[HN Gopher] Personality Basins
___________________________________________________________________
Personality Basins
Author : qouteall
Score : 143 points
Date : 2024-11-21 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (near.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (near.blog)
| dark-star wrote:
| wait... is this the same "near" who wrote bsnes, one of the best
| SNES emulators out there?
| daeken wrote:
| Sadly, that `near` died in 2021 after a massive bullying
| campaign.
| blueflow wrote:
| Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_(programmer)
|
| Apparently both Near's are Death Note fans.
| arslanjaffer wrote:
| Reverse settings
| MrMcCall wrote:
| >> Most personality changes are unconscious
|
| That is because most people are not consciously attempting to
| become better people for the betterment of those around them
| (which helps their own happiness, too, due to the nature of our
| karmic universe). Most people are simply acting out of the
| selfishness to have their own desires fulfilled, with varying
| amounts of concern for the consequences to those around them.
|
| A person can undertake self-evolution in any direction they
| choose; it is always our choice, except in the extremely rare
| cases where a person is physically damaged. Most people have the
| power to change, though it is difficult for us all. The universe
| does help those of us who seek to do so for the benefit of
| others.
|
| What makes human beings unique is that we have both the ability
| to self-evolve our attitudes and behaviors, and the tools to do
| so, our mind and conscience.
|
| >> Personality Capture
|
| A person who is not undergoing conscious-self-evolution is
| susceptible to being influenced (and even overwhelmed) by a
| forceful personality that caters to their desire-seeking. That is
| how dictators have always risen to power: they seek a loyal army
| of folks enamored with the leader's promises to make the in-
| group's lives better. Those folks never seek to make life better
| for _ALL_ people, because helping out-group members requires
| generosity, which usually requires making some level of selfless
| sacrifices of resources.
|
| As always, the strife is between selfish callousness and selfless
| care. Compassion for _all_ our fellow human beings is the nature
| of being a humanitarian, that is to say: being the best of what
| we can be, for the benefit of the entire human race. And it all
| starts with each and every one of us.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Most people are trying to survive in a capricious universe,
| after having observed over a lifetime that the good are often
| punished while the wicked are rewarded.
|
| Mind/consciousness is not unique to humans, we're just better
| at maintaining a thread of self reflection so that we can make
| long term changes in behavior.
|
| Kindness is all well and good, but when there's not enough to
| go around it's foolish to deprive everyone. Some people are
| just more deserving, whether for moral reasons or because an
| investment in them will be more fruitful.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| What's important is that you know who is deserving and who
| isn't, right?
|
| I did not say that mind or consciousness is unique to humans.
| Our difference is that only we can control our minds and only
| we have a conscience to help us make moral decisions, which
| is always within the realm of self-reflection. Animals only
| possess the barest minimum of mind and self-reflection, for
| the sole purpose of survival, which pressures them to be as
| fit as possible. We exist at a different scale of
| consciousness.
|
| Morality only exists within human beings because only we can
| calculate (using our mind, under the pressure of our
| conscience) how our actions might affect others positively or
| negatively. Then we use our greatest gift, our free will, to
| choose between selfish and selfless behaviors.
|
| Even our attitudes can be chosen, over time. Choosing to be
| empathetic is an essential path forward to positive group
| behavior, and those without empathy are dangerous folk,
| indeed. Helping our younger generations develop a matrix of
| positive group morality is the highest purpose of education,
| sadly mostly neglected nowadays.
|
| You should remember, as a CEO, that your choices bear a
| greater burden because they affect an entire organization as
| well as all the folks affected by whatever it is your firm
| produces (I don't know, I didn't look).
|
| And, my friend, my universe is not at all capricious, but my
| fellow human beings are definitely flaky, being solely
| motivated by selfish desires, few having any more than a
| passing interest in the well-being of others. Of course, I do
| not consider that some being given more wealth and/or
| hardship than others is capricious; others surely disagree,
| obviously. As to the fairness of our criminal justice system,
| that's on the human beings making those decisions, not the
| universe for giving them the power to shade things however
| they choose.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You don't know to what degree animals are conscious or
| control their behavior.
|
| Empathy is a lot like turning the other cheek which the
| institutions of power like to beat the small minded and
| powerless with in order to perpetuate themselves. Sure,
| it's often good, but there are also cases where it isn't so
| good or useful, however having the population docile by
| default is always good for power.
|
| People become CEOs because they're power hungry and good at
| manipulating others. Those sorts of people are least likely
| to buy the empathy line in any non performative way, so I'd
| save my breath.
|
| The flakiness and inconsistency of humans is just a
| reflection of a pattern that repeats itself at all scales
| of the universe. There is no coherent order, only the
| chaotic ramifications of countless minds, both human and
| non, coevolving the universe together.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| >> You don't know to what degree animals are conscious or
| control their behavior.
|
| Just because you don't know something or even understand
| that it can be known, in no way limits my knowledge. It
| just paints yourself a confident fool who already knows
| it all. Sounds like a CEO, neh?
|
| And, BTW, I _do_ know. Also, I know that you don 't know
| that I know, because you believe that no one can know,
| which is solely because you, yourself, don't know. As the
| Doobie Brothers sang so many years ago, "What a fool
| believes..."
|
| In my humility, I say to you, "There are things you know
| that I do not." As well, I say to you, "There are things
| that I know that you do not." Now, here's the tricky bit,
| I know that what I know is more important than what you
| know.
|
| How do I know that last, crucial, bit? Because you think
| there is a way to decide who gets resources and who
| doesn't, and that it should be based upon some value
| function that folks "smart" like you can determine for
| one and all. Pleeeaaase. I am a student of history, which
| is riddled with folks like you, perched upon your spire
| claiming to have the voice of reason to speak over your
| lessors. It's tired and shall not do well as this Age of
| Truth lurches forward.
|
| That said, it's your choice. Every fool has chosen to be
| a fool. And the first step to not being a fool is having
| the humility to entertain the possibility that you are,
| indeed, a fool. Here's the secret: we all are, to some
| extent, but a few of have the humility and desire to
| escape it.
|
| As to "coherent order", we are the only beings capable of
| consciously designing and creating such order, but our
| being slaves to our lower, selfish selves has prevented
| our doing so. As with all things human, the choice is
| ours, and the choices we have made thus far have been
| less than optimal.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You are obviously either a crank or a hardcore religious
| kool-aid drinker. Which is it?
