People Don't Know Themselves Very Well | Hacker News Reader

People Don't Know Themselves Very Well

theatlantic.com

247 pointsdmurthy131 comments

Something worth adding is that there isn't anything in your brain that is immutable. We aren't really capable of observing some changes as they happen so gradually, yet it is quite obvious the changes have occurred. The way you perceive the world is going to be significantly different today than it was when you were an adolescent, yet you can't recall exactly what it was like to be that adolescent since you would have had to create an exact copy of your brain/body at that point in your life to have access the same context.

I always try to remember this fact when dealing with others. Past experiences and environmental context (that is to say, internal environment, e.g. blood sugar levels, hormone levels, neurotransmitter levels, etc) are extremely important to how you experience life on a day to day basis. It is literally impossible to fully imagine what someone else's experience is like, so it is important to listen carefully and be empathetic with others.

yet you can't recall exactly what it was like to be that adolescent since you would have had to create an exact copy of your brain/body at that point in your life to have access the same context.

Or I could just simply remember what I felt. I actually do. And to people talking about writing down your thoughts, the thing that always surprises me when reading my texts from decades ago, is how similar they were to my current thoughts. Circumstances are very different, I'm not.

the thing that always surprises me when reading my texts from decades ago, is how similar they were to my current thoughts. Circumstances are very different, I'm not.

I've had the exact opposite experience. I blush at the posts I see on facebook from what I've posted 2-3 years back, and that's stuff that I had given a little thought to, before posting.

If I kept a diary/journal, I'd be perpetually embarrassed of my past trail of thoughts.

I'm more or less in the same boat as you :). But to look at it in a more positive light, that discomfort at looking at your past self just shows how far you've come. So it can also be an indicator you're on the right track.

Hm. I used to be the same, but now I look back and I'm no longer embarrassed. I'm already so hard on myself about everything, I really don't want yet another thing to beat myself up about. What's the use in being upset because I was wrong in the past? I'm wrong about things every day. All I can do is try to do better.

I think one key was that I have gone back and read something that I wrote which I no longer remember writing that genuinely impresses me. I've stumbled upon my own answers on, say, StackOverflow, or found old posts on discussion boards before for topics I find interesting, or found some old scripts I wrote long ago that do something I now have need of. When I've had a question that needed an answer and discovered that my own answer from years ago is the best one I can find, it feels pretty good. When the argument I've used in the past is still well-reasoned, that also feels pretty good. When the code I used in the past was correct and complete and well commented, that really feels good.

No, not everything I've done before has been good quality, but it's a lot of fun to stumble on your own things that are good quality. It also makes it easier to forgive yourself for all the errors that you've made in your life.

Agree wholeheartedly. I've posted my fair share of cringeworthy things over the years, but that has improved as my sense of self-identity has stabilized and my insecurities have faded. What makes me cringe is usually not the content of the message but the way that I say it -- a tone of superiority, condescension, anger, self-pity, or attention seeking. Without being too reductive, my feelings about myself have changed and that's made it easier to be nicer to myself and by extension to others.

From age 12 to 17, I was a super prolific "poet." I had four binders full of looseleaf pages of all kinds of writing. I had also kept every note that my girlfriends had given to me during that time. Around age 22, I found them in my closet, and I was overcome with shame and embarrassment. I immediately burned them all.

More than a decade after burning them, there's a little bit of me that wishes I hadn't, but the feeling of embarrassment is so strong, I'm cringing thinking about some lines now. I would never want to show them to anyone.

I clearly remember writing some of it, the environment where I wrote it, the events that inspired the writing, the path my brain took (and how that path was determined) for the lines I wrote, the pain in my hand from gripping the pen too tight for too long.

I remember exactly how I felt then. But I am not that person. I don't like who that person was. I envy anyone who isn't ashamed of their previous writing.

Each recollection of a memory changes and affects further recollections. You likely have a need to feel that you have a consistent self-schema more than one actually exists. https://theconversation.com/the-instability-of-memory-how-yo...

I agree with you on this. I remember how I felt. When I read my posts on Facebook or entries in my diary, no matter how cringe-worthy, I remember how I felt at the time.And they have evolved but along the similar path. It is not very different from how I think today, it doesn't seem like a different person now and then. I am still the same adolescent, but with more experience and better perspective.

To the comments below: You can't say it is not valid or not the same as having an eidetic memory. It is not as simple as that. We are more than the sum of memories.

> Or I could just simply remember what I felt. I actually do

Even eidetic memory isn't as perfect as media likes to pretend. It's unlikely that you have anything but a faint model of what you think you were like.

I shared my experience and you believe I'm wrong or lying. It's OK, but you stated your disbelief without providing any actual reason, just throwing one arcane word, the media and your opinion of what's unlikely in the pot.

Fortunately I have the writings. Otherwise I might be tempted to believe you ;)

How would you, or anyone, know with a high level of certainty that it is unlikely that he has anything but a faint model? You can point to studies I imagine, but how do we know those are correct? The topic isn't as deterministic as math or physics.

To know exactly what the contents of your mind were at that time, you'd need to make a full copy of it, so there is a physical limitation there. You can certainly get approximations of how you felt, but we typically remember peak experiences better than mundane ones. This makes sense from the standpoint of evolution: if you remember what it felt like when you put your hand on the stovetop in vivid detail, you won't do it again. Remembering what it felt like when you walked down the street on October 5th, 1995 is less important because nothing happened, so you just discard it entirely. You can make an educated guess from some template of what walking down the street feels like and what the weather in early October feels like, but you're not going to remember that instance exactly as it happened.

To know exactly what the contents of your mind were at that time, you'd need to make a full copy of it

To know it exactly. But I don't need that. I just remember how I felt and why, and that's what we were talking about, not about some sci-fi cloning feat.

