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Gibson's type discussion
van der Hoop on Ne
Robert Downey Jr 's dominant Ne
Elon Musk and the INTJ Archetype
Walter Issacson: "Compounding his social problems was his unwillingness to suffer politely those he considered fools. He used the word 'stupid' often."
Walter Issacson: "He was a very determined kid."
Kimbal Musk: "He has this fierce determination that blows your mind and was sometimes frightening and still is."
Walter Issacson: "Elon also had a tendency to be spacey and wander off on his own, oblivious to what others were doing."
Walter Issacson: “He didn't have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked. He was not hardwired to have empathy. Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole."
Walter Issacson: "[As a child] Elon developed into a night person, staying up until dawn reading books."
Walter Issacson: "Elon developed a reputation for being the most fearless [out of the cousins]. When the cousins went to a movie and people were making noise, he would be the one to go over and tell them to be quiet, even if they were much bigger. ... He was also the most competitive of the cousins."
Walter Issacson: "Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch. When the family went to someone’s house, he would disappear into their host’s library. When they went into town, he would wander off and later be found at a bookstore, sitting on the floor, in his own world."
Walter Issacson: "The single-minded passion of the superheroes impressed him."
Walter Issacson: "Musk read both sets of his father’s encyclopedias and became, to his doting mother and sister, a 'genius boy.' To other kids, however, he was an annoying nerd. 'Look at the moon, it must be a million miles away,' a cousin once exclaimed. Replied Elon, 'No, it’s like 239,000 miles, depending on the orbit.'"
Walter Issacson: "When he reached his teens, it began to gnaw at him that something was missing. Both the religious and the scientific explanations of existence, he says, did not address the really big questions, such as Where did the universe come from, and why does it exist? Physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential crisis. 'I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was,' he says. 'And I got real depressed about it, like maybe life may have no meaning.' Like a good bookworm, he addressed these questions through reading ... existential philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schopenhauer."
Walter Isaacson: "He was more interested in late-night philosophy discussions about the meaning of life. 'I was really hungry for that,' he says, 'because until then I had no friends I could talk to about these things.' But most of all, he became immersed, with Mr. Farooq at his side, in the world of board and computer games."
Walter Isaacson: "At college he became more focused on the [video game] genre known as strategy games, ones that involve two or more players competing to build an empire using high-level strategy, resource management, supply-chain logistics, and tactical thinking. Strategy games—those played on a board and then those for computers—would become central to Musk’s life. From The Ancient Art of War, which he played as a teen in South Africa, to his addiction to The Battle of Polytopia three decades later, he relished the complex planning and competitive management of resources that are required to prevail. Immersing himself in these games for hours became the way he relaxed, escaped stress, and honed his tactical skills and strategic thinking for business."
Walter Isaacson: "He never got fully immersed in [parties]. 'I was stone cold sober at the time,' he says. 'Adeo would get wasted. I’d be banging on his door and say, like, 'Dude, you’ve got to come up and manage the party.'' I ended up being the one who had to keep an eye on things.' Ressi later marveled that Musk usually seemed a bit detached. 'He enjoyed being around a party but not fully in it. The only thing he binged on was video games.' Despite all of their partying, he understood that Musk was fundamentally alienated and withdrawn, like an observer from a different planet trying to learn the motions of sociability. 'I wish Elon knew how to be a little happier,' he says."
Walter Isaacson: "He had a fanatic love of video games and the skills to make money creating them, but that was not the best way to spend his life. 'I wanted to have more impact,' he says."
Walter Isaacson: "From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance. At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same. His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges."
Walter Isaacson: "With his weak empathy gene, he didn’t realize or care that correcting someone publicly—or, as he put it, 'fixing their fucking stupid code'—was not a path to endearment. He had never been a captain of a sports team or the leader of a gang of friends, and he lacked an instinct for camaraderie. Like Steve Jobs, he genuinely did not care if he offended or intimidated the people he worked with, as long as he drove them to accomplish feats they thought were impossible. 'It’s not your job to make people on your team love you,' he said at a SpaceX executive session years later. 'In fact, that’s counterproductive.'"
