We’ve got this thing called developmental psychology and also the fact that most breakthrough progress is made while young. What’s going on? If dev psych is about becoming a more well adjusted person what is it about being ‘well adjusted’ that makes breakthrough work less likely?
My guess is that it has to do with flexibility of cognitive representations. Having more degrees of freedom in your cognitive representation feels from the inside like more flexibility but looks from the outside like rationalization, like the person just has more ways of finding and justifying paths towards what they wanted in the first place, or justifying why something isn’t possible if it would be too much effort.
I think this should predict that breakthrough work will more often be done by disagreeable but high openness people. High enough openness to find and adopt good cognitive representations, but disagreeable enough to use them to refute things rather than justify things. The age effect would appear if cognitive representations tend to get more flexible with time and there is some sort of goldilocks effect.
I think developmental models predate the relevant form of modernity. E.g. I expect to see psychological development with age in hunter gatherers and others not exposed to post-modernity.
We’ve got this thing called developmental psychology and also the fact that most breakthrough progress is made while young. What’s going on? If dev psych is about becoming a more well adjusted person what is it about being ‘well adjusted’ that makes breakthrough work less likely?
My guess is that it has to do with flexibility of cognitive representations. Having more degrees of freedom in your cognitive representation feels from the inside like more flexibility but looks from the outside like rationalization, like the person just has more ways of finding and justifying paths towards what they wanted in the first place, or justifying why something isn’t possible if it would be too much effort.
I think this should predict that breakthrough work will more often be done by disagreeable but high openness people. High enough openness to find and adopt good cognitive representations, but disagreeable enough to use them to refute things rather than justify things. The age effect would appear if cognitive representations tend to get more flexible with time and there is some sort of goldilocks effect.
Cf. https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1473779351904792579
I think developmental models predate the relevant form of modernity. E.g. I expect to see psychological development with age in hunter gatherers and others not exposed to post-modernity.