Hacker News Reader

Comment by neuroticnews25 | Hacker News Reader

"Conscientiousness is the ability to perceive and abstract the world outside yourself"

It sounds like you've confused consciousness with conscientiousness? First paragraph sounds like it's about consciousness. And second is about conscientiousness. Third is like a synthesis of both meanings?

EDIT Sorry, your comment actually makes a lot of sense, it's just that "Conscientiousness is the ability to perceive and abstract the world outside yourself" is a very weird definition, see [0] [1] - nothing about perception or abstraction.

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/conscien...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness

View on HN

No. Consciousness is the waking self, the ability to perceive at all in a sober and non-dreaming fashion. With regard to consciousness the ability to perceive at all is sufficient regardless of whether that perceptive ability is limited to yourself, a narrow subject, or details around you. The oppose is unconsciousness, which is typically thought of as the sleeping mind.

Conscientiousness is more distinct, a subset. It is the fine detail by which a person can perceive dates, times, and schedules. Other facets of conscientiousness include social intelligence, empathy, organizational capacity, cleanliness/orderliness, details about nature, comparisons and measures, and more.

Low conscientious people struggle to think beyond themselves and struggle to find the energy to perform tasks not considered immediately pleasurable or self-rewarding. That is what makes the costs of abstract task completion so very expensive, because the effort required is beyond consideration. For example a simple task like cleaning your room or waking early without an alarm clock is an impossibility for some people and for others it is as effortless as getting dressed. For people who struggle with these they appear more comfortable with complexity or disorderly, which is a false conclusion. These disordered result may be very stressful and perhaps over stimulating, but the effort to correct for it is too expensive to resolve. That is why some programmers can seem to build anything and refactor large applications in a few hours while other developers struggle to merely formulate a starting idea in that time and an equivalent refactor would take weeks to accomplish.

Extremely low conscientiousness is linked to a variety of mental and behavioral health disorders because it is so completely detrimental to standards of living and real world performance. Extremely high conscientiousness is linked to perfectionism, OCD, and anxiety in a world of disordered imperfections.

I consider myself to be on the lower conscientiousness side of the spectrum. For others who are like me, what has worked best to improve myself in this area are these two things:

1) develop empathy and compassion for yourself. celebrate wins, and analyze losses.

2) make small, concrete steps to simplify your environment. as the above commentor mentioned, task completion is expensive. however, some things decrease the cost of task completion or increase your available energy. among these are: habits, good sleep, consistent exercise, a decluttered environment, proper nutrition.

together these form a virtious cycle, improving your capacity to make meaningful decisions by either increasing the energy you have available to you, or by decreasing energy drain from other areas.

finally, remember that some things are not worth thinking too much about.

>conscientiousness include social intelligence, empathy, organizational capacity, cleanliness/orderliness, details about nature, comparisons and measures

I'm not sure what "comparisons and measures" means but the rest checks out for me, I had no idea these things are corelated. I used to think about conscientiousness as "behavoiral" lack of discipline, but it totally makes sense that it affects perception of reality deeply.

People with exceptionally low conscientiousness struggle to compare two or more things because they lack the ability to externalize such comparisons from themselves. Instead each item will be considered on a value system in relation to the person and then those relationships are what’s compared. That is both biased and logically absurd.

The same logic applies to measurements. It simply costs so much less to just guess at a measure that is self pleasing that it isn’t cost effective to use any external tool to form an objective result.

Nice word, isn't it?

I agree that the parent poster's usage is unconventional, but I quite naturally interpret it as: conscience dictates that sloppy thinking, disingenuous arguments, and self-delusion are to be avoided; that one has a moral duty to reason correctly on the basis of available perceptions and knowledge, and pursue true conclusions even if it's to one's own detriment.

Stands to reason that being inherently motivated towards that sort of thing improves one's capacity for abstract thought, and thus effective action in complex domains.

In the computer metaphor, intelligence would be how much RAM you have, while conscientiousness would be how often your CPU has a glitch and performs an incorrect computation due to "overclocking", i.e. burdening your mind with self-serving yet ultimately unproductive cognitions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com