Is it really coherent to speak of IEs? I've said before that socionics seems like zooming in on parts of an overall system rather than putting things together (which Gulenko points out in his cognitive styles thread in the Holographic-Panoramic section, and all the Ti-ish socionics mathematician types tend to think of types like this as well) and in that case I don't think it is.
For example, take
, what people consider the most boring function. On the one hand I tend to be good at the arts and I like to keep my things "Ordnung muss sein!"-level neat because I think that's pleasing and helps with actually accomplishing things, but on the other hand even since I was young I've said "I don't think things can be real except that they stand for something else" (which is philosophical idealism in the non-Berkeleyian sense and very, very,
from a Jungian perspective) and have a rather infamous tendency to not notice things like the temperature (including wearing sandals when it's below freezing outside, then someone says "You're wearing sandals? It's below freezing..." and I respond something like "...Oh. I didn't notice, but I'll go put on some real shoes if this is weird then,") or when I've been injured (like the times where I'd fall down, people would gasp and say "Are you OK?" and I would respond "Of course, why not?" and then later I'd take off my jacket and see that I have a 2-foot-long dark black bruise across my entire arm). People will often break up functions into positive and negative versions of functions, like in this case +
and -
, which are "enjoys positive aesthetic experiences, organization, etc." and "avoids discomfort" respectively in this case, and you could say that I'm good at +
and frighteningly bad at -
, but that seems like severely overcomplicating things to me, and people don't think like that in general and that gets into alternative models that are very, very far from classical socionics (as if people used classical socionics in the first place. People use Filatova around here generally).