|
| As for this age of truth lurching forward, have you not
| noticed the regress? If only the world progressed towards
| order.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| You can call me what you want, but you have told us all
| who you are, and that's all I need.
|
| We move forward together, usually with the loudest and
| most ignorant leading the way. Same as it ever was. The
| important thing is which side we each take. I side with
| compassion, justice, honesty, and science, which puts me
| in the minority, thank God.
| makerdiety wrote:
| It is naught but crypto-fascism the proposition that
| there is a choice between exercising empathy and being an
| immoral character. It is moral authoritarianism, the
| gaslighting of others, trying to make them believe that
| free will exists in the service of neo-conservative
| morality's dialectic of good judgement and evil judgement
| being a problem to consider at all in the first place.
| The reality is that morality lives way beyond what the
| rhetoric of neoliberal initiatives try to seductively
| present to vulnerable intellects and hearts.
|
| Advertising empathy as being better than a slice of bread
| is just fascism and a strain of neo-colonial desire in a
| clever (but not clever enough) disguise. The global
| threats to capitalism's productivity goals aren't fooling
| anyone. The Devil's idle hands and economic regression
| will have to retreat back to the drawing board and find a
| new military tactic that would be more effective than
| trying to disguise morality as something cool looking
| (when in reality it looks ugly and unappealing as an
| asset).
| verisimi wrote:
| > This is why techniques like nonviolent communication,
| dialectical behavior therapy, and mindfulness have observation
| and introspection as a core facet, because it's something that
| you have to consciously practice to become good at rather than
| something you're born with.
|
| I now tend to think that consciously observing and uncovering
| what you already are is really the start and end of it. One ought
| to try to concentrate oneself, rather than dilute oneself into
| something one is not. One might want to be a billionaire
| technologist, or sports hero, or whatever, and one might even
| edit oneself into something approximating that (via mentors,
| diligent study or whatever), but one will remain unfullfilled -
| for how is it possible to 'lie to' _and_ be 'right with'
| oneself?
| wavemode wrote:
| This article approaches human psychology from the perspective
| that, we are all neural networks and our output (actions) are all
| a learned function of our inputs (experiences).
|
| This is a common (and convenient) perspective, especially among
| engineers, but doesn't reflect reality particularly well. We know
| large swathes of a person's personality is directly linked to
| their genetics.
|
| The article extrapolates this neural network perspective onto
| other topics like, mental disorders and depression. The solution
| is made clear then - just learn how to not be mentally ill!
| Again, convenient. But not really reflective of reality.
| jw1224 wrote:
| That's not how I read it, I think you're missing some nuance
| here.
|
| The article doesn't imply genetics have no effect, it just
| treats them as a baseline which are then adjusted over time
| according to the person's lived experiences.
|
| Likewise with mental disorders and depression, the "solution"
| you claim it states as "not being mentally ill" is the outcome
| of a process, not the process itself.
| wavemode wrote:
| The process itself, as far as I can tell from the article,
| seems to be "increase your learning rate", "change your
| environment", "meet new people", "take psychedelics".
|
| My point is not that doing these things is never beneficial
| (well, one may argue about the psychedelics lol), just that
| it oversimplifies the problem space (and solution space) to
| the point of not being useful advice.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > My point is not that doing these things is never
| beneficial (well, one may argue about the psychedelics lol)
|
| In our experience, psychedelics are very hit-or-miss
| depending on the person. Some (like us) take high doses
| regularly without much consequence, others can suffer
| terrible damage after just a single dose. It can be
| difficult or impossible to predict, anyone who's unwilling
| to take the risk probably shouldn't.
| Balgair wrote:
| > it just treats them as a baseline which are then adjusted
| over time according to the person's lived experiences.
|
| So like the randomization process that seeds the values for
| RNN weights?
| Nevermark wrote:
| And the architecture which determines what units have
| weights between them.
|
| And the training rules, that determine which weights are
| adjusted in response to what units.
| makerdiety wrote:
| But what if it's possible to alter your influential genes,
| through some powerful mechanism? Whether it be through insane
| willpower or anything else. In that case, you have an analogy
| like something like artificial general intelligence or
| recursive self-improvement. We get to approach the discussion
| of questioning natural values and instinctive goals with this
| line of inquiry. We get to eventually question the metaphysics
| of God, morality, and aesthetics, by introducing fantastic
| elements like radical self-modification.
| jw1224 wrote:
| > But what if it's possible to alter your influential genes,
| through some powerful mechanism? Whether it be through insane
| willpower or anything else.
|
| Sounds like epigenetics, where the environment actively
| influences the genes themselves:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
| makerdiety wrote:
| Doesn't the environment already affect genes albeit on huge
| timescales like millions of years? Then the more clear
| question becomes how to accelerate mutations and for one
| individual person instead of through delicate and fallible
| processes like generations of species made through costly
| reproduction acts like civilizational projects.
| exe34 wrote:
| > just learn how to not be mentally ill!
|
| you can also learn to cope with mental illness with more or
| less self-destructive responses. not everybody gets a chance to
| learn healthier coping mechanisms.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Not everyone can just learn such coping mechanisms. Some
| people have physical problems that need physical
| help/remediation. Of course, our current psychiatric drugs
| are their risky attempts to help such folks. It is all very
| tricky, but we should all learn how to have better attitudes
| and behaviors.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Kind of, but the data isn't that great on that. There's
| some doubt about even SSRIs being net positive long term.
|
| TL Dr: yes, some people have low levels of "X", but we have
| insufficient data about why that is.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| I agree, and the profit motive for the pharma corps seems
| to have really compromised their ethics (to put it mildly
| while giving them more benefit of doubt than I think they
| deserve).
|
| Ultimately, medical science didn't even know the brain
| had a lymphatic system until this century. Futzing with
| the subtle biochem of neurotransmitters and hormones is
| quite beyond their abilities, looks to me. That doesn't
| appear to prevent them from making a solid off their
| profit, regardless of any negative results.
|
| And, always, RIP Chris Cornell. Man, we miss that man's
| voice.
| slothtrop wrote:
| I Am a Strange Loop tangentially covers this.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| >The solution is made clear then - just learn how to not be
| mentally ill! Again, convenient. But not really reflective of
| reality.