Persons are different and experiment life, memories and emotions in different ways. I was once talking to a friend and then certain night arised in the conversation. It turned out that she had forgotten we had had sex five years before. I don't know which of us was more dumbfounded.

The argument in my first post was about remembering your experience exactly, so I think we agree. I am curious, how do you know you are remembering exactly how you felt and why? The 'why' you feel a certain way is itself actually tricky because we often do post hoc rationalizations for why we feel a certain way, so we aren't even always good at explaining why we feel the way we do in the present, let alone in the past.

'Thinking Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman has an interesting bit on experience vs memory and how this affects our judgement. The two can differ quite a bit, based on the research presented in this book.

I'm very suspicious of treating the Kahneman system 1, system 2 as any more than a hypothesis since even he admits it's a model without any biological basis. What's worse is that most of the research he cites come from studies with almost no replication.

The hot-hand fallacy is perhaps my favorite example of experimentally debunked wisdom from that book.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-hand_fallacy#Recent_resear...

This has nothing to do with system 1 vs system 2, it is what you experience vs what you remember from that experience.

Which is why it is ExtremelY important to email yourself lengthy details of your thoughts on important subjects. It is a record of your thought process and world view at that moment in life. I am amazed every time I go back and read things I wrote 5+ years ago.

I ordered a typewriter - for some reason it makes this easier for me.

For me I think it's a few things: feeling of security, knowing no pw leak or other hack will reveal my thoughts, the immediate gratification of seeing my thoughts on paper, and lastly a dedicated machine that I associate with the task and doesn't allow me to wander.

You mean like at the end of the day so you can remember what you were doing the next morning when you sit back down at your computer? :D

I mean what I think about "big ideas" such as Love, Family, Work, Humanity, Theos, XYZ person etc... Or for example if I read something that affects me I email myself a commentary.

My favorite, which I have not done in a while, is to simply record a summary of the conversations I have with friends.

Email yourself? You could simply use an offline diary in any text editor or in physical space.

I am one of those people who use email for everything including file storage.

This is a very important and true perspective. It makes me wonder, have you ever used psychedelics of any kind?

A valid question, but I want to point out that Buddhism (and modern psychology, to a certain extent) have been using this transitory, conditional model of the self for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta

https://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-P...

Many people think psychedelics are an alternate path to the same destination, although I haven't done any major searching on whether any significant research has gone into comparing experiences.

I think you're partially right.

At least from the Buddhist side of things (and in more than one Buddhist tradition), the spiritual path consists roughly of:

1) an initial awakening to the true nature of one's own self-construct

2) a lifelong process of deepening and integrating this deeply liberating insight into all aspects of one's mind, life, and behavior

The Buddhist canon contains a lot of stories about people who attained at lease a glimpse of 1), sometimes seemingly triggered by a random event (especially in the Chan/Zen tradition) such as hearing a loud shout. So I wouldn't be surprised if psychedelics could drop-kick one's consciousness into this realization.

But I would be surprised if drugs alone could produce the kind of long-lasting shift in perspective and well-being that 2) brings - mainly because it requires a lot of meditative effort, and effects of pharmaceuticals tend to be transient.

From personal experience, I believe it can create the shift in perspective, but you're right about the permanence of it, that seems elusive in a way that cannot even be described.

As I mentioned, I haven't tried psychedelics but from listening to Sam Harris and a few other experienced meditators talk about it, it sounds quite useful for witnessing firsthand the context dependency of human experience. I think this is an important insight in to our existence - the person you feel like you are is whatever is happening in your brain right now and that can change quite easily and quite quickly. A bit unnerving.

Nope. I just read a lot and meditate.

I would like to add another viewpoint from my own real world experiences.

Many people know who they really are deep, deep down. I find that most of the life long struggle is just to be, and express who we know ourselves to be.

I'm sure there are plenty of people that do not genuinely know who they are, and it's hard to blame them. In my 30s, I feel like our generation as born, lived, and died with extreme amounts of advertising and promotion in front of our faces.

The only thing that scares me more than not having an implicit identity is having an identity that is driven by so much consumption that you believe you need to buy the Crest Whitestrips, do squats for a bigger butt, or person who has lots of Starbucks Star Rewards. No disrespect to those goals in their own right, self-improvement is always a noble cause to me, but I fear of people just becoming: Guy with the good teeth, girl with the Kardashian butt, or person who knows every piece of Starbucks lingo.

I genuinely mean it when I say that I hope that folks don't allow their identity to be supplanted by everything that the glowing box says we should be. I hope we don't become as unique as the sum of our corporate fingerprints, but perhaps we should accept that corporate fingerprints are allowed to be part of us too.

There is no pretending here, I'm not anymore free of this than anyone else, but I sometimes think this is why the world (and to some extent Americans) say that if you leave milk and America by themselves, only one of them will develop a culture. We have the unfortunate chance of being a nation that developed in a relatively modern era with more advertising being done in the last two hundred years than in the entire span of human history (note: I have no proof of this, this is purely conjecture on my part)

P.S. I apologize if this came off as preachy in any way. I love humanity and I get sad thinking about people living and dying without ever knowing who they really are. This just ended up becoming a stream-of-conciousness type post more than anything.

I'm skeptical of the idea that if we just looked deep enough we'd find our "genuine" selves. As if we were the representation of some platonic ideal of ourselves.

Also, assuming such a thing does exist, why assume it would be a good thing to find it. Reminds me of Rousseau vs Hobbes.

I'm skeptical too. Keep searching for your "true self" and you may not find anything there. Like a hurricane, it has a name, a shape, tendencies, but can appear and fade away into material substrate. While we might say the hurricane has a personality, it's affected by the conditions around it (wind, temperature, etc...). We get angry when our life is threatened and we get angry when the ego is threatened, but was that upset ego you? Or was it a reflection of shape of the comments directed at it? Who are you?

