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Notes -
Has anyone else noticed that people in academic or intellectual hobbies tend to split in terms of disposition? On one hand, you have fact collectors; Those professors who read everything in a dry voice, who seem impartial to the conclusions or suggestions of whatever they might say, as if the raw accumulation of knowledge or data were the only goal, and who fill their books with raw, nigh uncategorized information. On the other hand, you have those who love intellectual topics due to their love of conclusions, and who see knowledge as a stepping stone to something greater. These types love to cherrypick, they make sweeping generalizations, they are often your world-famous intellectuals.
I don't have much to add to this dichotomy, but I believe it would benefit everyone if we recognized it. Partially because they are incompatible: Just as narrative writers draw ire from the fact collectors and their inaccuracies, so too the former is frustrated with the latter's awful signal-to-noise ratio. As one hard-aligned in the former category, I find myself learning more from a Thucydides than an Oxbridge historian or a Freud than a journal; even if I entirely disagree with their narrative it still produces something to collide against and draw sparks, whereas a collection of facts passes through empty air leaving no impression.
Ok, don't know why I have a tab open with this slightly older comment, but I liked it apparently, lol.
What your dichotomy makes me think of is the Meyers-Briggs distinction between "P" perceivers and "J" judgers -- this of course has poor test-retest reliability, I myself have tested on both sides of the silly line -- but it's not entirely silly in its concept.
True to what the MBTI people would say about me, I find myself on both sides of this spectrum. I have different dispositions depending on the subject, my mood, my interests, my needs, etc. In theology, for instance, I tend to be conclusion-driven, because my goal in studying theology is finding a church home. That doesn't mean I don't love collecting facts, but I do so with the goal of making decisions. When it comes to history, I tend to be fact-collecting, because I just find historical events intrinsically interesting and memorable, I like hearing stories and telling them. With psychology, it's more conclusion-driven. With philosophy, it's intensely conclusion-driven, because I find the people I disagree with on basic philosophical topics insane, even if I try to be charitable towards them. With computing and IT, it's a mixture, sometimes I want to get things done but sometimes I find myself reading the Linux File Hierarchy Standard on the train because I just think standards are neat. With astronomy and space science, I'm the "I Fucking Love Science" idiot, I'm sorry, I just like outer space, I will always be a little bit the tiny boy who made pillow forts in my childhood bedroom and pretended they were spaceships.
All of this kind of gets blended together into my best guess at a cohesive worldview. This can seem like fact collecting, but I distinctly remember in college all the various disciplines I took courses in started to connect together like puzzle pieces and at the end I felt like I had a much stronger sense of myself, my views, and my place in the world. If I could make a positive argument for a liberal arts education, it would be that. (Now if only what most people were learning in those sorts of courses had anything to do with verifiable fact.)
My girlfriend comments constantly that I seem to know random things from all over the fact spectrum -- but of course the joke's on her, she gets the same comments from her coworkers. But it's important to note that for me, like my professor father before me, sharing trivia facts is anything but "dry" or "impressionless" -- my father gets emails from students about how much he makes them laugh. It's all about storytelling, and being genuinely excited about sharing the things that interest you with other people. I'd freaking love to be an instructor, and 100% of the people who know me well say they can't imagine me ever being anything else. Now if only universities were looking for cis-het-white-male adjuncts with contrarian tendencies...
But if I had to pick a side -- it would be Judging, because I get very annoyed at people who seem so charitable to all sides that they become unable to pick a viewpoint, or so open-minded their brain falls out. Looking at you, religious studies students.
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Another concept analogous to this is the is-ought distinction. Fact collectors care about what is and the conclusion seekers care about what ought to be.
You could also say this about autists and normies. Autists leaning towards more how things are and the normies obsessed with how things are supposed to be. Although I will admit this one is a reach.
Unrelated but, I think for a long time biology has been filled with fact collectors and not enough conclusion seekers. The conclusion seekers go into programming and engineering. Once these engineering type conclusions seekers come to the conclusion that we should be healthy forever and turn their intellect and focus on biology, that's the beginning of us becoming Human 2.0
People who have the ol' good clinically diagnosed autism often have limited range of interests and poor understanding of everyday things, including cause and effect.
Nerds have great obsession about how things should be according to their own pet theories. Normies won't care about irrelevant things, unless it is necessary or beneficial (and then it is no longer irrelevant)
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It's the opposite, in my experience. Normies just deal with what is, and autists are very concerned with the way things ought to be.
Normies deal with what is, but get very upset if you accurately describe them as they are, instead of how they ought to be. Autists can deal with things as they are, as long they're labelled correctly, it's the dissonance between the actual state and the description that drives them nuts.
This seems to hit the nail on the head.
I wonder if this clash plays any sort of key role in autists often falling out of working life and social circles.
I feel like polite social life often requires a certain amount of lying. Not only to others, but even to yourself. It helps ease the tension in all sorts of awkward situations, if we can all just fib a little and pretend things don't exist. Autists really struggle with that. (And I say that as someone who is a bit autistic and a terrible liar)
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Yep knowledge lovers vs wisdom lovers. A tale as old as time.
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