Let There Be Light

I'm going to second the recommendation of using psychometrics to further your self-awareness.

For narrowing things down beyond what's been turned up as typical human reactions to things, you can try personality tests like Myers-Briggs or Big Five.

As the Wikipedia articles discuss, Myers-Briggs doesn't enjoy a great reputation among psychologists. Nevertheless, the INTP profile describes me, and probably a lot of people here, with freaky accuracy.

The Big Five is a great recommendation. It is very well respected in psychology, and I find especially useful for understanding disagreements with others. There is a big difference between how intelligent people who are low and high in openness view the world. Furthermore, differences in Agreeableness are a big source of interpersonal conflict.

your intelligence types,

I would stay away from this one. Gardner's notion of multiple intelligences has theoretical problems and does not enjoy empirical support.

categorize your love language

For something scientifically validated on how people handle relationships, check out the concept of attachment style. Here's a quiz. I'm convinced that a lot of relationship problems are due to differences in attachment style, rather than one person being in the right and the other person being in the wrong.

Other individual differences that are useful for self-awareness, and understanding how others think differently:

• Interests in people vs. things. Richard Lippa's research has shown that this dimension of interests is independent of the Big Five. See this section of his book for more on what the dimension is.

• High sensitivity

• Self-monitoring

There's a major body of literature designed to figure out just what the hell happens inside our skulls: it's called psychology, and they have a rather impressive track record.

Of outstanding displays of confirmation bias, illusory correlation, observer-expectancy effect, and ignoring overwhelming experimental evidence?

Don't get me wrong, we know a lots about the human mind thanks to the skill and dedication of various cognitive scientists, but psychology's track record is still somewhat patchy.

"While you're at it, give some thought to your intelligence types, categorize your love language1 - anything that carves up person-space and puts you in a bit of it."

Hey Alicorn. I think what you're trying to do with luminosity is awesome, but I think it's important to note that it's very easy to just make up different ways of categorizing people (with no evidence), just like it's easy to make up your own school of psychology (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2j/schools_proliferating_without_evidence/). For example, while people certainly have different cognitive skills, Gardner's "multiple intelligences" model has largely been disproven (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences#Lack_of_empirical_evidence), as it turns out that most of the "multiple intelligences" correlate well with each other.

Cross-posted from Seven Shiny Stories

1. Words

Maria likes compliments. She loves compliments. And when she doesn't get enough of them to suit her, she starts fishing, asking plaintive questions, making doe eyes to draw them out. It's starting to annoy people. Lately, instead of compliments, she's getting barbs and criticism and snappish remarks. It hurts - and it seems to hurt her more than it hurts others when they hear similar things. Maria wants to know what it is about her that would explain all of this. So she starts taking personality tests and looking for different styles of maintaining and thinking about relationships, looking for something that describes her. Eventually, she runs into a concept called "love languages" and realizes at once that she's a "words" person. Her friends aren't trying to hurt her - they don't realize how much she thrives on compliments, or how deeply insults can cut when they're dealing with someone who transmits affection verbally. Armed with this concept, she has a lens through which to interpret patterns of her own behavior; she also has a way to explain herself to her loved ones and get the wordy boosts she needs.

"Love Languages" link is broken.

I dug up some expert opinions on the validity of the Myers Briggs Personality Test (please suggest additional experts). The evidence I could find so far for its validity is weak:

Is the Myers-Briggs personality test meaningful?

As mattnewport already alluded to below, I think there's a strong possibility that the popularity of the test is due to the Barnum effect.

Perhaps you could argue that even if the test is not scientific, then it could still be useful for help exploring your personality. But then again, that benefit may be negated by encouraging beliefs in false categories.

Personally, I've tried to "unlearn" some of the test's assumptions, having taken the test years ago and identifying with the personality with the results it gave (ENTP). Since then, I've started to view a "P" as somewhat of a "J" who's yet to find a way to conquer akrasia. And a "T" is somewhat of an "F" who's yet to appreciate others' feelings. I didn't really need Myers Briggs to figure out the existence of these personality traits, and the fact that Myers Briggs considers such things intrinsic was in my opinion damaging.

I suggest Phil Goetz's personality test :)

The outside view has gotten a bit of a bad rap

Not in the context of "luminosity" or related topics, though; only when applied to certain kinds of futurism.

You may be planning to get to this later in the sequence, but if not: could you give examples of what it looks like to use outside view or psych or personality assessments as a jumping-off point? E.g., examples of the types of predictions one might make this way, or of the types of improvements you or others have found?

I'm having trouble picturing what it looks like to go through one's life and focus on data and prediction. If I have many concrete examples, they'll seed my brain so that the kinds of self-prediction you're recommending are easy or automatic to start in on.

Also, any tips on how to get friends/family to give useful and honest feedback?

it helps to ask about specific situations ("Do you think I'm just tired?" "Was I over the line back there?") rather than general traits that feel more judgmental to discuss ("Am I a jerk?" "Do I use people?").

I found this suggestion extremely helpful for getting useful feedback. At first I began with asking general questions which not only felt judgmental to the friends I asked, but were also difficult to answer. Asking a very broad question made them draw a blank - nothing specific came to mind, only vague images of how they felt like I usually acted. Whereas when I asked about specific situations, they had something concrete to base their responses off of. Going situation by situation, they were able to clearly describe how I acted and what impression it gave off, with greater detail.

