A screenshot from the GoodGuide application.

Kaj Sotala: Greeting from Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden! I will be here for two months, participating in the research program "Existential risk to Humanity", sponsored jointly by the University of Gothenburg and the Chalmers University of Technology. My appreciation to Olle Häggström who was so kind as to invite me to participate.

We had the opening of the program yesterday, where the vice-chancellor for the University of Gothenburg held a talk saying that this was their most important research program so far, with "the world's leading researchers" participating. Eeep. I hope to live up to that!

Kaj Sotala: I really liked this: maybe the best answer to "what is the meaning of life" that I've ever read. 

> The main thing missing in the question, “What is the meaning of my life?” is “meaning for whom?" An apple has a very different meaning to a worm, a hungry deer, a poet, a scientist, or someone who doesn’t like apples. From our perspective, we can see that the tree produces apples as part of its nature, one of millions of species that exist because they are successful at reproducing themselves. But as far as we know, an apple has no “meaning” to itself, or to the tree that produced it, it is simply part of the tree’s functioning. 

> It is easy to forget that meaning is always relational; a thing cannot have a meaning for itself, only to something else. Apples have no self-awareness, so they can’t even think of the question, “What is the meaning of my life?” much less ask it. But if an apple could ask the question, how would it answer it? When we ask the same question of ourselves, can there be an answer? An apple can have meaning for other organisms, but not for itself, and the same is true for us. 

> If we are to find a meaning for a question like, “What is the meaning of my life?” we have to fill in not only the “for whom?” but all the other missing elements. “What is the meaning of apple for whom, in what context, with what consequences, in relation to what outcomes, as measured by what criteria?” 

> If we were to leave out most of the ingredients for a cake, we wouldn’t be surprised that the result didn’t look or taste much like a cake. When we leave out most of the ingredients for creating meaning, it’s not surprising that it’s hard to find any. Searching for an everlasting transcendental meaning is like trying to make a cake while leaving out most of the ingredients; that’s not how you make a cake. When we specify all the ingredients for meaning, we can always find it. 

> If I specify all those missing scopes, I find that I can answer the question quite easily. For instance, if I ask, “What is the meaning of my life for my children, and their outcomes and criteria?” I can answer it easily both in specific contexts and more generally. The specific meaning for my son this morning was that I provided warm friendship, interaction, and some information, things that he and l both value. 

> However, if I were to ask, “What is the meaning of my life to the postman", I would get a very different answer. Then I am someone to whom he delivers mail, one of many people who provides reason for his job and livelihood. 

> So my life doesn’t have a single large meaning; it has many meanings to many different people, depending on my place in their life. Having found ways in which my life has meaning for others, that has meaning for me. I am someone who has been important to others. So while I can’t find meaning in my life reflexively and directly, I can find a wealth of meaning indirectly by realizing how my life has had meaning for others. 

> When I add together all these meanings, I can find “The meanings of my life,” a very useful and important category. If you think of all the people you have contacted or influenced in any way, including all those whom you never met, like the people who made, shipped, stocked and sold the paper clips you bought last month, you have provided a lot of meanings for many different people. 

> In the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey is depressed and on the brink of suicide because of an impending business failure, when an angel shows him what his small town would have been like if he hadn’t been born and all his good deeds over the years had never happened. 

> If you have lived your life according to your values and what is important to you, you have had a positive impact on many people, most of whom you have never met. Your life doesn’t have a meaning, it has many, many meanings, and the sum of all those meanings is considerable. If you think of all those meanings at once, you can have an experience of that that goes far beyond “just words.” 

> I like to close my eyes and imagine that I can see all the people that I have affected in my life so far, both directly and indirectly. Nearer to me are my family, and closer friends whom I have impacted most. A little farther away are students, casual friends, and people that I know somewhat. Then there are the grocery clerks and others whom I might barely recognize on the street. Beyond those are all the other people that I have affected, and the people who were affected by people that I affected-friends of friends, spouses of students, an immense crowd, widening toward a distant horizon. 

> That is a way of using what you have learned to create an experience of an immense category, utilizing aggregate scope to provide a meaning that will still be with you on your deathbed, when everything you have had is about to be taken away. 

-- Steve Andreas, Six Blind Elephants: v. 1: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other

Kaj Sotala: I like how searching for "a fully general..." gives you very specific results.

Kaj Sotala: > Some time back, I saw somebody express an opinion that I disagreed with. Next, my mind quickly came up with emotional motives the other person might have for holding such an opinion, that would let me safely justify dismissing that opinion. [...]

> ... we tend to think of our own opinions as being based on evidence, reasoning, etc.. And at the same time, we don’t see any of the evidence that caused other people to form their opinion, so instead we think of the opinions of others as being only based on rationalizations and biases. [...]

> ... being able to imagine a plausible bias that could explain another person’s position, is a Fully General Counterargument. You can dismiss any position that way.

> So I asked myself: okay, I have invented a plausible bias that would explain the person’s commitment to this view. Can I invent some plausible bias that would explain my own commitment to my view?

> I could think of several, right there on the spot. And almost as soon as I could, I felt my dismissive attitude towards the other person’s view dissolve, letting me consider their arguments on their own merits. [...] New cognitive trigger-action plan: if I notice myself inventing a bias that would explain someone else’s view, spend a moment to invent a bias that would explain my opposing view, in order to consider both more objectively.
Debiasing by rationalizing your own motives

Kaj Sotala: "Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels", Annalyn et al 2017 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06643

"Psychological studies have shown that personality traits are associated with book preferences. However, past findings are based on questionnaires focusing on conventional book genres and are unrepresentative of niche content. For a more comprehensive measure of book content, this study harnesses a massive archive of content labels, also known as 'tags', created by users of an online book catalogue, Goodreads.com. Combined with data on preferences and personality scores collected from Facebook users, the tag labels achieve high accuracy in personality prediction by psychological standards. We also group tags into broader genres, to check their validity against past findings. Our results are robust across both tag and genre levels of analyses, and consistent with existing literature. Moreover, user-generated tag labels reveal unexpected insights, such as cultural differences, book reading behaviors, and other non-content factors affecting preferences. To our knowledge, this is currently the largest study that explores the relationship between personality and book content preferences."

If you are wondering for signaling purposes which genres correlate the most with the generally perceived as "healthy" personality dimensions (low Neuroticism, high Agreeableness/Extraversion/Openness/Conscientiousness), that would seem to be: religion, philosophy, and self-help; and conversely, the worst genres are: paranomal/comics/drama/memoir/graphic novels/young adult/manga (especially manga).
[1707.06643] Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels