This essay was originally published on my Substack. Crossposting here for the LessWrong community.

We tend to think of our lives as a collection of private experiences; our memories, our feelings, our wins. A curated archive of the self.

But your impact on the world is not defined by what happens to you. It is defined by the operating policy you write that others will copy. You are a manual to be used, more than a diary to be read.

Scalable Character

If that framing is true, then character is not just personal. It is replicable.

You are a prototype of a “way of being” that will be partially cloned by:

Your friends
People who hear your stories or see your work
Your kids / students / younger founders you mentor
Future AIs trained on humanity’s traces, including yours¹

What really persists from you is not your memories or your feelings. It is the algorithm of how you respond to reality: how you handle fear, power, love, money, truth, status, boredom, failure, etc.

And because humans learn by imitation and culture transmits by copying, that algorithm will get copied, mixed and amplified.

Once character is something that gets copied, it stops being private. It becomes a system with feedback. An outer loop.

The Outer Loop

Many operate with a myopic metric of impact, focusing on the direct visible outcomes. But “success” in the contemporary sense is a flawed metric: it captures results, not the rippling effect of character through the network. The true consequences are governed by a distant, external feedback loop. This shift in perspective has further implications:

1. Your worst moments are high-leverage training data. We are trained by both our victories and our failures, but the “edge cases” carry the most weight. It is easy to broadcast a clear signal when you are winning. It is much harder when you are afraid or humiliated.

When shit hits the fan, the gap between the character you want to have and the reaction you actually have is at its widest. That is why the recording light goes on. Everyone around you, and the models ingesting that data, is watching: “So, this is how we handle disaster.”

That recording gets reused. How you bridge that gap during a crisis becomes the manuscript for how those around you will handle their own storms. It evolves from a reaction into a trait, and that trait becomes a signal that others copy when they ...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments