Quote Originally Posted by Adam Strange View Post
I've seen an ILI and an LSE work in the same company for a year, but they weren't close and I wasn't paying strict attention. They seemed to get along well enough, but neither ever went out of their way to talk to the other.

I can't say how an Ni-dom would see someone who is Ni-PoLR, but I am close to being an ILI in a way (just the top two functions are reversed in strength), and I can tell you how LSE's seem to me.

First, the good. I could not ask for better Te communication with another type. We instantly "get" what the other is talking about, and why, because we are both Te-doms. BUT, LSE's have Si as their second function and that makes them great at creating comfortable spaces and knowing what worked before, while LIE's have Ni as their second function and are therefore good at imagining future scenarios and projecting the most likely outcome of many possible futures.

Ni-PoLR is, in my opinion, an inability to have faith that you can predict how something is going to turn out, just from experiencing the flow of events. I think that LSE's compensate for this lack of Ni by reading a lot of history and collecting facts about the world. This helps them to see how certain events, which have happened before, could happen again. Which assumes (and I think they know this) that all the inputs which created those events can be assumed to also be the same now. LSE's desperately want a rule book that they can refer to as gospel. It should preferably be based on historical experience. If they don't have one, they want to make one.

When LSE's look at me, they think, "Smart guy, but he sucks at practical stuff. Why can't he see that if he just rearranged this and that, just like the historical rules in the book spell out, then he'd have a much better space or design or whatever."

I, on the other hand, look at LSE's and see really smart guys who lack a creative vision for radical alternative choices in design or action. They can improve, perhaps better than any other type, but they can't seem to make leaps of intuition to see the best long-term opportunities. They seem unimaginative to me, even though I'm very aware that one of the best, most innovative design engineers that I know is LSE.
So, as is usual in all Socionics ITR's, we're talking feelings, not facts.

Since ILI's are better at Ni than I am, they probably view LSE's the same way that I do, only more so and with less appreciation for their Si. In other words, they probably (and I'm guessing here) view LSE's as direct, concrete, square and sensible, but future-dumb. Kind of like bricks.

Let me add this about Supervision:

My father, ex-wife, and son are all SLI's and my Supervisors. One day I decided to give Socionics ITR's a test. I know that my father never respected anything I ever did, even though I was out-earning him when I was 22. But hey, he went to Law School and volunteered for two wars, so maybe I'm a disappointment because I didn't. I get that, it's possible. And my ex-wife also thinks I'm an idiot, because her father is a big wheel in the town in which he lives and I'm not, she works for the University Law School and I don't have any job guarantees at all, and I keep spending money on stuff that she can't see any use for but which somehow, inexplicably and ignorably, almost always gives great returns.
But, I thought, my son. He's not biased by accomplishments yet. So one day we were in the car, I think he was about 12, and I asked him if he thought I was an idiot. He froze for a minute, and I rephrased the question, because maybe it was too blunt. I said, "John, do you think I make bad decisions?"
He replied, "Dad, almost all your decisions are bad." And I knew that Socionics ITR descriptions were correct.
I asked him, "So, you are sitting in a S-class Mercedes with a guy who has run a successful company for many years and has kept his marriage together for an even longer time. Which of my decisions were bad?"
He had no answer, but he still knew that he was right.

ITR's. It's not reality. It's just how you feel about it.
Thanks a lot! I couldn't have hoped for anything better.