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Notes -
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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