The personality trait I am most eager to understand is perfectionism.
Perfectionism is sometimes referred to as obsessive-compulsiveness (but those words are not as apt because they get conflated with “addictive personality,” which has no valid connection to perfectionism).
If anyone reading this knows how to define perfectionism using concepts from machine learning or brain science and can teach me the definition, I will kiss your feet and treat you like a king or queen.
The main reason I think it would be a huge win to understand perfectionism better are that people often comment on it and that it almost completely defeats my attempts to attenuate it.
I have found that I can amplify or attenuate most of my psychological dimensions when I set out on a persistent campaign to do so. Here “persistent” means lasting for years. Examples of traits I have been able to attenuate greatly include fearfulness and dysthymia (tendency to be sad for most of the time for days on end). But my perfectionism has proven almost completely unchangable. And the most unchangeable aspects of my mind strike me as the aspects most worth taking the trouble to understand.
P.S. there seems to be some stigmatization of perfectionism. It seems to me that some nonperfectionists do not want to understand perfectionists, they just want to eliminate them from their interpersonal environment.
“Perfectionism” is probably related to Conscientiousness from the Big Five. Perhaps it’s also related to Neuroticism. My hypothesis is that Conscientiousness causes you to have a high bar for your performance, and Neuroticism causes you anxiety when you aren’t meeting that high bar.
Going along with Neuroticism, perfectionism may also be related to self-esteem or a need for agency in a particular area. For instance, during my insanely perfectionistic days, I would try to solve any word or logic problem that I ever came across, even if it wasn’t a good use of my time and energy. I think the motivation was that I needed to prove something to myself.
Update: Wikipedia’s article on Perfectionism) concurs that it may be related to Conscientiousness and Neuroticism.
This suggests that the main ways to deal with perfectionism are:
a) lower your bar for success (e.g. don’t set it higher than the task actually demands, or higher than is practical given your allotted time for the task): “OK, this is good enough… time to stop...”
and
(b) better cope with your anxiety when you fail to reach whatever bar you are measuring yourself by: “I’d like to put a bit more work into this, but no sense in beating myself up...”
I’ve used both strategies successfully in my own life.
Or perhaps “satisfaction criterion.” Perfectionists would then have a high satisfaction criterion for any task, some higher than is demanded by the task or actually practical.
Lowering the satisfaction criterion even a little can put completion of an impossible task into the realm of attainability.
Another heuristic is to start a task with a low satisfaction criterion so you can at least get something out, and then come back the next day with a high satisfaction criterion and refine what you started yesterday. This strategy of starting with a low satisfaction criterion that you raise as you get more done works well with writing and programming (e.g. prototyping).
Of course, the drawback of lowering one’s satisfaction criterion in one area is that once you get used to that way of thinking, it is easier to start letting things slide in general.
For example, when I was learning to socialize, I had to lower my satisfaction criterion for what constituted an acceptable utterance in a conversation, and what amount of thinking it required. Due to the speed of socializing, I could not use the high-deliberation, high-precision, and mistake-minimizing strategies that I used to excel at other tasks such as chess and school, because they got me stuck in analysis paralysis while the conversation whizzed by.
Yet once I learned to lower my satisfaction criterion, I found myself cutting corners in a lot of other areas, like schoolwork. So I had to learn to switch between my perfectionistic cognitive style, and my more improvisational cognitive style. I think the ideal is to appraise the satisfaction criterion necessary for any stage of any specific task.
Based on this experience, I would suggest that anyone attempting to lower their perfectionism attempt a task that cannot be effectively solved by perfectionistic cognitive strategies, particularly time-constrained or real-time tasks such as socializing, musical improvisation, dance, blitz chess, or doing a painting all in one sitting.
A perfectionist will want to excel at any task they attempt, but to succeed, they will have to cognitively inhibit or disable their own perfectionism: being non-perfectionistic is the only way to approach perfection. Thus, perfectionism implodes.
An intriguing, fun post by Phil Goetz!
The personality trait I am most eager to understand is perfectionism.
Perfectionism is sometimes referred to as obsessive-compulsiveness (but those words are not as apt because they get conflated with “addictive personality,” which has no valid connection to perfectionism).
If anyone reading this knows how to define perfectionism using concepts from machine learning or brain science and can teach me the definition, I will kiss your feet and treat you like a king or queen.
The main reason I think it would be a huge win to understand perfectionism better are that people often comment on it and that it almost completely defeats my attempts to attenuate it.
I have found that I can amplify or attenuate most of my psychological dimensions when I set out on a persistent campaign to do so. Here “persistent” means lasting for years. Examples of traits I have been able to attenuate greatly include fearfulness and dysthymia (tendency to be sad for most of the time for days on end). But my perfectionism has proven almost completely unchangable. And the most unchangeable aspects of my mind strike me as the aspects most worth taking the trouble to understand.
P.S. there seems to be some stigmatization of perfectionism. It seems to me that some nonperfectionists do not want to understand perfectionists, they just want to eliminate them from their interpersonal environment.
“Perfectionism” is probably related to Conscientiousness from the Big Five. Perhaps it’s also related to Neuroticism. My hypothesis is that Conscientiousness causes you to have a high bar for your performance, and Neuroticism causes you anxiety when you aren’t meeting that high bar.
Going along with Neuroticism, perfectionism may also be related to self-esteem or a need for agency in a particular area. For instance, during my insanely perfectionistic days, I would try to solve any word or logic problem that I ever came across, even if it wasn’t a good use of my time and energy. I think the motivation was that I needed to prove something to myself.
Update: Wikipedia’s article on Perfectionism) concurs that it may be related to Conscientiousness and Neuroticism.
This suggests that the main ways to deal with perfectionism are:
a) lower your bar for success (e.g. don’t set it higher than the task actually demands, or higher than is practical given your allotted time for the task): “OK, this is good enough… time to stop...”
and
(b) better cope with your anxiety when you fail to reach whatever bar you are measuring yourself by: “I’d like to put a bit more work into this, but no sense in beating myself up...”
I’ve used both strategies successfully in my own life.
How about “a tendency to optimize even when the costs of optimization (may) outweigh the benefits”?
Maybe “stopping criterion”.
Or perhaps “satisfaction criterion.” Perfectionists would then have a high satisfaction criterion for any task, some higher than is demanded by the task or actually practical.
Lowering the satisfaction criterion even a little can put completion of an impossible task into the realm of attainability.
Another heuristic is to start a task with a low satisfaction criterion so you can at least get something out, and then come back the next day with a high satisfaction criterion and refine what you started yesterday. This strategy of starting with a low satisfaction criterion that you raise as you get more done works well with writing and programming (e.g. prototyping).
Of course, the drawback of lowering one’s satisfaction criterion in one area is that once you get used to that way of thinking, it is easier to start letting things slide in general.
For example, when I was learning to socialize, I had to lower my satisfaction criterion for what constituted an acceptable utterance in a conversation, and what amount of thinking it required. Due to the speed of socializing, I could not use the high-deliberation, high-precision, and mistake-minimizing strategies that I used to excel at other tasks such as chess and school, because they got me stuck in analysis paralysis while the conversation whizzed by.
Yet once I learned to lower my satisfaction criterion, I found myself cutting corners in a lot of other areas, like schoolwork. So I had to learn to switch between my perfectionistic cognitive style, and my more improvisational cognitive style. I think the ideal is to appraise the satisfaction criterion necessary for any stage of any specific task.
Based on this experience, I would suggest that anyone attempting to lower their perfectionism attempt a task that cannot be effectively solved by perfectionistic cognitive strategies, particularly time-constrained or real-time tasks such as socializing, musical improvisation, dance, blitz chess, or doing a painting all in one sitting.
A perfectionist will want to excel at any task they attempt, but to succeed, they will have to cognitively inhibit or disable their own perfectionism: being non-perfectionistic is the only way to approach perfection. Thus, perfectionism implodes.
“Stopping criterion” is already the standard terminology for how your machine learning algorithm decides when to stop.
Thanks for clarifying.