I’m very curious about which things fall into the “then-get-stuck” bucket and why. Are you confident there isn’t a range of lower-level drives and innate reactions that get fixed similar to accents?
I think the way that rewards (pleasure or displeasure) turn into desires (motivation) is one thing that is definitely continuous learning, not “get stuck”. If you’ve done something over and over in childhood, and then you do it today and it’s 100% miserable and embarrassing, and then you try it again the next day and it’s again 100% miserable and embarrassing, then you’re probably not going to try it a 3rd time, and certainly not a 10th time.
We see this when people get clinical depression as adults. They lose motivation to do all the things they used to like, no matter how much they liked it in childhood, or even more recently than that.
I think personality surveys mostly catch stuff like that. Even introverts go out sometimes, and even extroverts stay in sometimes. If it’s pleasant vs unpleasant, they’ll do it more. So a decision-to-socialize keeps getting steered towards the innate ground truth reward function. Likewise the decision to think about things versus people, to be honest or not, and ≈every other question on personality surveys. (Empirically, adult personality is approximately independent of childhood upbringing, in the population at large.)
Childhood regional accents are not “rewards turning into desires”, but rather something different—I think it involves the learning rate of a certain part of the cortex dropping towards zero after childhood. I don’t think “idiosyncratic cognition” is in that category, my impression is that PFC learning rates remain high throughout life.
(You’re an unusual case RE your accent … hmm, random question, did you watch a lot of American TV / movies as a kid?)
Childhood phobias don’t always last into adulthood but sometimes they do. The trick is that it’s a case where the reward itself can change (I call it “upstream generalization”). So the rewards→desires pathway continues to produce updates, but that doesn’t help. Separately, the reward itself does keep updating in response to new data, but only in narrower circumstances, by and large. I can’t immediately think of other things besides phobias that “get stuck” in that way.
I don’t feel my picture is invalidated by this though. Even with PFC having continuous learning with high rates, I expect that people get pointed in a certain direction that reinforces it. If you learned early that social rewards are the best rewards, then go into politics, you might have chosen an environment that continually rewards and reinforces that motivation, even if a different environment might override it. Assortative mating and association might also cause people to hang out with others reinforcing the attitudes they first developed.
(Re my accent. I reckon I watched the same as anyone else. I don’t think I don’t feel especially autistic, but there’s a claim that autistic kids learn more from media than peers. I don’t know how that ties into it continuing to shift during adulthood.)
It’s definitely possible to “get stuck” not doing X because you’ve never tried X in your life, so you don’t know what you’re missing. Sometimes it can take people many years before they try X. And sometimes they just never do, even though they would totally “take to it” if they did.
I feel like you want to say that the never-trying-X failure mode is “the rule” and I want to say that it’s “the exception” … But if so, that might not be a real disagreement, and instead we’re just thinking about different kinds of X.
I definitely agree that it can be a thing, and brought it up in Heritability: Five Battles multiple times. My examples included X = “living in Churubusco, Indiana” (§2.2.2), or X = “becoming a Soil Conservation Technician” (§2.3), or X = “joining a niche online community like rationalism” (§2.2.3).
Yes, I do think something like “X never getting rewarded enough” is closer to a rule than weird exception. Chosen environments is one dynamic. Another dynamic here is kinds I think many things are such that if you’ve specialized, they continue to be worth doing and yield rewards, and if you didn’t, there’s a huge cliff before you’d get such benefits so won’t go down that path. E.g. a child who learned to play instrumental in childhood vs not.
I’ll write my next post which is the main point I’ve been working towards, and I’ll be quite curious for your thoughts on it.
I think the way that rewards (pleasure or displeasure) turn into desires (motivation) is one thing that is definitely continuous learning, not “get stuck”. If you’ve done something over and over in childhood, and then you do it today and it’s 100% miserable and embarrassing, and then you try it again the next day and it’s again 100% miserable and embarrassing, then you’re probably not going to try it a 3rd time, and certainly not a 10th time.
We see this when people get clinical depression as adults. They lose motivation to do all the things they used to like, no matter how much they liked it in childhood, or even more recently than that.
I think personality surveys mostly catch stuff like that. Even introverts go out sometimes, and even extroverts stay in sometimes. If it’s pleasant vs unpleasant, they’ll do it more. So a decision-to-socialize keeps getting steered towards the innate ground truth reward function. Likewise the decision to think about things versus people, to be honest or not, and ≈every other question on personality surveys. (Empirically, adult personality is approximately independent of childhood upbringing, in the population at large.)
Childhood regional accents are not “rewards turning into desires”, but rather something different—I think it involves the learning rate of a certain part of the cortex dropping towards zero after childhood. I don’t think “idiosyncratic cognition” is in that category, my impression is that PFC learning rates remain high throughout life.
(You’re an unusual case RE your accent … hmm, random question, did you watch a lot of American TV / movies as a kid?)
Childhood phobias don’t always last into adulthood but sometimes they do. The trick is that it’s a case where the reward itself can change (I call it “upstream generalization”). So the rewards→desires pathway continues to produce updates, but that doesn’t help. Separately, the reward itself does keep updating in response to new data, but only in narrower circumstances, by and large. I can’t immediately think of other things besides phobias that “get stuck” in that way.
I don’t feel my picture is invalidated by this though. Even with PFC having continuous learning with high rates, I expect that people get pointed in a certain direction that reinforces it. If you learned early that social rewards are the best rewards, then go into politics, you might have chosen an environment that continually rewards and reinforces that motivation, even if a different environment might override it. Assortative mating and association might also cause people to hang out with others reinforcing the attitudes they first developed.
(Re my accent. I reckon I watched the same as anyone else. I don’t think I don’t feel especially autistic, but there’s a claim that autistic kids learn more from media than peers. I don’t know how that ties into it continuing to shift during adulthood.)
It’s definitely possible to “get stuck” not doing X because you’ve never tried X in your life, so you don’t know what you’re missing. Sometimes it can take people many years before they try X. And sometimes they just never do, even though they would totally “take to it” if they did.
I feel like you want to say that the never-trying-X failure mode is “the rule” and I want to say that it’s “the exception” … But if so, that might not be a real disagreement, and instead we’re just thinking about different kinds of X.
I definitely agree that it can be a thing, and brought it up in Heritability: Five Battles multiple times. My examples included X = “living in Churubusco, Indiana” (§2.2.2), or X = “becoming a Soil Conservation Technician” (§2.3), or X = “joining a niche online community like rationalism” (§2.2.3).
(Or sorry if I’m still missing your point.)
Yes, I do think something like “X never getting rewarded enough” is closer to a rule than weird exception. Chosen environments is one dynamic. Another dynamic here is kinds I think many things are such that if you’ve specialized, they continue to be worth doing and yield rewards, and if you didn’t, there’s a huge cliff before you’d get such benefits so won’t go down that path. E.g. a child who learned to play instrumental in childhood vs not.
I’ll write my next post which is the main point I’ve been working towards, and I’ll be quite curious for your thoughts on it.