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Comment by visualradio | Hacker News Reader

Identity is used to automate decision making, so less energy is expended on conscious thought, so less time is spent weighing pros and cons of each alternative for every daily decision. If someone is 'dog person' they have routine where they take dog for walks, with positive effects such as exercise, without having to weigh pros and cons each time it is performed. If someone is coffee person, they do not have to weigh pros and cons of what to drink with breakfast. With politics this is perhaps bad, as we do not want people to make decisions unconciously, we want citizens to weigh pros and cons conciously, so that they are less easily duped. But for other daily activities it is useful to simplify decision making so conscious thought can be allocated elsewhere.

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I appreciate how you framed this and helped me see how identity can help us streamline the decisions we make in what we do.

I think identity can have a secondary effect of communicating to others those decisions we've made about what to do.

For example, Someone: What do you do? Me: I give speeches. Someone: So you're a speaker?

It can be a way to bundle a bunch of actions/beliefs/etc into something that is quicker/easier to communicate to others. For example, as a speaker, I may write speeches, deliver speeches, book clients, travel to different companies, and other actions.

The challenges may come in the disagreements we have about which actions belong to which identities. For example, a speaker for some may be someone who speaks at corporations and gets paid for it. For others, it may be someone who gives motivational speeches to schools. For others, it may be someone who speaks on YouTube videos. So for each of those groups, they may hear "speaker" and associate different actions/beliefs/etc. and it can lead to conflict. I know I've seen some of this conflict when I tell someone I have created some Wordpress sites, they can immediately jump into "so you're a coder" and I can quickly think "no no, coders are people who create fullstack stuff, I'm just a tinkerer," etc etc.

>The challenges may come in the disagreements we have about which actions belong to which identities.

This is where the benefits of using tools like E-Prime, a form of English language that avoids usage of the verb "to be" help me. Thinking about things in terms of e-prime allows me to realize that while using labels as a shorthand for more specific information is convenient, I lose specificity and precision, and begin to think in terms of identity when I use labels and think/speak in terms of what things are, rather than think in terms of what people or things actually do.

Sweet, I'll check it out! I had heard of it but never dove too deeply into it. I have used a lot more of the semantic primes framework, which may yield similar results by parsing phrases into very simple, irreducible concepts. If you like E-Prime, you may like semantic primes :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes

> If someone is 'dog person' they have routine where they take dog for walks, with positive effects such as exercise, without having to weigh pros and cons each time it is performed.

That describes a dog owner which is a much more concrete category than "dog person". Not every "dog person" actually has a dog. Even if you want a dog, your apartment might not allow dogs, or you might not have time/money to care for a dog while working.

> That describes a dog owner

You'd think so, but unfortunately, not all dog owners actually care about their dogs.

[Serious]I feel I've wasted so much time weighing pros and cons when someone asks me something like what my favorite animal is, because I never really made these things part of my identity.

I'm not sure people with a readily-available answer for these questions made these things part of their identity, they just use language differently.

For many people, language isn't that much about content, but about signaling affection, social bonds, respect etc. (and of course all the opposites). So "how are you" signals "I care for you", though they don't necessearily want/ are able to work with an honest answer - i.e. the moment of asking is the actual content, and words are just the communication channel.

People who work like this have readily available favorite animals and colors and so on because having these answers is important for maintaining fluent conversation, not necessarily because these things are more important to them. This different usage of language also explains why people often complain about something, but don't want to hear solutions from their communication partner: It's more about bonding by sharing the ups and downs of life, not about searching for a new solution.

And in my experience people working like this sometimes are self-conscious about communication, too, but focussing on the level that's elusive to them: Fearing they are dumb, don't know enough about the topic at hand and so on.

Somewhere I’ve read something in the lines of “I’m not five, I don’t have a favourite color”. I’d go on a limb and say that if this kind of questions is asked you can either take it as an ice breaker and discuss the pros and cons (it makes for better small talk than weather) or answer at random if you don’t actually want to engage with the person.

>> "Somewhere I’ve read something in the lines of “I’m not five, I don’t have a favourite color”."

That comes off as combative and doesn't make any sense. There's no connection between getting older and losing the ability to have preferences. I answer hot pink because it's true, and because it surprises people who think they know everything about me based on outward appearance.

I think it's more about choices being more nuanced as you get older, not really losing preferences. E.g. one might not have a favorite movie, but could have favorite action movie or similar.

Btw, 'hot pink' is the correct answer to the "what's your favorite color" question.

If this is the explanation then shouldn't we find it weird how intensely factional humans are about identities? How much work marketers put into identifying segments and creating associations? A smart robot would also economize on decisions, but it wouldn't necessarily gang up with other Emacs robots against the vi robots.

Well of course it wouldn't because all robots are Emacs robots \s.

“...so conscious thought can be allocated elsewhere.”

If at all. If you subscribe to thinking in identity-terms for optimization benefits, don’t you get a whole host of other heuristics and shortcuts to ‘conscious thought’?

For one thing, ‘uncertainty’ can be reduced. It’s this or that. And politically, you can turn uncertainty into us/them.

Add, “curiosity”. That gets in the way of automated/automatic thinking. Always eat the same foods, because what if you don’t like the food you buy/served? Then you go hungry (the classic mother, eat the food I make you or go hungry). Or, you waste other resources.

Automatically you get many other rules and reasoning,

If the food you eat doesn’t upset your stomach, don’t change—-what more do you need?

Why change, it’s all going to the same place in the end.

Unmoved and impenetrable to argument these shortcuts come with other formative logics.

It also begs the question of why politics is the one field everyone seems to be an expert in - and the true experts in the field are never listened to.

Having the broader population decide geopolitical relationships, is like telling your doctor which cancer medication you should take.

I don't see these things as identities - at least, they don't have to be.

If you own a dog, you should take your dog for walks because you care about your dog, not because you're a dog person and that's what dog people do. If you drink tea every morning, that's a habit or routine - possibly a caffeine addiction if skipping it gives you withdrawal symptoms. You don't need to identify as a tea person for that routine to be useful to you.

I think both habits and identities can be harmful in politics, but identities are worse. If someone questions your habits, you might stop to think about them, but most people become defensive when someone questions their identity.

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