|
| And you know this because?
|
| Cutting edge theories of depression link it to alterations in
| the reward learning system. There is some evidence that
| training persons with depression to attend to certain aspects
| of the reward learning mechanism can reduce depressive
| symptomology [I am involved in this research]. But speaking
| more broadly, cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most
| successful non-pharmaceutical treatments for depression,
| involves people "learning how not to be depressed" by
| unlearning problematic patterns of negative thinking and coping
| with negative events: first by recognizing what those
| problematic thoughts and behaviors are, and working to adjust
| those ... to move you out of that basin.
|
| The main issue with this article imo is that it does not
| consider the meta-problem: how the reinforcement learning
| system can be altered by experience as well.
| wavemode wrote:
| CBT can work, sure. It can also not work. As with any
| treatment.
|
| And depression is only one mental illness, there are
| countless others. And there are also many different forms and
| causes of even depression itself.
|
| As I mentioned in another comment, my point isn't that the
| article's advice is necessarily harmful, just that it
| oversimplifies a lot of things by assuming that all
| psychology can be boiled down to learning and unlearning.
| Ignoring the role of biology may also cause one to ignore
| possible paths to progress.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| > This is a common (and convenient) perspective, especially
| among engineers, but doesn't reflect reality particularly well.
| We know large swathes of a person's personality is directly
| linked to their genetics.
|
| I really am not an expert in any of this. Just my quick
| thoughts of the idea about genetics and "being born with it".
|
| If we're attempting to create a mental model of how machine
| neural networks relate to human brains, would it be useful to
| think of genetics as the basis that determines your neural
| network's architecture? Maybe there's even some pre-trained
| weights that are communicated through genetics.
|
| I think it would be oversimplification to say we're all born
| with the same neural network and pre-trained weights because
| like you've mentioned: large swathes of a person's personality
| is directly linked to their genetics.
| tarr11 wrote:
| Idle musing - maybe some genetics is for stored environment?
|
| Eg, perhaps some of your genes' purpose are to encode memories
| in DNA.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Natural selection encodes adaptive responses to the
| environment in DNA (and other molecules), so memories can be
| encoded to the extent that they are adaptive and can be
| encoded (i.e., mechanisms may not exist to encode everything
| using only standing natural variation).
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Bro genetics is what determines the neural network in the human
| brain. You ARE a neural network.
| ve55 wrote:
| This is noted and considered out of scope: >Obviously some
| traits are more genetic, and thus inherent, than others, but
| that is not the scope of this post as even highly-heritable
| traits will result in a large distribution of outcomes.
| Balgair wrote:
| I've made the jump from physics to neuroscience, so I can talk
| to the engineers here (I've taken a lot of EE and worked
| professionally in it too).
|
| The linkages between neurons is somewhat similar to how and RNN
| looks. But you must remember, there are electrical and chemical
| elements going on here. It's not just one neuron spiking
| another. There are _many_ different biochemical processes that
| modify the behavior of little parts of a neuron,
| stoichiometrically. And there are many different types of
| neurons and they all change over time, sometimes drastically
| so. Most of the goings on is biochem. It 's not digital, or
| even analog. You really need to go down to the field equations
| at times, finite elements will get you far, but only just so.
|
| RNNs thinking certainly will help you understand better what is
| going on in a brain, but, like, these things are millions of
| years old, and optimized just to make more of themselves, not
| to be understood. It's tough going, and we as a species are
| only at the very beginning of hundreds of years of study of the
| brain.
|
| If you'd like to learn more, I can recommend some texts.
| Hargeysa wrote:
| Hargeysa
| paint wrote:
| Reading computer scientists' takes on psychology or social
| sciences after taking 1 (one) 101 level class and then
| reinventing the wheel on topics that have been researched for
| decades is just grating. Where does this come from? We get it,
| you like to think a lot, but if you're as smart as claim you
| would've realized you can't solve a topic by just thinking really
| hard and long about it alone in your room. Gurwinder Bhogal is
| one of the other guys repeatedly falling victim to it
| sgt101 wrote:
| >Your personality is formed by a process conceptually similar to
| RLHF. You are first born with a set of traits in a given
| environment. After this, you perform many interactions with your
| environment. If an interaction goes well, you're likely to do it
| more often, and if it goes poorly, you'll probably do less of it.
|
| first off 0 evidence presented, second off what about the kids
| that grew up stealing food in concentration camps or due to
| abusive parents. Do they grow up to be liars and thieves? Nope.
| What about all the kids that get nothing but positive vibes and
| turn into total arseholes...
|
| I gave up reading immediately - just dumb.
| jw1224 wrote:
| > Do they grow up to be liars and thieves?
|
| I think you've completely misunderstood what this article goes
| on to say.
|
| > I gave up reading immediately - just dumb
|
| There's your problem then.
| jollyllama wrote:
| > A common mistake in life is to let your personality basin
| solidify too early. Your parents and schooling environment have a
| disproportionately large influence on who you become as an
| adolescent.
|
| > But as soon as you gain the freedom to act independently as an
| adult, it's usually a good idea to force yourself to try as many
| new things as you can, including moving cities (or countries!)
| and considering drastically different lines of work. ...
|
| Oh dear, I'm beginning to fear that the author's personality has
| been captured by global capital...
|
| And what if it's personality capture all the way down, i.e. that
| you've got to be personality captured by _someone_? In that case,
| the closest you can get to a choice is whether it 's your
| parents, religion, or someone/something else. While the integrity
| of your parents may vary, there is a subjective argument that
| they've got a better incentive to steer you into an optimal basin
| than anybody, relatively speaking.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > there is a subjective argument that they've got a better
| incentive to steer you into an optimal basin than anybody,
| relatively speaking
|
| Many parents do not have their kids best interest at heart;
| from religious fanatics to divorced parents using their kids as
| pawns to failed athletes living vicariously through their
| "he'll be in the NHL someday" fantasies to just parents who
| didn't want have kids and don't care at all.
|
| Then there a whole slew of parents who genuinely want what is
| best for their kids but won't succeed due to incompetence or
| their own issues with drug addition or passing on generational
| trauma.
| adrianN wrote:
| I'm reasonably sure that religious fanatics usually have
| their children's best interest at heart. Their value function
| is just different from that of less religious people.
