# Ni-dom or Si-dom?



## Komplex (Jan 14, 2011)

Right, Though I do not wish this to be solely about myself, I will be opening this thread about the altercation I beleive I currently have. For the past several years, I have taken a vast amount of several MBTI tests, some come back as INTJ others ISTJ. Recently the last 5 months there's been more ISTJs, then INTJ's which is unusual. 

So I have decided to delve into understanding how MBTI works, via the cognitive functions. I have reached to a point where I am either Si, or Ni dominant, but I can not decide which one. My mom is an ESTJ and I find her lacking in the same vision that I have, she seems to be more of a computer, and fails to see things that I can easily pick up, especially when it comes to abstract. My aunt is a very strong INTJ, and we get on well for the most part, but we do have our arguments. These two characters have been the two most impacting people on my life, and my Aunt homeschooled me with her young duaghters...

The thing is I am like an archive machine, I can read something, like Hayek's _Constitution of liberty_, or say... the works of Eddington, or Aron Gurswitsch's _On contemporary nihilism_, and in the end i remember the basic discussion, and i am at times able to break it down into key points. Give me more time and I could reel off all the ideas, and premises behind that argument. 

But I have the ability to remember facts, and figures. I know about 5, maybe 6 different Language grammar, and I know a majority fo the english words etymologies. Once I understand a concept as well it's cemented within my head, and the need to study is irrelevant. 

Though people say I'm observant, and at times, i have no idea or i am not certain what people are actually thinking, but I could guess that they might be feeling x because of w, y, and z. 

I also seem to be able to learn something more efficiently when analogies used. So I don't know. I personally don't think i have a strong Ne. the Se I am not so sure... I guess I could see that being my inferior. Thinking in a Ne perspective would leave me tired I think. 

I have to think on one thing at a time, and when i think about many possibilities at once, that's usually because I'm nervous, and stressed. My aunt said i'd be perfect in a research enviroment, and that she couldn't see me functioning in any other career as effectively. She also stated that doing philosophy seemed like a lost cause on me, and I'd be better off at specializing in a certain disclipline such as Linguistics. 

I often think a lot! I get criticised often that I think too much, and i should paint, or something, which i argue "where's the productivity in that? how will that benefit me?" So I don't know if this makes me Si or Ni-dom.

discuss.

and thanks for reading, for those that have bothered.


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## chaeriean (Jan 18, 2011)

to me it sounds like you are si-dominant with developed inferior functions. people often think i am intuitive as well, despite the fact that i rely almost entirely on my si. it just has to do with how much you use si. if you use it in a very complex and nuanced fashion to rely on all of your data intake, it can sometimes appear so seamless that you just "know" random things about people. judging by your post, it sounds like you take in information primarily by sensing, which is a si trait. you observe, analyze, categorize and profile everything around you. the more in-depth your analyzation is, the more "intuitive" you can seem.


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## Komplex (Jan 14, 2011)

Okay so as part of explansion, it seems last ngiht i had an altercation, where I relief on my N function. Last night i was trying to get to a play in the botannic gardens, and i parked at the carpark, looked at the map, and registered what it said, but then the parks directions stated otherwise, and the botannic garden wasn't very well signposted.

so in the end I went with my gut, and fllowed to where i thought it would be, and in the end we got there quicker. It seems that i don't use my N, but when I do, i feel energized, and relieved when It is successful which it generally is. Perhaps my turbulent years is because I've relieved so heavily on my S which has turned me into a hermit crab? perhaps the cause of my avoidance ersonality disorder?


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## chaeriean (Jan 18, 2011)

i recently made a post which you might be interested in: http://personalitycafe.com/cognitive-functions/44263-sensing-versus-intuition-different-take.html

my basic opinion is that being a sensor doesn't mean you have no intuition, it just means that you don't trust what intuition you have. if you ever get a "gut" feeling sometimes you will go with it but most times if it is in a matter of importance you will require it to be confirmed with tangible evidence. such as intuitively knowing a person is feeling bad but instead of saying "want to talk? you're upset." you would say, "hey, are you doing okay?" because you need to confirm if the person is really upset and thus your intuition is correct or not.


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## ItsAlwaysSunny (Dec 17, 2010)

I would agree that you sound more Si than Ni.

I also agree with what chaeriean said about trusting your intuition. As a dominant Ni user, sometimes my intuition is the only thing that I trust. I could have all the information laid out in front of me, but if I still don't feel right about it or I think something is fishy, I will keep searching for something else. My intuition is really the only thing I don't question.

I actually have a pretty good memory about stuff, but I'm not archive machine. I tend to only remember things that are related to other things. Stand alone facts, figures, details, etc. go in one ear and out the other. Anytime I can connect two ideas they are more likely to stick in my mind. 

Also, do you naturally try and see things from as many perspectives as possible? Thats a big one for me. I think thats why I only trust my intuition. I try and see so many sides of the story that at the end of the day, I just have to trust my intuition or I'll never be able to make a decision.

Hope that helps.


