Four-dimensional Sensus (introverted sensing) allows you to tolerate and accept a wider variety of unusual sensory experiences; this includes a toleration for people's physical appearance; also, guesses about Ayn Rand's and Nathaniel Branden's personality types (INFJ = Branden)

Over the past few days, while I've been drinking a lot of coffee and obsessively reading things on the net for hours and hours, I looked at the socionist blog again.  I found this post: 

http://socionist.blogspot.com/2007/11/openness-of-mental-functions.html

This post describes something similar to what I've been reading about the 'dimensionality of the functions.'  What are the four dimensions?

http://www.wikisocion.org/en/index.php?title=Dimensionality_of_functions&redirect=no

1. experience (Ex)

2. norms (Nr)

3. situation (St)

4. time (Tm)

I've been looking for more detail about this.  The Socionist post gave me more information.  This matches my own experience with my being willing to tolerate a wide variety of physical appearances on people.  Sensus is my strongest function, and as such, it is the most accepting or permissive or open to variety.  I happily enjoy seeing a wide variety of ethnic groups, for instance, and I feel that all ethnic groups are beautiful and interesting in their own way.  I also was writing in the previous post about how I enjoy seeing long hair on men, even if that hair is 'imperfect' somehow.

However, someone who has Sensus as their second function is slightly less tolerant and open about what types of sensory information are 'good' and 'okay.'  They still have a relatively strong opinion about which kinds of physical appearances are desirable, but the base function's (Profiteor or Emoveo) opinion is more important.  So they have more limits and restrictions about which kinds of hairstyles (for instance) they think are beautiful and attractive.  Information about aesthetic beauty must fit into narrower categories in order to be acceptable.  People with 3-dimensional Sensus would be more inclined to say 'Long hair might be nice, however, you need to make sure that it is only mid-back length or shoulder length, and you mustn't be bald on top, and you mustn't have any split ends, and you mustn't grow it long if you're over a certain age, etc, etc, because my base function says so.' 

Usually, when this happens, it's coming from an ESE, my supervisor relation.  I see this on web pages where people have posted photos and are getting a huge number of negative comments from people saying 'OH MY GOD! THAT MAN NEEDS TO SHAVE HIS HEAD!' and other very strong negative judgments about people's hairstyles.  They still have an opinion about what looks good and what doesn't, but this opinion is more narrow and restricted and it's less important than 'Whatever is socially acceptable' or 'Whatever is popular and trendy right now,' which comes from their base function of Emoveo. 

The Supervisor relation is one of the most difficult of all socionic relations.  Your supervisor can do almost everything, almost as well as you can, but they can also do the thing that you're weakest at, too.  So, it's like, imagine you're the person with the highest IQ in the world, and you go your whole life thinking that you're the smartest person on earth, but your secret weakness (for instance, in the SLI, like me) is that you're really lousy at expressing emotions and keeping track of other people's emotions as they express them. 

Suddenly one day you meet this person who has an IQ just as high as your own, someone who is almost exactly like you and is able to do most of the things you can do, but they're also able to understand feelings and express them quickly and easily.  (This would hypothetically be a highly intelligent ESE type.) They might have a few minor weaknesses, but it seems unimportant compared to all their strengths.  That person makes you look really bad.  This is an asymmetrical relationship, where one person is able to do almost everything the other person can do, plus a few extra things that the other person can't.  And, as I said, it's one of the worst socionic relationships, and it can cause problems if you live in the same household, if it's your family, if you depend on that person and you have to please them, or if it's your boss in the workplace and they're constantly nagging you to do a better job.

The supervisor relation isn't always that extremely bad.  In the workplace, I've been with people of the ESE type and I got along with them okay.  But that's not the same as trying to live in the same house with them for years and years at a time, while you're still a child and you can't drive a car and you can't leave the house and you don't have any money of your own to buy the things you need.  These would be the stereotypical people who would tell me that I have to cut my hair and I have to shave and I have to obey all the rules that tell us what kind of physical appearance we should have. 

Those are the same people who write comments on websites and answer polls about hairstyles and they always say that a balding man MUST shave his head, he looks AWFUL, and so on and so forth.  Having 3D Sensus as the second function, instead of 4D Sensus as the base function, makes you less accepting of people's physical appearances, and yet you still have a strong opinion about them. 

I think that Supervisors and Supervisees are actually the groups of people in society who I have always complained about the most.  These are the groups of people who I blame for all the problems in the world.  I complain about them even more than I complain about my conflict relation, the EIE, and most sources say the conflict relation is supposedly the worst relation of all.  It's true that I don't live with EIEs and I don't encounter a lot of them, so I don't know how difficult it would be to be with them daily.  But I am very much aware of what it's like to interact with ESEs. 

(I do have a suspected EIE at work, and she and I frequently have small, trivial misunderstandings that lead to hurt feelings and anxiety.  It is very easy to miscommunicate with her.  So yes, this is a difficult relation, but I don't encounter it as often as the supervisors/supervisees.)

And I can clearly see the activities of the LIE in our culture, and I complain about them a lot ('Those drug company executives just don't care that their pills have horribly toxic side effects!').  I complain that my supervisor, the ESE, is responsible for all the ugly hairstyles that I have to put up with, and I complain that the LIE is responsible for the corporate activities that I disapprove of or believe are harmful. 

So even without knowing socionics, I see a pattern over the years, where I was aware that there existed groups of people who were doing things that I didn't like, in society, and it just so happens that they are people who have either the supervisor or the supervisee relations to me.

That wouldn't just apply to me.  It is probably true for everybody, for people of all the socionic types.  If you think about which groups of people in society annoy you the most, which groups of people seem to always be responsible for 'everything that's wrong with the world,' those groups will most likely be your supervisors and supervisees.  So I am not saying that it's 'objectively true' that everything wrong in the world is caused by ESEs and LIEs. 

Ayn Rand had particular groups of people that she complained about the most.  She thought these people were responsible for everything wrong in the world, and she ranted about them sometimes.  I'd like to look back at her books again, in my attempt to decide what type she is.  She hated the whim-worshippers, the witch doctors, and the Attilas (one of her witch doctor/Attila rants was in a video that someone posted in the forum in a thread about Ayn Rand's type). 

Rick changed his opinion about her type several times, and left it at LSI, which is what it says right now.  I'm sure I could get an opinion if I looked at her books again, and also Nathaniel Branden's books.  They are all packed in boxes in storage right now.  I suspect she might not be LSI, because she placed enormous value on things like 'profit' and 'productive work' and 'entrepreneurship,' which sounds more like Profiteor, extraverted logic.  She created Dagny Taggart, the leader of a corporation, someone likely to be LIE or LSE, as the hero of Atlas Shrugged. 

And Nathaniel Branden seems suspiciously like a Delta NF.  He might even be an EII.  His books are all about self-esteem, about your relationship with yourself, about self-improvement, perfecting yourself, improving your consciousness and responsibility.  I read his books for years and years - they were my bibles.  All of my beliefs were based on them.  He is a very reserved man who does not openly express his feelings - he's commented about that in his books, about how uncomfortable he is openly expressing feelings or talking about himself - and yet, he is extremely ethical and concerned with internal feelings and self-evaluation.  I adored him, all these years, and admired him, and I put him at the highest level of all my favorite book authors.

In order for Nathaniel Branden to get along with Ayn Rand and to cooperate with her for as long as they did, he had to have some kind of relatively favorable relation with her - but that relationship broke down when he met Patrecia and fell passionately in love for the first time in his life.  I think Ayn Rand would have to be an NT, Gamma or Delta, instead of an LSI, in order for Nathaniel to get along so well with her for so long. 

