Uhhh, continual is a subset of ongoing. Essentially, my friend fixes things when they're obviously problematic, and actually does a fair bit of self-modification in the process, in addition to modifying her environment. I think perhaps it's somewhat like she just tries to find a local optimum, and then goes back to doing stuff with her life.
The mindset test basically asks two questions phrased a bunch of different ways, and those questions amount to "to what extent are your abilities (talent/intelligence) fixed?" My friend certainly believes (and demonstrates) that if necessary she can level up at any given thing, but for the most part her focus is on actually doing stuff, rather than growth.
For a long time, Eliezer has been telling me I should write more like he does. I've mostly resisted, preferring instead to write like this:
At the recent Effective Altruism Summit I tried to figure out which personal features predicted writing style preference.
One hypothesis was that people who read lots of fiction (like Eliezer) will tend to prefer Eliezer's story-like style, while those who read almost exclusively non-fiction (like me) will tend to prefer my "just gimme the facts" style. This hypothesis didn't hold up well on my non-scientific survey of ~10 LW-reading effective altruists.
Another hypothesis was that most people would prefer Eliezer's more exciting posts, while people trained in the sciences or analytic philosophy (which insist on clear organization, definitions, references to related work, etc.) would prefer my posts. This hypothesis fared a bit better, but not by much.
Another hypothesis was that people who had acquired an epiphany addiction would prefer Eliezer's style, whereas those who just want to learn everything efficiently would prefer my style. But I didn't test this.
Another hypothesis that occurs to me is that people with short attention spans could prefer my more skimmable style. But I haven't tested this.
Perhaps the community would like to propose some hypotheses, and test them with LW polling?