One of the more depressing things of the AI boom is watching engineers and “atheists” get hoodwinked by mystic gibberish like this blog. There is nothing here but astrology: even Myers-Briggs is more scientific.

I think 30% of atheists bothered to think carefully about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and recognized Pastafarianism as a funny commentary on epistemic uncertainty. The remaining 70% said “heh, stoopid Christians believe in a spaghetti monster!” and took it as confirmation of their tribe’s superiority.

I agree that it can be helpful to think of identity as a trajectory shaped by interactions along the way. However, we also continually shape our environments in large and small ways. TFA ignores this completely. Can this be effectively modeled in RL?

Over 130 years ago, Dewey [1] criticized the model of psychology which looked at human behavior in terms of stimulus -> internal processing -> response. Stimuli don't just come to us; we seek them out and modify the world around us to cause them to occur. Dewey and other pragmatists proposed reframing stimulus/response in terms of "acts" or "habits," or changes to the unified agent+environment. Popper was getting at the same entanglement of agent and environment in "Three Worlds" and Simon in "The sciences of the artificial."

I see RL as an elaboration of the stimulus/response paradigm: the agent is discrete from the environment. Does RL work well in an environment like Minecraft, where the real game is modifying the relationship between actions and future states? What about in contexts like Twitter, where you're also modifying the value function (e.g. by cultivating audiences or by participating in a thread in a way which conditions the value function of future responses)?

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/#ReflArcDeweRecoPsy...

I see this post getting trashed in the comments for its overly literal interpretation of personality as a reinforcement learning process, but I think there's some value to it as a mental model of how we operate (which is how the opening sentence describes it).

If you can see past some of the more dubious, overly technical-sounding details and treat it as a metaphor, there is for sure a "behavioral landscape" that we all find ourselves in, filled with local minimal, attractors/basins and steep hills to climb to change our own behaviors.

Thinking about where you are and where you want to be in the behavior landscape can be a useful mental model. Habit changes like exercise and healthy eating, for example, can be really steep hills to climb (and easy to fall back down), but once you get over the hump, you may find yourself in a much better behavioral valley and wonder how you were stuck in the other place for so long.

> A common mistake in life is to let your personality basin solidify too early. Your parents and schooling environment have a disproportionately large influence on who you become as an adolescent.

> But as soon as you gain the freedom to act independently as an adult, it’s usually a good idea to force yourself to try as many new things as you can, including moving cities (or countries!) and considering drastically different lines of work. ...

Oh dear, I'm beginning to fear that the author's personality has been captured by global capital...

And what if it's personality capture all the way down, i.e. that you've got to be personality captured by someone? In that case, the closest you can get to a choice is whether it's your parents, religion, or someone/something else. While the integrity of your parents may vary, there is a subjective argument that they've got a better incentive to steer you into an optimal basin than anybody, relatively speaking.

This article approaches human psychology from the perspective that, we are all neural networks and our output (actions) are all a learned function of our inputs (experiences).

This is a common (and convenient) perspective, especially among engineers, but doesn't reflect reality particularly well. We know large swathes of a person's personality is directly linked to their genetics.

The article extrapolates this neural network perspective onto other topics like, mental disorders and depression. The solution is made clear then - just learn how to not be mentally ill! Again, convenient. But not really reflective of reality.