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## Empurple (May 20, 2010)

Wow! Good thread. Learning a lot. I've noticed that Si-doms and Ni-doms can be very confusable at times, especially if Si runs fast and smooth with some development of Ne, or if Ni is tempered by perfectionist Fi or very organized Te (INTJ). Or else, Si being critiqued and extrapolated upon by Ti (ISFJ) might come forth sounding Ni-ish. In the case of INFJ, I suppose Ti might also temper Ni, while Fe doesn't betray its own certainty about things (being cautious about how what's being said might be perceived), making it seem like Si's deliberate and linear method.


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## Thalassa (Jun 10, 2010)

Sounds like Si dom who uses inferior Ne under stress or in unusual situations.


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## Komplex (Jan 14, 2011)

ItsAlwaysSunny said:


> I would agree that you sound more Si than Ni.
> 
> I also agree with what chaeriean said about trusting your intuition. As a dominant Ni user, sometimes my intuition is the only thing that I trust. I could have all the information laid out in front of me, but if I still don't feel right about it or I think something is fishy, I will keep searching for something else. My intuition is really the only thing I don't question.


In some respects i hardly used my intuition, though i depended on it a lot more when i was younger and in my teens. if something was fishy I'd disregard all the other information. Im not one to use information over what I am feeling. Like I was working with someone who everyone thoguht was a great person, but what I felt in his presence and the way he carried himself; I didn't trsut him. 2 months later he's caught on drugs...



ItsAlwaysSunny said:


> I actually have a pretty good memory about stuff, but I'm not archive machine. I tend to only remember things that are related to other things. Stand alone facts, figures, details, etc. go in one ear and out the other. Anytime I can connect two ideas they are more likely to stick in my mind.
> 
> Also, do you naturally try and see things from as many perspectives as possible? Thats a big one for me. I think thats why I only trust my intuition. I try and see so many sides of the story that at the end of the day, I just have to trust my intuition or I'll never be able to make a decision.
> 
> Hope that helps.


Yes my memory is very good, but not as good as it use to be, I can't remember things as well as I use to. Maybe it's because the data and information I am processing these days is far more then what it use to be. I can barely remember all the GDP's, GDP PPP, GNI PPP. I can remember some...

Like I think off the top of my head Switzerland's GDP is 544,000 approximately according to the international momentary fund. Luxembourg is $104,000 GDP per capita. but around $80,000 GDP PPP per capita. Austria's GDP is somewhere around $303,000 Norway with 256,000. 

But even off the top of my head, I'm struggling to recall the amounts straight away, and it's taking time for it to splurge out. This is the same issue I have when people get me to switch languages. You see I know 5 languages. So once some friends got me to say things in all these languages, and it took a while to switch. 

Finnish was the hardest to switch into, and i think that's because I know the cases in my head as a cluster of letters. Like what I mean by this is when someone says I went to the store. I only understand the motion to something in Finnish, as -lle. because that is the suffix you use to denote the origin of x or a movement of x towards y. 

lle is cluster of letters to me that represents movement towards a surface or to someone. and when I say it envision them, I literally mean I see the letters as a cluster in my head, I don't know lle as the allative case(I just had to check that) Just like I naturally know that the cluster -sta means out from inside, or the origin of something, or it can mean the movement away from the surface. I don't know that it is the elative, but this is how i perceive it.

However maybe this information is there it's just buried deep within my subconcious. I have recently gotten back into trying to gain fluency in French. I had learned french for 8 years, and not siad a word or anything in it for 10 years. My french tutor is impressed about how fast I am picking it up again, as well as other things. 

It came to me naturally that I was speaking in the standard parisian, naturally pronouncing the words as i read them, and spelling them as i heard them. There was simply no effort, it was like my mind knew not to pronounce the -ent at the end of a verb, and to remember that you pronounce the ai as an e sound, and the french R was like it was second nature.

So how well have I progressed? Well after 9 hours of french tuition, I am now reading 8 year old books without a prblem, and I am understanding them, words are coming to me out of nowhere as well... Have I done any study? Well I started in jan 6th and I say I have done about 30 minutes study at home a week. 

As for the Ni/Ne very rarely do I use it, but one example I can think of using N I think this is N, is that I will imagine, a "what if" like what if Perth widened the tracks from 1000mm to the standard 1435mm guage, bought their own trains, and say they were the Siemens Velaro, and what if they WA deoartment of transportation started to turn Transperth into a public company, selling part of it off over time, would the service be a lot more efficient? will you pay for first class tickets to have a table? would people be more inclined to take the train, if the train is now faster, with a lot more facilities. Would people from mandurah commute to Joondalup(one end of the city to the other). Could transparth expand to Bunbury, and up to geraldton, creating an expansion of property homes along the coast? 

that's how my mind works. when thinking of a circumstance. however I have a tendency to think off on a tangent, many people don't know how on earth i an get from topic a to topic b...

My french tutor always says _revenons à nos moutons_ which is a saying which means let's return back to the subject at hand. I don't know how, but i can get from one topic to a topic with hardly any corellation to the other, yet i've managed to make connection. 

