The other day, I went to an event hosted by a psychological/philosophical research organisation I’d ideally like to work for. While I was there, I spoke to one of the staff about psychometrics, and he recommended I take a Big 5 quiz occasionally to track changes in personality as I go about self-improving.
So, the next day, I took a test on Open Psychometrics. Today, since I decided I should give Tumblr some updates about my life, I thought I should probably post the results. This is what my personality looks like these days, according to this measurement, at least:
Or, in more familiar OCEAN terms: Openness at the 93rd percentile, Conscientiousness at 80th, Extroversion at 96th, Agreeableness at 83th, and Neuroticism (reverse of Emotional stability) at 9th.
If someone had told me two months ago, when I started down the path of self-improvement, that in that much time I could have an OCEAN of 93/80/96/83/09, I would have thought they were crazy. But, no, these results seem to fit with my lived experience. The only thing that makes it hard to be confident is how little time has passed, despite my subjective experience of it having been over a year.
The only thing that really surprised me is that my extroversion still scores so high, now that I spend far more time with myself. However, the test seemed to mostly base extroversion on how interested I am in other people, how much I care about their well being, and how socially competent I am – all of which are high enough to justify a 96th percentile result.
Definitely, far and away the thing I’m most pleased by is the conscientiousness result. Before I used to be consistently below average. Now I’m on the cusp of the top quintile. I’m absolutely thrilled, but I think I’d still like to improve it. In conscientiousness, I’m still significantly lagging behind my father, my grandfather, my great grandfather, Elon Musk, and other similar people. That’s where my target lies, and less than 95th percentile definitely isn’t cutting it.
I anticipate my neuroticism continuing to drop as I continue to cultivate stoic mental habits. However, I doubt it will drop much farther, or at least not for long. That’s because I also want to cultivate conscientiousness, which requires some amount of intolerance for substandard states.
In this chart, my Openness is reported as slightly reduced, but that’s only due to the aforementioned appearance of standards. I’m being more careful about which experiences to have (in the short term), because I care about directing myself through a long term growth arc. However, I am in a sense maximally open to experience. That is, in the long run, I want to inhabit the broadest range of possible human experiences. I want to understand the extent of the human mind, to the degree that I can, and part of that is investigating the range of qualia it can instantiate.
The only thing popularly considered good that I’m trying to bring down is Agreeableness, which seems to be somewhat working, as my agreeableness is now in the ‘mere’ 80s. I think that my target level is about 70th percentile. High enough that I consistently lean toward cooperation and good faith and treating others well. But I don’t want to be hyper conflict averse and I don’t want to take shit. Being small and inoffensive and never taking up space is no longer my aspiration.
Also, shout out to a few weeks back, when I was posting on Tumblr about looking for a therapist who might help me to develop a healthier approach to life over the course of a several weeks. At the time, I thought that hoping to have my life on track after three months of therapy was overly optimistic, even though I needed to improve at that rate.
And now, one month later, I’m fist-pumping to my top-quintile consientiousness, while going about setting my life in order in all directions. Oh, and I kind of got distracted priority-wise during this time, so I still haven’t found a therapist. Whoops. I still think it would be a good idea for me to find one. It’s just – apparently once I was the kind of person who would systematically look for a therapist, I became quite capable of healing myself.
At first I was leaning against saying anything, but since this post you’ve made a second one in which you also treat conflict-aversion as a form of hyper-agreeableness, so:
I was so surprised by this that I wondered if maybe we’d taken different OCEAN tests, but your link looks like it may in fact be *exactly* the one I took.
The questions on that test that look like they might be involved in the Agreeable stat pretty much boil down to “How much do you want to fight people?” and “How much do you care about others’ well-being for its own sake?”
I said that I often want to fight people† and that I’m uncertain whether I care about other people’s well-being for its own sake††, and that’s how I ended up with a 12th percentile Agreeableness score despite being highly conflict-averse.
(I tried again using your link, and this time I got 14th percentile.)
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†Too cowardly and low-pain-tolerance to actually *do* it, but they didn’t *ask* *that*.
††But I’ve never *needed* to be certain of that: I want to live in an environment where people are nice to each other because then they’ll be nice to me, and to have any chance of getting that I need to do my part. It’s hard to tell whether I care about them per se precisely *because* it never actually comes up. (My attempts to use thought experiments to control for this tend to result in my brain going “I refuse to ever be sufficiently confident that being mean to someone won’t bite me in the ass later. There’s always the risk of having *misjudged* the level of risk.”)