I find you will have better results thinking about what has MADE you the way that you are, rather than trying to FIND what you are.

Learning about how my childhood has affected my adult psyche has been more revealing than trying to find some static inner "me." I think your "you" is nebulous and ever changing. I would go as far as to say relative and situational, even. But you can learn about your patterns of thought by reverse engineering them, both in real-time and historically.

If you do this enough you will find a pattern that you can define as yourself. Then it turns into a game of playing to that pattern's strengths and stress-testing it for growth.

I've always thought of "true self" as the intersection between:

  + Who other's think you are
  + Who you think you are
  + Who you actually are

If all three of those are in harmony, you've found "your true self." Nothing more, nothing less.

Anthropomorphization of hurricanes is not exactly evidence that there is nothing at the center of human beings. It's simply an analogy and analogies are by their nature imperfect and inexact.

If that projection of hurricane weather phenomena appeals to you as a model for human existence, it may speak more to your own understanding of human existence rather than the reverse.

There appear to be some universal aspects of human existence: joy, hope, longing, loneliness, happiness, anger, melancholy. Needs for acceptance and belonging, external purpose beyond eating and excreting.

To say that there is nothing there at the center of our selves cannot be accurate, in my mind.

True self, is not some alternative universe you need to connect with, it literally means being true and authentic to yourself. Its your actions aligning with the values and beliefs you've managed to collect over your lifetime. When you meet someone who is authentic, you can just sense it.

I don't think it is as simple as just looking inside and boom, there it is. Discovering yourself I think is a long process. I think it begins when you learn to quit lying to yourself about who you are.

I hate to go all "woo woo", but mindfulness was the first step for me. Getting out of the habit of blocking thoughts and clearing my mind has allowed me discover a lot about who I want to be.

I certainly agree with the last part of your comment. In my opinion, mindfulness and meditation, and learning how to stop identifying ourselves with irrational, uncontrolled thought processes are steps in the right direction.

Oddly enough I don't think people who have 'found' themselves necessarily have found some genuine self. Rather they've found something permanent and stable to latch onto. Given OPs thoughts about media/advertising these days, it could be said that we don't get enough permanent stuff to fashion an identity out of in mainstream culture. Part of the MO of advertising is always changing and building a need up for products. That implies a heightened impermanence to our mainstream culture.

> we'd find our "genuine" selves

Maybe think about it this way: what are your very _deepest_ values? The things that you think make a life worth living? That's starting to touch your genuine self.

To find who you really are you must be in difficult situations where there are decisions to be made, and see what decisions you make, and how you feel about them afterwards.

The crisis of self-identity, if we call it that, isn’t helped by pervasive ads sure, but the root cause is easy living, the economic conditions which give rise to ads...

“All Greeks know what is right, but only the Spartans do it”

I have wondered my whole life how we would all speak and behave, if we hadn't seen examples of so many interpersonal situations in TV and movies.

It's not wholly negative. Unintentionally or not, media provides extensive education-by-example of behaviors to avoid, far beyond the cartoon villain.

I'm not concerned about any moral or social-grace aspects. I'm concerned about authenticity. I wouldn't mind if I knew my examples were family and real-life role models. But when I'm in a dramatic situation in my life, I do wonder whether I'm rehashing a performance synthesized from sitcoms.

I guess it depends on your preferences- e.g. would you rather be an inauthentic good parent, or an authentically terrible parent?

You're putting too much moral value in media. Think of how many TV shows & movies put adolescent rebelling in a good light, puts value in materialism, or highly correlates good/bad behavior and storyline importance with character attractiveness.

We're probably thinking of different examples, but to me it's not morality- it's more like the exploration of unintended consequences. If you act like X, what unintended consequence Y might come about? I have always felt like hearing the stories of other people, good or bad, makes it easier to think about new-to-me circumstances. To borrow two popular quotes:

- A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one

- Experience is the teacher of all things

I don't disagree with that, but pop media is particularly inaccurate at teaching the consequences of parenting, good or bad.

Wasn't preachy, made sense to me :). Thanks for it, I've had lots of vague thoughts swirling around about this.

Perhaps we become who we are through what we pursue. So if we never wade beyond the tide of 'low' goals pushed upon us by that glowing box, we end up the simplistic people you mention above (good teeth etc.).

But do we have an innate identity that's being supplanted by consumerism, or are these just the easiest, most available goals, and so we create our identity from these shallow things?

So perhaps it's less that this shallow self-knowledge is externally imposed over our innate deep self-knowledge, and more that we're simply shallow people because we've set shallow goals.

Maybe we realize our potential and develop that 'real' identity by looking up, aiming higher...

This is something I struggle with and am profoundly bothered that, in my 30s, I can't answer simple questions about my own personality. Things like: am I a morning person or a night person? How close am I to burning out? Introvert or extrovert? Do I actually enjoy travel?

Maybe 10 years ago, I had solid answers to all of these, but now I don't. Or at least the answers change month to month. Maybe this is an example of Socratic wisdom: it's better to admit not knowing than "know" the wrong answer.

I am absolutely a morning person. I know this because I absolutely prefer to get up before the sun rises. And I prefer going to bed earlier than most people. I have more energy in the morning and like to get important things done then. My wife is more of an evening person, but has adapted quite well to my schedule and it's not nearly so clear for her.

My wife is absolutely left-handed. She has trouble doing things with her right hand. I'm mostly right-handed, but I have no trouble doing things with my left hand, so it's much less clear for me.

My point is that everyone has some things that are very, very clear, but not everything is clear. Don't expect to be able to put yourself into pre-made categories for everything.

And don't be upset when you're more adaptable than other people. Failing to classify yourself isn't a problem. Being adaptable is an asset.

I'm a morning person, but I like to go to bed once I've seen a summer sunrise; does that make me a night person?

