haha, I know what you were referring to. People with similar intellectual interests are going to have similar other personality traits too, though, and peoples' religious beliefs aren't boxed off from the rest of their life. The ones they
state that they have might be, but the real ones pervade the rest of their lives.
To your other question: not at all. My dad's an ESTJ, my mom's an ISTJ, and I can't actually think of an idea/ideal/theory I've had, or decision/independent choice I've made that they weren't immediately critical of. Their parenting style seems to have been "we need to be firm in everything, never change our minds, and not give the kids an inch of thinking they might have better ideas than us, or they'll lose respect for us forever"--so the criticism wasn't even
arguable criticism... it was "I'm bigger than you, so you're easy to intimidate, and I'm going to use that advantage until you stop arguing" criticism. They've come around to appreciate the college I chose (CMU) over the alternative (Rensselaer Polytech), and they were patient when I was making up my mind, but immediately after I decided CMU was a better fit, they started trying to convince me to go to the other one. This reluctant acceptance is about the closest thing to respect for me that's still in my memory banks (though, admittedly, I have a poor memory). I'm not even going to get into the number of times in middle/high school I mentioned offhandedly that I did something of questionable respectability, thinking it wasn't a big deal, to get scolded at it (partially because I'm ashamed of how many times I tried--it was around 4, I can distinctly remember thinking "I should never tell them anything again"). Did I mention that they've been trying to make me look/talk socially acceptable, with the intent of making me easier to befriend, without considering/respecting the fact that half the reason I act the way I do is to "screen" shallow people away from me, so I don't have to put on facades around friends? I used to have consistent nightmares of being hunted when I was younger, by a male/female pair of people, but it wasn't til recently that I suspected it might be because it always felt like they were watching over my shoulder, waiting for me to screw up so that they could tell me what a poor decision I'd made.
No, my parents don't appreciate my ideas in the slightest, and I've long since stopped trying to communicate them. My brother is a fantastic person, and always happy to listen... but he didn't really become that way until about my sophomore year of high school. I also have one friend now, and my girlfriend, who I can talk with about things I enjoy... but I didn't meet either of them until college. After a few bitter fights, now that I've grown up a bit, my parents are
definitely trying to listen more and try to have reasonable conversations with me, but I'm finding it
extremely hard to actually say anything of importance to them.
So no... no real "influential" people that I can think of that gave me these interests. I ultimately went into science because I found it easy--it was quite literally the path of least resistance, and I thought it would be almost criminal to do something less math/sciencey if I had these talents to begin with--and found computer science to be a lot like a game... which makes it really fun/easy to work on. Philosophy I just enjoy (I can literally take ideas out of the bible, write 6-10 page philosophy papers explaining them, and get an A with glowing feedback from the professor/TA, so long as I talk as if they were my thoughts and don't mention where I got them from. It makes me giggle inside
... but I got bored of it after I had a few classes that were centered around repeating what other philosophers had said, using very precise wording). The friends/girlfriend I have are just some people who I attracted/was attracted to after I found these interests.
![[SS].Invictus](/data/avatars/l/2/2365.jpg?1519222843){kind=avatar}
. They're all too close to even. You're going to be one of the older members here, I suspect. Either that or you just picked a whole lot of in-the-middle answers because you didn't care much. It's rare someone < 20 is that balanced in everything, though. That's more often for the > 40 folks.
It's not quite that easy, but yeah.
I'm a big Aquinas fan, and I aspire to that level of semantic systematization.
