@YXPR @Lord Pixel

It would be interesting to hear the opinion of an Alpha NT
Hey, that’s me! And I think I understand how ILEs work pretty well.

So what’s most important to understand is that Ne is basically like a drug. Users need fixes. In Deltas Ne-caused assholeness is restrained by Fi, but in Alpha NTs and especially ILEs, there’s a really persistent impulse to be amused, like a child. If you care, this technically originates in a more general need to feel interested and engaged in life; if he can’t, he feels genuine despair and suicidal desires. Get to know an ILE well and you’ll usually find existential despair locked under the surface. Early enough in life he gets disillusioned by how limited life appears, by his mortality, by how disgustingly similar and banal most people are, whatever. But humor is different: the same impulses that fuel desire for the novel make it significantly easier for him to find humor in things — a specific kind of humor though. It thrills him to no end to push people’s buttons, because he’s changing them and making them act differently from normal! He not only gets to see what people are like under the surface, but actually instigate the change — and, of course, the change is humorous, not just interesting. ILEs/Alpha NTs’ favorite humor is the bizarre and unexpected, and if they can cause someone to feel their world has turned inside out for a second it causes a genuinely euporic feeling.

I recently posted an example about how I once, without even thinking about it, convinced my girlfriend jackalopes were a real animal, because it really amused me to watch her try to fit jackalopes into her worldview. It was an asshole thing to do, but it illustrates the point. A lighter example is of my ILE classics professor: a student in class tended to swear a lot, and once he asked her to name the grammatical function of a word. She replied “cognate accusative.” He replied “please don’t swear in my class,” taking her aback and causing her to replay the last ten seconds several times over in her head to wonder what had provoked that response and if he was angry at her for having sworn so often in class before. He was quite amused from her confusion, and though on the one hand the joke was about a pesky element of grammar, it was also calculated to confuse her.

Now that I explain it it really does makes us sound like jackasses. But it’s really not meant that way. If ILEs realize they actually hurt someone they feel awful, and there’s generally a great deal of effort made to establish a casual, lighthearted atmosphere.