Actually I just love peace at any time of day.

I'd say I'm an evening person, but I like waking up before the sunrise.

I suppose that makes me also a night person. I'm constantly either a morning person or an evening person. Quiet daytime is nice too, sometimes.

Maybe you’re both like me— more of an “I don’t want to miss a moment” person

Thank you for the beautifully written comment.

I think it's worth asking yourself, "What is the consequence of being unable to answer this question?" In most of your examples, the answer is likely: none.

These questions are mostly some form of arbitrary categorization--the sort of thing humans love to do to make sense of the world. But these are just mental shortcuts, and best used for trying to understand others for whom you have little insight into their deepest thoughts and feelings. If your wife rises at 6am everyday, you don't need to deeply feel what she feels about rising early--just call her a morning person and move on to thinking about breakfast.

For yourself, you are free to appreciate the nuance of experience because you have unfiltered access to all of it. Don't feel the need to categorize yourself, which can just constrain your thoughts and actions to those stereotypically within that category. (I've associated with enough -ism's over the years to realize that I don't ever want to describe myself with any -ism label again.) Really examine the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations of your experience apart from labels created by society.

Reminds me very much of what Eckhart Tolle says. “You are not your personal history. You are not your story.”

> Reminds me very much of what Eckhart Tolle says. “You are not your personal history. You are not your story.”

If not that, then what? Your aspirations? Your beliefs? Your intentions?

How can you say that not knowing yourself has more utility than knowing yourself?

I think it's more that confidently moving forward without self-knowledge has more value than ineffectually trying to know yourself.

If there were an answer, it might be worth finding, but as that project hasn't found anything promising, there's not much value to keeping on with it.

I think tvanantwerp's point wasn't that you shouldn't attempt to know yourself, but that you should try to do so in a way that doesn't ascribe labels arbitrarily, such as "morning person" or "evening person". Not all aspects of identity can fit into such boxes. Otherwise, there's quite a risk of reifying the label and thinking that everything the label describes must describe you too.

I used to believe I am a night person. Once upon a time I would remain awake until 2 a.m., sometimes until 4 a.m. too, hacking away on some interesting technical problem with no fixed time for when to go to bed. It was impossible for me to wake up before 9 a.m. My professional working hours were between 1:00 PM and 9:00 PM. Since I was working remotely, this scheduled worked fine and led me to believe I am a night person.

About two years ago, I got a non-remote regular job where I need to travel across the city to get to my office. I began waking up early at 6:00 a.m. to reach office early before the traffic begins to peak. My professional working hours are now 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. My personal hacking hours are 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. I go to bed by 10:00 p.m. I have become a morning person and I see no difference in productivity.

If I had to choose if one is better than the other, although it would be a difficult choice, I would choose being a morning person is better for the sole reason that I go to bed at a fixed time and I don't keep hacking away at problems indefinitely until 4:00 a.m. when both body and mind are tired.

But at the same time, if my circumstances changed and I had to turn into a night person again, I don't think I would have any difficulty doing that.

I think human beings cannot be categorized into such black and white categories for many things. We are, by nature, adaptable species.

That might not be as easy as you expect. Here's a relevant passage from sleep scientist Matthew Walker's book 'Why we sleep' (which I highly recommend):

"Although every human being displays an unyielding twenty-four-hour pattern, the respective peak and trough points are strikingly different from one individual to the next. For some people, their peak of wakefulness arrives early in the day, and their sleepiness trough arrives early at night. These are “morning types,” and make up about 40 percent of the populace. They prefer to wake at or around dawn, are happy to do so, and function optimally at this time of day. Others are “evening types,”and account for approximately 30 percent of the population. They naturally prefer going to bed late and subsequently wake up late the following morning, or even in the afternoon. The remaining 30 percent of people lie somewhere in between morning and evening types, with a slight leaning toward eveningness, like myself. You may colloquially know these two types of people as “morning larks”and “night owls,”respectively. Unlike morning larks, night owls are frequently incapable of falling asleep early at night, no matter how hard they try. It is only in the early-morning hours that owls can drift off. Having not fallen asleep until late, owls of course strongly dislike waking up early. They are unable to function well at this time, one cause of which is that, despite being “awake,”their brain remains in a more sleep-like state throughout the early morning. This is especially true of a region called the prefrontal cortex, which sits above the eyes, and can be thought of as the head office of the brain. The prefrontal cortex controls high-level thought and logical reasoning, and helps keep our emotions in check. When a night owl is forced to wake up too early, their prefrontal cortex remains in a disabled, “offline”state. Like a cold engine after an early-morning start, it takes a long time before it warms up to operating temperature, and before that will not function efficiently. An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics."

The worst thing about having a very late sleep cycle is that a lot of people with early or in-between cycles often can't fathom the possibility that some other people's sleep cycles can be so different, no matter how hard you try. You get all sorts of things like "you just need to be more disciplined", or "you just need better sleep hygiene" etc... As if I hadn't tried that over the last couple of decades!

If you have these kinds of sleep problems, really that sort of "friendly advice" you get is about as useful as telling a depressed person to "just be happier" or "just stop feeling sorry for yourself." (That is, absolutely useless).

> "Although every human being displays an unyielding twenty-four-hour pattern"

Not even this part is true for every single human being.

Did your family setup etc also change around this time?

I have an unsubstantiated belief that age / family etc affects this. As you add up more commitments, you start having to work with / for others meaning a lot of overlap time is required. This also means morning is the only time you can get to do your own stuff and eventually the habit sets in.

Anecdotally you can see this in kids who've committed to sports etc. Early. They tend to become morning folk just out of habit even if they party it up for certain years.

