Recently, I've been going down the rabbit hole of the Substack Catholic Miracle Discourse, that started with a prominent Effective Altruist and shrimp welfare campaigner, Matthew Adelstein, aka Bentham's Bulldog, promoting a Catholic evangelist called Ethan Muse, who revived the argument from miracles as the main (at least, initial) reason to become Catholic. Many other prominent Substackers commented on these events, with eventual involvement of the prominent universalist theologian David Bentley Hart.
Since Socionics is a mind virus that makes you type anyone you come across who is even somewhat interesting or distinct, it's only natural that I am unable to fight the desire to type some of the people involved here in another group post. As usual, typing a living person is always a touch more uncertain than typing historical characters.
Bentham's Bulldog himself: LII with a strong IEI accent
Adelstein is definitely a very "ascending" character, concerned with global humanity (and shrimp) issues more than with one-to-one relationships and pragmatic profit. (Note that LII and IEI are the types who prefer theory to practice the most). Engaging with cosmic moral scales, he clearly likes to systematize and to classify, Ti-lead style. His entire Substack is dedicated to building systematic, logically rigorous frameworks (e.g., his arguments for moral realism, detailed analyses of fine-tuning). He defends his positions with precision, but is willing to update and question them, unlike your typical LSI. However, him being drawn to figures like Ethan Muse — confident, system-building sophists — shows a certain IEI-ish attraction to strong and confident personalities, although it's worth noting that he eventually rejected Muse's fundamentalist Catholicism. He got swept into a grand narrative ("leg, no leg — you're done" re: the Miracle of Calanda), and then did become more skeptical when it failed to take hold, which suggests a greater suggestibility to environment than the "static" canonical LII allows.
Ethan Muse: LSI
Described as a "foot soldier of a long-running actual unironic psychological warfare campaign on behalf of the Catholic Church" with his warnings about eternal hellfire for disbelievers, Muse may be a sophist, but what's undeniable that he's also a dogmatist. He has his own global system of traditionalist Catholicism, which is is willing to fight for, both in Substack comments and on-video. The systematic, organized output of his apologetic project also points to lead Ti, and the unshakable nature of it to anti-Ne. "He has his reasons, the primary one, I suspect, being ecclesial authority: it’s true because the true Church says it’s infallibly so," mournfully notes the liberal Orthodox priest Adrian Kimel. The Bulldog's investigations eventually ended in the "David Hume, I own you an apology" post, while Muse' formula stands untouched. He is also known to have a somewhat "hypnothizing" quality when he speaks, which is especially characteristic of types between LSI and EIE poles, and between the two, Muse is closest to LSI.
BSB is a mild academical philosopher whose entire corpus is calm, logical analysis. His piece on moral relativism is a decent example of academic LII prose: a formal audit applied to moral conditionals, which results in a conclusion that "moral judgments have to have consistent entailments" and that only moral realism "gets all these things for free." On a side note, while I'd say that rational ethicals are the most likely to subscribe to moral realism, and irrational logicals are the least likely to do so, it's quite a loose correlation, and note that BSB defends it with logic, not with empathy or altruistic motivation. His essays are LII-style exhaustive prose. The thesis in "Nuance Won't Save You" is built through a precise structure of nested qualifications ("I don't believe the general argument will necessarily apply to every fundamentalist belief... Nor do I think it will apply to beliefs that..."). Even his chosen nickname justifiably boasts his opposition to team formation and groupism which is another LII trait (now, if this boast were not justified, this would be a more interesting typing case...)
Arthur T: ILI with an Alpha NT accent
This substacker, with the typically characteristic Memento Mori skull as his avatar, has some attraction to Ti global systems and Ne speculation, but his greatest delight is debunking other people's logical constructions. Although he has been focused on doing this with miracle apologetics, he himself admits "I don't think there's any worldview I don't find deeply off-putting... I think existence might actually just be an inescapable nightmare," which is quite telling — anyone can be a pessimist about something, but ILI's pessimism is cosmic, not only linked to a single topic. He is a skeptic, but his favorite cases for investigation, the ones he receives the most actual pleasure from reading, are the ones he finds "the eeriest." Among the people involved in the Discourse, his pull is a touch more the temporal specifics, as opposed to the more abstract epistemology of testimony (BSB) or grand metaphysics (Bulldog).
David Bentley Hart: ESI with a strong accent on EIE
The famous universalist liberal Orthodox theologian had wandered in the Discourse, making his opinion of Ethan Muse perfectly clear. In fairness, Hart is on THC for pain therapy, but in general, while neither of his logical functions is the weakest, his main arguments are ethical ones. He quite notably derided the whole "analytic philosophy" approach in his other comments, saying that the "analytic" substackers have only basic philosophical competence, pointing to his Ti function not being that valued — he clearly doesn't derive the "joy of being" from logical analysis. Note that his universalism is rooted in moral conviction (as opposed to Arthur T, who admits that while infernalism is illogical, he doesn't find arguments involving it that emotionally compelling) and in Christian tradition — Gregory of Nyssa, the pre-Augustinian East, the ancient liturgy — against later accretions. Another one of his works, the rather-combatively titled Atheist Delusions is literally a defense of ancient Christianity against modernity's "fashionable enemies." He's also quite an aesthetic snob in his disdain for consumer capitalism and pop culture. Really, he's quite a Tolstoyan character, even if he applies his talents more to pure moral theology than to novels and political philosophy.
Sophia in the Shell: LII with accents on ILE and maybe even on IEE (LII/IEE possible)
The LII base shows itself just like with BSB — for instance, in the whole fine-tuning piece. Here, she conducts a strip-it-to-basics defamiliarization exercise where she lets the reader decide whether the argument for God secretly has the same shape as an uncontroversial argument about minds ("As for the rest of you, are some of you starting to see the bigger puzzle pieces fall together? The amazing possibilities unlocked by Dark Birgles?"). The essay even has a staged Q&A where she voices and answers her own strongest counterarguments! The inventive exercise concept itself is quite a Ne move, as well as the genre-hopping from fine-tuning to shamanism to the biographies of apostles, and her consistently light, non-competitive tone lacks ILE's occasional blunt, unceremonial assertiveness.
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