I’ve become a double decider.
The eight cognitive types are real because you can check if someone is doing a function by combination of two others. Like someone who is extroverted feeling can only do introverted feeling by triangulation. Can you feel your own feelings or are they triangulated by another? That’s one way to check.
Richard Sutton wrote The Bitter Lesson: the history of AI research shows that general methods leveraging search and learning beat specialized methods every time.
Search is sensing. Casting wide, trying everything, brute force over the space. Learning is intuition. Compressing what search found into a pattern that predicts without searching.
The duality between them is broken in the way that arrows recreate objects in category theory.
Intuitions are formed out of senses. They’re maps between sense impressions. Given an intuition, you can figure out how it would feel by plugging it back in. But given a sense impression, you can’t uniquely recover the intuition that generated it. The arrow reconstructs the object. The object doesn’t uniquely determine the arrow. Ni is built from Se but Se doesn’t determine Ni.
This is why you constantly want opposing things. The demand for opposites is what causes turning inward. If everything you wanted was compatible, you’d never need to organize internally. You’d just reach out and take it. It’s because the world demands contradictory things of you — be gentle and be strong, be patient and be urgent, be humble and be ambitious — that you develop intuition at all. The opposites force the compression. The binary tree of doubts forces you to find a root.
Doubt comes from the Latin dubitare, from duo — two. To doubt is to be split in two.
The basic function flow is wide in, narrow, wide out again.
From my notes.