see things differently

Posts tagged with personality

When we do something in a default style acquired unconsciously, it is like typing on the only typewriter we have ever known: we do not notice the style of our activity any more than we notice the typeface on the machine. In such cases, we have an abstract concept of action that leaves style out of account.

We can have a concept of lying without being aware…that, in practice, we must have a style of lying. We can have a concept of quarreling without being aware…that in practice, we must have a style of quarreling.

from Clear and Simple as the Truth by Francis-Noël Thomas & Mark Turner (via untilasinglesolitonsurvives)

(Source: cmnotes)

“a mixing console to your personality”

You may not be this bold or ferocious in your day-to-day life, but on stage you amplify these things in you that already exist.

File:Dirichlet.png

I could talk about this in equation form: imagine the personality is a vector (list) and some of these aspects are in some way independent or separable to each other.

$\alpha \cdot |1 \rangle \ + \ \beta \cdot |2 \rangle \ + \ \gamma \cdot |3 \rangle \ + \ \cdots$

where |1⟩, |2⟩, |3⟩ are projections of the whole personality down to one “aspect”.

Then St Vincent’s idea is simply to lower and raise some of the α, β, γ, δ … “sliders”. So like when doves cry inside a convex hull, it’s just linear combinations of pre-existing stuff, rather than the generation of “truly new” (orthogonal) things. (Properly in maths one needs multiple distinct examples to do linear combinations and create a span. I wonder if she would agree that “projecting” (isolating) the “elements” of her personality is a step requiring work in finding out what the aspects of the personality are, to amplify or mute them.)

Paul Bloom disproves the idea that sexual pleasure se logra by merely the proper stimulation of various genitalia with the following Gedankenexperiment:

Imagine you find out that the person you had sex with last night is not who you thought they were.

Maybe you learn that the charming gentleman is the author of white-supremacist hate literature.
Dave Chappelle playing a (blind) black white supremacist
Maybe you find out that the beautiful woman was your long-lost sister. The feeling of wanting to crawl out of your own skin and leave the ugly husk of your body behind wouldn’t be out of place.

That such tropes appear in literature we’ve found from millennia ago suggests people have long felt this way: sexual pleasure must be tied in with not only the body of your partner, but with their spirit and inherent nature as well.

Pleasure is complicated. Economists know this but usually choose to forget the fact. The study of where individual demand curves come from would be a new discipline, although ink has been spilled on the topic.

However, the questions of pleasure and satisfaction are relevant to the engineering of society. If the objective function is set to: maximise output, but people derive pleasure from achieving increasingly difficult goals and receiving even artificial rewards, then the world of work is not optimised for happiness but the world of school is.

Getting more practical than grand critiques of “society”, anyone who manages more employees than herself would benefit from knowing which free-or-cheap buttons she can push to motivate and reward the people “under” her. Even more pedestrian: I know that sitting down feels better after a physical labour or constitutional, but I haven’t a quantitative knowledge of how to engineer my habits and routines to take fullest advantage of that fact.

Sound the trumpet again for a department of happiness studies.

hi-res

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a … clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall … take account of this clash and explain … many of the divergencies of philosophers by it.

Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he (sic.) tries when philosophising to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognised reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would.

He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it.

William James

via Artemy Kolchinsky

commodification

same hopes & desires
same choice of stores
the same houses and the same decorations in those houses
EFFICIENCY
fruit from the other side of the world

part II

Do our sexual norms derive from the invention of chimneys in the 14th century?
the invention of table manners
furniture, music, buttons, wainscoting, and intellectual pursuits — all due to the Little Ice Age?
lower and upper classes slept in the same hall, with the animals, around a fire, in the manor-house days. And had sex right in front of each other! omg! Economics begetting morals (I mean seeing thru to the 19th century)
So the Little Ice Age was the beginning of privacy. Speaking of not having sex in front of each other, maybe it contains as well the roots of abortion as well as the roots of Victorianism. Privacy norms were made law in 1979 in the United States, to the chagrin of anti-abortionists. Since then and before, appeals to privacy as a fundamental human right have been made to justify any victimless crime (homosexuality, libertinism, drug use … some of which are no longer criminal). What if our conception of this “natural human right” is just a function of the history of global temperature?

