My Ti is starving

[passingby]

I quit trying in high school, due to me hating the system (it's been gone over so many times I don't even need to elaborate on what I mean here). Even in the classes I might have had an interest in (the sciences, math) I tuned out because I didn't see school as necessary to make enough money to support my intellectual pursuits outside of work. And in that I was correct, I'm doing just fine financially, and in fact compared to people my age I'm doing excellent (I have an entrepreneurial spirit... actually scratch that I'm lazy and found a way to make money with little input). The problem is my day to day life just isn't stimulating my Ti. I mean I play around with math problems just to keep myself from going nuts, but I need something I can really sink my teeth into. So I'm going to upgrade my high school physics and chem and math, and then enroll in a comp sci undergraduate program at the city university.

I think one of the main reasons I've been able to last this long, is I've been high pretty well daily for 4 years or so, or drunk, and I think those things kind of tune out my Ti in favor of Ne, which runs loose when stoned. Anybody else experience this (the tuning out)? I hear some people claim weed actually helps them focus, but not for me.

Just to clarify, by 'tuning out' I don't mean it's completely absent, just that I can stare at the sky (or the wall, or blankly at TV shows) for hours coming up with some ludicrous things without having to actively engage and analyze a particular system, ie. feeding my Ti. Except the economy, and making money, I got that down and now it's boring.

 

[Zionoxis]

I'm still in high school, so I can understand what you mean by it not mattering. At least I have college level classes and I'm learning computer networking (getting CCNA next year). That has kept me from going completely crazy on my teachers. As for your plan of furthering your education, it is a great idea. INTP's sort of HAVE to be thinking....about something. Worst case, think about something completely random. I mean, today I was waiting on one of my parents to pick me up as my car was broken. They were not going to be there for twenty minutes, so in front of the school, I started contemplating what a world without senses is like.

So, keep it up. My mini-rant shows how easily I get off topic.

 

[passingby]

Indeed. I'm lost if I have no new information to analyse/contemplate.

 

[Artsu Tharaz]

read a (text)book or five

 

[Zionoxis]

Here's a good subject. Go read as much as you can about covert hypnosis and how to perform it. Than get back to me on that.

 

[Latro]

My route, although I never got nearly that frustrated, has been to get jumpstarted up to the level of partial differential equations. In this program I'm in at my university, you can do this with only elementary differential equations ("Calculus IV" if you will) and linear algebra (a class with no prereqs except perhaps precalc) and then be doing research on PDEs. Although the field of PDEs has a lot of stuff already established, a lot of which I don't yet understand, there's still a lot of new stuff to do, so with only relatively basic understanding you can find yourself a niche. It'd be tricky to do without a mentor, though; I'd never have come up with my project on my own.

More generally though, try and find an area that has active research, and make your way into it.

 

[fullerene]

Teach yourself a programming language and start chugging through the problems on http://projecteuler.net/

Both math and programming are pretty Ti-heavy, so it might work out pretty well.

 

[Artsu Tharaz]

Teach yourself a programming language and start chugging through the problems on http://projecteuler.net/

Both math and programming are pretty Ti-heavy, so it might work out pretty well.

Thanks for this link!

For me, maths is 90% intuition, but certainly having to put my intuition into the logical form of programming would do wonders for my Ti. (though, I'm probably going to be bored of the question once I have an intuitive understanding of how it would be solved)

 

[fullerene]

You're actually in luck: the fun thing about these questions is that most of them are actually very easy to 'solve'. Getting an answer is usually quite simple. The tough thing is that that solution would take so many steps and iterations that even your computer may churn away for hours or days trying to find it.

To really solve the problem, I think the site said, your computer ought to be able to turn up an answer in less than a minute. If it takes much longer than that, your algorithm may be correct, but it's not the elegant/efficient way to do it.

So... unless you have an awesoem intuition for how long it takes a computer to solve a problem, you're kind of forced to program it out and let it run to see.

 

[Artsu Tharaz]

Having these to do during school would have been cool.

 

[digital angel]

I found that things got better. I have two professional degrees.

Keep your options open.