Stefan_Schubert comments on Strategic choice of identity - Less Wrong

76 Post author: Vika 08 March 2014 04:27PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (58)

Comments (58)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Stefan_Schubert 01 March 2014 10:51:23AM *  7 points [-]

Very interesting. A point that is obvious but that is still worth making, I think, is that what identity is strategic to choose depends on your personality (and other factors). It strikes that many of the suggested identities imply a high level of "openness to experience" - one of the "big five" personality traits. Now according to some studies openness to experience is 57 % heritable (highest of the big five). This suggests that it is not easy to change your level of openness to experience, which means that if you're not open to experience, the identities suggested in this post would be hard to take.

That said, I think we do have lots of influence over our identities. One identity that I find both very dangerous but also avoidable is the cynical, "disillusioned" one. Unlike many other dangerous identities, it is particularly dangerous to highly intelligent and otherwise rational people as Yudkowsky points out in this brilliant post

I'm especially on guard against cynicism because it seems to be a standard corruption of rationality in particular. If many people are optimists, then true rationalists will occasionally have to say things that sound pessimistic by contrast. If people are trying to signal virtue through their beliefs, then a rationalist may have to advocate contrasting beliefs that don't signal virtue.

Which in turn means that rationalists, and especially apprentice rationalists watching other rationalists at work, are especially at-risk for absorbing cynicism as though it were a virtue in its own right - assuming that whosoever speaks of ulterior motives is probably a wise rationalist with uncommon insight; or believing that it is an entitled benefit of realism to feel superior to the naive herd that still has a shred of hope.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 02 March 2014 01:59:27PM 4 points [-]

Now according to some studies openness to experience is 57 % heritable (highest of the big five). This suggests that it is not easy to change your level of openness to experience

"Heritable" does not imply "immutable".

Comment author: Stefan_Schubert 02 March 2014 05:22:22PM *  -1 points [-]

I comment on this below.

Comment author: benkuhn 04 March 2014 05:19:00PM 3 points [-]

You don't actually answer Kaj's criticism, though, which is that the statistical concept of "heritability" does not mean the same thing as the English word "heritability". See Wiki article for details on how it can be confounded.

Comment author: Creutzer 01 March 2014 10:06:35PM 2 points [-]

It strikes that many of the suggested identities imply a high level of "openness to experience" - one of the "big five" personality traits. Now according to some studies openness to experience is 57 % heritable (highest of the big five). This suggests that it is not change your level of openness to experience, which means that if you're not open to experience, the identities suggested in this post would be hard to take.

Curious. I remember there being some evidence that openness to exerperience is actually relatively malleable; something like students spending some time abroad coming back with higher openness. My introspective experience seems to agree with this.

Comment author: Ben_LandauTaylor 02 March 2014 12:54:44AM 5 points [-]

If it's 57% heritable, then ~40% of the difference is due to other factors, many of which you can control. Imagine someone at the 40th percentile of openness and contrast them with someone at the 80th percentile of openness. 40% is a lot.

Comment author: Stefan_Schubert 02 March 2014 12:49:34PM 0 points [-]

I think that openness can be changed to some degree. However, even though I think that traits that are highly heritable are harder to change generally, I don't think one could say that one could say that the fact that openness to experience is 57 % heritable means that we have control over 43 % of our openness.

For instance, openness to experience is 57 % heritable in the present social set-up. This does not conclusively show, however, that it wouldn't be much less (or more) heritable in other social set-ups. For instance, it might be possible to develop techniques that increase openness to experience radically.

Conversely, non-heritable factors might be beyond our conscious control (as you indeed point out). A person with low openness to experience due to childhood traumas might have at least as hard a time changing level of openness as a person who is not so open to experience for biological reasons.

In general, I think, though, that high degrees of heritability signals that it is not easy for the individual to radically change the trait in question.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit