Greg

In this post I discuss the World Socionics Society interview with Greg, embedded below.

I was not able to get in touch with Greg who did not respond to my messages. I would prefer to have the permission of the people who I analyze in a detailed public fashion, but I found this particular interview so compelling that I decided to post about it anyway. While I would prefer to have Greg's approval, ultimately I consider it ethical to examine for public analysis a video that is shared publically.

Here is a selection of the notes I took about Greg while watching the video:

Lots of use of corporate, businesslike language. Very involved and identified with his profession.

Strange, energetically-driven comments, "I am fortunate to have the ability to see between the molecules, to have a greater comprehension of the human condition."

Shows somewhat limited emotional range although becomes much more comfortable in the later part of the interview

Idealistic commentary about his profession, a bit unusual in the context of a marketing job perhaps. Sees a portion of marketing as helping people and driving innovation.

Describes interesting "pre-instigating" -- taking the initiative before other people have a change to take the initiative whenever he senses that someone else is about to initiate

If these observations do not seem substantial to you, and/or you did not get a whole lot out of the interview to understand what sort of person Greg is, you are much like me, at least the first time watching through the interview. The interviewer's suggestion of ESE initially appeared reasonable to me, but I wondered about other types especially ILE and IEE; I did not have a good sense of what was going on.

The second time I watched the interview, I caught a lot more. The meat of the interview is subtle. Pay close attention to the language used. Here is a selection of comments:

"I am highly loyal with my friends [...] My friends and I are very open, we tell each other that we love each other [...] We're vulnerable around each other; there's an authenticity to our engagement"

"I am very touchy-feely in relationships; I have a high degree of emotional sensitivity and physical sensitivity, so I like to express myself physically and emotionally"

"I try to maintain relationships with my family that are authentic"

"My perception of the given emotion in that moment is that my whole life has felt that way, it's very extreme [...] I struggle with the desire to say what I feel in any given moment regardless whether it's appropriate or not"

"I'm a good channeler of otherworld energy"

"I'm in tune with the world's energy, which isn't always a good thing, I think I suffer a lot because of it, but I do feel honored that I have the ability to sense that, I'm on a wavelength that if I watch a news report, I'm there and feeling it the way that people there would be feeling it."

These comments are stated without much emotional energy, but I was drawn to the extremity of these comments, and especially of the somewhat bland telling our friends that we love each other. All of these comments are spoken softly, but their emotional depth is quite strong and a lot of types are not comfortable saying things like the things he says he says, with such open emotionality, especially towards strangers.

The comments about "between the molecules" and "otherworld energy" are particularly well described. This sort of language, reading the "energy" of other people or situations is something that is most often described by Fe ego types. Typically these are stated in vague ways such as e.g. "I am good at reading the energy of situations" which is vague and sounds metaphysically implausible. Greg's descriptions of this phenomenon, especially the description of watching news reports and feeling things, and his experience of observing riots in Belfast, do an excellent job of very precisely showing exactly what these comments are supposed to mean. That is, he expands on the vague statements like "I am a good channeler of otherworldly energy" and describes that what he really means by this is tapping into the emotional mood of the world around him, basically a picturesque example of Fe orientation towards the exterior emotional state.

It is also worth noting that a key component of Greg's emotionality is his *openness.* He has an altruistic idealism towards the world, a friendliness towards others and seems to be not at all judgmental, ideological, or heated. A typing of EIE wouldn't necessarily be extremely unreasonable from this video, but I interpret that alpha values are better.

A few other observations

Interesting comment, "I tell what is going on in each specific moment and then figure out what is the best thing to do at that moment, but I can't plan more than a few steps ahead"

But I can plan very meticulously somethnig that is self-contained, like a six-week vacation I can plan every part in advance.

These can be thought of as Si ego statements with Ni vulnerable. The argument that they are suggestive of Si immediate-moment attention is stronger than them being Ni vulnerable.

