
Personality Vectors (2019) - aeonneo
https://www.yangvincent.com/resources/personality-vectors/
======
stared
For both personality and preference vectors, it would be great to see data
from the data from OKCupid, from its good old days
([https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/aapn1l/okcupid_blog_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/aapn1l/okcupid_blog_archives/)).

Even more, since for questions there are:

\- questions one decided to answer (which says something on its own)

\- answers

\- declared answers they accept in their partners

\- actual partners they pursue (judged by matches, or dates)

While I expect that mostly similarities attract (so-called associative
mating), there are compatible traits (e.g one person loves to listen, one
person loves to talk), and there is the level of lack of self-knowledge, or
hypocrisy (what we SAY we like, vs what we actually do).

And then e.g. probability that person A likes person B can be expressed as:

sigmoid(actualPrefVecA * personalityVecB)

...and with gradient descent magic, we can turn people into vectors!

~~~
GuiA
Which is all very silly since OKcupid will incorporate dealbreaker questions
like “how important is your partner’s religion to you” with ones like “do you
like horror movies”, and thus you may end up matching at 90%+ with someone
whom you would never consider dating.

~~~
stared
Right now the match % is close to useless, see:

[https://twitter.com/pmigdal/status/1268959822378082304](https://twitter.com/pmigdal/status/1268959822378082304)

It used to be much more informative, especially as the answers are weighted.
Of course, a much more informative approach would be to use update weights
from data.

Also, when it comes to your example:

\- I know people with a deep believer and a lukewarm one (I don't take for
granted that it is a more important _question_ than if someone enjoys horror
movies),

\- for important matters (e.g. whole conservative-religious-right-traditional)
it is not a single answer but many, many.

Also, usually, there are much fewer deal-breakers than one initially states
(vide
[https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_datin...](https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating/transcript?language=en)).
Again, looking at data (vs assuming what is important) would be a big deal.

~~~
GuiA
Online dating stands on its own in that it is a very front loaded experience
in terms of getting to know another human - the judgement begins much before
any interaction occurs. That is not the case in any sort of similar degree
when you meet someone say at work, or in a sports club, or even in an online
game or internet forum.

And as you point out, that makes the notion of a dealbreaker a fairly nuanced
one - e.g. I might tell myself that I would never date someone who doesn't
want kids because I do want kids, so why would I waste my time? On a website
that shows these preferences, I will likely not engage with profiles who
mention that they don't want kids, and ignore their messages.

But of course when the new guy shows up at work and he turns out to be really
cute and interesting, I may be interested in him/we may start a romantic
relationship before these preferences become apparent.

Which can then go in any number of directions - the relationship might fizzle
out really fast. Or it may engender personal change for the partners. Or it
might lead to many decades of bitter resentment. Who knows! This could make
the rational argument that one should accept to chat with anyone on a dating
profile regardless of their displayed preferences, but of course that's not
how humans tend to reason.

~~~
stared
I think you summarized nicely on-line vs off-line dating. And yes, look at
online dating only one can tell the (online) preference vector.

Also, it is not only about personality. People make much stronger judgments on
someone's else appearance: [https://priceonomics.com/online-dating-and-the-
death-of-the-...](https://priceonomics.com/online-dating-and-the-death-of-the-
mixed/)

------
mwexler
It's fun to see folks rederive these things. Multiple arms of psychology have
dove deep into this for many years now, including social psychology
(individual biases and relationship behaviors), cognitive (modeling decision
making processes), quantitative psychometrics (formal mathematical models of
how people represent abstract concepts or traits), personality psychology
(emphasis on individual differences and patterns), and of course, clinical
psych.

Lots of overlap among these, but rather than start from scratch, a bit of
reading in almost any of them, perhaps starting with behavioral economics or
social psych, might enhance the "vectors".

~~~
GuiA
Rederived from... what? A comfy armchair? The blog post chose to use vector
math as its starting point but I’m not seeing any data that validates the
approach in anyway, or anything that justifies it besides the assumption that
“ You can take preferences and combine them into a single value/point on a
vector” - which you can, but how meaningful is it really to say that my “dog
preference” is 0.9? Why not model people with irrational numbers, regular
n-gons in 24 dimensions, or a directed acyclic graph instead?

------
photonemitter
I was recently thinking about this, but on a slightly bigger scale.

There’s a term “off-kilter”, which is easy to explain using vectors like this.

If we take the general vector of society, just sum up all personal vectors and
normalise, we form a big vector for society. This is what’s “normal”.

Kilter refers to the concept of how aligned we are with society’s vector. So
the concept of being off-kilter is how skewed you are wrt this normal vector
essentially.

Of course valid for any of the eigenvectors corresponding to subfields again,
and this also goes some way to help form the overton window, which has
recently been up here in some posts...

It’s a fun sociomathematical formulation.

~~~
op03
Society's normal vector could be whats off kilter :)

Society feels like multiple interacting vector fields ala magnetic and
electric fields. But instead of 2 fields there are probably
many...personality, knowledge, energy, needs etc. And you exist as some
charged particle (negative or positive?) thrown into the middle of all that
dynamic chaos being pushed and pulled in various directions.

~~~
photonemitter
normalized, not normal.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_vector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_vector))

theoretically if you add the value-vector of all people together you end up
with a long vector that represents the direction of society (even the opposing
ones), and you can then normalize this to have the unit vector of society.
i.e. what is the "direction of society".

Your skew wr.t. this one (inner product with, or projection on to this) will
be some number between -1 and 1 (if we account for opposition I guess)

Basically if both vectors are of unit length, you get the cos(angle between).
Completely off kilter would be a score of 0. While "opposed" would be -1

------
platz
> You can take these preferences and combine them into a single value/point on
> a vector.

No, you can't.

Also, people don't have "preferences" in the way the article posits

~~~
undoware
This.