I think it is biological. Babies sleep all day and feed so the parent must attend. Toddlers learn all day nap and go to bed early. Kids can fit a normal routine as well as teenagers but I think that hormonal changes cause teenagers to stay up later and sleep later. In a hunter-gather society this may have been useful for standing guard and raising alarm. Then you have the grandparent/elders who tend to sleep the least. But I also think it is adaptable so as you say people who do sports tend to do so in the mornings. Also if you have a tough work commute you might have off hours to minimize commute time.

> Maybe 10 years ago, I had solid answers to all of these, but now I don't.

My experience is that as I get older I get less certain about many things, not more. I think this is mainly due to experience teaching me about the complexities that can hide below the surface of seemingly simple things. My younger self didn't know this - which is ok as he had other things to do.

So it is possible that you just know yourself better than you did ten years ago, and that's the reason that the simple questions about yourself don't have simple answers anymore.

It's humbling and exciting at the same time. You realize how much there is to know and how little you know. The big realization for me was that you can just decide "this is who I want to be," follow it while ignoring other possibilities, then try something else.

You can opt out of the chaos of possibility and see how far you can go with one path before hopping on another rocket. You can't do all the things, but there is enough time to give full attention to one thing for a while and have time left for quite a few more things. Some people even manage a few things at the same time! I use a software synthesizer made by someone who is somehow a math whiz, programmer, and musician all at once.

I think the article is just stupid "do you know who you are nonsense". I've been a morning person and a night person at and I've had different ambitions and widely personality traits at different intervals of my life. One of the whole point of buddhism is maintaining that we don't have a consistent identity. Claiming that you're smart doesn't make you dumb and practicing humility doesn't make you smart either. The actual smartest people on the planet can be overconfident a$%holes just like that rest of us. Socrates also refused to "play the game" and chose to drink poison over just moving to another city. I'm not sure if that's wisdom, maybe. He chose to act in certain ways and made decisions that reinforced that, as the rest of us do - and the world certainly takes more "kinds" than that to keep moving forward - so whether or not we should show conviction in our personalities or not is, I think, the wrong question to ask.

Same. Especially since the article concerns itself with how others perceive you. WRT to others' perspective, I'm sure I've been a complete asshole, and the sweetest guy ever. I've been an early riser, and a 3rd-shift worker, and both were preferable and natural at different times of life. I've been very overconfident, and very under-confident; extremely introverted, and the life of the party; far too cautious, and far too risk-seeking.

I do however believe there is a deep core, that has not changed one bit since my earliest memories. Those aspects would have little to do with however I may appear, socially.

Or maybe the whole morning person vs a night person is nonsense and it change with lifestyle, day program etc. And maybe are people rarely in two completely distinct groups, but rather on continuum - meaning your need for company vs loneliness, how much tiring it is to be in company etc is a.) rarely in the extreme b.) vary with circumstances (unless you are one of those extremes).

That's good, you're not the same person from day to day after all. As we all should know by now the continuity of the Self is mostly an illusion. Most people, however, decide once during their lives that they are, for example, "not a morning person", and never stop to revise their self-perpetuating beliefs. In our endless quests to categorize and label everything in the universe, we end up doing the same things to ourselves and our own self-images are often composed of simplistic and hastily-formed judgments and categorizations. It seems natural that people don't know themselves, an extreme (but common) example being a bodybuilder with body dysmorphia.

I would say that it makes total sense not to be able to identify oneself in those categories, because they are white-black options and we are influenced by many variables to be absolutely certain about them. For example, you could be a morning person but there are weeks in which you don't sleep well for whatever reason, so your mornings are a mess. The same happens with being introvert/extrovert. What if, when you feel confident because things are going well, you are more extrovert than usual? what if you have a period of time doing public speeches, getting used to them and you get less exhausted than usual when dealing with people? What about enjoying traveling but not alone? or traveling with a purpose and not just for tourism?

I think you have to just make these things concrete by asking yourself specific questions. Live in the moment and take an assessment. Have you tried to be a morning person? This probably requires going to bed early and waking up early and probably limiting food after 5pm and caffeine before noon. Possibly limiting alcohol etc... Do you have to commute a long distance to work? Do you like company and seek people out? Do you call people? Do you visit other places? Do you look forward visiting other places? For work, do you find yourself getting irritable, overworked? Are you looking forward to a vacation? Do you have some kind of balance (gym, friends, family?) Do you work 12 hours a day on a project going nowhere? Do you like your work, your coworkers? I also wouldn't say that your personality is necessarily defined by these things either. I think personality has a couple aspects and is by definition multi-dimensional and changeable. It can defined by you to yourself and that as it appears to others. It easy to see personality evolve from little kids to adults. Perhaps you are searching and that's ok. I think you just have to find things that work for you and work for your goals.

Don’t answer these questions. Each of what you listed is an identity you are trying to stick to yourself like some kind of bumper sticker. You become limited when you identify. This is hard shit. It’s not easy to shed these things when you grow up being bombarded by them your whole life. With companies and groups vying to stick their bumper sticker on you. This goes as far as realizing your body isn’t you either. You borrowed that from the earth.

> So if I wanted to know how smart political candidates were, I wouldn’t bother with an IQ test. I’d just ask one question: How intelligent do you think you are?

This is a terrible measure. It's not "dumb people think they're smart, smart people think they're dumb, so just flip the answer." It's "everyone thinks they're roughly 75th percentile."

Moreover, there is difference between what people think about themselves and what they say about themselves. Politicians in particular are bound to say what is considered "appropriate". If confidence is popular and rewarded, they will call themselves smart and if humbleness is woke, they will say something humble.

> The real geniuses will know it’s not their place to judge.

I was taught or picked up this sort of self-depracation thing as a child and I think it hurt me more then it gave me any sort of advantage.