| ndileas wrote:
| Something something a different enough value function is
| indistinguishable from malice.
|
| More seriously, like the old adage about everyone being the
| hero of their own story, all parents think they have their
| children's best interests at heart. There's probably no
| such thing as universal best interests. Gets at some of the
| thorny problems - personhood, adulthood, cultural values.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| It depends on the person, and it depends on the religion.
| There are positive and negative values, and a misaligned
| person may well believe they are doing right but actually
| causing damage. That is why humility, compassion, and
| honesty are prerequisites for all successful
| undertakings.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I mean, sure, from a certain technical point of view you
| could say "honour killings" are done to "save the soul of
| the child" and hence come from a place of "in their best
| interests" but by then the "value function" has gone
| totally awry.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| The quotation in the GP's post does seem to evince little
| appreciation (if not outright disdain) for ties to family and
| local community across the generations. But what if the
| potential harm caused to some kids by bad parents, is an
| unavoidable part of the social-cohesion benefits to all
| society that would be caused by young people not moving far
| away?
|
| I don't necessarily want to have a dog in this fight myself.
| But I immediately thought of how that quotation would jar
| with some cultures represented on HN, where children stay
| close to parents all their lives and it is widely felt that
| the West is doing it wrong.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Agreed! I think blanket assumptions the other way are bad
| as well.
|
| > where children stay close to parents all their lives and
| it is widely felt that the West is doing it wrong.
|
| It's interesting to see how close some 1st/2nd/3rd
| generation European families are, having first hand
| experience with Italian, Portuguese and Spanish families.
| It might be only certain parts of the West that is "doing
| this wrong".
| justinmulvs wrote:
| > How do you know if you're in the "right" personality basin
|
| I'm not so sure "right" is the right frame here. I like the
| multi-dimensional viewpoint you take. My experience would be a
| healthy personality would be one capable of adaptation in service
| of your interests at any times. It's dynamic.
|
| This reminds me of Bob Kegan's stage of adult development.
| Initially, most of us leave adolescence at the "socialized" stage
| of development, ie our personality basin has primarily been
| determined by the external factors of our upbringing and
| environment.
|
| From there, if we choose to continue developing, we eventually
| reach a "self-authored" mind, where we have transcended our
| socialized basin in favor of a self-defined and created
| personality structure, until ultimately, for those who continue
| evolving, we reach a "self-transforming" mind, or a mind capable
| of transforming itself.
|
| I like the simplicity of the model, and I also think it reduces
| personality to an unnecessarily static entity. Things like
| internal family system/parts work also demonstrate that our
| personality is not a singular entity, it is represented by a
| whole slew of parts that show up in different ways and different
| contexts! I think the broad strokes of it still hold, and also
| think there are many additional approaches to truth and the
| awakening path, lying in parts work, embodied transformation, and
| whole bunch of other experimental modalities (thought perhaps
| that's just my personality speaking...)
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| One of the more depressing things of the AI boom is watching
| engineers and "atheists" get hoodwinked by mystic gibberish like
| this blog. There is nothing here but astrology: even Myers-Briggs
| is more scientific.
|
| I think 30% of atheists bothered to think carefully about the
| Flying Spaghetti Monster and recognized Pastafarianism as a funny
| commentary on epistemic uncertainty. The remaining 70% said "heh,
| stoopid Christians believe in a spaghetti monster!" and took it
| as confirmation of their tribe's superiority.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I have not read this blog except the linked blog post, but
| could you be more specific on what you think is mystic
| gibberish?
|
| Speaking as someone who works in clinical neuroscience, the
| basic picture being presented is similar in many respects to
| the informal model I carry around. It may be lacking in certain
| details, but big picture seems to me that it has a lot going
| for it as a guide to intuitions.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Personally I've always found, ironically, some of my most
| ardent atheist friends to essentially treat the topic with a
| level of intensity you might expect from a religious
| evangelist. Often there's also a level of religious fervor they
| carry over to politics as well.
|
| I don't really care what other peoples religion/non-religion is
| anymore than what type of underwear they prefer, and yet...
| bedobi wrote:
| i agree with your sentiment, but it bears pointing out that
| no one brandishes their underwear in people's faces screaming
| that they must wear the same ones, or use the political
| system to privilege people of the same underwear and punish
| others etc etc
|
| fwiw me personally i'm all in on uniqlo airism, there is no
| better underwear and if i could force everyone to wear them i
| would (for their own good, of course)
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Well there were the old Michael Jordan ads...
| MrMcCall wrote:
| We already know that our science can simply not
| explain/understand what happened in the first 10e-33s after
| the Big Bang, which is just established science.
|
| There is nothing more "negatively religious" than believing
| that nothing caused that primal explosion of all that is.
| Unfortunately, they then proceed to throw out the positive
| aspects of some religious teachings concerning, e.g.,
| compassionate concern for our fellow human beings.
|
| Regardless, religion is a personal thing; forcing any beliefs
| on others is always a problem and must be prevented. We are
| all free to choose our attitudes and behaviors. Behaviors
| that harm others, however, must -- in a just system -- be
| dealt with by the society, for the benefit of the whole,
| irrespective of belief system of perpetrator or victim. Using
| compassion to make such decisions is always the best way, for
| varying values of compassion.
| jfactorial wrote:
| > We already know that our science can simply not
| explain/understand what happened in the first 10e-33s after
| the Big Bang, which is just established science.
|
| Yet. There's a very big difference in "I don't know," vs.
| "I know that no one can ever know."