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#reply via reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
2. Birthday: I’m gonna leave this one blank for anonymity reasons.
3. Sign: Scorpio (I always feel like I don’t fit Scorpio descriptions at all, cause they’re like “sexy and mysterious and confident and super organized” and I am like the exact opposite of all of those things, but it is what it is)
4. Height: Five foot five and three-quarters inches, barefoot and if I stretch. The orthotic sneakers and inserts add a fair bit, though; when I’m walking around I’m functionally about five seven.
5. Hobbies: I’m not even awake enough to word the requisite terrible pun, so I’m just gonna headbutt @camshaft22 here ❤️ (Reading, writing, knitting, singing, karate. I’ll learn basically any craft to a fair level of competence and then never do it again, but those are the ones I can think of that have stuck)
6. Favorite colors: Blue. Royal blue especially. Some shades of green, but there are a lot of green shades I dislike (especially the more brown-shaded ones) and only a few blue ones I dislike (mostly for reasons unrelated to the actual color). Jewel tones and neons in general, I like very vibrant colors.
7. Favorite books: Lord of the Rings, Starfighters of Adumar, Gone-Away Lake/Return to Gone-Away, The Cricket in Times Square, Digger, Chris Claremont’s original run on Uncanny X-Men (which is technically fifteen years of comics issues, but neener ;S). I read Cricket in Times Square at age two or three and I’m pretty sure it materially influenced the OTP dynamic I’ve gravitated to ever since. ^_^
8. Last song I listened to: Uh. God only knows. The last audio thing I deliberately chose to listen to, as opposed to muzak or ambient TV noises coming through the door, was an episode of Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, which was recommended me by the excellent @ravenskyewalker (I may be mistagging them) many moons ago. I only listen to three podcasts regularly, and this is by far the most structured – no live kitchen beagles at *all*. XD I like it partly because I know and love the source material, partly because Jay is the kind of thinky and articulate person I aspire to be. (Although Jay does a lot less screaming about his personal life on the internet. ^_^)
9. Last movie I watched: Seriously, these memes are designed for people who do a *lot* more media engagement than I have lately. I just haven’t had the spoons to watch movies since I got kicked out. Is there something like extroversion/introversion for visual media watching? Because hanging around live people in realtime energizes me, which I know it doesn’t for a lot of y’all, but I mostly find movies and TV really draining, even when it’s a show I like, like SG-1 or Leverage.
10. Inspiration/muse: You know, my first author I betaed for had a “muse”, which was a little wooden wolf creature that sat on her computer and she wrote little dialogues with him in the author notes. He was intended to herd plotbunnies or eat them or something. His name was Katchi. So that’s *my* association with the term “muse”. Apparently it’s more commonly used to refer to a character one RPs, but that makes mine Wes, and *that* just brings up mental images involving urns, which nobody needs at this hour. ;P
11. Dream job: Proofreader. Just sit in a comfy chair all day and make other people’s words go right. God, I wish. :P
12. Meaning behind your url: It’s a song title. Canadian folk music, less depressing than most. If you YouTube it, be sure you get the Stan Rogers version and not one of the inferior covers. (Apparently most people who know this song and my association with it think of me as primarily the narrator, but I tend to think of myself as primarily the ship, which is sort of distressing by this time because people keep having to rescue me. :P) I’m looking for a new url, to change to if and when I ever get out of this situation, but the only one I’ve come up with that really clicked for me yet was pretty damn personal and also people would have to spell “statistician”. So that’s a project.
>>Is there something like extroversion/introversion for visual media watching? Because hanging around live people in realtime energizes me, which I know it doesn’t for a lot of y’all, but I mostly find movies and TV really draining, even when it’s a show I like, like SG-1 or Leverage.<<
There must be people who react better to visual media, given the existence of things like marathons, and the literal version of Netflix-and-chill, and the ridiculous quantities of Youtube my mother somehow finds the brain processing-power to watch, and the concept in things like anti-40-hour-workweek essays of being “too tired to do anything but watch TV”.
