I don’t have much data, and I know that memory & introspection are unreliable, but it seems to me that I have essentially the same personality as I had 35 years ago.
There are changes that in my opinion necessarily come with age. I have learned a lot. I became cynical. I feel more secure now that I am an adult, have my own income & savings, have a family & friends, so I care less about opinions of others.
But the following things remain the same:
I prefer to know the truth, rather than hear a nice story,
I am picky about people I spend time with, and I prefer to be alone rather than in company of people I don’t click with,
I am willing to make a sacrifice if it helps other people more than it hurts me (I just don’t trust anymore that others would reciprocate),
I am interested in math and computers,
I spend a lot of time thinking about various topics,
I try to be nice to people, I am not really assertive, and prefer to avoid people I don’t like.
That seems like “personality” to me, maybe I missed something substantial, but quite likely that thing also didn’t change. Similarly, I see people around me making the same mistakes decade later, etc., which makes me conclude that personality doesn’t change much on the deep level, the observed changes are mostly about circumstances and specific skills.
What is different now? People started to believe supernatural?
It’s more privileging a hypothesis because some cool people you hang out with believe it for religious reasons. Why are there so many articles on LW about the power of meditation, and so few about the power of prayer or religious belief?
Sure, there are some things that don’t change. But how to ensure that it isn’t just survival bias? And if I will try for example to look into my traits which I considered important at a time, then it looks like most of them changed in my case.
It looks for me that preferences (even as they feel on emotional level, not just appear in behaviour) are vastly influenced my your capabilities. Eg I really hated reading and really liked computers when I was 9, and now it changed because I read better and easier and because I now can use my mind instead of computer. So I strongly suspect that if you will drop on somebody +50 iq points he will suddenly start to like math (previously I was skeptical about EY’s claims that increasing intelligence will lead to sudden changes in preferences, but now I totally believe it). Or eg I didn’t like emotional and interpersonal moments in fiction, but now I suddenly like them because I understand them so much better. And the question “do I prefer to know awful truth or be happy” doesn’t even make sense to me now since I can disentangle those mentally.
In some sense it looks obvious, but yet I totally wouldn’t expect these things to change, they didn’t look like having these concrete slots for circumstances variation or even more, things that changed felt like internal for those mental preferences. And even more again, they changed because of change in cognitive circumstances, not environmental.
And maybe I had more malleable personality than usual. I never had a unified place for storing my personality info and was extremely prone to decoupling, so different behaviour modes inside of my brain totally could just check consistency against themselves.
And maybe I spent much more time than usual person to introspect and notice behavioral differences.
And maybe I was affected here by the fact that I looked through my memory to find my forming childhood events and reflect on them and update with all my current cognitive skills.
Anyway, personality now looks for me much less stable. It looks like you can shift personality to almost any state by changing capabilities. Just people usually have mild preferences to not do that, to improve eg their first best math and not second best languages. Or if to put it another way, personality usually looks not changed because it’s traits tend to on average have the same average as previously, not because traits are stable.
I still don’t get what are you talking about. Religious belief isn’t discussed because it is something that can be be destroyed by truth? And meditation isn’t? There could be said something about power of “всенощное бдение” from Christianity, but sleep deprivation seems to much, much more likely to have huge harmful effects than meditation?
I don’t have much data, and I know that memory & introspection are unreliable, but it seems to me that I have essentially the same personality as I had 35 years ago.
There are changes that in my opinion necessarily come with age. I have learned a lot. I became cynical. I feel more secure now that I am an adult, have my own income & savings, have a family & friends, so I care less about opinions of others.
But the following things remain the same:
I prefer to know the truth, rather than hear a nice story,
I am picky about people I spend time with, and I prefer to be alone rather than in company of people I don’t click with,
I am willing to make a sacrifice if it helps other people more than it hurts me (I just don’t trust anymore that others would reciprocate),
I am interested in math and computers,
I spend a lot of time thinking about various topics,
I try to be nice to people, I am not really assertive, and prefer to avoid people I don’t like.
That seems like “personality” to me, maybe I missed something substantial, but quite likely that thing also didn’t change. Similarly, I see people around me making the same mistakes decade later, etc., which makes me conclude that personality doesn’t change much on the deep level, the observed changes are mostly about circumstances and specific skills.
It’s more privileging a hypothesis because some cool people you hang out with believe it for religious reasons. Why are there so many articles on LW about the power of meditation, and so few about the power of prayer or religious belief?
Sure, there are some things that don’t change. But how to ensure that it isn’t just survival bias? And if I will try for example to look into my traits which I considered important at a time, then it looks like most of them changed in my case.
It looks for me that preferences (even as they feel on emotional level, not just appear in behaviour) are vastly influenced my your capabilities. Eg I really hated reading and really liked computers when I was 9, and now it changed because I read better and easier and because I now can use my mind instead of computer. So I strongly suspect that if you will drop on somebody +50 iq points he will suddenly start to like math (previously I was skeptical about EY’s claims that increasing intelligence will lead to sudden changes in preferences, but now I totally believe it). Or eg I didn’t like emotional and interpersonal moments in fiction, but now I suddenly like them because I understand them so much better. And the question “do I prefer to know awful truth or be happy” doesn’t even make sense to me now since I can disentangle those mentally.
In some sense it looks obvious, but yet I totally wouldn’t expect these things to change, they didn’t look like having these concrete slots for circumstances variation or even more, things that changed felt like internal for those mental preferences. And even more again, they changed because of change in cognitive circumstances, not environmental.
And maybe I had more malleable personality than usual. I never had a unified place for storing my personality info and was extremely prone to decoupling, so different behaviour modes inside of my brain totally could just check consistency against themselves.
And maybe I spent much more time than usual person to introspect and notice behavioral differences.
And maybe I was affected here by the fact that I looked through my memory to find my forming childhood events and reflect on them and update with all my current cognitive skills.
Anyway, personality now looks for me much less stable. It looks like you can shift personality to almost any state by changing capabilities. Just people usually have mild preferences to not do that, to improve eg their first best math and not second best languages. Or if to put it another way, personality usually looks not changed because it’s traits tend to on average have the same average as previously, not because traits are stable.
I still don’t get what are you talking about. Religious belief isn’t discussed because it is something that can be be destroyed by truth? And meditation isn’t? There could be said something about power of “всенощное бдение” from Christianity, but sleep deprivation seems to much, much more likely to have huge harmful effects than meditation?