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Personality Basins

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160 points qouteall | 1 comments | 21 Nov 24 12:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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wavemode ◴[21 Nov 24 13:18 UTC] No.42204042[source]▶
This article approaches human psychology from the perspective that, we are all neural networks and our output (actions) are all a learned function of our inputs (experiences).

This is a common (and convenient) perspective, especially among engineers, but doesn't reflect reality particularly well. We know large swathes of a person's personality is directly linked to their genetics.

The article extrapolates this neural network perspective onto other topics like, mental disorders and depression. The solution is made clear then - just learn how to not be mentally ill! Again, convenient. But not really reflective of reality.

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1. bronco21016 ◴[21 Nov 24 15:35 UTC] No.42205348[source]▶
> This is a common (and convenient) perspective, especially among engineers, but doesn't reflect reality particularly well. We know large swathes of a person's personality is directly linked to their genetics.

I really am not an expert in any of this. Just my quick thoughts of the idea about genetics and "being born with it".

If we're attempting to create a mental model of how machine neural networks relate to human brains, would it be useful to think of genetics as the basis that determines your neural network's architecture? Maybe there's even some pre-trained weights that are communicated through genetics.

I think it would be oversimplification to say we're all born with the same neural network and pre-trained weights because like you've mentioned: large swathes of a person's personality is directly linked to their genetics.