220 - Over-Critical Self-Criticism
Humans tend to sometimes hyper-focus on narrow aspects of themselves, in a neurotic form of over-critical self-criticism. However, the way that humans experience communication and go about decision-making is nothing remotely like those over-critical self-portraits. This struck me when trying to talk a friend through a particular neuroticism that they’ve developed more recently, as it relates to one solitary aspect of their slowly changing appearance (aging).
For example, consider the “7-38-55 Rule”, as it properly applies to conflicting or otherwise inconsistent information sources. In this famous “rule”, under such conflicting or inconsistent information, a broader spectrum of data is examined, and some sources are favored over others.
This was applied in Mehrabian’s case to the spoken word and associated text, tone, and body language, but could just as easily be applied to any other similar category and subsets. For example, you might gauge personality traits based on a short video of someone walking, divided up by their gait (how they walk), what they’re wearing, their personal grooming, and their active facial expressions.
No single one of these factors is truly considered in isolation by the unconscious mind, which does most of the heavy lifting where the formation of decisions, intuitive impressions, and various related appraisals come into play. Points of emphasis also vary strongly across individuals, cultures, and contexts, leading to 1,000 different “success stories” that don’t actually generalize, applied to virtually anything someone can tell a “success story” about.
This puts over-critical neurotic individuals at a further disadvantage as if they hyper-focus on a de-prioritized attribute in a subset that the unconscious minds of those around them consider, and other members of that subset are inconsistent with the thing they pour most of their work into, then the other prioritized members of the subset overrule and discard that heavy investment of time.
In AI the term “over-fitting” comes to mind, and in this context, a highly neurotic human can “over-fit” to the data they seek to emulate on one particular aspect that their attention hyper-focuses on. However, the result is that by over-fitting they fail to generalize to other factors in any related subset, producing marked inconsistencies, resulting in considerable wasted efforts. Humans are strongly biased to favor consistency, and neuroticism is inherently inconsistent when viewed as a larger subset of factors, causing it to reliably backfire.
You can sometimes optimize isolated factors in simple AI systems, but you can virtually never do that with aspects of your real life without running head-first into this problem. Consistent and general progress reliably takes you further than a “glass cannon” approach to life optimization.