(Well, I mean, I guess I *have* arguably been in states of being too tired to do anything but watch TV, like when I had the flu. But at those times I wasn’t *really* watching the TV either, not consistently. Last time I was that kind of sick there was a Deadliest Catch marathon on, which I found worked well: it was *just* engaging enough to have something to listen to when I couldn’t keep my eyes open but my brain was working enough to be capable of boredom, maybe even open my eyes for a bit occasionally, but also if I fell asleep for an hour I hadn’t missed much. Sometimes when people talk about “being too tired to do anything but watch TV” they *do* seem to mean something like that, but not always.)
I have also heard the occasional rumour of people who find *textual* media draining, but of course one wouldn’t tend to encounter such people when one hangs out primarily in text-based venues, so I wouldn’t know.
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#if you don’t want me reblogging this let me know and I’ll take it down #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #illness tw
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune courts. WE DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE PLUTO COURT THING. (…There’s a story there.)
Clockwise and Counterclockwise courts
…or Deasil and Widdershins, fine, but the clockwise version is more neutral
Proton, Neutron, Electron courts
you know I could keep going but I think I’m going to stop
This is not as much of an issue as it used to be – to my knowledge no one has been killed over it for a few years, but my advice to humans who must deal with the Courts remains the same: Do NOT ask if there is a Court of Pluto. Do not ask why there is no Court of Pluto. Ideally avoid mentioning the word ‘Pluto’.
The problem is that the story is rather embarrassing to several powerful people and they would really rather it not be brought to mind. Ever.
Background radio at work: *opening notes of “Call Me Maybe”*
My brain: “♪ My name is Nietzsche, hello/A sort of nihilist bro/Hey, God is dead, did you know?/What is morality? ♫”
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#this actually happened *last* week #but I was thinking about it again because last night they played ”Counting Stars” #and I ended up with the Awakening of the Birds soundtrack stuck in my head #my brain has some firm opinions on what the primary versions of songs are and they are not always the same as the mainstream view #Amenta #philosophy #music #oh look an original post #in which Brin has a job #♪ I gazed into the abyss ♫ #♪ off of that dark precipice ♫ #♪ in existentialist bliss ♫ #♪ it gazed back into me ♫
I was originally going to reblog this without commentary, but then I was looking on Wiktionary and it points out that “biscuits” derives from the French for twice-baked bread. I think that makes bread the monoscuit.
(time to call rolls “monoscuits” and confuse everybody)
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P.S. Nobody seems to know why Triscuits are called that, as far as I can tell.
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#food #overly literal interpretations #possibly just-literal-enough interpretations #reply via reblog
After traveling for two years and billions of kilometers from Earth, the OSIRIS-REx probe is only a few months away from its destination: the intriguing asteroid Bennu. When it arrives in December, OSIRIS-REx will embark on a nearly two-year investigation of this clump of rock, mapping its terrain and finding a safe and fruitful site from which to collect a sample.
The spacecraft will briefly touch Bennu’s surface around July 2020 to collect at least 60 grams (equal to about 30 sugar packets) of dirt and rocks. It might collect as much as 2,000 grams, which would be the largest sample by far gathered from a space object since the Apollo Moon landings. The spacecraft will then pack the sample into a capsule and travel back to Earth, dropping the capsule into Utah’s west desert in 2023, where scientists will be waiting to collect it.
This years-long quest for knowledge thrusts Bennu into the center of one of the most ambitious space missions ever attempted. But the humble rock is but one of about 780,000 known asteroids in our solar system. So why did scientists pick Bennu for this momentous investigation? Here are 10 reasons:
1. It’s close to Earth
Unlike most other asteroids that circle the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Bennu’s orbit is close in proximity to Earth’s, even crossing it. The asteroid makes its closest approach to Earth every 6 years. It also circles the Sun nearly in the same plane as Earth, which made it somewhat easier to achieve the high-energy task of launching the spacecraft out of Earth’s plane and into Bennu’s. Still, the launch required considerable power, so OSIRIS-REx used Earth’s gravity to boost itself into Bennu’s orbital plane when it passed our planet in September 2017.
2.It’s the right size
Asteroids spin on their axes just like Earth does. Small ones, with diameters of 200 meters or less, often spin very fast, up to a few revolutions per minute. This rapid spinning makes it difficult for a spacecraft to match an asteroid’s velocity in order to touch down and collect samples. Even worse, the quick spinning has flung loose rocks and soil, material known as “regolith” — the stuff OSIRIS-REx is looking to collect — off the surfaces of small asteroids. Bennu’s size, in contrast, makes it approachable and rich in regolith. It has a diameter of 492 meters, which is a bit larger than the height of the Empire State Building in New York City, and rotating once every 4.3 hours.