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Absolutely. I actually know that (know that I don't know,
| but that my not knowing doesn't mean that no other person
| can know), but modern science will not be the source of
| such explanations.
|
| Those explanations can only be accessed once we
| understand that the universe itself is queryable (that is
| our joint purpose here, us and our expansive environment
| together) and that a human being needs to undergo a
| process of self-evolution to become aligned with the
| Creator's Intent such that we gain access to it.
|
| You could say that a person must learn of the challenge,
| accept the challenge, and then pass all the tests,
| thereby gaining access.
| jfactorial wrote:
| > once we understand that the universe itself is
| queryable
|
| We do understand that. "What happens when I push a rock
| off a cliff?" is a query to the universe. The universe's
| response is observable when the experiment is executed
| and the rock is pushed.
|
| > a human being needs to undergo a process of self-
| evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent
|
| I have no need for this hypothesis. We can query the
| universe at any time simply by observing it, proposing a
| falsifiable explanation for what is observed, and acting
| within it to test our explanations.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| There are deeper queries than "What happens when I push a
| rock off a height?" The science and math of Newton's laws
| of motion is enough for that, especially if combined with
| some materials science.
|
| I didn't say that you "needed" anything, but the fact
| remains that if you want to calculate the trajectory of
| something traveling at a significant percent of light
| speed, you will need some higher maths. Such calculations
| require advancing one's mind, as do other queries. But,
| no, none of that is necessary to find out what happens
| when a person's cat pushes something off the countertop.
|
| No observation was even feasible for Einstein to
| formulate GR or Feynman to formulate QED, so if all that
| matters to you is what you see, that's your choice; I
| wish you well.
| jfactorial wrote:
| I thought it would be obvious that my simple example was
| only illustrative. I'm not actually suggesting we discuss
| high school physics.
|
| > No observation was even feasible for Einstein to
| formulate GR
|
| Einstein made many observations about the real world to
| formulate his theories, e.g. Mercury's orbit, the
| relativity of motion, the inability to distinguish
| between different forms of acceleration.
|
| > if all that matters to you is what you see, that's your
| choice
|
| To be clear, in this discussion about what science can
| explain/understand, I'm advocating for the scientific
| method as the sole means through which objective truth
| can be verified, not the sense of sight.
|
| When you mentioned a Creator being whose intent could be
| known and aligned with, my reply was a reference to a
| Laplace quote I thought you'd recognize. I apologize if
| it seemed personal. I only meant to say that we can and
| do query the universe to discover explanations for how it
| works without ever assuming the existence of gods or
| their supposed intentions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-
| Simon_Laplace#I_had_no_...
| MrMcCall wrote:
| I am merely explaining that there are more sublime and
| direct ways of querying the univere, but that is beyond
| our current understanding of the depths science could be
| developed to explain.
|
| At some point in a certain kind of seeking, the proof is
| accepted and no more is needed. That someone calls it a
| hypothesis is akin to a flat-Earther opining that my
| understanding of the solar system is a theory.
|
| And, yeah, flat-Earthers are also very authoritative in
| their manner.
| jfactorial wrote:
| > At some point in a certain kind of seeking, the proof
| is accepted and no more is needed.
|
| This is part of what intrigues me about this topic, the
| inductivist view that if we make enough empirical
| observations we can eventually settle on an objective
| truth. E.g. by observing enough cats we can conclude that
| all cats have whiskers.
|
| The realm of science is falsifiable statements. "All cats
| have whiskers," is a falsifiable statement. We can only
| state it with 100% certainty by observing all cats
| (impossible). We can disprove the statement by
| experiment, however, one designed to discovering just one
| pathetic little whiskerless cat.
|
| I subscribe to this, Karl Popper's view, that truth is an
| ideal we can pursue but never quite expect to arrive at.
| Truth seekers aim to be less wrong, but have little hope
| of being 100% exhaustively right.
|
| This isn't to say we are unable to act like we believe
| anything. We can assume the next cat we meet will have
| whiskers and get by pretty well. But I wish more people
| could accept that statements like "God exists but is not
| observable in any way," or "The government is covering up
| aliens and anyone who says differently is part of the
| cover-up," are not falsifiable, and because they can't be
| disproven they also can't be trusted as truth. Maybe they
| are true, but you can't know, so it doesn't matter.
|
| If a used car salesman tells you the car you're buying
| has above average fuel efficiency, you can test that and
| you should. If he tells you that it is a magical car that
| only runs out of fuel when destiny ordains it, we can't
| test that, so we should stay skeptical of the claim.
|
| Whatever means by which someone believes they are
| directly querying the universe, if they are making
| falsifiable statements, those statements can/should be
| tested by the truth seeker; and if they are not making
| falsifiable statements, there is no compelling reason to
| believe them.
| norir wrote:
| I agree that the scientific method is the best approach
| towards finding objective truth (which is of course
| precisely what it is designed to do). The problem is
| placing objective truth above all other truths. It
| annihilates subjectivity, which is possibly the most
| crucial element of being human. And of course formal
| science has limitations on the truths that it can reveal
| in its own system (the uncertainty principle) and on a
| practical level every known scientific theory, no matter
| how successful, breaks down at some level (see quantum
| gravity).
|
| All of which is to say that my stance is: embrace science
| but accept its limitations.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| That is well put.
|
| Know that the key to human existence is the fact that, by
| changing one's attitudes, behaviors, and thought
| processes, one has also changed one's subjective
| viewpoint, by expanding both one's field of view and
| one's depth of comprehension, so long as those changes
| are harmonious with compassion.
|
| Our most important capability is being able to self-
| evolve (with the help of the universe) ourselves beyond
| our more primal impulses and towards our more abstract
| endeavors such as selfless service to mankind.
| jfactorial wrote:
| Can you give an example of a subjective truth?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Feeling strongly about lack of belief in something wild
| without evidence is not congruent to strong belief in
| something wild without evidence. Even if the people in the
| former camp can be equally passionate or annoying.
|
| Suddenly there's this big unnamed (or is it named and I don't
| know it?) cognitive error that I see everywhere that is
| believing in an automatic symmetry between two opposing
| viewpoints. Sometimes one idea is better than another. No,
| you don't get "objectivity" points for virtue signaling that
| you're above the whole debate.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| It's funny that questioning evangelical atheism is getting
| me more downvotes than even questioning AI or Crypto..
