\[ \newcommand{\Var}{\mathrm{Var}} \newcommand{\E}{\mathbb{E}} \newcommand{\H}{\mathbb{H}} \newcommand{\Inf}{\operatorname{Inf}} \]
intro
The title sounds weird. What do I even mean by «Context Independent Personality», you might ask. I’ve discussed this with people for some time. I remember telling Shreyansh this, and some other juniors, too. Maybe I discussed this with Arikith, I don’t recall.
I’ve tried writing this down before but ended up never finishing it. I was discussing something similar with my girlfriend today, and I figured I should finally get to writing this out. So here goes.
background
I had a rather drastic change in my personality around the second semester in my undergrad. It wasn’t caused by any external event, but just that, the world in my mind aligned in the right ways for this to happen. I somehow got very interested in reading and understanding some Hinduism and Buddhism.
I understood the key tenets very quickly. Maybe within a few weeks. Everything happened so quickly that I am not sure if all of it was because of reading religious philosophy. But it definitely helped me internalize a lot of the things that I was thinking.
This post is on one of the things I realized.
context-independent personality
If you spend a little bit of time thinking about your behaviors, and the behaviors of society at large, you would very quickly realize that the behaviors/personality that an individual exhibits depends, very strongly, on the context they are in.
If they are with their parents, they behave a certain way. If they are with their friends, they behave a certain way. If they are with their partner, they behave a certain way. If they are with a professor, in a class, they behave a certain way. Etcetera.
I define «Context-Independent Personality» as an individual who exhibits personalities that don’t deviate way too much, regardless of the context they are in. It is quite clear that context-independent personality is rare.
You might think, “well, that seems about right! what’s wrong about that? stop stating trivialities”. When I say this, I do not, obviously, mean that you’d go about having rude banter with your Professor. It is easy to negate this line of thought in that way.
I mean more important things: parents not having a clue about how you actually are [to the point that your parents believe their child is the nicest kid in the world (rather common in nerd circles, especially in India)], being unable to raise doubts in a class due to the fear of social judgement, having few things that you strongly believe in, lack of confidence, being afraid of rejection (from your desired gender, for a job, etc.)
easy solution
Does this world really seem right? Further: do you think Buddha would have been like this?
Nope. An individual rooted in a consistent world view, with self-consistent ethics, and reasonably detached to societal pressures like fear and judgement wouldn’t exhibit behaviors that deviate too much. Yet, this is extremely common.
That is because people are driven by strong negative emotions that they think they have no control over. I claim, a very easy way to get better at this i.e. being less affected by irrational, negative emotions is to force yourself to do things that your context-independent version would be doing.
This means:
having that difficult conversation with your parents where you tell them things adversarially: find sub-behaviors your personality deviates the largest in, across different contexts. another easy way to find such topics is to ask yourself, “what would they want to know?”
diving in headfirst in social judgement and learning to be okay with it: there is freedom, in the truest sense, on the other side. this means being perceived as “dumb” in a class, being perceived as “annoying” and “difficult” if need be.
speedrunning rejection from your desired gender, your dream job, etc.
end
I think religious philosophy becomes too unnecessarily mystical way too often. That is unnecessary, and I doubt that was ever the point.
A much easier way to be closer to Buddha, is to understand how his mind would’ve operated as an implication of Buddhism and, then, forcing yourself to be that way. Infact, funnily enough, this isn’t very different from distillation in AI research.