3. It’s really old
Bennu is a leftover fragment from the tumultuous formation of the solar system. Some of the mineral fragments inside Bennu could be older than the solar system. These microscopic grains of dust could be the same ones that spewed from dying stars and eventually coalesced to make the Sun and its planets nearly 4.6 billion years ago. But pieces of asteroids, called meteorites, have been falling to Earth’s surface since the planet formed. So why don’t scientists just study those old space rocks? Because astronomers can’t tell (with very few exceptions) what kind of objects these meteorites came from, which is important context. Furthermore, these stones, that survive the violent, fiery decent to our planet’s surface, get contaminated when they land in the dirt, sand, or snow. Some even get hammered by the elements, like rain and snow, for hundreds or thousands of years. Such events change the chemistry of meteorites, obscuring their ancient records.
4.It’s well preserved
Bennu, on the other hand, is a time capsule from the early solar system, having been preserved in the vacuum of space. Although scientists think it broke off a larger asteroid in the asteroid belt in a catastrophic collision between about 1 and 2 billion years ago, and hurtled through space until it got locked into an orbit near Earth’s, they don’t expect that these events significantly altered it.
5. It might contain clues to the origin of life
Analyzing a sample from Bennu will help planetary scientists better understand the role asteroids may have played in delivering life-forming compounds to Earth. We know from having studied Bennu through Earth- and space-based telescopes that it is a carbonaceous, or carbon-rich, asteroid. Carbon is the hinge upon which organic molecules hang. Bennu is likely rich in organic molecules, which are made of chains of carbon bonded with atoms of oxygen, hydrogen, and other elements in a chemical recipe that makes all known living things. Besides carbon, Bennu also might have another component important to life: water, which is trapped in the minerals that make up the asteroid.
6. It contains valuable materials
Besides teaching us about our cosmic past, exploring Bennu close-up will help humans plan for the future. Asteroids are rich in natural resources, such as iron and aluminum, and precious metals, such as platinum. For this reason, some companies, and even countries, are building technologies that will one day allow us to extract those materials. More importantly, asteroids like Bennu are key to future, deep-space travel. If humans can learn how to extract the abundant hydrogen and oxygen from the water locked up in an asteroid’s minerals, they could make rocket fuel. Thus, asteroids could one day serve as fuel stations for robotic or human missions to Mars and beyond. Learning how to maneuver around an object like Bennu, and about its chemical and physical properties, will help future prospectors.
7. It will help us better understand other asteroids
Astronomers have studied Bennu from Earth since it was discovered in 1999. As a result, they think they know a lot about the asteroid’s physical and chemical properties. Their knowledge is based not only on looking at the asteroid, but also studying meteorites found on Earth, and filling in gaps in observable knowledge with predictions derived from theoretical models. Thanks to the detailed information that will be gleaned from OSIRIS-REx, scientists now will be able to check whether their predictions about Bennu are correct. This work will help verify or refine telescopic observations and models that attempt to reveal the nature of other asteroids in our solar system.
8. It will help us better understand a quirky solar force …
Astronomers have calculated that Bennu’s orbit has drifted about 280 meters (0.18 miles) per year toward the Sun since it was discovered. This could be because of a phenomenon called the Yarkovsky effect, a process whereby sunlight warms one side of a small, dark asteroid and then radiates as heat off the asteroid as it rotates. The heat energy thrusts an asteroid either away from the Sun, if it has a prograde spin like Earth, which means it spins in the same direction as its orbit, or toward the Sun in the case of Bennu, which spins in the opposite direction of its orbit. OSIRIS-REx will measure the Yarkovsky effect from close-up to help scientists predict the movement of Bennu and other asteroids. Already, measurements of how this force impacted Bennu over time have revealed that it likely pushed it to our corner of the solar system from the asteroid belt.
9. … and to keep asteroids at bay
One reason scientists are eager to predict the directions asteroids are drifting is to know when they’re coming too-close-for-comfort to Earth. By taking the Yarkovsky effect into account, they’ve estimated that Bennu could pass closer to Earth than the Moon is in 2135, and possibly even closer between 2175 and 2195. Although Bennu is unlikely to hit Earth at that time, our descendants can use the data from OSIRIS-REx to determine how best to deflect any threatening asteroids that are found, perhaps even by using the Yarkovsky effect to their advantage.