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Well, again, believing that modern AI is close to what
| human consciousness and intelligence are, or that coders
| will fix society without running into Chesterton's fence,
| are good examples of huge beliefs that require huge
| justification. For which faith isn't a good substitute.
| You shouldn't be made to feel like you're extremist in
| the opposite direction for requiring that justification.
| chzblck wrote:
| Perfect comparison at Myers-Briggs being more scientific.
|
| like astrology with extra steps for dorks
| jerf wrote:
| It's an application of chaos mathematics to personality
| development. It isn't a rigorous treatment of such, it's a blog
| post, but it seems fairly reasonable.
|
| Being a blog post and not necessarily intended to end up on
| Hacker News, shorn of any other context, the author never even
| used the term "attraction basin", which is the term you'd want
| to Google if you want to figure out what the author is saying.
|
| If you don't know what an attraction basin is, then yeah, this
| definitely comes off sounding bad, but if you know what it is
| it makes sense. Attraction basins are one of those basic
| concepts from chaos mathematics that, once you realize what
| they are and why they are, you realize that the world can't
| _help_ but be full of them in all sorts of places, including
| human personalities. The world is fundamentally iterative, so
| patterns that arise in all iterations are relevant all over the
| place.
|
| Attraction basins are a good reason to expect in advance, sight
| unseen, that human personalities can actually be fit into a
| relatively small number of buckets relative to the conceivable
| number of buckets that could exist. In fact this is true of any
| generally similar set of entities living in a generally similar
| environment, including AIs (of similar architectures, not the
| entire space of possible AIs) and aliens, assuming they also
| have some sort of "species" categorization as we do. (Which
| doesn't have to be "DNA genetics", just, a bunch of similar
| being for whatever reason.) It doesn't tell you what those will
| be in advance by any means; it just gives you reason to believe
| that you won't in fact be looking at an "unbiased", uniformly
| random distribution of personality parameters, but that they
| will collect around certain attraction basins in general.
| heap_perms wrote:
| This is what happens when an engineer tries to apply mathematical
| models to entirely different fields where they have no
| applicability. Reducing human personality to machine learning
| concepts like 'gradient updates' misses the fundamental
| complexity of human psychology and consciousness.
| evv555 wrote:
| You can accept that "personalities" have a state space without
| falling into reductive explanations. They're not mutually
| exclusive.
| cproctor wrote:
| I agree that it can be helpful to think of identity as a
| trajectory shaped by interactions along the way. However, we also
| continually shape our environments in large and small ways. TFA
| ignores this completely. Can this be effectively modeled in RL?
|
| Over 130 years ago, Dewey [1] criticized the model of psychology
| which looked at human behavior in terms of stimulus -> internal
| processing -> response. Stimuli don't just come to us; we seek
| them out and modify the world around us to cause them to occur.
| Dewey and other pragmatists proposed reframing stimulus/response
| in terms of "acts" or "habits," or changes to the unified
| agent+environment. Popper was getting at the same entanglement of
| agent and environment in "Three Worlds" and Simon in "The
| sciences of the artificial."
|
| I see RL as an elaboration of the stimulus/response paradigm: the
| agent is discrete from the environment. Does RL work well in an
| environment like Minecraft, where the real game is modifying the
| relationship between actions and future states? What about in
| contexts like Twitter, where you're also modifying the value
| function (e.g. by cultivating audiences or by participating in a
| thread in a way which conditions the value function of future
| responses)?
|
| [1]
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/#ReflArcDeweRecoPsy...
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I agree that the discussion in the blog post is incomplete
| because it does not consider that we shape the environments
| that shape us, though it does briefly touch on the fact that
| other RL agents (people) try to shape us, and we them. But it
| is certainly more than that.
| jerf wrote:
| "I agree that it can be helpful to think of identity as a
| trajectory shaped by interactions along the way. However, we
| also continually shape our environments in large and small
| ways. TFA ignores this completely. Can this be effectively
| modeled in RL?"
|
| You don't need to. All that is necessary for an attraction
| basin to emerge is an iterative system. If you prefer to model
| the human being and their entire environment rather than the
| human being and their input, you'll still get attraction
| basins. You'll just get two views on the same reality, suitable
| for different uses and different understandings, but it's not
| like "ah, if we model a human iterations we get these
| attraction basins but if we include environmental interactions
| suddenly we get a uniformly random distribution of
| personalities across the total personality space, it's all
| totally different once you consider the environment as part of
| the iterative system too".
| cproctor wrote:
| Thanks; I agree--both that you could train an agent in these
| situations, and that "You'll just get two views on the same
| reality, suitable for different uses and different
| understandings." I think the latter seriously undercuts the
| article's attempt to explain these trajectories in terms of
| personality; they could just as easily be attributed to the
| power of culture or social structure.
| jerf wrote:
| Heh, well, another lesson from chaos mathematics is that in
| iterative systems, you don't really get "explanations" the
| way we humans like to think of them... the answer to "what
| caused X" for any X than has taken a long time to develop
| is "everything". So rather than culture "or" social
| structure, I'd say "and", "and" also a lot of other things,
| and also the culture and social structure are themselves
| affected by the very personality structures we're trying to
| discuss.
|
| Determining "causes" isn't as hopeless as that makes it
| initially sound, but you need something more sophisticated
| than the normal human concept of "cause" to even
| approximate useful answers. The good news is, this isn't
| impossible; we all live in an iterative world and we
| operate in it even so, which requires us to have certain
| models that conform to the world. It's one of those cases
| where I don't really love the "humans are just horribly
| irrational" gloss; our instincts and intuitions often have
| greater rationality than we realize, because they were
| formed in this iterative world, and sometimes it is in fact
| the particular naive concept of "rationality" we are trying
| to measure them by that is deficient, whereas if you use a
| more sophisticated one we look less bad.
|
| (But sometimes humans just act suboptimally, no question
| about that.)
|
| Another thing that helps is that you aren't generally
| interested in modelling the entire system. For considering
| myself and whether I may want to, as the article discusses,
| make changes in myself, I can take my culture and
| environment more-or-less as a given; I need some flex to
| consider options like "well what if I just up and moved to
| another country?", but I don't need to consider my own
| effects on society very much because they are some complex
| combination of "tiny" and "utterly unpredictable". While
| society is chaotic, the time frame of the impact on society
| from me changing from excessively introverted to somewhat
| less introverted is way, way past my horizon for making
| decisions.
| foxbarrington wrote:
| Personality is ~70% determined by genetics, not life
| experience.[0]
|
| I'm surprised that someone interested enough in the topic to
| write such a long post wouldn't put the time in to do a cursory
| dive into personality psychology. I'm going to assume that the
| author has a similar definition of personality to mainstream
| psychology, but if so, they are ignoring accepted studies and
| evidence that make it pretty clear that personality is not
| learned through conditioning like AI.
|
| 0: https://www.themantic-
| education.com/ibpsych/2019/02/11/key-s...