She might have been an LSE, except that she always talks about long-term consequences and chains of events.  She talks about abstraction and foresight, and she complains about people who are short-sighted and narrow-minded, people who can only see what's happening in the immediate moment.  She might be ILI.  She describes the Dagny Taggart character as being someone who is 'like a stronger, more outgoing, more aggressive version of myself,' or something like that - those are not quite the words she used.  That could mean Dagny is her mirror, the LIE, and Ayn Rand is an ILI. 

What kind of relation does the ILI have with the EII?  The EII (Branden) is a request recipient, 'inferior' to the ILI (Rand).  The two of them would be attracted to each other's Te/Fi. 

Ayn Rand might have been extraverted.  Nathaniel said that she was able to get into a conversation with any random person they met, for instance, the taxi driver, and argue about something, and be able to win the argument and persuade the taxi driver of the logic of her point of view.  If she was an LIE, she would be Nathaniel's semi-dual, and they would have had a strong attraction to each other, but also a feeling that something was missing (and I know how that is, because I was with my ILE semi-dual for a long time, and I know that we couldn't be everything to each other). 

I'd like to look at her books again and also the books that other people have written about her.  But after thinking about it I'm pretty sure Nathaniel Branden is EII.  I loved him so much, for so long, and felt that his books spoke to me, and it was all about self-improvement and achieving your personal potential.  His writing style had to be compatible with me, or I would not have felt that way for so long.  I still very much agree with his books, except, as I've said several times recently, I decided that 'physical health' was neglected by both Rand and Branden, as they tried to understand what makes people the way they are, and as they make suggestions for what to do about it. 

Some philosophers complained that Ayn Rand didn't actually make a 'philosophy,' and her philosophy wasn't deep enough or technical enough.  She was interested in applying it to the real world, to show the philosophy in action, and didn't want it to be a theory that just floated in empty space.  She was interested in applications.  They complained that her definitions weren't strong enough, that her logical structure wasn't strong enough, and it seems that she might have been better at using Te instead of Ti.  That makes her a Gamma or Delta.  They said that she didn't give her philosophy a very strong basis with strict, formal definitions.  She has some 'axioms' or assumptions.  Some people scoffed that her axioms were too shallow or too informal or something.  'Existence exists' was her main axiom.  This is something you can see for yourself.  She starts off saying that all those people who debated about whether we were living in a dream world and whether existence existed at all were totally wasting everyone's time, and you just had to assume that life is real, and we're really here, and just start from there.

She really valued Fi, introverted ethics, Relatio, in her books.  There were some characters who were portrayed as loyal, devoted, ethical, honest people, in a world of people who had no ethics and no morals and would do anything to anyone.  She also had Howard Roark, the architect, and she described how emotionally unexpressive he was, as though that was a very admirable thing. 

She valued work, work, work, and productivity, and seriousness, and if I recall she complained about artists who can't be bothered with getting a job and working for a living, moochers taking the government's welfare handouts.  This sounds like she was complaining about the (worst-case) behaviors of SEIs and IEIs.  She complained about people who valued 'feelings' too much and said mockingly that your FEELINGS can't make the crops grow on bare soil, and things like that.

Nathaniel Branden wrote about something that puzzled him.  With all her strength and her greatness, he was surprised to learn that she actually wanted a man to be stronger than she was - she wanted to be dominated by a man.  That suggests she was Ni valuing Se.  He found it hard to understand because she seemed like such a strong woman, and she made strong female characters in her books, and he expected her to be like a feminist, someone playing the strong role in the relationship, but instead she wanted a man to overpower her, to be even greater than she was.

And I always must mention the 'she couldn't sew a button on her shirt' comment.  She seemed to have weak sensing.  Nathaniel wrote that she was totally helpless if some small physical thing went wrong, and she was so abstract-minded that she couldn't deal with the real world, and he commented that this was in contrast to her story characters, who were strong, realistic people taking action in the real world all the time. 

I'll just post this for now.  I'm reading a little bit about Ayn Rand on the net, since I can't look at the books right now.