Interviews -- Jian-Wei Gan Lim

I confess I do not know how to interpret this name but as I understand it this person goes by "Gan." I assume only because the interviewer refers to him with this name. Gan's interview is embedded below.

Observations:

• Preciseness of syntax. From 0:10 "I am doing splendidly, how about you." Yes I understand he is not a native speaker.
• Stiff, focused demeanor. Not a lot of motion. Somewhat stern, attentive gaze, even while thinking. Continuously returns to the same posture.

A selection of notes (i.e., most of them) I made taking the video:

• 3:00  Describing why psychology is interesting, makes use of considerable generality
• 5:20 Studied english literature to study allusions made by "exaggerated reality"
• 6:20 Describes enjoying literature and psychology because of "deciphering", need to make mental leaps to decipher the unsaid.
• 8:50 Social "brashness" a learned skill
• 9:40 "I like to refer to myself in the third person, in a very regal manner.
• 10:30 Enjoys messing with people
• 11-12 Describes considerable ambition without much forethought (wants to be professor of english literature, doesn't know specialization, has no plans for current time, etc.) This ambition is a "greedy" on life rather than the passivity of Ni dominant types.
• 18:30 "Narrative fiction dominates my life"
• 19:00 Going to the gym "Pumped to get that healthy body" at first but interest wanes quickly.
• 22:30 Adjust to match interaction, continues to describe interactions in a "strategic" way
• 25:55 Part of the attraction from women is that I make things "challenging". Very frank discussion of attraction. Describes intentionally minsinterpeting others to mess with them and so on.
• 28:15 Assents to inconsistency in sometimes taking initiative, and sometimes hanging back. Which is reasonable for IEI but not so expected.
• 29:25 Passes from a question about perspective taking to this completely unrelated generalization about evil in the world
• 31:30 Fatalistic view about unspecified psychological illnesses "There is not necessarily anything I could do about that." Not indicative but interesting.
• 33:15 "For all the hot air and occasional depravity, I have morals that I stick firmly to." Very general statement of morals: "One of my big convictions is having loyalty to people. Loyalty to yourself as well; A man should never betray himself in the sense that he betrays the beliefs or standards that he has for himself." Someone who has no convictions at all, those are the people I find a little bit difficult to understand. "The kind of people that would betray their own beliefs just for the sake of a moment."
• 39:20 People that I admire most are the ones that are the least judgmental
• 41:45 My ideal world would be somewhere ruled by the spirit of acceptance
• 43:35 What would the ideal world look like? I haven't really given it that much thought.
• 46:00 Again describes a dislike of judgment
• 47:20 "When I go to a karaoke bar, I feel uplifted, particularly if I am singing a song that has meaning to me"
• 48:45 Expressing messages to the world, I don't necessarily find them gospel that needs to be expressed, I find more joy in the act of expressing them.
• 51:40 I have optimism for the world in general, because I believe we are good in general. I believe the world is in balance, it finds a way to balance.

My typing of Gan is LSI, and not IEI as the interviewer suggests, which of course is a very close type to LSI. There are a number of inconsistencies in the interview that serve to nicely document Gan's character (as we can learn a lot from looking at a person's inconsistencies), many of which are touched on in the notes above.

First of all, there is an uncertainty as to social settings. In this interview, Gan is serious, and stiff. But he tells us -- and probably many people of Gan's type would not realize about themselves -- quite openly about his tendency in social settings to be "brash", to mess with people, and so on.

Gan repeatedly describes his desire for free expression -- for environments where he can be free of judgment and where the "spirit of acceptance" predominates. All Fe-valuing types prefer such environments, but it is an issue for Ti ego types with Fe in the super-id. It is easier to see the repeated, insistent emphasis of free expression as a characteristic of Fe super-id than as Fe ego. The same is true of comments like "I am uplifted by the energy of singing songs in the karaoke bar," it is of course possible but the entire presentation is a bit over the top for Fe ego types to say such things. It's also worth pointing out the note at 6:00 about "deciphering" -- in this case the statement is less clear in that it would be reasonable for an IEI to say something similar, but it is very common for Ti dominant types to be enchanted at their own ability to "decipher" hidden motivations.

Gan has a certain self-presentation of regal formality, present in his language (which as I note at 0:10 is very precise, there are other examples of specific usage of complex syntax which I concede may be a language issue). He presents himself in a measured way even when talking about quite personal issues, and does not try to come across as overly intellectual.

Relatedly, he is willing to speak about many topics, including ethics and psychology, by summarizing them with broadly general overview statements. In my opinion -- again not straightforward to prove -- Gan's style of generalizing is characteristic of the logical chunking (i.e., compressing data into one neatly formulated concept) usually expressed by Ti dominant types. This type of chunking is offered repeatedly on a range of topics, and in my opinion, while I think IEIs do sometimes offer this sort of chunking, in my opinion in Ti types, and especially LSIs, it as central to the way they generate explanations as it is with Gan here.