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<p>Don’t know which type you are?
<a href=“http://www.personalitypathways.com/[/url]”>http://www.personalitypathways.com/</a></p>
<p>Let the “My name is X, and I’m an INTP” therapyfest begin!</p>
<p>My name is Lil’, and I’m an INTP.</p>
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<p>I see - what books did you self-study out of? I have a huge list of books that I collected - right now I’m reading Koch’s “Quest for Consciousness”.</p>
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It also seems to be that INTPs are the types whose talents aren’t best reflected by either grades or test scores (although some of them do quite well in test scores relative to GPA). I have lower grades and test scores than my brother - yet I’m far more inquisitive and knowledgeable than he is.</p>
<p>Inq, I skipped assigned readings and school altogether (save for the occasions I actually cracked the books open before a test I’d decied it was best not to slack off on). I went to school in Scandinavia, so no options to self-study out of things at all were offered - you accept the roadblocks they put on your thought, or you drop out. </p>
<p>I used to hang out at the library and read material school tends to convince students to stay away from until they get “ready” (by reading bullet-pointed intro matieral that waters down the basics completely? Give me a break). I hung out on political debate forums and discussed ideas through with older friends. Do you feel this same way? Like the idea that school is the only, or even best, venue to get knowledge is just the most absurd thing ever?</p>
<p>(Btw, my favorie book is “Goedel Escher Bach”. You have to read it. It’s very star trekkie and sends your mind into a complete tailspin.)</p>
<p>Grades & scores: I think you’re right. I have a 4.0 gpa today, mostly because I got myself together and realized the game isn’t played by my rules, and I have to adapt. I’m still not the happy-go-lucky student with organized notes and a datebook for deadlines (although I have a fetish for buying datebooks, post-its, all the good stuff – then never touching it again), but I manage by trying to be creative with my assignments rather than creative with how to interpret deadlines, haha.</p>
<p>My ACT is 27, but I can’t say I care. Like we talked about in the other thread, standardized tests say very little (in fact, 88% of the time throwing a dice better predicts college aptitude than SAT scores… but believing otherwise is benefitial to testing agencies, so there you have it).</p>
<p>I used to feel a little bitter about kids with no originality in their thought getting better grades than I did simply because they believed in the system so much. I’ve come to realize it’s been my own fault for not just sucking it up and adapting. Another issue I’ve had school-wise is my tendency to abandon a topic as soon as I feel I’ve explored it enough - there is no consistency, and so I end up not truly excelling at anything; neither do I feel the need to, even though I know it’ll be the end of me once I’m hurled into life beyond college.</p>
<p>INTP</p>
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<p>Wow. I read about how difficult it was to homeschool oneself (or self-study for placement exams) in other countries through “The Teenage Liberation Handbook”. It was somewhat depressing - and it also forced me to rethink (I was narrow-minded back then - so after the 2004 Bush victory I developed some sort of hatred for America and thought that other countries would have ran better). I finally got out of that mentality. It would have been easier for me to get out of that mentality had I simply posted my thoughts online and to get pwned for it.</p>
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<p>Yes - I feel exactly the same way - it sums up my thoughts as well. While school in America does not prohibit you from "material school tends to convince students to stay away from until they get “ready” " - it certainly convinces students that they need to “get ready” before investigating any sort of material in depth.</p>
<p>The other problem is the entrenched nature of the school structure. You’re with the same group of peers for several years straight. If none of them are intellectually open (this was the case for everyone at my school) - then there is no social reinforcement for you to pursue ANY material of interest. The sad thing is that I never read ANY behavioral science books other than Herrnstein and Murray’s “Bell Curve” and the “Nurture Assumption” of Harris until I was 17 (and that was only after my original plan turned out unsuccessful because I couldn’t control my curiosity!) I literally would have to control my curiosity in order to do well in my classes. While one has to control one’s own curiosity in order to get tasks done - the fact was that I still had a lot to learn and that since I didn’t have many opportunities after college to pursue the resources that I would be interested in - I decided just to bite into my natural curiosity and read, read, read, taking full advantage of my university library’s system.
(the situation was actually more complex than this - I actually had no foresight that I would have learned so much through this. It initially merely started with my obsession with journal articles that started out from a sociology class that was very well taught - unfortunately - most classes are not taught like that). A WELL TAUGHT class ENCOURAGES students to seek out materials on their own initiative - it does not present materials in a textbook format. And it shouldn’t be in the form of a class either - it should be in the form of a website that anyone with potential interest could be able to access. </p>
<p>On a side note - it’s also the notion that “if you have straight A’s and good test scores - you should go out and have some fun.” If you’re that way, you should become complacent. So as the mentality says. The problem with that is that you’re still narrow-minded after all that. Very few people actually READ good non-fiction books on social theory or evolutionary biology or the problems of the educational system or etc.etc.etc in their spare time - and the problem is that they never get the idea to read those in the first place. It’s kind of sad that the best-selling books by scientists have names like “The God Delusion” instead of names like “The Extended Phenotype”. </p>
<p>By the way, the class that was very well taught: <a href=“http://courses.washington.edu/academy3[/url]”>http://courses.washington.edu/academy3</a> . You can see the research journal articles and books there. It had an online forum. None of the students were as motivated as I was (early entrance students by the way) - since most of them were already bent on their professional tracks. Once they’d finish with their schoolwork - they’d go out and have fun. They wouldn’t go on pursuing more reading.</p>
<p>Maybe there needs to be an essay contest on this. There is a facebook group called “Free World Class Education” - with students who are dissatisifed with the informational asymmetries that school systems (and universities) generally promote.</p>
<p>I know people who have been been discouraged from a particular subject/field of study just because of a SINGLE poor class. In fact - people in college are encouraged to be “open” - but yet - they don’t have much of an opportunity to really pursue what they want to do. If they do poorly in a single class - they’re told to stop pursuing that particular class. People who tend to rely on external motivation tend to be discouraged from subjects that they have potential interest in rather easily. In contrast - I developed an internal motivation in the subjects I want to pursue, and even though I fully know that most of my classes will not be particularly engaging, I’m not going to let those facts discourage me from my pursuit of the material. Self-studiers are a lot less likely to get discouraged by such instances than people who are socialized to rely on classes for most of their material.</p>
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<p>Am going to post more…</p>
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<p>Yeah - the most intellectually open people I ever met came from online forums (that does not speak much - since none of my classmates were anything close to intellectually open). It’s actually interesting - forums tend to be highly self-select communities where you’re judged solely on the basis of your ideas. Ever since I was 13, I noticed how most of my fellow forummers were far smarter than average - and that there were many forum debates that gone into depths that none of my classmates could ever go into (and those forums were gaming forums - though I had the luck of the draw - not that many gaming forums actually do have forums with intellectual and historical discussions). That being said though - I’m not one who really partakes in political discussions. I later became somewhat annoyed that most of the intellectual discussions on forums tend to be political discussions - rather than discussions of an academic nature. Social incentives are particularly powerful - but since the vast majority of one’s fellow grade school students are unlikely to be particularly academically motivated - one can only find the Internet for such social incentives. Even then I haven’t met anyone with similar academic interests as me - even if many of those people are across the blogosphere. Certainly though, I’d like to be able to contact people of my age who have similar interests as myself - and that hasn’t been much of an option (I did set up Facebook groups - they seem to have some audience - hm - maybe I need to be more proactive there)</p>
<p>Another thing is that society tends to reward pursuits that can be operationalized by means of some standardized test or school grades. This provides few incentives for people to read books on their own initiatives (and they often need such incentives to initially pique their interest - otherwise they’d probably prefer to play computer games - especially if they already have straight A’s and good test scores). I was socialized into such a mentality as well. I wanted to go beyond my school system - but I didn’t know of any good options to go beyond it (some of my erratic self-study habits in 7th and 8th grade were not particularly efficient ones). I was socialized into believing that learning history and literature was more important than learning more recent and relevant research in the social sciences. And as a result - I took the care to memorize minute details such as the individual details of particular battles or of mere historical facts that weren’t relevant to anything. Honestly - I think that history needs to be taught in a completely different way. I certainly learned A LOT about the educational system through learning the history of the educational system - and learning the history of its development certainly puts me in a much better position to critique it. On the other hand - learning the individual battles of the Civil War or of the Missouri Compromise - well - that is unlikely to be cited in any of the social science literature. I finally learned that I could self-study APs - but even then - we’re socialized only into achieving an outcome - and come to over-rely on our prep books. That outcome - a score of 5 - is merely contingent upon formulaic thinking - not upon investigating resources for our own benefits.</p>
