Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

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> Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown up in a quite different society

This contains a strong assumption of nature over nurture. I push back on that. (A point of evidence being salivary cortisol correlations with high-stress childhoods and even prenatal environments.)

Independent-minded cultures produce more independent thinkers. A culture that censors raises children by rewarding convention-seeking behaviour and sharply punishing non-conformance.

(Counterpoint: Did the children of circa 1920s academics become academics at a greater frequency than those of postwar academics? Anecdotally, I think so. A lot of them, as PG hypothesises, became founders. That suggests an innate quality that seeks its environment.)

This might also be content-dependent. When I was young, I oscillated between tattletelling and rampant rulebreaking, with a memorable drive to stand out from my peer group. Notably, an inflection point, to my memory and, surprisingly, to my discovery a few years ago after reading childhood notes, was when my family immigrated to America. To-day, I’m passively conformist with the law, but moderately independent when it comes to personal social, political and broader commercial activities, enjoying standing out even if it means being quirky or disliked. I don’t imagine I’d have been the same in Switzerland or in India.

After seeing how different an adopted child acted compared to the non adopted ones in a close family member's family, I believe a lot more in nature causing big differences in behavior vs. nurture. Even when you have your own kids, children born 1 or 2 years apart in the same family can have very different personalities.

People don't like it, because it's used to justify fatalistic write offs of people. I agree it's wrong to do that because people are often wrong in writing off people, especially the aggressively independent :)

Adopted and second children still represent different environments. If the adopted child wasn't adopted at birth, their formative years would greatly impact what is perceived as nature. Its a meme that parents are generally more cavalier and relaxed with later children than they are with the first, and that is a significant environmental variable.

Nature definitely hardwires in some baseline chemistry, but those first couple of years have a huge impact on how a child will deal with that chemistry.

Yes nurture has an effect, but the current science suggests that our DNA has an even greater determination of who we are than we ever imagined, the degree of which is incredibly surprising and non-intuitive. It would suggest that we become who we are determined to be, no matter the early childhood variables.

https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93YWtpbmd1cC5saW...

This is a fair point. To say that personality can be purely characterized in full using a few adjectives is grossly over-generalizing. It seems like a better model of "the four quadrants" would be to add a dimension, the dimension of personality when it comes to dealing with different things in life. For instance, while one can be passively conformist in a particular area, say, following the rules of society, one can be aggressively independent in one's own discipline or expertise.

For instance, you could expect a brilliant academic to be socially conformist, while academically aggressive and independent. Some sort of criminal or outlaw would be aggressively independent when it comes to following the laws of society, and maybe conformist when it comes to following the criminal discipline (this is when you have mobs and gangs --- outlaws find each other and form groups, too).

And it is a combination of these different styles that make up the overall personality profile.

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