ultimately.
If you're sitting there deliberating over getting the Good First Impression, or even just waiting for your turn to speak, people are going to pick up on that. Not saying you are, just that it is an easy trap to fall into.
Some decent summaries can be found here: https://www.scienceofpeople.com/read-people-eyes/#5-eye-dire...
That was until I noticed that if I picked up the discussion again the next day he had internalized yesterday's conversation. From then on I worked perfectly fine with him building up shared understanding one point at a time.
I really wish for him, and me, that there was a word he could've used to describe his style of thinking. I'm sure it would save everyone many a frustration.
I actually think you found those words in this post. He could have just said "I often need a day to digest a conversation. So ideally let me sleep on it after we talk about something"
The desire to articulate something like that is 99% of the task. Words can be found.
Your friend is just slow.
The issue here is that, in the US at least, referring to someone as "slow" is making a statement about their IQ.
There are many possible causes for the coworker's "slow"-ness here, e.g. anxiety, doubt, and high standards. Perhaps the coworker feels the need to respond only with well-researched responses and refuses to engage in speculation.
deliberative, thoughtful, methodical, considerate, introspective
cold hard truth.
If it's tactical problem, then slow is not good for others.
If it's strategic problem, then it's good to spend long time on it.
I am an eng manager/product manager so usually my stuff is "strategy" - it's worth to keep talking/thinking because if I get an idea 10x better, that's millions of dollars difference over years.
She's an emergency room physician. If she takes too long to think, the patient dies. It's all about quickly executed tactics.
It took us a bit to realize how our preferred ways of thinking connect to our work (cause or effect, not sure)
I have great memory when it comes to useful or interesting things but if I can't figure out the utility of some information, my brain struggles to learn it and will quickly discard it.
The most interesting experience I remember was at school when I was a small child. I didn't understand the concept of school or education at that point. I remember after I moved up a grade, the teacher was referencing concepts which I had learned the year before (I think it was related to alphabet and reading) but because I was in a different class (and different teacher), I did not make the (supposedly obvious) assumption that the teacher was referring to concepts from the previous year (which came from a different source). In my mind, because I didn't understand the purpose of education or school, I had fully compartmentalized the knowledge from the previous year/grade and I couldn't make sense of the content from the later grade which built on top. Once I learned the purpose of school and figured out that knowledge from previous years was still relevant and that knowledge wasn't supposed to be compartmentalized based on the teacher/class, I was able to start learning faster. At least fast enough to be a slightly above average student throughout all my school and university years. I remember being surprised that all other kids seemed to know intuitively that knowledge 'stacked' regardless of the teacher or context. It was a big revelation to me.
I still think I have a tendency to compartmentalize information/knowledge provided to me by different people. My brain compartmentalizes everything based on source until there is enough consensus/synthesis between the sources and then it gets merged into the trunk.
But now that I think of it, it doesn't seem that ridiculous for a child to think that knowledge taught by different people isn't compatible... If you think about modern education, it's actually quite amazing and weird that two different teachers who never met might have the exact same knowledge as each other to the extent that they can reference each other's thoughts and ideas... To a child, it can seem like telepathy.
For me it’s that my brain simply will not accept facts or advice unless all the underlying dynamics have been made explicit, and it’s been put into context as part of a bigger system. Until then it’s just a distant and profoundly uninteresting suggestion which my brain will rapidly dispose of.
Personally I flopped at high school science once the teachers stated putting rote formulas on the whiteboard without deep explanation if their significance, i could feel my brain rejecting the contextless information. Later in life I became fascinated by the same subjects, when I started reading well written popular science books.
Why does this happen? Any idea? I have a really hard time committing things to memory or building understanding. I find that I have to read the same paragraph multiple times, and often need to go back to the beginning or look at the previous paragraph 5 times to make sense of things. Even after doing this, there are times when I'll overlook some obvious information, only to have a major insight the next day.
It's like studying a statue from 20 different angles and learning everything about its history and the real person, including who made it, when, where it was displayed, and who owned it throughout history, just to remember its name.
It doesn't feel right.
This should be the default mindset of every thoughtful person! We are all imperfect. Our vision, hearing, reasoning and perception are all imperfect. Eyewitnesses to a crime routinely describe completely different suspects/activities, despite being completely earnest in their accounts. I believe it it absolutely crucial to maintain a certain level of doubt about everything, at all times, based on the fact that we are imperfect beings that have imperfect knowledge and imperfect reasoning skills. I further believe that the humility that this constant awareness brings is useful and necessary. Beware people who are absolutely certain about things.
Quick responses and slow responses reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow". I found it a very thought provoking read and in particular how often our quick responses are completely wrong with 100% confidence.
That in turn makes me think that those quick responses are very much like what ChatGPT does - come up with the most likely thing to say using our meat based large language model.
Many people know this yet still fail to do it.
I am much the same although I was not always. I used to jump in first with a quick and usually basic comment.
Now I listen and think of multiple responses before I open my mouth.
Is it maturity? Wisdom I have picked up over the past two decades? Perhaps my brain is just a slower with age?
I don’t know but I certainly feel less pressure to answer first these days. If someone comes to me first for comment I will almost always answer with “I will need to think about that a bit more and get back to you”.
I’ve had a few people give me unsolicited feedback that I don’t “engage” enough (what they mean here is fast enough). To which I just say it is far easier to start correctly a bit later than start sooner and make mistakes.
Undoing mistakes, in my experience, takes far more time than starting a little later. This is especially true in design, development and management.
Sometimes undoing mistakes is not possible without throwing all previous work out and starting over. That to me is far more frustrating and wasteful than taking a little time before you start to give yourself the best possible platform from which to begin.
