Sounds like it would be interesting to have your mother make some comments on LW, if you think she would be interested.

It's a funny, though in retrospect unsurprising, coincidence that you're using a light-related metaphor. For a while, I was intending to write about "phenomenal transparency", especially as used by Thomas Metzinger. He quotes an early paper by the philosopher G.E. Moore, who spoke of the fact that while we can see e.g. the color blue, we cannot see what it is that makes it blue.

And in general, that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us; it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent - we look through it and see nothing but the blue; we may be convinced that there is something, but what it is no philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognized.

Metzinger notes that the most philosophers now use "transparency" to mean that the "content properties" of our mental states are available for introspection, but not their "vehicle properties". However, he finds this definition unsatisfactory and offers his own:

Transparency in this sense is a property of active mental representations already satisfying the minimally sufficient constraints for conscious experience to occur. [...] The second defining characteristic postulates that what makes them transparent is attentional unavailability of earlier processing stages for introspection. [...] What is attention? In short, attention is a form of nonconceptual metarepresentation operating on certain parts of the currently active, internal model of reality. It "highlights" these parts, because it is a process of subsymbolic resource allocation. The earlier the processing stages, the more aspects of the internal construction process leading to the final, explicit and disambiguated phenomenal content that are available for introspective attention, the more will the system be able to recognize these phenomenal states as internal, self-generated constructs. Full transparency means full attentional unavailability of earlier processing stages. Degrees of opacity comes as degrees of attentional availability.

Definition 2 For any phenomenal state, the degree of phenomenal transparency is inversely proportional to the introspective degree of attentional availability of earlier processing stages.

In other words, the processes in our mind that we are unable to perceive, we take as givens. Were we able to perceive e.g. the way our visual cortex constructed images, or the way our cognitive subsystems constructed beliefs, we'd realize them to be constructions and not take them so easily for granted.

I've been meaning to write more about this, but have never gotten around it.

introspection can't be scientific by definition

What you observe via introspection, is not accessible to third parties, yes.

But you use those observations to build models of yourself. Those models can be made explicit and communicated to others. And they make predictions about your future behavior, so they can be tested.

Great airport metaphor.

Another test:

Could smoking during pregnancy have a benefit? Could drinking during pregnancy have a benefit? It's not necessary that someone know what the benefit could be, just acknowledge the nicotine and alcohol are drugs that have complex effects on the body.

As for smoking, it's definitely a bad idea, but it reduces the chances of pre-eclampsia. I don't know of any benefit for alcohol.

Yes. I agree completely. This is why you saturate and have low standards for throwing things out the window (after extracting information from the fact that it's something you want to throw out the window).

If you're talking to someone you suspect may be a visual thinker, and they're not getting your point from your telling stories, you could try drawing a picture. If they now get it, that reinforces your belief that this clustering is meaningful, that they belong in that category, and it gets your point across. If they still don't get it, that accredits the hypothesis that your point is unclear, or that they are yet another type of thinker. ;)

"While you're at it, give some thought to your intelligence types, categorize your love language1 - anything that carves up person-space and puts you in a bit of it."

Hey Alicorn. I think what you're trying to do with luminosity is awesome, but I think it's important to note that it's very easy to just make up different ways of categorizing people (with no evidence), just like it's easy to make up your own school of psychology (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2j/schools_proliferating_without_evidence/). For example, while people certainly have different cognitive skills, Gardner's "multiple intelligences" model has largely been disproven (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences#Lack_of_empirical_evidence), as it turns out that most of the "multiple intelligences" correlate well with each other.

But Nisbett is quoting from a study "which found improvement on almost all tests for African American 12th graders". That study may not even have contained the data on 9-year-olds. You can ask "Why didn't that study include that data?", well because they were comparing data for 12th graders.

Maybe you can unpack why you feel obligated to be a way you don't want to be.

Do you want to want to be the way you feel obligated not to be?

The predictions you should make from personality assessments and the like about yourself should be fairly isomorphic to those you'd make about other people upon learning the same data. For instance, if I know someone with a particular Myers-Briggs result, and then I learn that another person has the same one, I will expect a certain level of similarity between the two people on that basis; I should make the same guess if I discover that I have the same Myers-Briggs score as someone I know. Tests themselves often supply predictions, although they're very vague and may require some precisification.

I'll use the love language idea because that's so easy to implement. There's five of them, and while I think there's a test available, it probably doesn't improve much on self-diagnosis. So, I look at the descriptions of the languages, conclude that I'm a "quality time" person because that fits best, and read what it says to expect from myself: Hmm, are distractions, postponed dates, or the failure to listen especially hurtful to me? And then I take off from there. (If I can't easily answer the question or refine my self-model relative to the provided suggestion, I assume that the description is accurate.)

Tips on getting friends/family to provide feedback: I find musing aloud about myself in an obviously tentative manner to be fairly useful at eliciting some domain-specific input. Some of my friends I can ask point-blank, although it helps to ask about specific situations ("Do you think I'm just tired?" "Was I over the line back there?") rather than general traits that feel more judgmental to discuss ("Am I a jerk?" "Do I use people?"). When you communicate in text and keep logs, you can send people pastes of entire conversations (when this is permissible to your original interlocutor) and ask what your consultant thinks of that. If you do not remember some event, or are willing to pretend not to remember the event, then you can get whoever was with you at the time to recount it from their perspective - this process will automatically paint what you did during the event in the light of outside scrutiny.

I find that introspecting tends to makes me feel bad, because I don't feel as though I am the way I "should" be - but I don't really want to be the way I feel obligated to be. So I try very hard not to think about it, because when I'm not thinking about it, I'm not experiencing any distress.

Agree, but as I said to cupholder, it doesn't help Nisbett's argument if he is cherry-picking data.

You may be planning to get to this later in the sequence, but if not: could you give examples of what it looks like to use outside view or psych or personality assessments as a jumping-off point? E.g., examples of the types of predictions one might make this way, or of the types of improvements you or others have found?

I'm having trouble picturing what it looks like to go through one's life and focus on data and prediction. If I have many concrete examples, they'll seed my brain so that the kinds of self-prediction you're recommending are easy or automatic to start in on.

Also, any tips on how to get friends/family to give useful and honest feedback?

Yes, but in that case you aren't looking at the data that Nisbett referred to. As cupholder pointed out

Clicking on the 'White-Black Gap' button, and then on the 'Age 17' tab (as Nisbett refers to 12th graders, so I am guessing that is what he and you are talking about...?)

You're looking at age 9, cupholder is looking at 17

In that case he is looking at the wrong graph when he talks about "your random graph."

In case it isn't obvious to people: The name is a pun. If there are "b"-liefs there must be "a"-liefs. One way to think about an alief is as a kind of proto-belief.

Have you read about Haidinger's brush?

Thanks - just learning that concept has actually appreciably increased my (self) understanding.

Since in general I have to analyze my actions to even see my emotions, I'd like to know how to become more luminous just to increase my shared vocabulary with people.