<p>Anyhow - of course I seem to value some subjects more than others. I do think that people would make better decisions if they actually learned more about the behavioral sciences. </p>
<p>Meanwhile - most of my erstwhile schoolmates don’t have much of an option to explore. They only have a few areas to explore - and not much time at that. Some people do become more enlightened as adults - however - it is well known that adults are less prone to belief-system changes than teenagers are.</p>
<p><a href=“Btw,%20my%20favorie%20book%20is%20%22Goedel%20Escher%20Bach%22.%20You%20have%20to%20read%20it.%20It’s%20very%20star%20trekkie%20and%20sends%20your%20mind%20into%20a%20complete%20tailspin.”>quote</a>
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<p>Haha - you’re the fourth person to recommend the book to me. The story-ish nature of the book irritated me a bit - but I’ll have to get at it sometime. I do have it though. :)</p>
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<p>The sad thing is that school tends to encourage such a mentality. We’re told that it’s “fine” to stop learning as soon as the class ends - we’re told that all activities should be focused on preparing for the test - and school also taxes our time - such that we just don’t have enough time to study things by ourselves unless we allow our grades to suffer</p>
<p>While people obviously needn’t be experts in their individual fields - it certainly does annoy me that the vast majority of people are remarkably ignorant of nearly all the branches of social science (I mostly socialize with people in the top few percentiles of ability - but I’ve also been in regular classes with people far lower) - and I can extrapolate that most of them haven’t read a single book on social science on their own initiative. That being said, I did think I was special when I was still in school (I did go to online forums - but while the people on forums were intelligent - most of them weren’t as academically motivated as I was - and most of them were older than I was - so I didn’t have a group to compare myself to). Anyhow the Internet has made me realize how less special I am (a mere look at the people who write Amazon.com reviews is enough to persuade me as such - even though the number of people who actually read those books probably number less than 1% of the population)</p>
<p>Well, I don’t know. I tend to think the “top few percentiles of ability” is what we want to see and identify ourselves with, but when it comes down to it, much of it consists of circumstance, luck, and what venues people have for expressing intelligence. Not ever picking up a book or bothering to go into academia doesn’t mean people aren’t intelligent or wouldn’t excel at it, it simply means that, well, they didn’t bother with that aspect of life. I’m a social science nerd too - which makes me extra cautious not to take for granted things I personally associate with ability are the only things that count.</p>
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<p>yes that’s true - the Internet allows people to have more such venues to explore (hence why some psychologist said that variance due to environment decreases as opportunity increases). I suppose that the “top few percentiles of ability” is a vaguely defined term - although it does seem to apply for the majority of individuals who are inquisitive enough to have the self-initiative to read anything scientific. It may just be that I don’t find most of my social interactions particularly rewarding so I only know of few people - and those are those who are at the top few percentiles of academic standing (there are many errors - but I still tend to think that the correlation is positive and somewhat significant - at the level of 0.5ish). There are definitely exceptions to this rule - and I don’t use IQ tests as a way to measure that - given Feynman’s IQ of 126, Watson’s of 124, and Shockley’s of 125.</p>
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<p>That’s true for individuals - but if entire groups of people haven’t picked up any books - that certainly does speak for lack of interest/motivation (given the variation in behavior that people have in pursuing their interest).</p>
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<p>I think one of the main issues is that a lot of people have difficulty distinguishing between ability and motivation - or just use one word to describe the two (either “gifted” or “highly motivated” - but rarely some conglomerate of the two). I do believe that intelligence does make a difference - it’s just that it’s not easily measurable.</p>
<p>MAJOR INTP.</p>
<p>Reading the description of an INTP is like reading a book of my life…</p>