I learned in school to conceal the actual extent of my intelligence, except when I was completely surrounded by other nerds. It's why I enjoy pseudoanonymity so much. As a log, I'm not obliged to conform to human standards and expectations. I'm the smartest and most popular chunk of trunk there is, and my only competition is from those who managed to register my username before I ever got there.

That's annoying, but it does give all of us some cover, in that no one can ever be certain whether any two logfromblammo users are actually the same person behind the keyboard. The HN logfromblammo is not the same person as the eBay logfromblammo, for instance.

I am very smart, in my own opinion--not a genius, but probably 90th percentile. It just doesn't seem to be rewarded very well, unless you turn yourself into an ass. So I'm smart enough to let my supervisors think they are smarter than I am, but not smart enough to get promoted above them and stop hiding it. The self-deprecation you taught yourself is probably part of the same act.

Making other people feel stupid just by being smart in their vicinity also seems sort of mean. By keeping my mouth shut, and dumbing down what I do say, people are free to assume that I'm no better than they are. But then again, if they ever do need someone smarter than they are, they wouldn't know to ask me.

Personally I strongly disagree with the author here.

A characteristic of intelligent people is that they know their limits, what they know and what they don't, how quickly or slowly they can learn a new thing and in general have a pretty good idea about their intelligence and how they might be positioned across other intelligent people they know well.

You can't get far if you can't perceive your limits and limitations. This is also where your modesty should come from; the understanding of your boundaries.

Depends which kind of intelligence. If what you wrote were true, there'd be a lot fewer sanctimonious libertarians with six figure programming jobs.

I believe my potential is unlimited on a long enough timeline, but any practical concrete endeavors or decisions I undertake are bound to be flawed, more or less. For example, I believe I can write an OS. But if you ask me where I think that project would be in a year if I started today and did my best, I would say it would probably be in pretty terrible shape overall, with some parts I'm proud of. And I would keep on working at it.

I was taught or picked up this sort of self-deprecation thing as a child and I think it hurt me more then it gave me any sort of advantage.

Me, too. It's a cultural clash. I had a really fragile up and down ego as a kid, and I tried to cover it up with the most normal, boring, appropriate modesty I knew, which in my family meant self-deprecation, but at school it didn't seem normal to people at all.

In retrospect the irony seems obvious. When I felt self-conscious about my problems I tried to use self-deprecation as a cloak of normality to hide behind, but everyone else saw it as using deviant behavior to intentionally draw attention to my problems.

It's weird how long it takes to realize how many of the assumptions you inherit from your family aren't shared by everyone else.

> It's weird how long it takes to realize how many of the assumptions you inherit from your family aren't shared by everyone else.

So true. But not weird, predictable. You need a lot of interactions with the world to understand how differently people might think and evaluate a given situation. You don’t know what you don’t know.

I'm over forty and still discovering new things that aren't universal.

Most people remark when noticing another's exceptional characteristics. For example, real geniuses tend to be constantly hearing about how genius they are.

> It's "everyone thinks they're roughly 75th percentile."

Unless you know that everyone thinks they're 75th percentile, and then you can assume it's the deluded answer--and more likely, you're much closer to average. Eventually, this is not so much a question about intelligence, but self-awareness.

"and more likely, you're much closer to average"

Ah, yes, that resolves it nicely, all tied up with a bow.

But... wait! If you're using that logic, it is itself probably very strong evidence that you're above average in intelligence!

Crap. Just when we had this all figured out!

(This is a "ha ha only serious" post; there's a serious point under it, too, but one better communicated this way than by just dumping it out.)

I think I agree, and then I couldn't help myself from writing the following.

If almost everyone think they are 75th percentile, the reason for you being closer to the average is barely affected by the aforementioned fact, but because for most statistics over large populations, you are always more likely to be close to the average. It's the average.

It does however inform you that if you feel like answering the 75th percentile, your answer will be quite certain to be incorrect, except obviously for the 25% of the people that's in that percentile.

If you however does that inference, and realise you actually need to calculate the relative odds of the various answers given what we know of other people's answers to have a chance of a better than average answer, you are almost certainly in the 75th percentile. At least when it comes to understanding how tricky statistics can be, as that is an extremely rare skill to encounter.

People almost always seem to assume I'm in the 99th percentile or above, with the notable exceptions of being 'really stupid' from time to time. I don't really know what stupid has as a numerical equivalent, but lets assume 1% for symmetry.

Personally, I'm ambivalent between agreeing with the majority, and believing I'm quite a bit less gifted, maybe outright stupid.

I'd say I believe that I'm in or above the 75th percentile about 25% of the time, which would seem like par for the course, on average.

>And at Morning Star, employees get to write their own job descriptions based on how they plan to contribute to the company’s mission that year. But they have to get their closest colleagues to buy in on it, and then their coworkers rate their performance and determine their salary.

Sounds terrifying. Payscale linked to your coworkers opinions of you.

And subject to gaming. Morning Star might be a nice cooperative environment - but when corporates try "360 review" it can get nasty. I've seen investment banks where people treat their colleagues as competitors for the bonus pool. If the review forms part of the bonus assessment why would people play nicely?

MBAs basically 5 star everyone in a 360 review. One reason is that you may work with these people again or they may be your boss sometime in the future (so yes do good work but why would you screw someone over). It should be noted that your 360 feedback is not anonymous. And two, it devalues the 360 review because it is effectively worthless. I've only seen 360s that work in cross functional teams where each person have independent and specific job responsibilities where the team is evaluated on performance and not the individual.

Absolutely -- in investment banking, 360 reviews are purely angling and knife-fighting. And "co-heads" of anything is an intentional Death Match.

Also, I suspect that this whole thing is for marketing executives or something, not the actual people making tomato paste. A job description of "I pull a lever on the assembly line to pour paste into the cans" isn't really a job description requiring a lot of explanation.

Not just terrifying, it could also lead to significant problems.

