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.

 

The Triangle of Other People

It is a common piece of advice in these parts to "treat people like ends, not an object." (Especially dating advice.) Even if you haven't heard of it that way, you've probably heard some dichotomy about treating people like an object (bad) versus... not doing that (good!)

This is a good starting place for authentic relationships, but integrity insists that it's not really truthful. It's missing quite a lot.

For starters, what does it mean to treat people as "an ends?" The dichotomy proposed here is that when you treat people like objects that's selfish, whereas doing things for the good of others is the "right way."

But in reality, generosity and objectifying are two different things, on two different axes. The father who literally whips his boy into shape is doing it "for his son's own good" (or at least believes this), but we would object strongly to this. And we all know someone who has obsessed over and intruded on a crush, believing with all their heart the target of their affection would be so happy and better off if they agreed to date.

I think the spirit this advice is trying to convey is not just about "for the sake of others" but that we should think of them more like we think of ourselves, than as objects without free will or self-knowledge. They have the right to make decisions with full knowledge, and when they have spoken for their preferences we should not question them as if we know better.

I would call this treatment Agentic. We treat them like fellow agents in the game of life.

Now, agentic treatment is not always the same as good or selfless. When someone absolutely chews you out in a bitter tirade, the agentic response is to believe "they must hate me" and a more objectifying response might be "they're low on blood sugar, feeling stress from other life events, and possibly only two years old. They don't really mean it." If we are honest, there are many cases in life when it is more generous to see someone as an object under various pressures, than to take every word they say seriously.

It's a very tricky balance, and when uncertain you should probably lean towards agentic treatment. But also sometimes our friends really need a coffee before we continue this tense discussion. (And sometimes you are an object too and you should treat yourself as such.)

If someone says they want sushi for lunch, even though you know they've always been disappointed in sushi when they got it, you have the choice of treating them like an object (refusing sushi) or like an agent (getting sushi.)

But there's another entire angle of how to treat people: as Ideals. An object is a something less than us, that we want to get something practical from (money, a vote, sex, etc) and we would then discard. But sometimes we see people as more than that - people represent ideals in our head. Our crush may not be on the actual person, and it may not be about wanting them for kisses, but about seeing them as an ideal of beauty or innocence or acceptance or stability. We don't want them to DO something for us, we want them to BE something for us, perfect and pure.

In common parlance, it's "putting someone on a pedestal."

Unfortunately, ideals are simple and people are complex, and this is a horrible format of how to treat them. Often they don't know that they represent this thing, or don't want to if they knew. Representing someone's "only hope of romantic acceptance" is a very heavy burden to bear, and most wise people shy away from that.

And even if you were okay with it... ideals are simple and durable, while humans are complex and fragile. You will fail to live up to this ideal, and then the giver of this affection will become disappointed and bitter. And if they are not able to deal with that, then they will lash out at you. When you have used up an Object, you just ignore it - but when an Ideal is broken, you want to destroy it. Sometimes that is a whole lot worse.

Ideal isn't always bad - your parent or your boss or a superstar probably wants to be an ideal. But when it gets bad, it gets really bad.

Now, in a simple world I would just say there is a spectrum from Object to Ideal and Agentic lies in the happy middle. But I don't see any reason that's actually true, so we get something more like this ugly chart.

I even made a small dot for what I consider "the best position to be in, on average." Though circumstances will vary widely in the best response.

An example of the explanatory power of this triangle. In the Nice Guy Discourse Wars of a decade ago, there was always confusing dissonance at "players treat girls like objects to be used up, whereas I want to worship her. Why is all the online anger at me?" And I think part of that is because many women knew that if they weren't going to be treated like agents, they'd rather be objects than ideals.