| skybrian wrote:
| That's not a good summary of what twin studies show. For a more
| sophisticated discussion:
|
| https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/book-review-eric-tur...
| ve55 wrote:
| This is noted and considered out of scope: >Obviously some
| traits are more genetic, and thus inherent, than others, but
| that is not the scope of this post as even highly-heritable
| traits will result in a large distribution of outcomes.
| antisthenes wrote:
| There's no practical point in separating genetics from life
| experience, as they go hand in hand together.
|
| Someone who has the genetics to be physically
| attractive/beautiful will have a completely different set of
| experiences than someone who isn't. Same goes for intelligence.
|
| Also, the source you linked only pertains to IQ (which itself
| is not a perfect measure of intelligence), and IQ is not
| personality (although I have met some folks who do treat their
| IQ as a substitute for such).
| jonnycat wrote:
| I see this post getting trashed in the comments for its overly
| literal interpretation of personality as a reinforcement learning
| process, but I think there's some value to it as a _mental model_
| of how we operate (which is how the opening sentence describes
| it).
|
| If you can see past some of the more dubious, overly technical-
| sounding details and treat it as a metaphor, there is for sure a
| "behavioral landscape" that we all find ourselves in, filled with
| local minimal, attractors/basins and steep hills to climb to
| change our own behaviors.
|
| Thinking about where you are and where you want to be in the
| behavior landscape can be a useful mental model. Habit changes
| like exercise and healthy eating, for example, can be really
| steep hills to climb (and easy to fall back down), but once you
| get over the hump, you may find yourself in a much better
| behavioral valley and wonder how you were stuck in the other
| place for so long.
| uoaei wrote:
| There's an additional aspect to the dynamics, which is that the
| social spaces you put yourself in change the landscape to
| discourage deviancy from the norm. You become like the people
| you spend time with.
| motohagiography wrote:
| the essential idea is that personality is malleable, there are
| concepts in NNs that are analogous to experience we can use to
| name, deconstruct, orient, and contrast, and as a way to
| exercise some agency over our own personalities.
|
| you can choose it, and like "the five monkeys experiment"[1]
| after a while, you don't remember the things you don't believe
| anymore.
|
| the author used trauma, env change, extreme experiences and
| psychedelics as examples, but something as simple as reading a
| book or a comment on a forum can detach us from beliefs and
| ideas that moored our personality in a local basin. we are the
| effects of feedback, so change your feedback.
|
| [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-
| ex...
| rurban wrote:
| > Maybe you were born tall and attractive and then this led you
| to engage in a lot of athletic activities and socialization, and
| at the end of all of the positive feedback you have ended up with
| a jock personality that goes on to become a professional football
| player.
|
| Is that really that tall and attractive guys want to become
| football players? I always that football players attract the same
| stereotypes as police officers, big and stupid.
|
| In Europe only the most stupid folks want to become soccer
| players. Even if they'll end up filthy rich, with lots of tattoos
| and horrible haircuts.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I just watched Gary Gulman's comedy special Depresh Mode. He's
| a guy built like a football player and yet he's a depressive
| comedian. Only someone whose perception of their body matches
| their perception of their personality would come to the
| conclusion that everybody else on Earth must be a walking
| stereotype. It's like the Talking Heads song Seen and Not Seen
| but it's not a joke.
| csours wrote:
| I feel like some people are reading this post too literally.
|
| An infinite number of factors go into developing a personality,
| this covers a lot of the big ones.
|
| ---
|
| Lately I've been thinking about the windows of plasticity and why
| people change beliefs as adults.
|
| The sad fact is that a lot of people have a lot of very wrong and
| bad beliefs, and unfortunately most of them are already adults,
| so you don't get to discipline those beliefs out of them (I hope
| you can read this as tongue in cheek); You will never get mad
| enough at a person to fix them. Anger is motivating, but you
| don't get to pick the direction.
|
| As I understand it, psychologists believe that parents and the
| environment of a person's youth set a lot of their basic beliefs
| about the world, but it is their friendships in adulthood that
| most determine their value system - you want what is best for
| your friends (and yourself).
|
| ---
|
| To me this also ties into evaluating the actions of historical
| figures; people seem to get hung up on very flat depictions - was
| it ok that a person who did good things also did bad things?
| Well, they are a whole-ass person, raised in a different time and
| place. They didn't choose when and where and by whomst they were
| raised. They had some level of choice in their friend group, but
| that is also constrained by time and place.
|
| I feel that you can judge people and actions, while also allowing
| space for humanity and personal stories; but that does take a lot
| of time and emotional work. It is much easier to just choose one
| side of the coin or the other, face or heel.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I really like this expression, "a wholeass person".
| b800h wrote:
| > meditation, drug usage, trauma, religious events, love,
| gambling, and sex.
|
| This is why joining a psychedelic sex cult is such an effective
| life-choice. I don't mean that sarcastically.
| michaelmior wrote:
| > If you were born tall and with a commanding voice
|
| I've always assumed that a "commanding voice" is not something
| one is born with, but something one develops over time.
| derbOac wrote:
| As someone with a lot of research experience in this area, I was
| expecting something more fluffy but this was actually pretty
| good.
|
| There's a lot of research into some of these ideas at the moment.
| The terms they use aren't necessarily the same but many similar
| ideas. I think for the most part, the evidence in support of many
| of them is fairly weak but at the same time many of these ideas
| are much harder to test well than it might seem at first. I give
| a certain amount of pass to people trying to test them because in
| this area, trying to pin down something often is a bit like
| trying to study an individual cloud: you can kind of see it
| there, but if you were to try to measure its boundaries and
| dynamics, it would be harder to do than it might seem at first
| glance, and you'd end up more easily making very general
| observations about it than you might like.
|
| One thought I had when reading it is that people's environments
| are much more stable than is usually recognized. The piece
| acknowledges this somewhat, but I think it's more of an issue
| than most like to admit. Even when someone tries to change it, it
| can be difficult, because assets and SES can be difficult to
| change, other people resist it due to their own incentives like
| the essay points out, and even when other people don't really
| care much they often will resist it unintentionally due to
| schemas about personality change and so forth. "Once an X, always
| an X" regardless of whether you're talking about vocation,
| career, social characteristics, whatever -- even though that
| statement isn't actually true beyond some kind of general sense
| of it. Or they just are used to seeing someone in a particular
| setting and so don't see them in another.
