Friendship with INTJ

[Matty]

Thank you for still engaging. I mean you no harm.

I agree with your observations of negative emotions in other people. It is very observant and wise to do what you do. You are using your periscope well.

I think our misunderstanding is this. You are referring to other people's emotions. I am referring to my own experience with them. My own distasteful emotions and what I can deduct from it.

It is part of my sonar system that I know how to extrapolate certain observations and connect it with past experiences, similar feelings, psychological insights into how people feel, think and act under certain circumstances which I have picked up since I was a child - I am just wired differently to you to survive I guess.

It is difficult to explain how it works - I get insights from dreams and during stages of diffused thinking. That is why I call it a sonar system. It works in the undersea world that is foreign to one that cannot breath under water. Let's call the water the "fluffyness" of feelings, intuition, making connections, getting sudden unexplained insights - a lot more can be added to this if I start to think about it. Accessing my heart more than my head is part of it.

I deliberately asked what you are going to do because that is my experience with the INTJ. They tend to ignore the blib on their own screen. Because they do not always know what to make of it.

They have not made a study of these things and are maybe not really interested to do it either - unless they try to understand what the use of such a skill can be. We know how intelligent INTJ's are. They will maybe not study these things because they see no use for it themselves, but after burning their fingers a couple of times in taking a hit - they could contemplate bringing someone into their circle who have this as a skill.

In that it can be helpful to use the raising of a child as an example. The patterns used in emotional validation will have as an end result either an emotionally neglected or emotionally nurtured child. This can have serious implications. The end result of the pattern will only become apparent after many years, maybe. It is only then that the observer will be able to verify the emotional nurturing to have been useful.

The "fluffiness" therefore is about patterns and their predictable outcomes - but it can take a long time to validate the insight. That is why INFJ's feel so misunderstood. Their wisdom only become apparent after the fact.

You mentioned something I recently referred to as "the mythology of emotions". Emotional neglect, and emotional meaningful-ness are not real things to me. Emotions in my understanding of them are the conscious interface we experience with intangible neurological needs. Emotional neglect isn't something which arises from not encountering enough emotions from others, or from not expressing enough emotions; it's a misnomer for behavioral conditioning, which habituates an individual to associate the fulfillment of basic needs with the petulant whim of others. Subsequent feelings of distrust are how one experiences the maintenance of a highly inefficient habit of doing things for oneself, when outsourcing and letting others do things for one would be so much easier and less costly.

The problem isn't the "feeling of distrust", it's the unwillingness to learn how to identify reliable people, and to actually rely on them. Psychological inertia makes training oneself to go about things differently a difficult, but short lived chore.

 

[Enso]

People are usually unreliable due to their own issues with emotions right, so wouldn't some empathy and ability to directly feel their emotions solve that problem and be an integral part in identifying untrustworthy people. People are basket cases in real life, and often don't even know why they screw people over. I don't think B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism has much use in anything but casino psychology and addiction.

 

[Matty]

People are usually unreliable due to their own issues with emotions right, so wouldn't some empathy and ability to directly feel their emotions solve that problem and be an integral part in identifying untrustworthy people. People are basket cases in real life, and often don't even know why they screw people over. I don't think B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism has much use in anything but casino psychology and addiction.

Reading emotions when determining who to manage a company is on par with reading their palms. Track records are far better.

I haven't read Skinner's work, or any psychologists' work, but it seems to me that the same psychology which drives some people to casinos or towards addiction is at work in everything else they're doing. People don't have spare psyches they can change like clothes, when entering Las Vegas, or leaving it. Not can they run different brain software at different times.

We are all extremely heavily conditioned to expect satisfaction at the end of our customary patterns of behaviour, and with good reason. However, some people have been conditioned to use very inefficient, contorted, dysfunctional patterns of behaviour to get by. Those bad habits are maintained by the emotions: the person who always has to double and triple check other's work is driven by what he experiences as anxiety. The person who makes the smallest favour an ordeal for others is driven by what she experiences as greed, envy, or jealousy, etc. Giving emotions any weight, or intrinsic value is a reflexive safeguard or justification for never learning better ways to navigate neurological needs. Mythologising emotions into being something meaningful instead of mere psychological flypaper is at it's heart a lie, which tries to tell oneself that one's ways are entirely reasonable.

 

[Spidertrader]

People are usually unreliable due to their own issues with emotions right, so wouldn't some empathy and ability to directly feel their emotions solve that problem and be an integral part in identifying untrustworthy people. People are basket cases in real life, and often don't even know why they screw people over. I don't think B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism has much use in anything but casino psychology and addiction.

I did not want to engage in Psychological research as I did expect it not to be helpful now. I also understand that metaphors are probably unhelpful too.

I do however want to acknowledge your sharp observation on Skinner and confirm that it is more or less what I tried to explain with the periscope. The eye that can only see the behavior without understanding it.

 

[Enso]

Reading emotions when determining who to manage a company is on par with reading their palms. Track records are far better.

I haven't read Skinner's work, or any psychologists' work, but it seems to me that the same psychology which drives some people to casinos or towards addiction is at work in everything else they're doing. People don't have spare psyches they can change like clothes, when entering Las Vegas, or leaving it. Not can they run different brain software at different times.

We are all extremely heavily conditioned to expect satisfaction at the end of our customary patterns of behaviour, and with good reason. However, some people have been conditioned to use very inefficient, contorted, dysfunctional patterns of behaviour to get by. Those bad habits are maintained by the emotions: the person who always has to double and triple check other's work is driven by what he experiences as anxiety. The person who makes the smallest favour an ordeal for others is driven by what she experiences as greed, envy, or jealousy, etc. Giving emotions any weight, or intrinsic value is a reflexive safeguard or justification for never learning better ways to navigate neurological needs. Mythologising emotions into being something meaningful instead of mere psychological flypaper is at it's heart a lie, which tries to tell oneself that one's ways are entirely reasonable.

Fair enough. But to give context, after Freud was Skinner who essentially said people could be trained like pigeons to do different things like repetitively hitting the slot machines for longer with inconsistent payouts because of course who wants a slot machine that pays out a dollar each time - that's boring, when people can get $2 and then $500 after 50 spins, it's way more addictive with inconsistent payouts. After skinner I believe Linguists and Aaron Beck essentially proved it wrong and developed cognitive behavioural approaches to psychology, so realise what has happened there, they went from a pure mind approach to a mind and emotion approach - how the two interact to create behaviour. So in terms of psychology your argument is going backwards, I'm not saying it's wrong but it has been outdated in popular psychology like Freudian stuff has. To be honest if your going to go backwards it's kind going more animalistic and needs based rather than intention and goal based, which seems to be along the lines of your argument. To the analogy of the person who wants to double or triple check their work that could either be emotional or that they are getting radically inconsistent reinforcement. Anyway, fair enough I guess.

Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that you can analyse behavior without emotion on the premise that emotion is redundant, and you are not denying that emotion is important in conditioning and social expectations and motivation, in-fact its part of your argument and that does align with modern psychology showing that thought and emotion are intertwined, but I guess your trying to turn it into just independent behavior and not analyse the emotion. It might be a winning approach but not one many people use in contemporary psychology.

 

[Spidertrader]

but with the majority of my total time spent in stoic contemplation of religious-ey things.

I am intrigued by this statement.