People often makes the mistake thinking that those who hide their ignorance aren't ignorant. But as your quote shows, the most ignorant people are the ones who don't speak up, not those who do and get corrected. People just perceive the non speakers as less ignorant.
On the other hand, you can't dismiss all questions addressed to you.
I think in addition to this, though, I struggle to verbalise many of my thoughts and feelings no matter how long I'm given. I've always struggled with pair programming for this reason – I have a sort of gut instinct about many coding best practices, developed through years of experience, without always being able to efficiently summarise the whys.
I am like that as well but I found it valuable to learn how to unpack and communicate the logic behind my intuition if I want to persuade others. It's also good because sometimes our intuition is wrong and you won't see that until you pick it apart.
I've been trying (with only limited success) to get better at verbalising thoughts/opinions and so on. It sounds like you may have had more luck than me – may I ask what has worked for you?
First, I literally tell people I work with that this is what I am like if I think we're about to have one of those conversations. I literally say "I have an intuition that we have a problem (or whatever) here. I don't have it articulated well yet, but I don't want to ignore it. This conversation might start messily, but please ask me questions / call out what's unclear so I can unpack my intuition." People respect this.
Second, I find that forcing myself to write it out is helpful. I often find that by paragraph 3 or 4, I realize what I am actually excited or worried about, so then I can rewrite with that as the lede, or simply now talk about it that way. Example: I can start of writing something like "I realized that developer X spent 2 months on something I don't think is valuable to the business. What is wrong with X and his manager?" and as I write about that, I realize maybe that what we actually don't have is a well-articulated strategy for value delivery and we need to solve that." My observation of developer X was just the thing that chafed me when I noticed it, but the reason it set off the intuitive alarm is that other thing.
With some people talking through ideas is easy - they understand that way of thinking and know that when you are talking it's a work in progress and not the final idea.
Other people it's more tricky. When you say something they interpret as the conclusion of a lot of deep thinking and will assume you are a complete ass when you trot out some half formed idea.
You just need to learn how other people work to make sure you don't mess things up.
On a new topic she would probably revert to slow thinking.
https://media.tenor.com/MFE6UiMEpRoAAAAC/math-zack-galifiana...
Let me think about it first, and I’ll get back to you.
Despite all these, George Washington was considered by his contemporaries as an "American Cato", which at the time was the highest form of praise.
And of course, the US wouldn't exist without Washington, who is the ultimate example of a general who could get a lot done with only a little.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Principles_(book)
But obviously my experience is 100% anecdotal because I lived 6 years too many with an undiagnosed autoimmune disease, and there's a high chance that there's one ongoing on top of that.
Dear Seniors, At our last class I did not have time to adequately formulate my farewell message to you and I would like to use this opportunity to take a second chance to convey my thoughts to you. Although we have only been together for a very short time over a few months it has been my pleasure and honor to be your teacher. You all have impressed me with your intelligence, your sincere interest in learning and your appreciation of Torah and knowledge. I know that you are nervous about leaving the comfort and safety of high school and entering a new uncharted phase of your life but I want you to know that I am sure that each one of you will continue to succeed in your endeavors. I am not saying that it will be easy, or that you won't feel discouraged at times but you should always have confidence in the abilities which I have seen in you. I want to give you one piece of advice. When you see people who seem really smart or have great memories or some other talent, who are very impressive, you should never feel inferior or inadequate. Do not become unduly impressed with appearances and never surrender your right to think for yourself and trust in your own mind. It is often the case that there is a deep wisdom that is not found with the fast mind but resides in the slow, careful, methodical thinker. Please feel free to keep in touch, I would love to hear from you in the future and do not hesitate to ask for anything you think I could help with. Best wishes and I hope to see you at graduation.
If you treat the output of thinking as generating observations, marshalling evidence, drawing connections (and so on), then thinking slowly really isn't anything to celebrate. A slow thinker takes a day to give you an answer that someone else could've given in 15 minutes. They have poor minimum latency and bad throughput. And don't forget scaling--some people will give you the same answer on day 3 they give you after 15 minutes, others benefit from throwing more resources (time) at the problem.
Having met plenty of "slow thinkers" who are smarter than I am, they're not really slow, just higher latency. They take time, but they generate good ideas that someone else wouldn't have. And they build on their ideas over time.
You're saying he actually thinks fast but doesn't get around to thinking for a while?
Person 1 responds with the first thing that comes to mind. They have not considered alternatives. Person 2 considers a range of alternatives, and gives an answer.
If person 2 takes longer, they’re not doing the same thing person 1 does, but slower. They’re doing more productive work, spread over a longer time.
In various situations, I’d rather hear from person 1 or person 2.
> You're saying he actually thinks fast but doesn't get around to thinking for a while?
This is another possibility. If I just pause before speaking, I may be paying a fixed latency cost. I take 2 seconds to do what you do in 1 (100% overhead—shocking!), but I take 31 seconds to do what you do in 30 (~3% overhead, who cares?).
If he really does think slowly, it means he takes a day to answer your question and gives you the answer someone else would give in 10 minutes. That’s bad.
However if you are looking at answers in which you want a more deliberate thought the process the slow thinking answer is probably the individual who would be best suited.
Latency doesn't change output it just refers to a time lag - I think in this case the output is significantly different. Think of it more as a model, one that spits out an answer on an already trained model vs one thats training a model and giving you an answer. The model that is training takes more effort/time.
The simplest version (honestly oversimplified, but it'll do) is to imagine a graph. Time to respond on the x axis, quality of response on the y-axis.
Slowing down is just moving to the right. You take more time to deliver the same response. That would be bad.
Lowering quality is just moving down. Same time, worse response. That would also be bad.
What "slow (but deep) thinkers" do is move up and to the right. Better responses, delivered in more time. I don't want to call that "slow" though, it's just taking more time to do more valuable thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier