News & Notes

My story “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” is a finalist for Best Short Story in the Asimov’s 2023 Readers’ Award. As a result, it is available for a limited time on the publisher’s web site as a free PDF, along with all the other Finalists for Novella, Novelette, Short Story, and Poetry — a stellar lineup!

(If you are nominating for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, or any other 2023 award, I would appreciate your consideration.)

Everyone loves a personality test

How many different types of personalities are there? If you are a fan of Myers-Briggs, you might say sixteen. If you like the Enneagram, you might say nine, or twenty-seven.

If you’d lived in the eighteenth century, you’d have probably thought there were four — phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, and melancholy — which could be determined by the shape of your head and facial features.

All of these personality typing systems, and most others, have two things in common:

1. They are top-down, or deductive — meaning that someone first came up with a framework, and then worked out ways to sort people into it.
2. Research psychologists of the twenty-first century consider them pretty equally useless.

Among scientists, the gold standard of personality typing for several decades now has been the Five-Factor Model, sometimes called The Big Five. Unlike all of its predecessors, the Big Five was designed inductively, or bottom-up, by taking a large amount of data and statistically analyzing it to see which factors stood out as variable and important. The scientists looking at this didn’t start out trying to sort everyone along five axes; they were open to any number or arrangement, and five is just how it happened to work out.

(Scientists are by definition never satisfied, so as researchers continue to test and study this idea, some have gone on to propose a variety of ‘sixth factors’. So far none of them have been demonstrated to be as important or consistent as the original five.)

The names scientists gave to the five traits reflect the fact that it was created for use and reference by other scientists, not for a popular audience. In order of the acronym OCEAN most commonly used as a mnemonic, they are: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

In the popular parlance, these terms tend to be loaded with strong positive or negative connotations, but the actual psychology is quite a bit more nuanced. And importantly, each of these five dimensions are continuums, not binary on/off switches: a person is not simply either Introverted or Extraverted, but somewhere along the line between. That makes for an essentially infinite number of personality variations, which is true to reality, if less satisfying to our categorization-hungry brains. If you take a Big Five assessment (the ones used by psychologists are copyrighted, but here’s a basic open-source version), you don’t get an absolute designation, but a percentile score for each factor relative to the human population as a whole.

Finally, while a person’s scores do tend to show a certain level of consistency over time, they are never completely static. Like people themselves, scores can change with age and experience, and they can be impacted by external circumstances, mental health, and even medication. (Finding the right antidepressant dropped my Neuroticism score by thirty-plus points, from very high to barely above average, and I am hardly alone.)

But the particular personality factor that I’ve been thinking about lately is the one wordily labeled “Openness to Experience”. Here’s one paper’s description:

Individuals who score high on this dimension tend to be intellectual, imaginative, sensitive, and open-minded. Those who score low tend to be down-to-earth, insensitive, and conventional. Openness to Experience is highly compatible with the motivational goals of self-direction (autonomy of thought and action and openness to new ideas and experiences) and universalism (understanding and tolerance for all people and ideas and appreciation of beauty and nature). It is also compatible with the motivational goals of stimulation values (novelty and excitement). Openness to Experience conflicts with the motivational goals of conformity, tradition, and security — all of which concern preserving the status quo and avoiding what is new and different.

One of the things that’s always been true about me, and which I’ve lately come to see as related to ADHD,^[1] is that I’m absolutely ravenous for learning new things. In fact, that’s become one of the brain hacks I rely on every single day in order to actually complete basic household tasks.

I used to have a terrible time getting through something like washing dishes or chopping vegetables, because I’d either:

1. start doing the thing but get distracted and wander off in the middle to pursue something else, or
2. be too bored by the prospect to even make myself start.

Then about six or seven years ago I figured out that if I did all of these non-intellectual chores while listening to podcasts that teach me something new and interesting, I could actually manage to get shit done. I use the anticipation of {Learning a New Thing!} to help me get started, and then also to keep my brain engaged so it doesn’t go haring off after something more interesting and take my body with it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that — despite being Of An Age where people’s preferences typically ossify and they become less open to new things — I still score around the 85th-90th percentile on the Big Five O-factor, Openness to Experience. That means that I’m more O than all but 10-15% of the world’s population, of any age. In fact, as I get older, I actually am becoming interested in more different kinds of things than when I was young, because decades of intensive learning has resulted a breadth of knowledge that allows me to better understand how everything is connected.

