Te versus Ti

David Nelson

David Nelson

Permanent Fixture
MBTI
INFJ
Enneagram
1w9 possib
Let battle commence

Had the idea to give real world examples of how these cog functions differ. I have one example, maybe others could provide different ones…

If we think about economic inequality in a society and whether this is due to virtue and hard work versus laziness and incompetence (please put aside for now the reality which most here probably know).

Now Te could argue that we live in a more or less meritocracy (note I know we don’t). This opinion can be challenged by facts about how society works, but Te has no simple way to challenge this view without digging into the details, and probably won’t. But even if we assume here that it is a meritocracy, there is no obvious way to challenge this assumption. There is no ‘general’ counter to the Te argument.

Ti has a different way of seeing the inequality as inherently wrong. If we use theory, a meritocracy assumes individuals are rewarded fairly based on their talents and virtues. If we then also consider how much individual talent varies across a population, we realise that no one has 10 or more times the value of another. Thus, people are often financially rewarded disproportionately, which partly explains why it’s unfair and not a meritocracy. But what this kind of thinking also does is provide a general counter to Te argument without getting too much into individual details.

Note I am aware that Te has its uses. Ti can lack perspective and practical awareness of other options. Ti trades width for depth, as Ni does compared to Ne. This thread is not to diss Te but to aid understanding of how they differ.
 
How do you measure this "10 or more times better"? It's better to use percentiles. If someone is at 99.9th percentile of their field, they are gonna get huge slice of the pie compared to someone who is just average. For example, Lionel Messi will get 100x more than an average professional player and 10000000x more than a semi-professional player.

So yes, you can absolutely have such extreme distribution and still have relative meritocracy. Meritocracy exists in specific pockets of society, it's just that there so many other factors polluting it (like socio-economic status, where you are born, education, your nurture etc.). Sport is actually such a pocket where you are rewarded for your talents, irregardless of race, status etc.

PS: Te users can reach the same conclusion lol.
 
philostam said:
How do you measure this "10 or more times better"? It's better to use percentiles. If someone is at 99.9th percentile of their field, they are gonna get huge slice of the pie compared to someone who is just average. For example, Lionel Messi will get 100x more than an average professional player and 10000000x as a semi-professional player.

So yes, you can absolutely have such extreme distribution and still have relative meritocracy. Meritocracy exist in specific pockets of society, it's just that there so many other factors polluting it (like socio-economic status, where you are born, education, your nurture etc.). Sport is actually quite a good arena where you are rewarded for your talents, irregardless of race, status etc.

PS: Te users can reach the same conclusion lol.
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Professional footballers are one of the few exceptions where they earn directly in proportion to their rarity, but most people don't. Like approx. 99.999% don't, so they are a rare exception and a bad example to make a point. Your point about how do you measure is I think a Te way of thinking. The problem with measurement is it misses the Ti point that people don't vary in talent as much as their ability to earn exists in the world.

I'm thinking of, say, solicitors who earn £100-200+ per hour compared to a council employee on maybe £15 per hour or less. The value in the solicitors job is not 10 times that of the council employee imo. The difference in income is not primarily due to the training of the solicitor or their rarity/intelligence (common reasons Te users cite) but because of historical inequality persisting and a lack of competition within elite professions.

It's important to remember that when we are talking cog functions and personality that its not that a personality or a cog function can ONLY understand certain things, but it's to do with preferences and common ways of thinking. Yes, a Te user can understand this, but they generally don't care to or naturally choose to. It doesn't come as easily, so is often neglected. That's the point. Note there will be other examples where Te beats Ti to the understanding.
 
David Nelson said:
Professional footballers are one of the few exceptions where they earn directly in proportion to their rarity, but most people don't. Like approx. 99.999% don't, so they are a rare exception and a bad example to make a point.
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That's just a random BS number. Just if you sum up all the professional football players across the world and divide it by total working age population, you'll see the percentage is way bigger than that. And then you add all the basketball players, hockey players, baseball players...

...And then you add all other profession that people do that don't require formal university training. Like business, writing, sales, youtubing, even something like programming/coding nowadays can be done without formal training, etc.

PS: I am a Ti user, you know.
 
So what %age of society do you think are professional sportspeople? Can't be higher than 0.01% or 0.001. That's still low, and only a few are on massive salaries. UK where I live has 20 premier league teams with a population of over 67,000,000. Other UK sports have fewer well paid professionals. Do the math.
 
Actually I stand corrected lol. I did a quick google search and apparently there is 130k professional footballers in the world. If we take total working age population of the world at like 4.5 billion, this is not even 0.001%.
 
philostam said:
Actually I stand corrected lol. I did a quick google search and apparently there is 130k professional footballers in the world. If we take total working age population of the world at like 4.5 billion, this is not even 0.001%.
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OF course Ti position in your stack makes a difference of course. INFJ has Ti child, you have Ti hero as an INTP. Both have unique virtues and vices lol
 
Generally yes, of course I agree that we don't live in a perfect meritocracy and we never have. And it has certainly got worse in the last 20-30 years as we are heading toward the end of our prosperous cycle that has started post WW2. I do believe that meritocracy will improve after in the next 10-15 years. Things tend to be cyclical and self correct somewhat.

Still even now there are pockets of meritocracy and I prefer to focus on that rather than on the negative. That's all.
 
philostam said:
Things tend to be cyclical and self correct somewhat.
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What book was that from lol?
Status quo has been deliberately chosen and created by the overclass. The middle class and political parties have been hollowed out, so the only route I see to greater mertitocracy is via a change of course by elites, something not likely to happen because most don't want a change or don't understand how we got here, or even what here means lol. The forces won't go away, so we'll likely either get more populism or greater restrictions from our governments. Both will make things worse.
 
