Personality Basins

I see this post getting trashed in the comments for its overly literal interpretation of personality as a reinforcement learning process, but I think there's some value to it as a mental model of how we operate (which is how the opening sentence describes it).

If you can see past some of the more dubious, overly technical-sounding details and treat it as a metaphor, there is for sure a "behavioral landscape" that we all find ourselves in, filled with local minimal, attractors/basins and steep hills to climb to change our own behaviors.

Thinking about where you are and where you want to be in the behavior landscape can be a useful mental model. Habit changes like exercise and healthy eating, for example, can be really steep hills to climb (and easy to fall back down), but once you get over the hump, you may find yourself in a much better behavioral valley and wonder how you were stuck in the other place for so long.

There's an additional aspect to the dynamics, which is that the social spaces you put yourself in change the landscape to discourage deviancy from the norm. You become like the people you spend time with.

the essential idea is that personality is malleable, there are concepts in NNs that are analogous to experience we can use to name, deconstruct, orient, and contrast, and as a way to exercise some agency over our own personalities.

you can choose it, and like "the five monkeys experiment"[1] after a while, you don't remember the things you don't believe anymore.

the author used trauma, env change, extreme experiences and psychedelics as examples, but something as simple as reading a book or a comment on a forum can detach us from beliefs and ideas that moored our personality in a local basin. we are the effects of feedback, so change your feedback.

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-ex...

This kind of mental model (some variation of it of course), despite being trashed by the majority, is now becoming the zeitgeist in tech circles. I could have written a very similar blog post (modulo worse writing and more being made fun of), and so could many engineers working on AI. The meta implications of this on the larger society could be interesting.