part III

Jamestown, VA versus charcoal
Economics before capitalism. Sounds like the ruler had the economy’s interest at heart — a growing economy means more to tax.

part IV

before trains, each village was more-or-less a genetic island. Not that no-one swam the waters to marry someone from the next town over, but genetic interchange among geographically dispersed humans was slow. As transport became cheaper and faster, procreation between Poles and Germans, Lyonnaise and Bretagnes, Spanish and Portuguese became more common.

Parameters

The shape of the continents depends on the global temperature. (Cold locks ice in polar caps.) Google “Morse theory”.
The price of housing always rises, until it doesn’t.
You develop a system of habits to discipline yourself; maxims for self-motivation; then the working world changes on you. Loyalty is no longer rewarded. Hard work is less valued than the ability to make PlentyOfFish.com.
For years the normal trading range of [insert spread, instrument, or security] is X, until one day sufficiently many (external) parameters shift. The market changes and you see a 20-sigma event. Heroes only.
Whoever coded your profile website (chi.mp, flavors.me, tumblr), wrote a route that takes a string as parameter. Entering the name isomorphismes into this function fetches this webdata. Entering your name fetches your webdata. All part of one and the same formula.
The Lotka-Volterra equations of a large ecosystem, dancing as the sliders shift around in their hypercube. Death and life hang in the balance. And it’s literally a balance. If the fulcrum moves so far that the lever hits the ground, a species will either become extinct or overpopulate the ecosystem (like an algal bloom)—either phase change being irreversible. (Er, at least anti-entropic.)
You think you know yourself, until you step into a new context—new country, new career, new city—and latent aspects of you become dominant.

Who was I before? If I was her then and am this now, what is the underlying me?

Self as a function of circumstance. Perhaps just as constant at root, but reactive; responsive; springy; primed for change.

The Self

This week I posted different viewpoints on The Self.

Particularly I’m interested in self as a function of inputs. Just as the size of eyes a fly is born with is a function of the temperature of the eggs, so too, many facets of ourselves are a function of the environment, other people’s behaviour toward us, game-theoretic strategy, incentives, and so on.

Other people’s theories of us can be seen as functions as well. (For example, a hiring manager’s view of employee performance may assume school quality or GPA to be positively related to human capital.)

Economics: I didn’t get to Jean Tirole’s theory of money-saving as bargains among multiple selves.
Psychology: Jim Townsend found that self-versus-other dichotomies can be expressed as a negatively curved metric space.
Personality: I’ve already written that the MBTI is too restrictive a theory of self. It maps from habits to [0,1]^4.
Douglas Hofstadter’s thoughts on the extension of the pronoun “we”. ‘We’ went to the moon, ‘we’ share a common ancestor with other primates, ‘we’ are overcrowding the planet, ‘we’ have a nice theory of quantum chromodynamics, ‘we’ do not know if ‘we’ are experiencing a simulation or actual reality, ‘we’ don’t really know what makes an economy grow.
Criminology: My criminal output is a function of the crime level in the neighbourhood I’m raised in. Except when it’s a function of strongly held beliefs.
Sociology: In contemporary OECD places, ‘we’ are coerced by our cultures to play roles. “There are” certain scripts — modifiable but still requisite or recommended in some sense; at the very least influential, even if only because benefits and rewards are socially tied to role performance.
The topic of cultural coercion … is something I’ll return to.
The concept of people-as-functions is one I want to return to later, in discussing history, economics, and a couple different ways of talking about human behaviour mathematically.

I can think of several other mathematics-inspired questions about ourselves. The difference between habit and personality; the yogic metaphor of a river cutting deeper as related to habituation; choice & free will; Markovian and completely-the-opposite-of-Markovian choices (how constrained we are by our past choices); … and a lot more. But you know what, writing is hard. So I do only a little at a time.

Parameters

The Self

BROWSE