One of the reasons I wanted to post about this interview is because I felt that a lot of the informative content in this interview is very subtle and it took me a little while to realize it was there. However, the interviewer picks up on all of this subtlety and offers ESE as a typing very quickly -- as well as offering a sound explanation of the care with which Greg takes his image to explain why Greg's emotionality is so subdued in spite of this typing. Of the twenty-odd World Socionics Society interviews I have watched, most of them are pretty good, but still I identified some mistakes or choices that I found questionable in the interview methodology. This one is, as far as I can tell, virtually entirely free of executional flaws (apart perhaps from the interview questions). In no other WSS interview does the interviewer do a better job than in this one. Unlike some of the other interviews, the interviewer played his role in moving the discussion forward, generally did not make leading statements or speculate about motivations that were not stated in Greg's words, picked up on all of the subtle cues he was supposed to, and explicitly provided good explanations for why they were so subtle in his conclusion (which of course I think is correct). I can say without question that if I were interviewing Greg I would not have done as good a job.

Interview Rachel

Here I interviewed Rachel in the video which is embedded below:

Some observations and interpretations:

• Firstly, Rachel shared situations in which she seemed to fail to contemplate alternative paths. I got the impression that Rachel had difficulty with thinking of alternatives quickly in the interview from her discussion of being lost and unmotivated in psychology classes and discouraged from pursuit of clinical practice but neither contemplating an experimental psychology track nor having any actionable ideas of anything else that she might have wanted to do or study. Rachel's discussion of her experience floundering in college starts at 3:30-8:30 and my analysis describing the difficulty with contemplating alternatives follows right afterward at 8:30. We see some additional evidence that Rachel might not have contemplated alternatives in her description of social media activity, for instance in the story starting around 25:30 Rachel handled the people she was in conflict with on social media by removing them, without considering different technical or social engineering solutions, and further evidence of being especially inattentive to alternate ways of doing social engineering in the social media episodes described at 1:12:30. At multiple points in the interview, she describes that changes in her circumstances, both in work and family life (31:25), have removed the "guesswork", which allows her to focus better. 
• For much of the interview Rachel had a physically stationary posture. She moved her neck a great deal as she was thinking and communicating (for instance at the segment at 15:00). However there is very little motion when she stops talking and very little motion of the arms (e.g. for gesturing).
• Rachel has some mostly deep interests in physical subjects such as conditioning and animals, including birds (27:55), octopi (29:55), dance and martial arts (54:30), and physical therapy. Some of these interests are more fleeting or untapped, but some of them seem to have a lot of associated excitement and run rather deep.
• Rachel describes anecdotes that reveal a tendency to be very spontaneously and harshly critical of others, at times audacious critical. The situation described starting at 44:35 where Rachel had a confrontation with a supervisor could be considered audaciously critical. Rachel is critical of her colleagues starting at 20:50. She has critical comments about people on social media around 37:00. Rachel seemed especially critical of people who "don't shoot straight" as in her anecdotes about workplace gossip (23:00), and those who don't focus on their work (21:20, 22:00). It doesn't seem like Rachel is averse from conflict or confrontation.
• I mention this explicitly in the interview at points, but on the whole it seems like Rachel is a spiritually much more well developed person than she was in her youth.

Relatedly to the last observation it seems like Rachel is fulfilled by her life circumstances, and specifically by her responsibilities, by her ability to work with her mind, and by the lack of ambiguity that her current life's circumstances present to her. These three factors are my best interpretation of the things that seemed to matter for Rachel; they are debatable but they seemed to stand out in several ways. I thought it seemed uncanny that, having had a lengthy series of "just a job" jobs that Rachel described suitable fit and fulfillment from her job in the insurance industry, explaining insurance contracts and "putting down the law" on faulty insurance claims. Many people would find this job excruciatingly boring, detailed, or emotionally draining. Of course Rachel described that the best thing about the job was the compensation and benefits, and not the job description, but she also praised the job for various characteristics. I think the three characteristics I described above of regular, consistent responsibility, lack of ambiguity and emotional management, and the ability to work with the mind are all important aspects of why this job seems to be tolerable for Rachel.

