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HughRistik comments on The Machine Learning Personality Test - Less Wrong
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An intriguing, fun post by Phil Goetz!
The personality trait I am most eager to understand is perfectionism.
Perfectionism is sometimes referred to as obsessive-compulsiveness (but those words are not as apt because they get conflated with "addictive personality," which has no valid connection to perfectionism).
If anyone reading this knows how to define perfectionism using concepts from machine learning or brain science and can teach me the definition, I will kiss your feet and treat you like a king or queen.
The main reason I think it would be a huge win to understand perfectionism better are that people often comment on it and that it almost completely defeats my attempts to attenuate it.
I have found that I can amplify or attenuate most of my psychological dimensions when I set out on a persistent campaign to do so. Here "persistent" means lasting for years. Examples of traits I have been able to attenuate greatly include fearfulness and dysthymia (tendency to be sad for most of the time for days on end). But my perfectionism has proven almost completely unchangable. And the most unchangeable aspects of my mind strike me as the aspects most worth taking the trouble to understand.
P.S. there seems to be some stigmatization of perfectionism. It seems to me that some nonperfectionists do not want to understand perfectionists, they just want to eliminate them from their interpersonal environment.
"Perfectionism" is probably related to Conscientiousness from the Big Five. Perhaps it's also related to Neuroticism. My hypothesis is that Conscientiousness causes you to have a high bar for your performance, and Neuroticism causes you anxiety when you aren't meeting that high bar.
Going along with Neuroticism, perfectionism may also be related to self-esteem or a need for agency in a particular area. For instance, during my insanely perfectionistic days, I would try to solve any word or logic problem that I ever came across, even if it wasn't a good use of my time and energy. I think the motivation was that I needed to prove something to myself.
Update: Wikipedia's article on Perfectionism) concurs that it may be related to Conscientiousness and Neuroticism.
This suggests that the main ways to deal with perfectionism are:
and
I've used both strategies successfully in my own life.