A three-in-one deal! 🎉 Feel free to skip it if you're not interested / I'm not replying to you. 😦 I'm feeling a little self-conscious right now.
I pretty much agree, with a pedantic caveat: your career path is in large part dictated by your environment; people are a part of your environment and socionics models your interaction with those people.
Intertype relations, at the very least, influence your career path, even if not in a neatly predictable way. It's all pretty personal.
"Fe refers to the way one would rationalize encouragement in comparison to some baseline reference or requirement"
I don't think it does. Fe is not in any way limited to encouragement, though encouragement (emotional instigation, emotional support, enthusiasm) can be seen as Fe-related constructs.
Inspiring fear into others by acting afraid is another Fe-related construct.
Inhibiting excessive emotions in others can be another Fe-related construct, depending on the situation.
They're Fe-related constructs because they're strategies that target a person's Fe-related information processing; their Fe function, which is what tries to model Fe information processing.
If I scream in fear, your response will be partially dictated by how you process extraverted emotional information. That's not encouragement.
"Fe-types"
Every type processes Fe-related information, in different ways. Are you referring to Fe-ego? Are you referring to Alpha & Beta? Does it include SEE and IEE, who also process vast amounts of Fe-related information?
"Fe-types that neither sought nor needed encouragement whatsoever"
I'll assume that you're including EIE and ESE. I wouldn't expect them to be in much need of emotional encouragement of the kind that I was talking about. As far as I'm aware, EIE can be pretty driven. That doesn't invalidate the point. Some types might respond better to certain kinds of emotional encouragement than others, unless we are to say that all types respond the same to all kinds of emotional encouragement.
"so group participation is sought for confirmation purposes"
I didn't understand that.
"I've known copies of all types that've sought encouragement"
That sounds like every type is equally likely to respond well to every kind of emotional encouragement. I don't have a statistically significant base of socionic data, but dismissing the importance of Fe defeats the point of using socionics to model human interactions.
If that isn't what you meant, think about what it means for at least some types to respond better to warm emotional expression. If they were taught Math in an environment that made them feel this kind of emotional comfort, they would be more likely to take Math seriously.
I was never associating Fe with the content of Math. (I called them "external factors") I'm talking about the the typical Math classes and learning environment, which I believe discourage some sociotypes from taking Math seriously.
"I've an aptitude for maths so I didn't require encouragement"
Just because you didn't need it doesn't mean others wouldn't.
"I've met copies of every type who didn't have difficulty with the subject - with or without encouragement"
Again, just because they didn't need it doesn't mean certain types wouldn't benefit from various kinds of encouragement.
If the student-teacher relationship can be modeled by socionics, my point still stands. (The point that started it all.) Socionics factors external to the content of Math affect somebody's Math interest, learning, and therefore skill in the subject. Not for those who are passionate or particularly good at Math, but the rest of the common folk.
I could never get behind the hardware/software metaphor for socionics models.
- Metaphors for models are useful as educational devices. In a debate, a metaphor is counterproductive.
- A metaphor adds another level of abstraction on top of a model. Models already abstract reality. Why make things more complicated?
- To keep up a metaphor, you need to create a suspension of disbelief. Constant suspension of disbelief in a debate is counterproductive because it prevents you from grounding yourself in logic.
- Metaphors hide parts of the underlying model.
- Metaphors distort the underlying model.
- If one is very attached to a metaphor, they should make a model from scratch using that metaphor and not add it on top of another model.
- The human brain and a modern computer work differently. The main proof is that no amount of psychology can be applied to somebody's personal computer. You can find similarities, but they're not the same.
- Sociotypes have little to do with hardware. I suppose the metaphor is trying to imply that sociotypes cannot change, but that's an added assumption on top of the primary model. Maybe sociotypes really cannot change, but that's irrelevant to the points I made.
- Sociotypes have little to do with software. Sociotypes were created to describe and predict existing phenomena. No phenomena exist before somebody writes the firmware/software. They have different aims. One aims to predict or describe phenomena, while another aims to create phenomena from scratch. There are more differences than similarities.
- Human behaviour has little to do with software. You can make the analogy, sure, but if I need to suspend my disbelief for all the differences between humans and software, it's not a useful metaphor.
- The calculator app was created from scratch with a precise purpose in mind. It is a series of carefully written instructions. "Fe" is a collection of human behaviours aggregated from a wider population and amalgamated into a single, slightly vague concept. "Fe" has no purpose, but the calculator app does.
- "But if all you do is observe some apparent patterns and thinking that pattern will repeat, then it's a hopeless task."
Ancient tribespeople didn't know how the Sun worked. They saw the Sun rising periodically and made predictions we can still trust today.
As far as we know, modern and medieval physics don't represent reality, but they're still very useful and got us pretty far.
You don't need to understand reality to make predictions about reality.
You might not agree with everything I said, but any single one of those points is enough for me to dismiss the metaphor. That's just a measure of how much I dislike it. 😛
I can't dispute any points made within the metaphor, because to me the metaphor is already too shaky to hold a meaningful conversation.
And my first instinct in a debate is to tear down all metaphors/obscurity anyway.