My view is that Rachel is the LSI.

What is most clear from our interview is that she has Se values . She is readily confrontational, and appears to have had some deficits in planning in her life, especially in the realm of exploring different possibilities or different things to do.

When I first conducted the interview, I had not considered the LSI carefully, and thought more readily of Se dominant types, more likely the SLE. I think that there is some evidence to suggest the SLE typing, most notably the education and work history consisting of a sequence of short, odd jobs that Rachel held, with little long term direction or planning, and at times, little impulse control. .

When I reviewed the interview, taking it as a whole I was not inclined to see Rachel as impulsive. Instead I observed that was contemplative and had a stable amount of energy (including physically, with her posture). She also did not seem talkative; at many points after she was finished talking, and while I was writing notes or thinking, she did not proceed narrating, instead regarding the thought as concluded (she did continue her thought through the pauses sometimes; more often than not she didn't). These observations are debatable. It's true that Rachel has had a sequence of poorly planned events encompassing her entire life for a period of time. But she also seems to have gotten much better at planning and living intentionally, since then.

Rachel was very spontaneously demonstrative of her irritation or anger towards other people. This facet of Rachel is probably quite obvious even to the beginning observer. In her irritability there is a nervous energy, I think, which is a contradiction with the previous observation that her energy levels are stable. I think both are true.

Rachel mentioned very early on that she has a history of depression and at 31:45 that she has an "addictive personality." These are very common mental health difficulties and in my opinion, while different types of people have different mental health challenges that they are more susceptible to, it is difficult to say much more about how we can interpret this information with respect to quadra values and types. She has definitely progressed dramatically in terms of her spiritual progress, since her more acute mental health episodes. My point in bringing this up is not to make an "excuse" for data points that do not fit with my typing (such as impulsivity in work history), but rather to paint a richer picture of Rachel and to point out that the data points may not be inconsistent in any case.

In Model A, my opinion is that Rachel's difficulty with ambiguity better reflects Ne vulnerable than Ne role. She seems to have an affinity for work that involves working with impersonal information and applying a rule-based procedure, which in my view reflects a Ti ego type, likely Ti and Se. She does not like situations where she goes off-book from the protocol, and describes that she is uncomfortable with situations where things were not done correctly (see at 25:00) although this could be for multiple reasons).

Rachel seems to be an introvert in the colloquial sense of the term. She certainly does not describe herself as doing a lot of activities outside of a small world consisting of family and work. It seems most likely to me that her world really is just as small as that, as a stereotypical introvert.

As I discussed in the video (see dialogue beginning at 1:15:00), it seems that Rachel has at least some loss of focus towards the intentions and desires of other people, and especially other people that she isn't particularly close to. It's also interesting how she describes at multiple points (13:30, 1:00:40) that she doesn't want to sacrifice of herself in order to help people, or even seem particularly motivated to help other people (in a generalized way) at all. You could reasonably infer that Rachel's lack of focus on people is a total blind spot that better matches Fi vulnerable than Fi role, but I think it is not as clear, beyond saying that Fi is subdued in Rachel's psyche. Another possibility is that Rachel's lack of focus on people is a high level of selectivity associated with Fi valuing types, and that Rachel is a gamma type such as LIE or SEE. But a gamma extrovert seems to fit much less well with the overall observations, especially my view that she is an introvert.

Rachel does not seem very ideologically rigid, and is hesitant to generalize about other people. Although many LSIs are prone to categorical thinking, this type of intentional restraint from making categorical generalizations is also a reasonably common feature of LSIs.

The best alternative to LSI, I think, is the SLE. I have already discussed some reasons why it is or is not a good fit. So for many reasons I think the SLE typing is less likely, but I see where other people would find merits in that typing.