Honestly, this article is fascinating to me for reasons that might discomfit
its author.

Not that ignorance of the last 300 years of philosophy on this topic is
something necessarily to be ashamed of, but this essay, and the reaction to it
here, is of interest to me because (a) this is _not_ an empirically-validated,
or even merely well-argued, approach to reasoning about people, but (b) seems
to be thought well of anyway, reading the room in this comments section.

I understand better the class of ontological and epistemological elisions
system-thinking folks tend not to 'see', and I am reminded of the (now
thankfully bygone) era of analytic philosophy where you couldn't make an
argument in a respectable journal without translating your propositions into a
symbolic logic (your choice of which).

An excellent kettleball to level up with. It's like geocaching but with
unsupported assertions.

~~~
aeonneo
Hey! So full disclosure, but I'm the author of this. I thought you might enjoy
a discussion I had on this on reddit as well:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/h05n0j/personal...](https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/h05n0j/personality_vectors_a_framework_for_explaining/)

I fully admit I know nothing of the actual research in psychology/related
fields, and this is just my current understanding built up from when I was a
kid (completely anecdotal). I'm primarily interested in people's thoughts in
general (both good and bad) as well as where I might be able to improve my
understanding with the research that's actually been done.

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Der_Einzige
It'd be nice if vector based approaches (think MBTI tests being originally
created using PCA) would use state of the art dimensionality reduction
techniques instead of stuff from the 70s so that way each vector actually
matters and explains far more variance in the data.

If you need interpretability just use an autoencoder or simese network instead
of PCA. This way the new "personality" vectors are highly meaningful and
visualizations are better...

~~~
thesehands
This is what the mypersonality dataset collected on Facebook was. The 5 axes
of OCEAN - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and
Neuroticism for all those who took the test.

~~~
timwaagh
thats called the 'big five' test and is the most standard way to test
personality for psychologists. its been in use in job assesments since
forever.

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zitterbewegung
I have thought of Personality Vectors similar to this concept but for a
completely different purpose.

If we had a Chatbot that would interact with someone hypothetically we could
have this kind of distinction between Personality Vectors to mutate its own
behavior and to interact with others.

Its sort of the idea I had when I watched the movie Interstellar and TARS is
told to decrease his own humor. So if the system would just know who its
talking to it would create a preference vector for each person it interacts
with.

But you would need some kind of baseline so basically the Personality Vectors
would be set to neutral. And each interaction with a Personality vector would
be a system that stores a preference vector for each person.

As the system time evolves (which is also in the article) you would basically
end up with a set of graphs. There is a notion out there which is called a
Dynamic Network analysis [1]. If you also stored the history of that you could
then not just be able to rewind the system backwards to a previous checkpoint.

The way you could start learning how to learn a personality vector is a
reinforcement learning situation. If you say "bad AI I didn't like that" the
system would then look at what it said and mutate the preference vector for
that person. Or you could just change the vector manually by a technique that
was illustrated above by just saying "reduce humor by 70%".

Then you could have model which would do conditional generation [1] of text
based upon interactions with others. It would be basically a reinforcement
learning system paired with a generative text model. The reinforcement system
would store the Personality and Preference vectors for each person. For each
behavior and preference you would need a corpus to bootstrap the system. The
reinforcement system would be a retrieval network and it would retrieve a
pertained system based on user(s) input and get a generational text network to
provide a response. This would be similar to Alpha Go's design. [3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_network_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_network_analysis)
[2] [https://github.com/salesforce/ctrl](https://github.com/salesforce/ctrl)
[3]
[https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/10932/differ...](https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/10932/difference-
between-alphagos-policy-network-and-value-network)

------
TimJRobinson
Interesting article, and good timing - A few days ago I wrote about how we can
build decentralized social networks where you can filter your world to see
content from those with similar personality vectors to yourself -
[https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-
moderati...](https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderation-
system-for-the-decentralized-web/)

------
toto444
The concept of ordered preferences is the foundation of Microeconomics and
Game theory.

For those of you who are interested, a good introduction can be found here :
[https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.30...](https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.307.4118&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

------
obvthrowaway2
The idea of preferences as vectors seems like it has some fun consequences.

\- HIPSTERS: If you really like something, but don't want others to crowd your
interests, you will pretend to be nonchalant about it.

\- AUTHENTICITY: A person's interests in a topic can be vetted as "authentic"
if they are influenced by others whose average of personality vectors matches
the person's.

\- SOCIOPATHS: You can make in-roads with a group of interest by transforming
your PV; see AUTHENTICITY.

\- SKEW: You can influence others more by projecting a _very_ high value for a
specific topic. If you love a particular form of music to an absurd degree,
you're more likely to convert others.

I don't have any non-anecdotal evidence of any of these phenomena. Rather,
these are some reasonable if not amusing deductions from the author's model.

