Strategic choice of identity

As I understand it, in (a grossly twisted) Kahneman's language, identity is what System 1 is happy to wear, and what you suggest is to use System 2 to pick the outfit to dress System 1 into. Dangerously stretching this metaphor, one has to make sure that the clothes fit. For example, the growth mindset might not fit well if your System 1 is happy to watch TV all night. You also will have trouble if your identity clashes with what others around you wear. It might be enough to get into sweats and sneakers to find oneself going for a run, or you might look silly if everyone else is dressed for a ball. Hmm, have I just switched from metaphorical to physical clothes?

For example, if you have a "shy person" identity, then going to parties or starting conversations with strangers can generate counterexamples for that identity, and help to displace it with a new one of "sociable person". Costly signaling can be used to achieve this - for example, joining a public speaking club.

Counterintuitively, I think that joining Toastmasters has actually made me identify more strongly as an introvert, mostly because my introversion is never more painfully obvious than when I'm there. So, observing myself attending Toastmasters isn't enough for the "sociable person" identity to stick; I'll have to get to the point where I observe myself attending Toastmasters and also observe myself not feeling terrible about the whole talking thing while I'm there.

The adventurer probably does the most for me, finding new paths and places and people brings such delight. My conscious identification as a person sidestepped a bout of gender-confusion when I realised I hadn't ever identified as man or woman, merely with pieces of each.

I'm less sure about, say, my combination of someone who "gets it done" and "doesn't show imperfect work". The majority of interesting work that gets done is done coincidentally, because it needs doing, and isn't up to my standards. I've been experimenting with ways to overcome this, but with social commitments to share interesting work, not with identity changes.

I have been for a very long time a cryptic, who doesn't bare theirself to strangers, much less the public, and likes to play with words more than express clearly, I'm slowly replacing that with "an open person". I conciously push to show a more vulnerable bit of myself before I normally would these days, so far just with people that I imagine eventually sharing with anyway. I got burned pretty badly my second time trying that, but the the first time had me already completely convinced. Plus, I never could have written this if I hadn't.

Some time back, I argued that if we want to really promote rationality, we need to get people to adopt rationality into a part of their identity.

Stanovich believes that spreading awareness of biases might be enough to help a lot of people, and to some degree it might. But we also know about the tendency to only use your awareness of bias to attack arguments you don't like. In the same way that telling people facts about politics sometimes only polarizes opinions, telling people about biases might similarly only polarize the debate as everyone thinks their opposition is hopelesly deluded and biased.

So we need to create a new thinking disposition, not just for actively attacking the perceived threats, but for critically evaluating your opinions. That's hard. And I've found for a number of years now that the main reason I try to actively re-evaluate my opinions and update them as necessary is because doing so is part of my identity. I pride myself on not holding onto ideology and for changing my beliefs when it feels like they should be changed. Admitting that somebody else is right and I am wrong does admittedly hurt, but it also feels good that I was able to do so despite the pain.

Very interesting. A point that is obvious but that is still worth making, I think, is that what identity is strategic to choose depends on your personality (and other factors). It strikes that many of the suggested identities imply a high level of "openness to experience" - one of the "big five" personality traits. Now according to some studies openness to experience is 57 % heritable (highest of the big five). This suggests that it is not easy to change your level of openness to experience, which means that if you're not open to experience, the identities suggested in this post would be hard to take.

That said, I think we do have lots of influence over our identities. One identity that I find both very dangerous but also avoidable is the cynical, "disillusioned" one. Unlike many other dangerous identities, it is particularly dangerous to highly intelligent and otherwise rational people as Yudkowsky points out in this brilliant post

I'm especially on guard against cynicism because it seems to be a standard corruption of rationality in particular. If many people are optimists, then true rationalists will occasionally have to say things that sound pessimistic by contrast. If people are trying to signal virtue through their beliefs, then a rationalist may have to advocate contrasting beliefs that don't signal virtue.

Which in turn means that rationalists, and especially apprentice rationalists watching other rationalists at work, are especially at-risk for absorbing cynicism as though it were a virtue in its own right - assuming that whosoever speaks of ulterior motives is probably a wise rationalist with uncommon insight; or believing that it is an entitled benefit of realism to feel superior to the naive herd that still has a shred of hope.

Awesome post! I've definitely spent a long time vaguely thinking that "keep your identity small" was a good idea, while cultivating various identities anyway.

"The aversion to wasting money and material things predictably led to wasting time and attention instead. I found it useful to try "thinking like a trader" to counteract this "stingy person" identity, and get comfortable with the idea of trading money for time. Now I no longer obsess about recycling or buy the cheapest version of everything."

This resonates so hard for me.

I'm not sure that "jack of all trades" is a helpful identity, given the known benefits of economic specialization. Remember the origin of that term: "Jack of all trades, and master of none." It's often more useful to be really, really good at one thing and trade for what you need in other areas.

It can often be useful to have a "T-shaped" expertise, though: some level of familiarity with a wide variety of topics, and deep expertise in one area. The cross bar of the T helps you when your existing expertise and skills are not enough -- you know enough to find someone who can help you, or to know what new skills / knowledge you need to pick up. (Or, perhaps more importantly, you know what you don't know.)

I find appealing the strategy of identifying with what you can be identified via via others. I suspect that detaching identity from social realities is an error. Choosing how to frame one's traits can be orthogonal to this and solves some of the problems otherwise solved by idealistic wanna-be-self-fulfilling notions of identity.

I hadn't thought of this before. Thank you for posting this.