10. It’s a gift that will keep on giving
Samples of Bennu will return to Earth on September 24, 2023. OSIRIS-REx scientists will study a quarter of the regolith. The rest will be made available to scientists around the globe, and also saved for those not yet born, using techniques not yet invented, to answer questions not yet asked.
Read the web version of this week’s “Solar System: 10 Things to Know” article HERE.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
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#space #the power of science #proud citizen of The Future #Bennu #long post
I never heard this version! The version I know, after “grandpa shark”, it was “person swimming”, “shark attack”, “happy shark”.
I have done this song exactly once, and I have never been able to find anyone else doing anything close to the version that other Girl Guide troop taught us on that joint camping trip.
There was a lead-in about a couple going to the beach and swimming out into the ocean; I’m not sure how that part went exactly. It leads into the shark list with the line “Then they saw sharks”, though.
(Note that each line was only done once, not 3.5 times as in this thread.)
After the chorus is:
“So they swam back” [swimming motions with arms] “Faster back” [faster swimming motions] “Faster still” [even faster swimming motions] “Not fast enough” [continue swimming, shake head “no”] “They got a leg” [put one leg forward] “Other leg” [step forward with other leg] “And an arm” [hold out arm] “Other arm” [both arms forward] “And a head” [lean forward] “And I was dead” [not sure about motion for this one] [quietly] “And all were dead” [hold finger in front of mouth in “shh” gesture; “doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo” is subdued] [quietly] “And all were dead” [ditto] [big grin, normal volume] “Except the sharks!” [mama-shark clapping, because mama comes first in this version’s list]
(I think the shark order went “mama (horizontal clapping), papa or maybe daddy (vertical clapping), sister (diagonal clapping), baby (hand motions as if making a hand puppet talk; “doo doo”-ing is high-pitched), grandpa (place last knuckle of each finger against last knuckle of corresponding finger on other hand to evoke a mouth with no teeth left, make ‘talking’ motions; “doo doo”-ing is low-pitched and tries to sound old and toothless)”.)
And then you do the shark list again, and that’s how it ends.
It would be nice to refresh my memory on how that version went (though I’m kind of surprised by how much of it I *do* remember given that it was one time seven years ago), but I haven’t found anyone who knows what I’m talking about.
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#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(close enough) #my childhood #music #death tw #shark #long post #oral culture #amnesia cw?
I’m not sure what’s funnier: the fact that the French translation of this blurb doesn’t include the bit about “legume” being “a funny sounding French word”, or the hypothetical version where they *did* include it.
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(Note also the translation of the “Yes, peas!” pun as “Oui, s’il vous pois!”, which–I don’t speak French anywhere near well enough to know how well that really works, but from what I can tell they may have actually pulled that one off.)
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#I was expecting dried pea pods #but it turns out these are actually pea-pod-shaped rice puffs but with the rice flour mixed with a large proportion of pea flour #I can see why people would like them but I don’t think they’re for me #now I know #oh look an original post #our home and cherished land #language #food
my hobby: mass downloading the entire corpuses of long-running blogs on to my phone as an epub and searching keywords when i want to talk with someone
What mass-downloading method do you use?
I, too, am interested in downloading entire blog corpuses onto my phone, and I’m curious if you have any tips/techniques for archiving more effectively.
(I’m not sure to what extent your post is joking, but I thought I’d ask the above in case it’s sufficiently serious that you actually have a real mass-downloading method in mind.)
ive used http://www.bloxp.com/ (id like something better) which converts some blogs and has trouble with others
this is a thing i do! ah but i did prepend it with the meme format of “my hobby:” which is evidence that the thing following is not, in fact, your hobby
Ooh!
For what I can tell from the initial testing: not a full solution, but for the things it *can* handle, much faster and less effort than the pasting-things-into-LibreOffice-documents (sometimes printing-pages-to-PDF) I normally do.
(Automation is like salt: I often find things are better after adding it, but it rarely occurs to me to add it unprompted.)
P.S. It did at least occur to me a mere couple of weeks after changing my podcast-downloading habits to something that would be aided by a podcatcher that I should, in fact, get a podcatcher. Although that might have been prompted by noticing that Rhythmbox has a podcatcher built-in, so maybe it doesn’t count.
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#reply via reblog #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
Brinens and Things 