Depending on the job, but always to some degree, you'll have to do things that your coworkers won't like, but is actually good for the company, probably also good for your coworkers in the long run.

This system strongly discourages doing these things. And you generally can't just not do these things. They have to get done at some point.

It seems obvious that how I see myself is completely different from how person A sees me, which in turn is different from how person B in a different context sees me. But as an individualist, I bristle at the premise that self knowledge is a matter of other people’s perspectives. I’ve had other people say all kinds of whacky things about me, such as “I always assumed you were a pretty religious Christian,” while I think of myself as agnostic atheist.

I consider others view of me very important, for certain limited purposes. I guess I’m not sure what “more accurate” would even mean here. I wouldn’t necessarily privilege other’s view of me all that much, especially in the context of what “self knowledge” means to me.

Right? That's my takeaway as well. I think people mostly paint others with their own preconceived notions about the world.

They might be accurate in judging how someone will react in a given situation, but my coworkers truly don't know more than the tip of the iceberg.

> One: If you want people to really know you, weekly meetings don’t cut it. You need deep dives with them in high-intensity situations.

I'm sure most people experienced situations in a company where things were rocky and others in the company were experiencing the same situation. I haven't spoken to certain co-workers in years, yet I know for a fact that if I e-mailed them today saying I'm coming into town, they'd be excited to meet for dinner.

> Two: Looking under your own hood at what makes you tick and writing it down can provide a useful reference.

That's also where mindfulness can be very helpful in that you build up the sensitivity to see what's going on within yourself.

> Three: Put yourself in situations where you can’t ignore feedback from multiple sources.

If only I had design critiques / code review for my past life decisions.

I think for much stronger beliefs (e.g. "I'm intelligent", "I'm attractive"...) it takes repeated blows over a course of time to update the error. It wasn't until I got my ass kicked from learning STEM subjects over a course of a year and got rejected A TON in online dating until my priors got updated to a more accurate calibration.

One of the issues with practical psychology vs STEM is that STEM has a formal language which allows cumulative intergenerational learning.

You can literally look at the words and math used by people who have been dead a long time, follow their arguments, and learn from their insights in a semi-standardised course of study.

Psychology has stories and studies, but there's no formal process of learning from the mistakes of previous humans.

So people tend to make similar mistakes in every generation - politically, socially, and personally.

There are theories in psychology and there are experiments. You could read these papers and perform the experiments can come to the same conclusions (if they were reasonable to begin with and not biased).

Politics and social structures evolve in strategy but are essentially similar (you can read old newspaper articles and while the language is no longer appropriate, you see the same arguments rehashed today with different window dressing). These are forms of economic control by the wealthy and essentially appeal to racism and classism. We had slavery, then redlining, and then a war on drugs. And now we have failed cities. This structure has been maintained throughout society since America was founded and is passed along generation lines. You do see a dampening effect between generations unless some conflict reinforces it (largely economic/resource competition). But a conflict can be unifying as well. For example WWII had a unifying effect since a GI was a GI. But if we had diverse neighborhoods, schools and work opportunities we would rapidly see a more humane world.

Tbh i think online dating is sort of a scam. If i meet girls irl theyll be staring at me and following me around while similar girls won't be that into me online (some will but fewer). I just make friends irl now to meet people.

That has been my observation as well especially when it comes to interracial experiences. Specifically, I've gone on dates with women of a different ethnicity when I've met them first from platonic situations (meetups, school, work). But when it comes to online dating, I've never received mutual interest from a woman of a different ethnicity. Zero.

I don't think it's a scam. It's more that any averagely attractively woman gets a huge amount of attention online, so woman are permanently in filter mode.

Women get between ten and a hundred times more messages and contact requests than men do. The only practical way to deal with that is to ignore most of it, and that inevitably leads to false negatives.

I think a great deal of our confusion in life comes from the idea that we have a strongly fixed identity - that we are this or that "kind of person" - with definite characteristics which don't vary much with context.

I think we construct an enormous number of illusions, especially with regard to what our - usually untested - values are.

I think many of what appear to be our innermost feelings are learned/mimetic reactions that have become deeply ingrained.

This can be disturbing to some people because it makes them feel unstable - but it is also very freeing because it means we can really change. Even how we feel about things.

It also means we can become monsters.

I agree. We're a collection of stories that we tell about ourselves, and if something happens to cause cognitive dissonance with our desired self image we become distraught and often rationalize our way back into a comfort zone.

When I picked up my management education, part of it included psychology. The approach was focused on management, and things like Helle Hein’s archetype theory, Deci and Ryan’s motivational theory or stuff like DiSC profiles, all had the end goal of teaching me how to maximize worker and group performances in a professional and assertive setting, but I learned a lot about myself going through it.

I knew I was a perfectionist. I also knew compromising on quality demotivated me because I want to do things right. I learned that I could stop losing motivation and keep both the joy and personal ownership despite compromising by looking at the bigger picture. It doesn’t matter that parts of the software suck if the end user still see an improved product.

This may be obvious to some, it may even sound self-deluding to others, but I learned how to better handle one of the most common place occurrences in my daily life, compromise, by getting to know myself better and finding solutions to my weaknesses.

I highly recommend it.

I had an odd experience recently: I took around 20 milligrams of sativa, in edible form, as someone who hasn't really experimented with cannabis before.

The sativa made me feel somewhat egoless - I could re-examine different events from my life and seperate the stories I tell myself to placate my ego vs what actually happened. It's a very vulnerable state - your ego is also a necessary shield - but I felt like I was able to look at myself with more impartial point of view.

