The intuition of NTs

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I think it’s also possible that you are both partially correct. The behavior itself is certainly learned but there may also be some type of specialized hardware in the brain that helps facilitate the learning. If some of this hardware doesn’t develop at an early age to the same degree as it would for a typical person then some of the behavior has to be learned in a more difficult rote manner rather than in the natural / instinctual way. The AS person can slowly catch up but they will always be slightly behind the curve.

I’m on the side of Steven Pinker who argues that the mind is not a blank slate. Some things are innately easier for some to individuals to learn than they are for other individuals. This is even true for different people on the spectrum. We tend to specialize in the areas where we excel at learning, not the areas where we have difficulty learning.

Because they're irrational, temperamental, impulsive and emotive just as much as they're intuitive?

I think they project their own personality traits and ideas onto other people. That is how they end up making mistakes.

arguably some would say they're 'compensating' and WANT to be dominated (the female).



that is considered not socially acceptably by NTs actually. It's stronger and weaker in some cultures but that seems to be deemed universally bad by them.

Well here's a monkey wrench for you. :)

There's a very well respected scientist by the name of Richard Wiseman. One of the most well known, well respected and quoted scientists in the UK.

http://richardwiseman.com/

He wrote a very good book called the Luck Factor which details a great deal of his experiments spanning 10 years studying the subject of why a 2/3rds majority of people believe they have either good or bad luck. After ruling out a variety of possible causes like IQ and ESP, he determined that there was a strong correlation between personality type and "luck", either good or bad. The bad news here is that people with AS mostly have the personality traits that are associated with "bad luck" in spaces. However he did show at the end of the book that his research had shown that people could change their "luck" by changing their habits. Doing that involves doing a lot of things that you and I find extraordinarily difficult like being more social. But it can be done.

The big5 personality traits that do have a positive correlation with good luck are extraversion and openness (neither of which are traits aspies are known for). And further, neuroticism which most of us have quite a bit of (myself included) is strongly correlated with a sense that the person has "bad luck".

There are actually very good and logical reasons for this. Extraverts have more networking opportunities, people who are "open to experience" are more likely to try new things (which in turn leads to opportunities that would otherwise be missed), and neuroticism largely just puts people off (killing of a lot of networking opportunities, etc).

So he took the experiments further to investigate what specific habits these people might have that resulted in "good luck". (And incidentally, this is important too because "good luck" is also positively correlated with life satisfaction -- and "bad luck" has an EXTREME correlation with poor financial satisfaction. Aspies out of work? Anyone? Yeah, this is a big one for me too.)

It turns out that not only did most of the people who described themselves as lucky report that they trusted their intuition, those who engaged in some kind of intuition-building activities like meditation reported statistically higher life satisfaction than those who did not.

He does explain in the book that intuition can sometimes foul you up (there's even an exercise that shows how). And for myself I know that my intuition is basically useless with regard to learning how to tell people what they want to hear (which is a lack of intuition in that regard rather than actually having bad intuition). However the science taken as a whole indicates that indeed, intuition is quite beneficial.

That's one of the things I gathered from reading the Luck Factor.

That's been my take on it... intuition is actually learned as well, just not consciously ... it's trained by a series of experiences gradually over time, although it can also accumulate rather quickly (fast enough for table games to rely on our ability to build up intuition quickly).

There's another word for when people do things without having to think consciously about them -- "automaticised" or the like -- I can't remember exactly -- but it's what describes how you can type without thinking about the keys or drive without thinking (consciously) about the steering wheel of the car. I interpret that most NTs do quite a lot of social stuff automatically like that where they don't need to think about what they're saying consciously, they've automaticised the habit of wording everything in the particular way that their cohort are comfortable with.

I would have to do that consciously, the "framing" Dwight mentions, but I don't understand many of the rules unfortunately... Didn't know it was possible that I could learn them until about 2 years ago, thought everyone else was stumbling around the same way I do. And thus far it's been like pulling teeth to get my life to straighten out enough to get to a place where I might be able to get professional help learning.

Well yes, there are some ways in which social skills are formally taught, although most people don't need formal education for social skills and so most children don't get formal education for social skills. You only get formal training in social skills when it's recognized that your social skills royally suck (and I mean ROOOOOOYYYYYYAAAAALLLLLY SUUUUUUUUUCK, like Napoleon Dynamite suck) and that someone in your family or at least immediate surrounding gives enough of a damn to do something to help you at that age and is aware that formal education for that is available (which many of them aren't aware). I'm amongst the group of aspies who would have benefited from them - my mother hadn't really heard about autism until recently apparently and that's when I started researching it in 2006. I've been suicidal twice in my life as a result of not being able to adequately tell people what they want to hear. It's 2 years later now, I'm 34 and my situation isn't much better... a little, but progress is damn slow.