Walter Isaacson: "Elon at age twenty-seven walked away with $22 million ... Elon bought an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo and splurged on what for him was the ultimate indulgence: a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car, the fastest production car in existence. ... After the impulsive outburst, he realized that the giddy display of his newfound taste for wealth was unseemly. 'Some could interpret the purchase of this car as behavior characteristic of an imperialist brat,' he admitted. 'My values may have changed, but I’m not consciously aware of my values having changed.' Had they changed? His new wealth allowed his desires and impulses to be subject to fewer restraints, which was not always a pretty sight. But his earnest, mission-driven intensity remained intact."
Justine Musk: “He’s not a man who takes no for an answer.”
Elon Musk (asking out Justine Musk, then Justine Wilson): "You have a fire in your soul. I see myself in you."
Walter Isaacson: "[Justine Musk, then Justine Wilson,] was impressed by his aspirations. 'Unlike other ambitious people, he never talked about making money,' she says. 'He assumed that he would be either wealthy or broke, but nothing in between. What interested him were the problems he wanted to solve.' His indomitable will—whether for making her date him or for building electric cars—mesmerized her. 'Even when it seemed like crazy talk, you would believe him because he believed it.'"
Justine Musk: “For somebody who was so amorous about me, he never hesitated to let me know that I was wrong about something, ... and I would fight back. I realized that I could say anything to him, and it just did not faze him.”
Walter Isaacson: "On a trip to Paris, they went to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Musée de Cluny. Justine began describing what moved her, and she gave a spiritual interpretation involving the unicorn as a Christ-like figure. Musk called that 'stupid.' They began arguing furiously about Christian symbolism. 'He was just so adamant and furious that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I was stupid and crazy,' she says."
Disagreements with IDRlabs
My Typings (that's not on IDRlabs)
profession, no different than it is for any
other profession.”
Waltz: "When Jochen Rindt was racing ... I remember everything about
Waltz: "I have a less romantic and idealistic approach to acting."
Burr: "[Stand up is] like, This is what I’m doing now. ... I obviously learned from a bunch of masters, but it always flowed into me. When you find what you’re supposed to do there’s not a lot of thinking. It just is."
Burr: "Life is all about getting knocked down and learning how to come back up even harder. Not being stupid about it and keep running into the same wall the same way, you adjust and try to get over it."
Burr: "I feel like we live in this ridiculously over-sensitive time where people get offended over nothing."
Steven J. Rubenzer: “[He was] usually
Steven J. Rubenzer: “Harding always tried
Steven J. Rubenzer: “He was decidedly
Scott: “I hate cliques. I’m not into being labeled in any way. I don’t like
Why I don't think Hugh Hefner is Se dominant
Transcendentally Oriented:
Now I’ll move on to the functional approach to determining type. According to IDRlabs, “Ne is bound to always be dissatisfied with the world in its current state. In the words of Isabel Myers, the Ne types ‘regard the immediate situation as a prison from which escape is urgently necessary.’ … The escape from the status quo is worth more to the Ne type than the world as we know it. For his interest is not in the world as it is, but in the world as it could be.” Now, I must preface by saying that any type can be discontent with the status quo, as that can also be a subject of upbringing, beliefs, ambitions, etc. (factors outside of typological functions) but, all else being equal, Ne types are more likely to want to "escape" their current context and be attuned to issues that transcend the here and now compared to Se types. One could say that the combination of Ne and Fi causes the ENFP to often, as IDRlabs puts it, “undertake a crusade in order to help the marginalized or the underdogs in society. [They] will naturally see things from the point of view of the outsiders and seek to champion their cause” and be "tireless in your pursuit of the untested, the untried, and the fight against the status quo." And with the aid of tertiary Te, ENFPs, as Michael Goist in the IDRlabs "Why Ludwig van Beethoven Is INFP" puts it, "can often be surprisingly entrepreneurial with regards to motivating real-world movements and pushing for specific values and outcomes to be applied to the sphere of real-world affairs." Here are some quotes by and about Hefner that exemplify the aforementioned characteristics:
Rolling Stone: “His metamorphosis into Mr. Playboy in 1962, for all its PR value to the magazine, was never just a self-serving effort. It was also an attempt to change American ideas about sexuality, a way to challenge the stigma of sexual freedom. When Hef took on his role, blending his political rhetoric with a promiscuous lifestyle, he was trying to challenge the idea that casual sex was immoral.”