Two identities that I find very useful are:

• Nothing is beyond my grasp
• Fearless

Nothing is beyond my grasp is an internal compartmentalizing technique but I find it so powerful and used so often by myself that I might as well assign it as an identity. I do so cautiously. LWer So8res who coined the term, differentiates this technique from overcoming fear of failure. After thinking about it I tend to agree, so I separated it in to another identity which I call fearless.

The Fearless identity is pretty self explanatory. There are times when my will power and motivation are completely sapped because of the crippling fear of rejection, this is when I put on the fearless identity. Other times I will use the nothing is beyond my grasp identity when find my motivation taking a hit not because I am fearful but because I think I lack the competency to do a task well.

I have previously played with these ideas before but only recently formalized it for myself and actively use these identities more concretely than just reading about it. Looking back, before all these meta mind games I've learned, my greatest success in life and romance were when I was unreasonably confident and fearless. Nothing ever turned out to be scarier than what I thought it would be.

For example, if you have a "shy person" identity, then going to parties or starting conversations with strangers can generate counterexamples for that identity, and help to displace it with a new one of "sociable person". Costly signaling can be used to achieve this - for example, joining a public speaking club.

Often time doing signaling isn't that important. It might be better to get out pen and paper and write down counterexamples whenever they come up.

I've found identity to be a very useful tool for habit forming. For example, when I wanted to start running regularly, I decided to adopt "runner" as part of my identity. This made it much easier for me to actually get up and run every morning. Similarly, when I quit drinking, I decided that "I'm not the kind of person who drinks." I've done the same thing with waking up early, and a few other habits. This does result in adding a lot of things to my identity, but I don't expect them to be any harder to remove than they were to adopt, if that becomes necessary.

Somewhat related: Mark Sisson of Mark's Daily Apple recently wrote about Harnessing the Power of Self-Identity.

I think the most frequently used identity I have was created why a public speaking teacher commented that I was just fine acting on stage, but became very shy and nervous when I was speaking as myself. I don't recall if this was her idea or mine, but I developed a 'character' that was basically me sans said shyness. Large body language, typically spoke louder, almost a caricature of confidence. While it was originally just for speaking to large groups, it quickly got used for any conversation with people who weren't my close friends. Sometime during college, I got so accustomed to using this 'character' that I realized it wasn't exactly an act any more.

Ironically, a very useful identity was one I abandoned- in high school, I thought of myself as a prodigy, far smarter than the hopeless plebeians around me. This was probably useful, as it kept me focused on learning on my own when the class didn't move fast enough. On the other hand, as soon as I hit college, I realized this wasn't very helpful since it stopped me from asking questions, noticing that I didn't understand the material, and working usefully with the other students. I think it was very useful while I had it, but by far the most important lesson I learned in those four years was that I am not a genius. (I'm smart, but there's an order of magnitude difference from where I thought of myself and where I see myself now.)

When I was way younger and mildly depressed (and blessed with an incredibly stable hedonic setpoint), I used this quite a bit. First I made a 'I am not a serious person' identity (which unfortunately still bites me in the ass today) so I didn't take that sadness serious and could just dismiss it (seriously, use the right identity traits; I became way too good at dismissing sadness), and later a compartment/helper identity of 'going through this phase is normal and you'll likely grow out of it, you may not feel at all like it; probability is on your side', which helped tremendously in making me stay positive

It's incredible how far you can get just by implementing false identities and beliefs and habits and merge them into yourself. It's almost ridiculous, really

Whatever the choice, it matters. Importantly, discarding an old identity is not childs play. Do not choose identities for short term unless you intend to win only in the short term.

''Metacognitive experience is responsible for creating an identity that matters to an individual. The creation of the identity with meta-cognitive experience is linked to the identity-based motivation (IBM) model. The identity-based motivation model implies that “identities matter because they provide a basis for meaning making and for action.”[19] A person decides also if the identity matters in two ways with meta-cognitive experience. First, a current or possible identity is either “part of the self and so worth pursuing”[20] or the individual thinks that the identity is part of their self, yet it is conflicting with more important identities and the individual will decide if the identity is or is not worth pursuing. Second, it also helps an individual decide if an identity should be pursued or abandoned.

Usually, abandoning identity has been linked to meta-cognitive difficulty. Based on the identity-based motivation model there are naive theories describing difficulty as a way to continue to pursue an identity. The incremental theory of ability states that if “effort matters then difficulty is likely to be interpreted as meaning that more effort is needed.”[21] Here is an example: a woman who loves to play clarinet has come upon a hard piece of music. She knows that how much effort she puts into learning this piece is beneficial. The piece had difficulty so she knew the effort was needed. The identity the woman wants to pursue is to be a good clarinet player; having a metacognitive experience difficulty pushed her to learn the difficult piece to continue to identify with her identity. The entity theory of ability represents the opposite. This theory states that if “effort does not matter then difficulty is likely to be interpreted as meaning that ability is lacking so effort should be suspended.”[21] Based on the example of the woman playing the clarinet, if she did not want to identify herself as a good clarinet player, she would not have put in any effort to learn the difficult piece which is an example of using metacognitive experience difficulty to abandon an identity.[22]''

Another identity I forgot to mention is a sort of "court jester", a person who finds it rewarding to be silly and make a fool of herself sometimes. I find this quite useful for things like public speaking and learning skills as a beginner.

There is an "insufficient" mindset that's my biggest obstacle. Like, insufficiently smart to ask questions, insufficiently creative to contribute, insufficiently good tango dancer, etc. Work by Brene Brown on vulnerability has helped me a lot with this.

The identity that helps me most is: I'm a fifth order of consciousness in the making (I just levelled up to 4). :)

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I also think you don't necessarily want to eliminate negative identities, since they can help you if they correctly describe persistent personality traits. If you "know yourself," then at least you can try to compensate.