Humble computer programmer, author of this wiki engine, and host of The Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki.
INTP.
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If you're enjoying this wiki (or if you hate it), please post here or send me an email! I'd love to hear from anyone else who's found Lenore's stuff fascinating.
The February 2003 issue of Cutter IT Journal printed a somewhat Lenore-inspired article I wrote about Extreme Programming, titled "XP and the Cognitive Divide".
How I got into this
I originally got interested in Myers-Briggs in 1997 when I read Joe Butt's on-line type profiles. The distinction between Te and Ti seemed to mirror a topic that I'd been pursuing for many years: different aspects of logic and different rhetorical styles. One form of logic or rhetoric holds a conceptual framework or space of possibilities constant and applies it to concrete reality via measurement and deduction. The other starts with raw experience and forms it into conceptual spaces which are always fluid and waiting to have possibilities added or removed to better fit the potentialities found in concrete reality. The implicit rules of these two ways of understanding logic are incompatible and lead to strange disagreements and misunderstandings. These seem to be exactly the sorts of disagreements that are typical between INTJs and INTPs.
I went back and forth for quite a long time on whether the Jungian or Lenorean function-attitudes refer to the same thing and possibly extend the vocabulary to include much more. Well, I still go back and forth about that. I was particularly disappointed by the Definition Problem on psych-type--or rather, by the obliviousness to it. It sometimes seems to me that no two people in the Myers-Briggs world are using the letters to stand for the same things, and yet they don't notice. In 1999, just about to give up on the notion of Jungian functions, I got a copy of Personality Type: An Owner's Manual at the suggestion of Robbie Geary. Being only a self-help book, it doesn't supply the rigor I'm hoping to find, but I found its observations of people and hints of a theory intriguing.
Lenore Thomson's stuff seems to me to suggest a possible unity among a tremendous number of seemingly irreconcilable philosophical theories and disagreements going back to ancient Greece: a vocabulary for describing the worldviews and ultimate assumptions that make those theories simultaneously inescapable and irreconcilable.
More stuff to write
Here are various pages I'd like to post here, as I get time. Of course, if you have an idea along any of these lines, please don't hesitate to start a page yourself!
| • | An exegesis in terms of taking the socially accepted meaning of a sign for granted vs. seeing beyond the socially accepted meaning. |
| • | A Membranes Exegesis, casting introversion as a focus on the world within a membrane that you attempt to make completely knowable or controllable, and casting extraversion as a focus on getting the outside world to come through that membrane and make you react to it. |
| • | An explication of how Lenore's book fails as a self-help book for all but a tiny minority of people, and how that might lead to a better way of understanding it. Short version: what sort of rare intelligence can possibly make head or tail of this? (The fact that we have an exegesis wiki for the book says something about the likelihood of the book leading people to personal growth.) |
| • | A Channels-of-Becoming Exegesis: a way of linking all these concepts together, where Extraverted attitudes lead you to see the external world as a channel to become what you are (take form in the world) and Introverted attitudes lead you to call forth the powers and potential of the psyche to become what you are. This might explain what Extraverted and Introverted versions of the same attitude have in common as well as shed light on the basic Extraverted/Introverted conflict. |
| • | A Geological Exegesis: channels between the ego (consciousness) and the totality of the self. Visualized with a picture where each function attitude builds downward from the surface to water below. Unacknowledged aspects of the self find other ways to get through, like lava coming to the surface. |
| • | Plato's Cave as the basic myth of someone with dominant Ni. |
| • | Beyond Personality: how Lenore's stuff is not a drawing of boxes around people but a vocabulary for people to understand the boxes they've drawn around themselves, why that was a good thing, and how to go beyond it when it's no longer such a good thing. |
| • | An analysis of personal-transformation seminars like the Landmark Forum, NLP, and Anthony Robbins as preaching ENTJ attitudes, often in ways not appropriate for people of other types. "Be an ENTJ" requires some pretty massive rewiring if you're not already on that path. Also, the heavy-handed Ni preaching is done from a heavily Extraverted point of view. The costs and benefits of that are probably very interesting. |
| • | Aesop's Fables as preaching ESTJ attitudes. I think this could be spelled out and illustrated with examples very simply. |
| • | Christianity as an extreme Ni-Fi religion, and the difficulties this has raised as people have tried to make Christianity into the basis of a society. The strange Te element in Christianity. |
Here are some type guesses I'd like to write up with explanations based on explicitly spelled-out observations:
| • | Jim Anchower (obviously ISTP, so it might be fruitful to spell out why this is so obvious) |
| • | The Onion in general (ISTP humor at its richest) |
Why is The Onion ISTP humor? Can you characterize it some more? How would INTP humor differ? How would Ne be different from Se?
On a related note, Woody Allen's humor might be an example of INTP humor. The Ti is definitely visible. He takes normal ideas to their absurd conclusion, or he juxtaposes normal things to create weird unexpected combinations.
Perhaps we need a page on how humor varies between the types.
Monty Python strikes me as yet another variation, as a different kind of humor. Perhaps this is again ISTP. There is a distinct S flavor to it. Help me explain this and to explore the distinctions.
| • | Robert Greene and his books about power and seduction (ENFJ? ENTJ? ISTP? ESTP?) |
| • | Saddam Hussein (strikes me as an ENFJ power-player, great at manipulating the social structure so that everyone's needs get met only through him; it would be interesting to spell out biographical facts that relate to this) |
| • | Steven Covey (Lenore suggested ENTJ to me in email; that stimulated a lot of insight for me into various people I know, whom I'd now guess are ENTJs) |
| • | Jerry Seinfeld (Lenore proposed ISTP; I found that pretty interesting, but I'm also thinking INTJ, and thinking that the difficulty in sometimes telling these two types apart might shed light on a lot of things) |
| • | Jo Coudert (INFJ), author of Advice from a Failure, a book filled with interesting and genuine insights but that is ultimately lacking in tangible, applicable advice--perhaps a common trap for dom-Ni types. |
| • | The characters in The Big Lebowski: the sane ISTP who kind of goes with the flow but has no perspective from which to say no to bad things; the loony ENTJ who has that perspective in overabundance and tries to see through and transform nearly everything. |
| • | The characters in Fargo: the lady police chief was clearly an ESTJ, but I find the others harder to guess. Any public and obviously typable character is probably well worth writing up with observations that spell out the connections with Lenore-Attitudes. |
| • | Camille Paglia seems to me to be an extremely Lenore-like INTJ. Paglia proposes that pop culture is the vehicle through which the Dionysian spirit undermines the Apollonian. She sometimes seems to side with the Dionysian, but really she takes a Parliament of Attitudes view that the clash between these opposing ways of finding meaning is what keeps life going. She seems to be an Ni spokesman for Se: a commenter-on, an Se-wannabee, not herself a participant. She uses the word "chthonic" a lot, perhaps a bit like Lenore uses "numinous". I once asked Lenore if she was Camille Paglia, but she said no. Not sure whether to believe her. |