CBS: “‘I felt from a very early age that there were things in society that were wrong, and that I might play some small part in changing them,’ Hefner said. … Hefner was … a man on a mission to alter society's conservative views on sex, politics and social equality. Playboy would be his tool. ‘Playboy was the first mainstream club, non-black club that actually put on stage black comedians,’ Hefner said. … From abortion to capital punishment to the Vietnam War, Playboy was the forum for Hefner's concerns in society.”
NY Times: "The Playboy Philosophy advocated freedom of speech in all its aspects, for which Mr. Hefner won civil liberties awards. He supported progressive social causes and lost some sponsors by inviting black guests to his televised parties at a time when much of the nation still had Jim Crow laws. The magazine was [also] a forum for serious interviews, the subjects including Jimmy Carter (who famously confessed, 'I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times'), Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Malcolm X."
Rolling Stone: “Hefner explains that, during this time, he was ‘exploring the outer limits of what it really meant to be moral.’ … He was stifled by the traditional values that, up until that point, choreographed his life, and that he is purposefully discarding them.”
Hefner: “I’ve always … was able to see the inequalities in power
relationships, and have always felt connected to the underdog whether it
was in a sexual situation or political or anything else.”
Hefner: “There's always been a little bit of the crusader in me, and you know, you need dragons to slay.”
Manner of communication:
The quotes I will be presenting in this section all involve bringing together different perspectives to an illustrate abstract idea which, all else being equal, suggests more Ne than Se which tends to be more straightforward about the point it wants to make. Another thing to note is that while reading these quotes, we should also keep in mind the point I made earlier of Ne regarding the status quo "as a prison from which escape is urgently necessary [and] it's interest in not the world as it is, but as it could be" as those tend to also be a theme in these quotes, all of which are from the same interview (warning, many of them are long):
Hefner: “Puritanism is not there for the puritan, by it's nature Puritanism is there as a set of values that you must live by, however you feel about them and that of course is the authoritarian scary part of it. … The fact that women in their quest for a liberation should also include in their agenda the notion of taking some of the personal freedom away from another part of society is very puritan, and you can call it a radical or liberal or left agenda, but of course it isn't and the labels become very confused. And once again you have to go to Orwell to see how the labels of things change the perception of things, I mean that's what Orwellian Newspeak was really all about, the notion that you could change the labels and the language of things and you would change the perception, and we have seen that certainly in terms of sex in really dramatic form in the last twenty years in which sexual images that were perceived in the past as simply pin-up pictures were then perceived and called exploitation and then eventually called pornography, and they are the same innocent pin-up pictures, and I think that that is the way you change the perception of things and you change of course the perception of sex itself, when you begin to define it as sexual harassment and date rape and increasingly you start to think that sex is really the ugly part of life. Now that is … not to say that … sex [doesn’t have] its darker side, but I think that … one of the things I tried to do with the philosophy was to suggest that the one area of human activity that we don't have truly moral perceptions on is sex. We were raised in a time in which what was called moral in the sexual arena was simply a set of thou shall nots, taboos that were not necessarily good for the people, and in … all other areas of human activity, what is called moral is what benefits people and is good for people, and I hope that we can begin to, and what I called back in the sixties, [form] a new morality, that we begin to find a form of situation ethics that would define sexual values not as a set of absolutes but [as] things that really were good for people. … Because sex is more than simple procreation. … We have to … try to define a set of sexual values that don't perceive that sex itself and the attraction between the sexes is, is somehow equivalent to violence, because after all sex and violence are the polar opposites. One is the life force, the warming force and the other is death and destruction and war and murder.”
[Interviewer: "The nineteen sixties were a period of great change, what do you think overall were the causes of this change."]
