*to Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Κυνόσαργες

Friday 13 June 2014

What can you possibly be arguing for?

Although it is possible you are correct in this instance, the odds are long.

My long-suffering J-wife learned this again, not that she will remember, because clever as she is, she's ISFJ (I think).


This would be me.  The Japanese have none: they've killed themselves.



The story:

We have two children under five, ourselves and eight bags and a stroller to check in to a flight at Narita, and another half dozen bags to carry on.  My error was to muse aloud that perhaps getting a driver to take us in a van to the airport would cost little more than takkyubin, cab fare to the nearest useful station and train fare.  So I asked her to spend five minutes Googling in Japanese for the price of a chauffered van.  Taxi, train and takkyubin would cost us about 25 000y, and more trouble.

Apparently I needed a lesson that rationality and lateral thinking are rare enough in the species, and rarer yet in the Japanese (the woman thing: twice the emotional over thinker rate on MBTI tests*).  She insisted that was a "waste of time", would cost 30 000y, and that there was no such service in Japan because "Japanese don't do that". 

Well if you really wanted a fight with me, pull the 'ware-ware Nihonjin', 'ziss izu Japon' card.

I believe the following came out of my mouth as this escalated:
Christ you people are conventional thinkers.
You do not know that I am wrong, nor have I said that I am right: I asked you to look in Japanese because it is worth five minutes to find the price.  It's called research.  You should try it!
You know what, fuck you.  You've wasted more of my time than you'd have needed to look it up, but you are too stubborn.  I'll fucking do it in English and see what I get...  Look, 17 000y.  That would be cheaper.
After she apologized for insisting I was wrong, whereas I was right, again:
You've forgotten that my type is not always right, but we are honest when we are wrong, are voracious readers, gatherers of information and synthesizers of it.  I have been wrong.  It just happens rarely enough that when I insist I am right I most probably am.
Being right is what we do.  We are very, very good at it.  If you think an INTJ is wrong, whereas wrong is something you've seen them rarely be, would you give your fucking head a shake and save us both time?

Thank you,

All the rational lateral thinkers in the world (as few as we are).


*Twice as many women, not all, though twice as many makes it feel like all...  My best student this year is INTJ, and a teen girl.  Poor kid: she's only going to have male friends, and most of them will fall in love with her even when she cannot.

8 comments:

  1. I wanna know about heredity and personality types... over the weekend my FIL was so wrong but refused to relent, the hubs does the same thing which just shits me when I KNOW the actual answer. FIL buys me Hello Kitty Vans EVERY YEAR as a birthday gift. The b-day is right around the corner and he insists the "woman that makes those shoes refuses to make them now". ABSURD! I tried to tell him that and even pointed at my smarter-than-FIL phone and he still refused. Sometimes stubbornness defies logic it seems. Even when the proof is right before their eyes. Quite frankly Vans have no support and I am glad to be done of that yearly gift.

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    1. But I was correct... so I can't speak to your FIL or husband.

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    2. I so love the Internet for killing an idiot's argument. Just ten years ago you'd argue in circles that something was a fact unless you happened to be in a library at the time. An idiot at work tried to insist the Magna Carta was written in the English Civil War, which one may neither know or care about, but if a person's going to use it in a discussion they ought to have some clue of both items: they are four hundred years apart. Showed this to him on my phone.

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    3. I think I waffle a bit much between F and T that it makes an argument hard for me but damn if it don't feel good being right.
      As mush as I hate how connected (Facebook addicts) people have become, I still have no games on my phone which renders it completely useless for most and a library at my disposal; which makes it a paradise for me... that is unless power fails humanity. Then it's to grandma's house which holds an actual (3) set of encyclopedia.

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  2. You delivered - it doesn't exist because "we Japanese don't do that". No offense to your wife in particular, but why the need to bring nationality (or as they think about it, race) into every little transaction? Is it really behind every little thing that goes through their minds? I fear the answer is true. Pathological, narcissist nationalists.
    I was just trying to think of the opposite situation, i.e. a foreigner asking me to Google for a Limo service in my country, but even with the highest possible sense of objectivity, I can't fathom that I'd ever state something along the lines of "Forget about it, we Germans don't do that".

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    1. Exactly. I simply guessed that even if the service has a lower percentage of Japanese using it than Canadians, Tokyo has ten times the population of Toronto so...

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  3. She probably just couldn't be bothered doing it so said you were wrong so you'd do it yourself.

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    1. Not how is played out actually. Funny thing is that she's now on the phone telling a friend how clever I am, but pain in the ass. I would argue that the latter is a perception, the former is a proven fact.

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