Imagine for a moment that you'd only vaguely heard about computers, had some concept of what they are, but no formal understanding. Then imagine that someone set you down in front of one and said "your survival depends upon you being able to write a program that can play the William Tell Overture through those speakers there in the next 48 hours. And if you can't, then it's all your fault. Good luck!" and then just left you to your own devices with no books and no instruction. Where do you even begin? That's basically what my life has been like with regard to social relationships. I just didn't know that's what was happening until the last couple years.

Some people even base their social intuition on observing physical appearances as well as
body language etc.I have a work colleague who openly admitted that she 'judged people by looking at the condition of their teeth and shoes'.Another of her methods is apparently to check whether the person tucks their shirt ino their jeans or not on 'dress down' occasions.
If they don't do so this presumably tells her if they have a more laid-back personality

Well, what happens is they manipulate each other into getting involved and, depending on the interpersonal skills of each, they succeed or fail.
In the US, fifty percent of marriages fail. Apparently Americans aren't that great at getting along with each other anyway.
I think a lot of them get stuck with partners they don't really want to be with and then decide if the relationship is worth it. I bet most people despise being with the same person for a long time. Some of them decide to honor their vows and stay with that person, others decide they are tired of it and call it quits so they can go out on the dating scene again and pass their kids off to one another so both can begin dating again. It's silly, really. Makes you wonder if there's really a point to being married in the first place. Maybe to a few.

The mind of an NT always seems to me to be a very confused place. A contradictory mixture of,

a) what they actually want,

b) what society/the media/etc. tells them they should want, and,

c) what it's socially acceptable to want - i.e., what likes and desires they can express or be seen to enjoy without their social circle rejecting them.

When A arises in the mind, for instance, it must always be immediately checked out and then, if necessary, censored, by C. There can also be considerable confusion over whether the thought actually stemmed from A or B in the first place.

That's pretty much what life is like for me. And my social interactions are essentially governed by the mental equivalent of computer programs I've set up in my brain.

I can say two things:

Number1: NT's have social abilities, almost in contrary with a lot of autists. There's a lot of non-verbal communication being made, that ''only'' NT's see and notice, but people with AS not. Hence there is a lot of communication aspies don't notice. I think it may be possible NT's think they're intuitional, however, in reality they aren't. They notice slight differents in people's facial expressions, and notice the behavior people with AS don't see. However, they registrate it in their minds, though they aren't conscious and aware of it. As a result, they might think they have this great intuition, when in reality they've only interpreted unconsiously signs of non-verbal communication and facial expressions.

Number 2: They lie to themselves, to get themselves believing they have an intuition, when they don't have one.

Seems to me that the kind of role intuition plays in the "Luck Factor" stuff is just in-context and timely intuition. The kind of intuition garyww describes is the intuition of AS, which is much more grounded in objective reality and not social context. Hence, AS intuition would be untimely, out of context and get us in trouble (usually with unwritten rules). Whereas NT intuition would be more context-appropriate and less likely to cause consternation.

NT intuition: I need to call this person today... I know he's been networking in the past month, but hasn't called me. But I haven't seen him in some time and maybe he doesn't know that I'm doing some of the same things he's been working on. (Bingo! Right contact at the right time, and they start collaborating on a deal).

AS intuition: That creepy guy at work just slid another check into his pocket. Analyzing his pattern of behavior correlated with other strange behavior patterns of his and the missing money from the clients' accounts, I think I have found the embezzler with probability greater than 30 percent (rushes into the Boss's office to tell him why his nephew is 30 percent likely to be an embezzler, only to be fired five minutes later).

Luck is about context-appropriate intuition. Context-inappropriate intuition gets you fired or witchunted.

That is why they seek out similar or compatible people, and form social units that have certain common language memes and assumptions. That is "culture" and "subculture". Memes enable us to coordinate assumptions and archetypes. When you're all blue collar bowlers and "get" each other, you have a much higher rate of compatibility or correct assumptions about each other, than if you try to put Barack Obama in a Pennsylvania bowling alley and say and do the right things. He comes off looking like an ass and saying things that insulted rural Pennsylvanians.

It's easier for a con artist for a foreign country to dupe someone than someone from your own country. It's much harder to read what's really going on in someone from a totally different culture.

See, that's exactly what I think intuition is. It is something that you are only subconsiously aware of, but it isn't magic. There is a definite pattern and set of rules to it, you just don't know what they are. There is actually a magician (I forget his name, so bad with names...) that has actually trained himself to be consiously aware of these things and he can, for example, have a person look at a random word in a book, and just from their body language and other subtle clues, he can tell what the word is. It's actually the same sort of things a lot of magicians and so-called mentalists do, but this guy is just upfront and honest about it with his audience, which I love. And I think for people with Asperger's, those subconscious instructions just aren't there, but they can still be learned through a lot of hard work, just like this magician does.