HIVLI

I've seen in the rationalistsphere a lot of dividing people into binary personality models, that are useful and different from the more popular stereotypes (though obviously as simplistic as any binary model.) High decouplers vs low decouplers is a really big one, though also high agency vs low agency. (These descriptions are usually "high x vs low x" with implicit emphasis that the "high" group is better.)

I'm going to add one binary that I think has not gotten nearly enough attention, though you can decide whether I favor the high or low half.

High Impulsiveness

We are used to impulsiveness as just a straight up bad word, like someone who lacks the discipline to resist temptation. Really it's not even about people, but more about moods we can fall into and should be avoided.

I think that's bollocks - not only are some people more impulsive, but it's not even an entirely *bad* thing and has some real positive contributions.

An impulsive person acts on an idea without thinking about it a lot. It could be the decision to throw the first punch in a fight, it could be kissing someone without worrying if it will be reciprocated, it might be deciding to throw a giant party just because, it might be buying a cool new jacket from the leather store, it might be pivoting your business into an entirely new sector, and it very very often is tweeting something on the spur of the moment.

And let's be honest - we love some of the impulsive people in our life. We love how they drop everything for us in a moment of need, we love how they surprise us with a spontaneous gift, we love how they are the first to say I love you. This impulsiveness is hella charismatic because all of their actions feel genuine and powerful and they just do a lot more actions showing their affection than people who think about it too much.

A high impulse person never lies because they believe what they are saying at the time. It might contradict what they said in the past, or what they will follow through on in the future, or even what the state of the world actually is, but they could sure as hell pass a lie detector test saying it right now.

Elon Musk is famous as a high impulse person, boldly creating new companies and leading industries because he decided HE CAN DO IT and doesn't waste any time thinking about the reasons it's not feasible.

On a whim, he bought a $1 million sports car and this is what happened to it:

FWIW, this was on the way to signing a major deal with Thiel.

My contention is that it is no coincidence that the man who reinvented the electric car industry and private space travel, completely wrecked his uninsured million dollar car trying to impress another billionaire. These are two sides of the same coin.

Low Impulsiveness

I think of the epitome of High Impulse vs Low Impulse is Trump vs Clinton in 2016. If you ask a LI person something, they will want to pause and consider the answer - is it true, does it accord with the rest of the world, will it upset anyone, are there any necessary qualifications on this?

To the media viewer, this looks like a calculating liar who is choosing what truth you should get to hear. The more "honest" person was the one "shooting from the gut" and answering immediately and unambiguously. Which answer actually turned out to be "true" is something that would be lost until the question was long forgotten.

A low impulse person wants to plan out what they are doing, what are the risks, how to mitigate them, even if they succeed one time will they be able to consistently stick to replicating this. (Hillary and Obama have been married one time each, even as we both have seen the tribulations of those marriages. Trump and Musk have been married, what, 8 times total?)

Some people reading this will just say this is a new label on high agency vs low agency people. And there is *some* correlation - a lot of high impulse people (again like Trump or Musk) are very high agency, and many low impulse people can be depressed, defeatist and think nothing is worth doing (usually myself.)

But I don't think that's accurate, these traits aren't the same thing. You can be high impulse / low agency - that's usually a depressive that lashes out at everything around them. And low impulse / agency is the stereotype of the master planner who has figured out exactly how everything will go.

You might say that high impulse people have higher VARIANCE than low impulse people, and the effect we're actually measuring is variance. I don't think that's what's going on at the personal level, so it's not useful for describing the people involved and why they do things and causality.

But the point about high variance is that high impulse people fuck up a lot. They lead to ALL SORTS OF MISTAKES and costs that the low impulse people justifyingly grumble about. Which is why our prisons are mostly full of high impulse people (but then so are our performing stages.)

For a long time, what it took to get ahead at the highest levels of power, was iterated successes, and that weeded out a lot of high-impulse people. HI people would fuck up eventually, and they'd go to jail or lose all the money or piss off the wrong people or lose their reputation and they'd stop advancing. Which is how we got a stereotype of national leaders as wishy washy grey emotionless blobs - those were the only ones who could survive a gauntlet of potential mistakes in the press or gossipy political games.

We've clearly entered a new era where downsides are limited, and enough success can overcome any failure. If, as a business leader, you can get 10% of the people to LOVE you, they can buy your stock and buoy you, even as 90% of people hate every decision you make.

We're seeing its effects the most in politics - Trump can't do anything to lose the confidence of his people so long as the other people hate him, so "shooting from the hip" every second of every day works wonders for him, even as it leads to meaningless policy and complete denial of reality.

But we see its growth in the media with independent substacks and other influencer platforms. So long as you can never be truly knocked out, the strategy of "gamble everything, keep trying to get attention" beats out most of the planners and low impulsiveness.

I think this is a bad thing, but it's not because I exclusively prefer Low Impulse behavior. HI people are super fun. But our leadership needs some combination of people with "emotional spontaneity" and people doing "thoughtful engagement with reality", and drifting too much in the former direction has fairly obvious disastrous consequences.