However though I make a connection with strawberries to an event I went and to someones parfum that I have smelt...


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## Komplex (Jan 14, 2011)

okay cognitive function test says...

Fi(19) Si(17) Te(16) Ne(15) Se(12) Ti10) Ni(8) Fe(8).

Does this suggest INFP?


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## vel (May 17, 2010)

Komplex said:


> In some respects i hardly used my intuition, though i depended on it a lot more when i was younger and in my teens. if something was fishy I'd disregard all the other information. Im not one to use information over what I am feeling. Like I was working with someone who everyone thoguht was a great person, but what I felt in his presence and the way he carried himself; I didn't trsut him. 2 months later he's caught on drugs...


I believe you are mis-undertanding what intuition is in MBTI. Everybody has hunches like this one you are describing. For example I read about a study where a group of random volunteers was made to play a game where the participants had a choice of either cooperating or cheating each other. The study noted that if the volunteers were allowed 30 minutes time to talk to each other and get to know one another, they were significantly better at predicting who is going to cheat them at this game. You can imagine 30 minutes meeting new people is only enough time for some small talk, yet 30 minutes was enough time for these people to get these 'hunches' about who might be untrustworthy in the group and who will let them down. They repeated this with several groups. Clearly they weren't just picking intuitives every time. Intuition isn't what gives people such predictive ability in the first place.



Komplex said:


> Yes my memory is very good, but not as good as it use to be, I can't remember things as well as I use to. Maybe it's because the data and information I am processing these days is far more then what it use to be. I can barely remember all the GDP's, GDP PPP, GNI PPP. I can remember some...
> 
> Like I think off the top of my head Switzerland's GDP is 544,000 approximately according to the international momentary fund. Luxembourg is $104,000 GDP per capita. but around $80,000 GDP PPP per capita. Austria's GDP is somewhere around $303,000 Norway with 256,000. But even off the top of my head, I'm struggling to recall the amounts straight away, and it's taking time for it to splurge out.


I think you are confusing Si with very good memory. Si doesn't mean you will have godlike abilities to memorize every single little piece of data out there and be able to speak 10+ languages. These functions they are like value lenses through which you see the world. They determine what you think is valuable, interesting, worthwhile, and what you find boring and irrelevant and even unpleasant. They don't dictate your intelligence or how good your memory is, though people often try to make such correlations.

So for example for me as a Ni dominant I would not memorize GDP of various countries. I don't think this is worthwhile because my perception is that it is meaningless to spend time on memorizing these details when I can look them up anywhere where I can have access to internet. Neither do I need this sort of information for work or school. Hence my Ni would normally reject storing this in memory because I cannot relate this information to any context or anything that is meaningful for me.



Komplex said:


> As for the Ni/Ne very rarely do I use it, but one example I can think of using N I think this is N, is that I will imagine, a "what if" like what if Perth widened the tracks from 1000mm to the standard 1435mm guage, bought their own trains, and say they were the Siemens Velaro, and what if they WA deoartment of transportation started to turn Transperth into a public company, selling part of it off over time, would the service be a lot more efficient? will you pay for first class tickets to have a table? would people be more inclined to take the train, if the train is now faster, with a lot more facilities. Would people from mandurah commute to Joondalup(one end of the city to the other). Could transparth expand to Bunbury, and up to geraldton, creating an expansion of property homes along the coast?


There are no sensors who don't have intuition. We are all sensors and intuitives at the same time. Only difference is which functions do you use most often, with greater frequency in your daily life, sensing ones Si/Se or intuitive ones Ni/Ne? Therefore it is perfectly normal for a sensor to ask "what if" questions and for an intuitive to pay attention to the things as they are in the physical world rather than imagining anything hypothetical out of them.


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## Komplex (Jan 14, 2011)

vel said:


> I think you are confusing Si with very good memory. Si doesn't mean you will have godlike abilities to memorize every single little piece of data out there and be able to speak 10+ languages. These functions they are like value lenses through which you see the world. They determine what you think is valuable, interesting, worthwhile, and what you find boring and irrelevant and even unpleasant. They don't dictate your intelligence or how good your memory is, though people often try to make such correlations.


yes it sounds like it doesn't it?



vel said:


> So for example for me as a Ni dominant I would not memorize GDP of various countries. I don't think this is worthwhile because my perception is that it is meaningless to spend time on memorizing these details when I can look them up anywhere where I can have access to internet. Neither do I need this sort of information for work or school. Hence my Ni would normally reject storing this in memory because I cannot relate this information to any context or anything that is meaningful for me.


I actually didn't memorize, it's what I remember from looking at it once, out of interest.




vel said:


> There are no sensors who don't have intuition. We are all sensors and intuitives at the same time. Only difference is which functions do you use most often, with greater frequency in your daily life, sensing ones Si/Se or intuitive ones Ni/Ne? Therefore it is perfectly normal for a sensor to ask "what if" questions and for an intuitive to pay attention to the things as they are in the physical world rather than imagining anything hypothetical out of them.


yes I understand that, hence Si-dom or Ni-dom.


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