My educated guess is that most of my readers have above-average O-scores as well. The ones who stick around, I mean — not the ones who subscribe after reading one article and then unsubscribe again once they see the next one. Those are the people who didn’t read the label on the tin, and so were expecting a series of narrow variations on a familiar theme.

Which I know is exactly the way most people do this newsletter thing. Everybody’s supposed to “brand” themselves (ugh) these days, but I know myself too well to imagine I can stick to a single niche for long without becoming too bored to continue. So if I had to pick a “brand” for Nine Lives, I’d aim for something like “Eclectic and Insightful”. You might not know what you’re going to get from one installment to the next, but my hope is that for some people, that’s part of the draw.

I recently read a very interesting 2017 book by Derek Thompson called Hit Makers. Different pieces of it dovetailed with various different things I’m thinking about and/or working on, but the part that’s relevant today is in Chapter Two, where Thompson describes what scientists at Spotify and Pandora discovered about what people wanted to listen to. He quotes Eric Bieschke, the original chief data scientist at Pandora: “Preferences for familiarity are much more individual than I would have thought. You can play the exact same songs to two people with the same tastes in music. One will consider the station perfectly familiar, and the other will consider it horribly repetitive.”

If there’s one thing I’m not in danger of, it’s people complaining that Nine Lives is “horribly repetitive.”

Not that I don’t have my periods of fixation. At the moment, I’m a bit of a broken record on the subject of talking pets. My dog has 71 communication buttons and counting; his comprehensive vocabulary is at least 100 English words, across all different parts of speech. And that’s after less than six months.

But I’m siloing most of that in my personal journal and my (heaven help me) new Instagram account — both of which I am also struggling to find time to post to — because I do still have other things going on in my head concurrently, and the last thing I want is to lock myself into a “brand” as “the lady who (only) writes about her talking dog.”

Before this, my last intense fixation occurred in late 2019, when I figured out I was Autistic; for several months that was all I could write about, as I hoovered up information and recontextualized five decades of life. That interest never went away — it’s still there, informing everything that I think and write — but it’s no longer all-consuming. As Hannah Gadsby’s grandmother would say, “It’s all part of the soup.”^[2]

Or the sauce. There’s a world-renowned restaurant in Mexico City called Pujol; its chef is known for his mole, which famously has a hundred ingredients and is currently nearing three thousand days old.^[3]

After five decades of continuous independent study, my mind feels from the inside like Pujol’s mole. I don’t follow recipes when cooking or when writing – so if you signed up after one of my widely-shared posts late last year expecting more of the same, I’m doomed to disappoint.

Want a preview of what’s likely coming down the pike? I have significant notes or, in a couple of cases, partial essays already written on:

• my evolving thoughts about gender
• the unique ethical responsibility of speculative fiction writers
• the human future of the web
• the strange phenomenon of cursing
• how reading Heinlein as a teen fucked me up
• an open apology to my husband’s ex-girlfriend
• capitalism’s relationship to democracy and freedom
• the “AI” threat to fiction

I also am in the ‘gathering and pondering’ stage on two other subjects (popularity, sensitivity) that feel like possible essays. Will I get all of these finished in 2024? Almost certainly not. It generally takes me several weeks of near-daily work to pull together a single deep dive piece, and my non-writing life for the next few months is absolutely a clusterfuck of Way Too Much Going On {insert screaming face here}. Like, I don’t know how I’m going to find time to breathe between now and late June.

In the spirit of keeping my goals achievable, I’m aiming for five or six substantial essays in 2024. I intend to finish at least one of the above list before summer, and will try for two — but even so, new Nine Lives content will probably be heavily weighted toward the second half of the year. In the meantime, I’m going to start pulling the essays I originally published on Medium (2018-2022) from behind that paywall, and reprinting them here and/or on my web site. That conversion also will take time, but less than writing all new things.

For those of you who’ve generously chosen to pay for a subscription: I understand that you may have expected more new content than it looks like I’m going to manage this year. If you are disappointed and want a refund, please contact me directly — through my web site, or reply to any Nine Lives email — and let me know.

And finally, for anyone who made it this far down and hasn’t unsubscribed yet ... thank you! My entire thirty-year existence on the web has been aimed, one way and another, at finding my people; I’m very glad you’re here.