|
| Another issue that's maybe murkier is the essay is a bit loose
| about person characteristics, even at a given point in time,
| versus situation characteristics. I don't know that it affects
| the arguments very much at all, the points still stand, but it
| sometimes drifts into talking about "personality" when I think it
| really means something more relational, like "role" or
| "interactional pattern" or something like that.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| I think the article is missing some key aspect of personality
| forming : Maslow's hierarchy of needs[1]
|
| Personality and its development is hugely dependent on which
| needs are or will be currently fulfilled or not.
|
| Attention economics is able to impact you negatively on low level
| of the pyramids, notably due to its impact on sleep. It can also
| shift your priority towards less essential needs than the one you
| should be working on. And it's often myopic, missing totally some
| aspects due to hyper-focusing.
|
| It's also able to impact you by impacting those near you, that's
| what social networks are for. Developing a support structure
| whether family or friends is a double edge sword because you
| indirectly become as weak as the most vulnerable member of the
| group, or group may explode.
|
| The economy also apply pressure on basic level needs, like
| shelter, heat, air and water(when polluted), and safety, which
| probably contribute to shape the personality and are basins which
| are also hard to get out of ("you can take the girl out of the
| trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the
| girl").
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
| nothingatalls wrote:
| Woah really? So wait, if someone is constantly mistreated in all
| their interactions with women, what kind of personality would
| develop?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The author is clearly taking the time to reflect on the world
| around them and I genuinely see a curious mind. However, I also
| see a product that touches on an already established idea and how
| the gap between this writing and other reflects a gap between
| "hard" and "soft" sciences.
|
| The idea here is that of _habitus_. Habitus is an Aristotelian
| term that was expanded upon by Bourdieu in the field of
| sociology. It is the way in which people perceive and respond to
| the world through a durable transposeable disposition, set of
| skills, symbolic capital and doxa that is shaped by the
| environment and in particular the material conditions of the
| individual[1].
|
| Habitus plays a role in how individuals are perceived in ways,
| that like the author illuminates, can form a virtuous circle re-
| enforcing disposition, skills, and outlook in a way that can be
| positive for an individual.
|
| What the author doesn't allude to, and this is where I see a gap
| between hard and soft sciences and where they would benefit from
| being able to connect this idea to a broader body of work, is how
| habitus is reinforced - usually unconsciously - in ways that
| reproduce class, racial, disability, and gender habitus under the
| terms laid out by the dominant ideology - that is to say the
| ideology of the dominant class.
|
| An example in education would be how the education system
| perceives individuals possessing middle and upper class habitus
| as being ready and prepared for education, and those who lack
| that habitus as being lazy, disruptive, or unwilling to learn. On
| one hand you might be thinking "Of course that's obviously true,"
| and I'd like to take a pause to point out that "obvious truths"
| are often a signal of our own habitus and should be critiqued as
| such.
|
| They touched on the concept of reinforcement learning[social
| systems] acting upon individuals in a way that shapes their
| habitus, but it's crucial to point out that these reinforcement
| learning systems aren't free-standing disembodied mechanisms.
| They are situated in a social landscape and are constituted from
| of social relations which are themselves a product of economic
| relations. Furthermore, the systems of reinforcement are self-
| replicating. They are essentially social quines[2] - or more
| specifically oroborus programs ie: they plant the seeds of their
| own replication by encoding those relations into the habitus of
| individuals.
|
| There's obviously a bunch of writings expanding on the idea of
| habitus, how it's formed, reinforced in different social arenas,
| and the effects it has on individuals and groups. I'd expect the
| author would be interested in soaking up these related
| perspectives and perhaps you as a reader would be too.
|
| 1. Obviously not black and white, there are other factors which
| can influence habitus - disability is an obvious one, for
| example.
|
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Ouroboros_pr...
| norir wrote:
| The curious thing is that I have never met two people whose
| personalities were exactly alike.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| It's nice to see that Rationalists have reinvented Maimonidean
| virtue ethics. The idea that humans personality is maximally
| pliable, and this is metaethical grounding for the concept of
| moral responsibility is an extreme on a spectrum. It has some
| inspirational value, but I've never found it especially
| compelling.
|
| Also, the fact that this article does not mention the Big Five
| once really makes me feel like the author is trying to reinvent
| the wheel but has never looked at a wheel before. Despite its
| flaws (and the broader methodological critiques you could level
| at personality science as a whole), it is the most scientifically
| grounded model of human temperament that we have right now. But
| why start with the latest science? That would involve leaving
| your bubble, which is a major no no.
|
| Sorry for the snark, but this is scientific reasoning as cargo
| cult at its worst.
| deepnotderp wrote:
| I enjoy how people are dunking on this by saying "omg this is
| what happens when engineers dare to have thoughts on other
| topics" when this is very similar to the theory for CBT in
| psychology
| castigatio wrote:
| C'mon folks. So many "expert opinions" and erudite references in
| these comments. The sciences of cognition, neurology,
| evolutionary psychology etc are all still muddling around trying
| to figure out how the human mind works. We're learning a lot
| about possible ways the mind might work from our observations of
| processes and outcomes of machine learning. It's a cool new
| paradigm to add to the mix. I really like the framing offered by
| the author. They're quite upfront about the fact that there's a
| lot of genetics involved. That all models are wrong but some are
| useful.
|
| Why all the defensiveness? Whatever genetic aspects of our
| personalities and behaviours there are - there's still a pretty
| big component of just learning patterns. Language acquisition is
| like that. It's an innate thing but the languages we're exposed
| to as kids shape what patterns of language use we fall into.
| akomtu wrote:
| "Although there are many times in life you'll consciously decide
| to act in a certain way, this is the exception, not the norm."
|
| IMO, that's the most important idea there. Your personality is
| what you've created to live among others like you, but as your
| personality grows, it develops habits that have weight and
| momentum, and later in life those habits start defining your
| actions completely, you get progressively smaller windows for
| true self expression, and your life starts feeling dull and
| mechanical.
|
| Your attention is the only thing that's truly yours.
| exe34 wrote:
| This reminds me of "unstable orbits in the space of lives", a
| short story by Greg Egan.
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