Hefner: "Well I think we came out of a very conservative time in the fifties, part of it raised by the political climate at the time but also reflected in conservatism, in lifestyle and I think that a new generation was growing up that was responding to that. To some extent you see a kind of cause effect that is like a pendulum, it swings back and forth. I think that the conservatism that occurred in the nineteen eighties was a direct reaction to and response to the liberal changes that took place in the sixties and seventies. … With all of this kind of thing we get two steps forward and one step back and you know one hopes we’re coming out of the tunnel again. Always we find reasons to thwart and work against the personal freedom with some other explanation. During the fifties it was the cold war much of the repression that occurred, the sexual repression in particular that occurred during the eighties, they related it to Aids. The politicization of the disease … was cause and effect [but] backwards, because it's not really the disease that caused the conservative agenda, the conservative agenda was there already and we have had in America a rather dramatic rise in the Christian right, in America. they actually elected Reagan and gave us for one of the first times … in my lifetime a rather unholy alliance that existed between religion and the state, and that in turn gave us the Mise commission and the Mise commission was nothing more than a cross country witch hunt that had nothing to do with … research related to sex and there are many other evidences of it. … It’s very difficult for me to believe - when I was a kid I grew up, fascinated with Darwin and fascinated with the monkey trial [that took place] in nineteen twenties - … that that controversy would still exist. That creationism would still be perceived in some quarters as a viable perception and there would be controversy as there is in American schools, with evolution on the one hand, with science on the one hand and religious state of superstition on the other, in the form of creationism is strange, but this is the nature of the way we are, we and I don't just mean America I mean, I mean the world, we you know we have in this century you know reached the moon and the stars, our technology and our science is at such an incredible level and in so many other ways we are still superstitious savages in the jungle with some of our social and religious values."
[Interviewer: "How would you describe your own role in the sexual revolution in the 1960's and onwards."]
Hefner: "Well I think that I was very influenced by the, … to some extent the sexual revolution part two, that came after world war two, began really for me with Kinsey, and the research that he did in the books that he published, which were very unpopular, in particular the second book, was scandalous because it involved women, but it made a tremendous impact on me. The first book came out when I was in university in Illinois and I wrote an editorial about it at the time, and then mentioned … the second book in my introduction to the first issue of Playboy. I do think that there were other things going on at the same time and you see those interconnections, but I do think that we were one of the first to voice a set of values, a point of view that in turn became the sexual revolution, so I guess I'm one [of] the founders of that portion of it and I take a great deal of pride in that, but I think it's related to other things that were going on at the time, one can see the change in censorship laws related to some books in the sixties, in the fifties, and I think that you could look to rock and roll as a … part of what this is all about, I think the arrival of Presley a couple of years after the beginning of Playboy. ... to a new set of, more possibilities with personal sex, and when I started doing the philosophy. in 1959 Arnold Gingridge who was the editor of Esquire at the time did an editorial in which he talked about an arrival that he anticipated called the new Victorianism, and he thought it was going to be a more conservative time and he welcomed it, but he was a little older than I was and I think that the generation gap was … showing at the time, and there is something else that you can't separate at the time also, the pill was invented in 1960 and could you have a sexual revolution without the pill. It's all sort of kind of interconnected."
Additional Notes:
While this section may be my weakest, it is still important to consider. Viewing "possibilities" and "willingness to break the boundaries" as inherently positive may at best circumstantial evidence for Intuition, but when combined with a plethora of other evidence, it can strengthen a case, even if it is just a small addition:
Hefner: “I didn't want to repeat my parents' life. I saw in their lives a routine and a lack of dreaming, a lack of the possibilities, a lack of passion.”
Hefner: “[George Carlin] as with Lenny [Bruce was special because of] the combination of the insights and the willingness to break the boundaries.”
Gibson's type discussion
One point against Se dominant for Gibson is that he isn't very literal in his communication in the way an Se type wont to do, in fact, h...
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By S. Kim So I wrote and sent my blog post about Gwen Stefani's typing to IDRlabs through email, which they overlooked (probably due to...
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The following blog will be more casual and less exhaustive/elaborative like some of my other ones but it is still something I think is worth...
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The following blog was inspired by the IDRlabs articles "8 Common Typing Mistakes" and "Typology Lessons from von Franz."...