[FRIAM] truth, reality, & narrative

[Marcus Daniels]

Glen writes:

< For those of us who program themselves *toward* a (mythical) objective, the question becomes one of nature-nurture. Is self-programming built in or acquired? And what's the value of a liberal education (or travel as a kid)? Can self-programming be modified ... programmed-self-programming? Or are we doomed to be just like that old person, accidentally radicalized by the Fox News playing 24/7 in the nursing home? >

After jumping from project to project for a couple decades, I'd describe my self-programming as the result of something akin to stochastic gradient descent.   The effort to average over longer windows of time seems to gain no extra insight.   On the other hand, I recall being at an offsite SFI meeting once next to a stranger who struck up a conversation after a talk had just completed.   I had reason to think there were topics in the talk where the speaker was not telling the full story, and I said so to this person.   Immediately, he proceeded to make various speculations about my childhood, which struck me as surprising but also kind of amusing.  (As if I could possibly care that I had been judged unfavorably by this random person.)  He wasn't entirely wrong, but his commitment to guessing at my personality development seemed a bit too emphatic.   I guess I had unwittingly offended his sensibilities about his investments and that told him enough (apparently) to infer what my upbringing was like.   I could only speculate that his upbringing involved getting hit with a stick when talking out of turn.   This goes back to the episodic versus diachronic personality hypothesis, perhaps.    A diachronic person might be inclined to have a stronger emotional attachment to their decisions, because they thought they were "going somewhere".  

Marcus