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Personality Basins

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160 points qouteall | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.294s | source
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jonnycat ◴[] No.42204614[source]
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.

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1. riehwvfbk ◴[] No.42214682[source]
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.