o_19kdfsn0q18e31dfraas1esh19vta.pdf

more amusing when we look at his business practices. I would venture to say that there few
company Presidents who bring a math book to work.
It is rather surprising how much time Bowditch managed to squeeze in for mathematics. Referring
to his youthful days, Bowditch noted, "Before nine o'clock in the morning, I learned all my
mathematics." His biographer/son observed, "There is no doubt that taking the whole year together,
he got as much as six, and perhaps eight hours a day, for his mathematics, besides the time devoted
to his business and other pursuits." Bowditch seems to have made very good use of his time.
One of the interesting differentiations Keirsey makes between NTJs and NTPs is that the former
tend to be more focused on a single project than the latter. As Choiniere and Keirsey (1992) put it,
"[NTJs] focus sharply and very single-mindedly on their ever-present projects, rather like a
flashlight whose beam is very narrow but very intense and stable." NTPs, by contrast, tend to flit
back and forth between a more varied assortment of projects which sit at varying degrees of
completion. We see this tendency in Bowditch's habit of working at length (i.e. years and years) on
the same project, i.e. translating Laplace.
However, the NTJ focus does not mean that INTJs will not learn about everything they can lay their
hands upon. It was observed of Bowditch that, "His intimate friends have often been surprised at
finding him conversant with subjects apparently the most foreign from his favorite studies; and one
of the most profound scholars among them observed, that he could hardly form an adequate
estimate of the extent of his general attainments." Bowditch was capable of sticking with his
projects for decades on end, but he still gobbled up information on quite diverse topics.
Many an NT has gotten a comment like, "What are you learning ____ for? What good could that
possibly ever do you?" (In fact, many NTs ask this question themselves, particularly during
school.) As an NT, Bowditch had a justification for being a knowledge vacuum cleaner: "...when
any doubted about the importance of any kind of knowledge, because, for the time, it seemed
useless, he would reply, 'Oh, study every thing, and your learning will, some time, be of service. I
once said that I would not learn to speak French, because I thought that I should never leave my
native town; yet, within a few years afterwards, I was in a foreign port, and I became sole
interpreter of the ship's crew, in consequence of my ability to speak this language.'" NTs believe,
deep in their hearts, that whatever they are learning about will come in handy some day. As a child,
I used to imagine a scenario where an evil witch would capture me and refuse to let me go unless I
could answer obscure trivia questions correctly. The witch was stunned at my arcane knowledge
and ended up screaming in rage at my shocking knowledgeability. (Clearly, an NT fantasy.) I didn't
need life experience to know that knowledge would come in handy "some day." I simply knew it
instinctively at the bottom of my little NT heart. Then I found real life ways to justify that belief.
Moral Character
Sabin (2006) summed up a series of studies on type and moral reasoning by noting that,
“Researchers have generally found Introversion (I), Intuition (N), Thinking (T) and Perceiving (P)
to be influences on higher levels of moral judgment.” (read here) Essentially, higher levels of moral
reasoning are characterized by (for example) the ability to untangle grey-area moral dilemmas, or to
pick a right course that society would ordinarily frown upon. A good example would be, “Is it okay
for Robin Hood to steal from the rich to feed the poor?” One might say, “No, you should never
steal.” Or, one might say, “Even though stealing is wrong...here’s a justification.”
One might expect that INTPs would be the most moral folks on the planet. Actually, it just means
they're good at rationalizing. INTPs can justify the most surprising things using their advanced