David Nelson said:
What book was that from lol?
Status quo has been deliberately chosen and created by the overclass. The middle class and political parties have been hollowed out, so the only route I see to greater mertitocracy is via a change of course by elites, something not likely to happen because most don't want a change or don't understand how we got here, or even what here means lol. The forces won't go away, so we'll likely either get more populism or greater restrictions from our governments. Both will make things worse.
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Generations change. We see it in sports condensed in shorter 10 -15 year cycles, because professional careers usually don't last much longer than that. For example, Barca had the best team ever from 2008-12 and now they are nowhere to be seen for last 5 years at least.

In society changes take a bit longer, thus longer cycles (80-100 years). I think we are at the end of ours and by 2030 I suspect the transition will be complete.

Of course my position would be that technology will drive this change, you can believe something else, but sooner or later the world has to re-balance itself towards younger generations. This actually goes hand in hand with the generation argument, because older people are least likely to adopt new technology.

I don't think governments or "elites" have that much power than you believe. Even China is losing the grip now, and they are seen as the strongest and most competent government. And no one trusts the established institutions anymore, not to mention the mainstream media.
 
I agree that we are in a tech revolution affecting so many things. And yes, younger generations see things very differently and are mostly being screwed at present. Big changes likely, I'll give you that. Maybe some positive as well.

Even whole world order is changing, as so much is being challenged and questioned. Many more are realising that a few are screwing most of us, and lying or distorting the truth. another change largely due to technology. Maybe Elon Musk will be the leader of a New World Order?

I read most of Postcapitalism by Paul Mason. That's full of economic cycles theory. A heavy read.
 
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I honestly don't see the economic issues being resolvable at this point as lets face it there is far too many problems and the overall condition of modern civilization is headed towards a fairly dark future where if doesn't collapse with in the century the overwhelming majority of the population will be living in poverty no matter how hard they work. Worse still the population will go into decline in the later half of the century as population growth will stall with the exception of central Africa and I got to wonder why no one brings up that there will be a fertility crises in the next twenty to forty years where basically the population goes infertile due to endocrine disrupting chemicals primarily from plastics.
 
Does being so cheerful keep you going Roses lol. I'm sure the elites will have a plan to insulate themselves as the rest of us perish. Anyway, I only mentioned inequality to talk about Te and Ti. This thread has been internally hijacked lol
 
David Nelson said:
Let battle commence

Had the idea to give real world examples of how these cog functions differ. I have one example, maybe others could provide different ones…

If we think about economic inequality in a society and whether this is due to virtue and hard work versus laziness and incompetence (please put aside for now the reality which most here probably know).

Now Te could argue that we live in a more or less meritocracy (note I know we don’t). This opinion can be challenged by facts about how society works, but Te has no simple way to challenge this view without digging into the details, and probably won’t. But even if we assume here that it is a meritocracy, there is no obvious way to challenge this assumption. There is no ‘general’ counter to the Te argument.

Ti has a different way of seeing the inequality as inherently wrong. If we use theory, a meritocracy assumes individuals are rewarded fairly based on their talents and virtues. If we then also consider how much individual talent varies across a population, we realise that no one has 10 or more times the value of another. Thus, people are often financially rewarded disproportionately, which partly explains why it’s unfair and not a meritocracy. But what this kind of thinking also does is provide a general counter to Te argument without getting too much into individual details.

Note I am aware that Te has its uses. Ti can lack perspective and practical awareness of other options. Ti trades width for depth, as Ni does compared to Ne. This thread is not to diss Te but to aid understanding of how they differ.
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You don't understand Te.

Te, coupled with Ni designs societies to maximise efficiency. While many people complain about wealth inequality, I'm more interested in raising minimum standards of living, while reducing the number of hours worked to achieve it. This may involve most wealth being concentrated in companies and innovative individuals, because they increase the number of products and services available, and a majority living in high standard of living lower middle class, which minimises inflationary effects.

Essentially, the above mentioned structure is seen in Australia and New Zealand. There are very few billionaires, a lot of companies, and most people will struggle to own their own home before their late 30s. Nevertheless, people enjoy high quality housing, healthcare, childcare, and can afford to take full weekends off, travel for vacations, and have children in their 20s, all on one full time and one part time income per household.
 
5. Te deconstructs, while Ti builds from the ground up
First off, let me preface this entire section by saying don’t take this too literally. Take it in context with logic. Obviously, a Te user can build a physical building, and a Ti user can tear something down. However, in the realm of logic, Te users have a tendency to work backwards, while Ti users work from the ground up. That statement probably doesn’t make any sense though so let me explain.

As stated several times, a Te user is focused on results. So, if a Te user desires to understand something deeper, they will tend to start with the results and break them down, essentially deconstructing it down to its base components. You should also see this happen in debates and arguments. They’ll start with the premise and see if they can tear it apart. Essentially, they’ll want to verify the conclusion before subjecting themselves to the argument. The logic is meaningless if it leads to an incorrect result.

A Ti user does the reverse. Remember that they devalue the external, and focus on their personal understanding. To understand something, they will need to start from nothing and build up to the results. They need to understand every piece to feel as if they understand the whole. I can use this article (and most of my other theory articles) as an example for Ti in this context. I typically always start with root definitions and then build upon those, adding logic upon logic until I’ve reached the point or points that I was attempting to put forward.
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In politics, deconstructing is far less useful than building up. Te becomes pragmatic, whereas Ti becomes ideological.
 
@David Nelson

Not a bad job, actually—deductive versus inductive reasoning.

That said, no need to sigh when asking for an explanation. For my money, if I want to hear an explanation of something, having an INTJ do it is the best choice, all other things being equal. :P

Cheers,
Ian
 
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