iandennismiller

Personality characteristics are partially heritable (i.e. a small amount of variance in these dimensions is attributable to genetics) and the global distribution is not uniform. pplapi implements a simplistic model of this general system, but the point is that many of these demographic and psychometric dimensions - including language and religion - are indicated prior to birth. While there will always be exceptions, pplapi models the typical case.

From the agent you selected, income is obviously implausible but all the other dimensions are probably in the ballpark. If you went to Iran (the country of that agent), then odds are, you can find a real person with those characteristics (excepting income,... (read more)

This is my research. It's an ongoing project that I will be discussing as part of my PhD dissertation, which I plan to defend in a few months. I had hoped to finish my PhD before this project got attention, but the website is already live and I can't really complain. In fact, I'm really happy with the interest and I want to engage.

Here's a few important facts about pplapi:

• the agents are synthetic, not real people
• the numbers are based on population parameters, so in aggregate, pplapi approaches reality
• at the individual level, these agents exist in the "uncanny valley" of kindof-sortof-implausible demographics
• some dimensions have more noise (error) than others; income