I get my priors for my self-beliefs based on what's generally proven about human mental architecture. Your second sentence should be rewritten to indicate that you think we should take priors from somewhere beyond introspection.

I don't even think "priors" is meaningful as used. It's all just evidence to me. If there is some idiosyncratic personal prior belief in me, not due to evidence, I can either accept it (I do), or try to assume on faith that I'm like others except for this different prior, and adjust my prior until I match the conclusions of most people who use the same evidence as me. The question of where such a personal prior comes from is, however, unknowable until someone can scan my brain and explain exactly how it, in particular, works.

I generally distrust others' models of me except as it's useful to know what sort of impression I make. To get really useful insight about myself from others would require not only a tremendous competence and intelligence in them, but a huge amount of mutual trust and openness. Often you won't get honest negative feedback even if you ask for it. I see you have some sneaky tactics for getting around that.

I don't understand your "have I falsified this self-belief?". If I never have, fantastic. It must be true. If nothing I could have done (or that I can see other, different, people, do) would make it not true, then of course it's a pointless, tautological belief. I agree that you should be able to recall specific memories that are evidence for/against some believed tendency.

I don't think my scores on many of these tests are stable throughout different situations. I remember taking a Meyers-Briggs self-test and I ended up placing myself in the dead center of one of the dimensions scale. (I can't remember which one.) I no longer fit neatly into the introverted/extroverted category. I used to act like an introvert, and I'm still comfortable with solitary activities, but I'm far more inclined to talk to strangers than most people I've met. (This is, at least in part, desperation.) I also like performing, usually don't get "stage fright", and am generally comfortable with being the center of attention.

personality tests

Another test set is Gallup / Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 (http://www.strengthsfinder.com/113647/Homepage.aspx).

For me, the results were far more useful than the various "personality profiles" I have taken , sometimes at considerable cost to my employer.

"The CSF is an online measure of personal talent that identifies areas where an individual’s greatest potential for building strengths exists. ... The primary application of the CSF is as an evaluation that initiates a strengths-based development process in work and academic settings. As an omnibus assessment based on positive psychology, its main application has been in the work domain, but it has been used for understanding individuals in a variety of settings — employees, executive teams, students, families, and personal development. ... Given that CSF feedback is provided to foster intrapersonal development, comparisons across profiles of individuals are discouraged."

"When educational psychologist Donald O. Clifton first designed the interviews that subsequently became the basis for the CSF, he began by asking, “What would happen if we studied what is right with people?”Thus emerged a philosophy of using talents as the basis for consistent achievement of excellence (strength). Specifically, the strengths philosophy is the assertion that individuals are able to gain far more when they expend effort to build on their greatest talents than when they spend a comparable amount of effort to remediate their weaknesses (Clifton & Harter, 2003)."

The above two paragraphs are from Gallup's research report, available at http://strengths.gallup.com/110389/Research-Behind-StrengthsFinder-20.aspx . (Suggestion: download the file and open it in Adobe Reader. I've had trouble reading it inside Firefox.)

There is a small financial cost for the test: buy the book ($13 at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/159562015X/ref=nosim/?tag=thegalluporganiz) to get access to the test and support tools.

My strengths are: Intellection, Analytical, Input, Restorative, Learner

I don't really think anyone else can know what's going on inside my head except me. Perhaps I'm being a bit solipsistic here, but how could they? Empathy is more important than sympathy, so the only person I would trust to give me a reliable model of myself (better than I could model myself due to biases) would be someone whose already gone through that transformation. I think most people on LW are fairly intelligent people and so there will be very few people who are intelligent enough to develop that model.

"Where do you get your priors, when you start modeling yourself seriously instead of doing it by halfhearted intuition?"

Is the thought that here that you should try to find out what your priors ought to be by figuring out how you work psychologically? That seems odd. If you think some priors are special, why think they'd be the ones that you'd have in particular? If you think no priors are special, why bother trying to use your own?

Apart from the intrinsic interest of self-knowledge, I would have thought the point of making your psychological life more luminous would be to avoid known biases and misfiring heuristics that have bad consequences (epistemic and otherwise). Of particular interest here would be information about your current credences (which probably don't form a probability function, though they may approximate one in good cases) and your updating method (which probably isn't a form of conditionalization, though it may approximate one in good cases). Knowing your credences and updating method could help you know when you're subject to biases and misfiring heuristics.

But note that this other goal does seem to rely on “intuition” (scare quotes because no one knows that intuitions are) at some level (though I don't know if its half-hearted). You'll have to come to the table with some assumptions about what would be irrational so that you can compare your judgments to that standard. It seems doubtful to me that such assumptions could be vindicated purely empirically, since the questions seem thoroughly normative. It seems doubtful, for instance, that you could justify these assumptions about what would make some pieces of reasoning rational by appeal to psychological facts about yourself or anyone else.

Recite the Litany of Tarski a few times, if that helps: if you have a trait, you desire to believe that you have the trait. If you do not have a trait, you desire to believe that you do not have the trait.

On the other hand, the reason self-deception evolved was so that you could effectively signal and lie to others about your abilities. It might be a good idea to read up on only the positive traits that you might have.

In fact, if there ever was a place where you want to deliberately indulge in epistemic irrationality, this is probably it.