Echoing what others have said, the extent to which we know ourselves depends in (large?) part to the range of life experiences we've endured. Extremes might be enjoyment such as roller coaster or paintball wars, grief from losing a loved one, pride in seeing your child excel at a sport, fear while being under fire in a war zone, pain in a boxing ring,... If you haven't had extreme experiences, can you really be certain how you'd react and how intense those reactions would be? Can you really place your day-to-day experiences in context of the entire range of possibilities? I've found that, in general, people with less life experience tend to under-react to some circumstances and overreact to others, for example.

The other half would be how honest we are with ourselves on reflection of those experiences. (Did I really enjoy it that much? Was it really as painful as I felt at the time? Why did that circumstance cause so much embarrassment? I believe others would not have felt it so poignantly...)

It's a complex endeavor, but certainly worthwhile, especially if you're in or aspiring to be in, leadership. Leaders who don't know themselves are less likely to supplement their weaknesses and also less likely to exploit their strengths.

For me, knowing myself well is done by asking questions, and journaling about it.

I built a platform where I ask myself deep questions https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/

For me, it has helped give me a better holistic view of myself. At the moment I have over 35,000+ questions, and almost 2700 topics/keywords.

It is mostly me sharing at the moment, though there are some other users.

> I built a platform where I ask myself deep questions https://www.deepthoughtapp.com

Nicely done.

For my reflections of life, I favor "what have you done?" and "what are you willing to do?" questions over "what do you think/believe?"

Two different kinds of questions :)

I think analyzing your beliefs is also important as well!

I've added yours:

https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/questions/what-have-you-do...

https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/questions/what-are-you-wil...

Tangential: I was so pleased to see inline links to the actual studies cited. <3

I accept that others can evaluate us on some of these traits better than we can ourselves. Given that, how hard is it to update our mental models to better match reality? Besides doing a poll of my friends (which seems shaky), how can I self-evaluate to know more objectively where I stand on these? Is that even possible (by, e.g., studying biases, rationality, 'taking every thought captive', etc)?

It seems remarkably hard to try to address this in the workplace, where we feel so much pressure to be and seem competent anyway. I don't know if I trust my coworkers enough to honestly evaluate or be evaluated by them :D.

when they say co workers, whom do they mean? anyone in my company? some one whom i work with for 30 mins per week? some one with whom we work for 5 hours a day? some one whom i chat with through out the day as part of work?

>>They’re often more than twice as accurate.

which co worker is capable of being twice accurate than me in knowing about me.

So surprising, so magical and so flawed.

How do we destroy such bullshit analysis all over the internet.

Some where some normal person or even a smart person is going to read this and believe it to be true and is going to base this as source of his research and going to come up with a whole lot of new bullshit.

This concept of flawed non sense and noisy logic i think deserves its own word.

Any suggestions? How about SINFO ... any useful, meaningful info we can call as INFO and anything that is not useful or misleading or nonsense we can call it SINFO.

Because i think its a type of SIN to provide misleading information.

I'm not surprised, I'm a shifty character. No way I've told myself everything about myself.

I notice one thing missing from the various threads of discussion about self and what self means here: an acknowledgement that an individual's life is unlikely to ever meaningfully cover the full scope of human experience. It's always an attempt to stretch that individual's experiences out so as to somehow apply with nigh universality across a population.

It's seemed pretty clear to me for a while now that I can barely begin to imagine what it's really like to be in someone else's head, in terms of experiencing their perspective on the world. Empathy alone isn't enough to account for formative life experiences or physiological state.

There are some good suggestions in this piece. Absorbing a diversity of perspectives is often valuable.

The thing is, most of us view ourselves at least partly as 'who we aspire to be'-- we know we aren't actually that person technically right now, but we believe or hope that we could be. As we mature, I think more often than not we try to be more realistic about it.

It would be difficult or impossible for many of us to make progress in our goals if we didn't regularly see ourselves as more than we currently are. It's important to be honest, but it's just as important to have some optimism.

Well, this is a wonky topic. Before the question is asked, it should really be clarified what is meant by the "you" part. A lot of the responses here seem to talk about things like how you respond to situations or a crisis. I think this mostly suffers from the fact that the current wisdom is to merge what is "you" and what is "your body". You can control your body to some extent, but it's like saying you're your Toyota. You're really not. And if something happens to your body, it may drastically limit what you can express, i.e., you can become a vegetable due to an accident. But that wasn't of /your/ doing, so it's not really "you" (under the definition above). It's something that happened _to_ you. Just like most of your body, truth to be told. You don't create your infant body, or your normal body, so how can it be you? It's not, it never was.

So most of the time when people talk about their "true self" they're talking about "my body, without too many tweaks". And I think that's the wrong way to go about it. You should be tweaking and updating your machinery and potentially you can get pretty far doing so. But it's still just that - machinery. It's never going to be you. The "you" is not that interesting, and the idea that we're all sorts of fundamentally different "you"s is problematic in itself.

I think it's really the wrong question to ask, who you are. You got a machine and you can study it if you wish but it's not exactly some stable construction and it's not "you", regardless, you're just a meta-field it projects some stuff onto. I think the less mysticism around this are, the better, as the mysticism makes the machine seem too sacred and immutable, and as if it has its own right to exist.

"I'm not like that, that's not something I can do" is my least favorite response ever. You are not your machine. You may decide you don't want to do it, which is valid. But saying you can't do it because you're some immutable thing is not valid.

P.S.: I'd really like to know how they measured things like "smart" and what not in this study and why they're so confident about their measurements...

Seriously, there's no such thing as a reliable and unbiased "smart" test right now.

"Oh would some power the gift give us, To see ourselves as others see us."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_a_Louse

I’ve always gone by this little bit of wisdom...

“We see ourselves as who we want to be, others see us as who we are”

I'm disturbed that writing actually determines your thoughts more than thinking does.

The article was fine aside from not being news. But The Atlantic's quality has plummeted over the last couple months. A lot of lazy, narrative-driven pab. Someone upstairs must have decided quantity was the thing and screw quality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com