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
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
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?
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
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.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
Also, the things I describe over on @sinesalvatorem wrt doing math super fast or it feeling like beauty aren’t really that surprising when I think about it.
The brain does a lot of math really really really fast. It’s solving equations of parabolic motion any time it tells you where to position your hand to catch a ball. And what does that feel like? Well, it just feels like Knowing where the correct place to put your hand to catch the ball is.
I think that aesthetics is, deep down, about varying levels of that feeling of Correctness. Placing my hand in the right place to catch something feels like it requires the same sense for figuring out what is Correct that deciding where apply makeup or which clothes to wear does.
Certain things just register to the brain as more Correct in certain forms than others, when they need to complement something else. Like what colour of eye shadow to wear, or which top matches my tights, or where to put my hand to catch a ball. Similarly, the integer 27 feels like it complements the concept of 3^3. That they meet in the same place, much like the specific point in space that my hand and the ball intersect.
And while these may all feel like they’re the products of different processes and should be represented as such, I’m not so confident the brain does represent them as different. I think that, at the level of implementation details, the human mind might actually work a fair bit like the Greek philosophers. Where the beautiful, the true, and the good all have the same functional representation.
And I think a lot of semi-conscious thought is just these low-level Correctness-locators printing to stdout. So the sense of one’s eye being drawn to pretty things, and the sense of one’s hand reflexively shooting out into the parabolic path of a ball, and the sense of one’s thoughts turning toward the right answer to a math problem – that all of these are the same kinds of thoughts. But looking at them from the perspective of the conscious mind, they’re hard to understand. (I’m about to start reading How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker and will maybe get some more ideas here.)
But lately I’ve been trying to look really carefully at what I want, why I want it, and how those wants are represented inside me. And I think that, even if not everyone works the way I describe above, I seem to. When I’ve been talking lately about doing the things I really want to do, I could just as well have said doing the things that feel prettiest to me. On the lowest level, there doesn’t seem to be any distinction. The things I want to do will just seem prettier when I think about them, and that will be what tells me that they’re what I want to do. I think beauty is just a catchall attractor in the mind.
And since I started just doing whatever has the strongest feeling of beauty/truth/goodness as much as I can, I’ve been incredibly happy and productive. I can trust that I’m actually doing what matters to me, because I’m doing what satisfies the cluster of mattering. The sense that assigns value to world states and their requisite actions relative to each other.
Being charitable to others is Beautiful. Symmetric wallpaper designs are True. Understanding mathematics is Good. None of these are explicitly true, but all of them point to sense that truth springs from. Comprehend it, and the Dao shall unfold before you. (At least, that’s what happened for me. No idea if it works for other people. I’m just trying to report these internal experiences as best I can, in case they’re useful.)
In a moment of coming full circle, *Alison* is now the one explaining what it’s like to have a mind with certain parts intermingled.
I don’t think I know the above feel myself. Honestly, I’m not even sure I know the *components* of this feel. For all I know, maybe my low aesthetic drive and poor aim *are* linked.
(It doesn’t bother me much: I don’t need to aim very often, and I’ve been able to turn the limitedness of my ability to appreciate beauty into an advantage. Still, it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of the inner workings of someone for whom beauty is clearly very important.)
Tags:
#(context of the first sentence: sinesalvatorem and I first got to talking because) #(she saw my ”people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me” tag) #(and was curious what that was like) #adventures in dragon capitalism #(tangentially) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the wondrous variety of sapient life
@acemindbreaker, I didn’t want to directly reblog this thread (there were some pretty pressuring bits in previous parts of the reblog chain, and I follow a no-guilt-trips policy), but I did want to try and answer your question.
You live in Saskatchewan, right? It looks like this is Saskatchewan’s version of the medication assistance program my family’s on.
IIRC, the Ontarian program specifies that to qualify for it your household must spend more than 4% of its collective income on prescription meds†, and the program acts to cap your spending at 4% of income (each quarter you only pay up to that figure, and then the program kicks in and pays for the rest of your meds that quarter). The Saskatchewan page seems rather more vague about what its qualifiers and effects are, but the information might be buried in there somewhere, and presumably it has *some* effect for *some* people.
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I was not involved in the decision to make No Frills our primary pharmacy (it was a while ago), but I assume my parents had their reasons to switch over from Pharmasave, and they were probably financial reasons. The No Frills website says there are only three of them in all of SK, so you might very well not live near one, but the general idea might hold. I don’t know what websites might help you in determining which pharmacies are cheaper than others, though: search listings seem to be clogged with places trying to smuggle(?) Canadian meds into the United States.
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(And the smuggling brings up something that may be worth noting, that in some cases the efforts of Americans to get cheaper meds are just trying to bring prices down to a level Canadians would consider full price, and to some extent the reason there is less Canadians can do is because there is less to be done. I still remember, shortly after we moved, how horrified our new friends were when they heard what my parents had been paying for their medications. But I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that: even when things are better than they *could* be, it’s often important to try to make them better still.)
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†so I suspect we’re going to get kicked out at the next assessment now that we’re making more, but anyway
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#this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism
Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
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