Osiris comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: orthonormal 01 April 2013 04:19PM

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Comment author: Osiris 21 April 2013 07:53:56AM 1 point [-]

Welcome, fellow new person! You've got some wonderful music. Any particular things that interest you in the "confusing question" genre?

Comment author: DiamondSoul 22 April 2013 12:11:57AM 0 points [-]

Thanks! As for "confusing questions", some thing I've had long-term interests in are: ethics, consciousness, and trying to wrap my mind around some of the less intuitive concepts in math/physics. Apart from that, it varies quite a bit. Recently, I've become rather interested in personality modeling. The Big-5 model has great empirically tested descriptive power, but is rather lacking in explanatory power (i.e. it can't, afaik, answer questions like "what's going on in person X's mind that causes them to behave in manner Y?" or "how could person X be made more ethical/rational/happy/whatever without fundamentally changing their personality?"). At the same time, the Myers-Briggs model (and, more importantly, the underlying Jungian cognitive function theory) has the potential to more effectively answer such questions, but also has rather limited/sketchy empirical support. So I've been thinking mainly of how M-B might be tweaked so that the theory matches reality better.