Human Fine-Tuning
Published on February 20, 2026 10:20 AM GMTWe constantly change, as time passes and we experience the world.We learn and we forget.We get addicted and traumatised.We build habits and lose them.We discover new facets of reality, and start ignoring them.Our personality changes. We change.The question of how people change is complex. But it is critical for understanding the world, how it shapes us, and how we shape ourselves.This question is among the most important ones in psychology. It underpins memory, trauma, our sense of self-worth, our relations to others, AI psychosis, and so much more.—Paradoxically, despite how pervasive it is, there is no name for this phenomenon.For the change we go through as a result of experiencing something.There are more specific words, like “conditioning” or “learning”.There are more generic ones, like “change” and “transformation”.But there is none for the actual thing. So I will arbitrarily pick one: Human Fine-Tuning”.Before analysing Human Fine-Tuning in depth, let’s start with a few examples.A Few ExamplesVocabulary ListSometimes, the changes to our brains are directed and purposeful. In which case we call it learning.For instance, we set out to learn a vocabulary list in a language in which we hope to become fluent. By doing so, we hope to enact many changes on our brains.<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/bcLQD5QYMW4Af4sYm/sxa0bbwn7hfnxdv26jsy" alt="No photo description available.">I hated these when I was a child.First, we want to learn to understand that new language. More precisely, we want our brain to naturally conjure the relevant concepts when faced with the words.Second, we want to learn to speak fluently in this language. When we need to express the concepts from the list, we want the words to come naturally. However, this is hard to get just from working on a vocabulary list. So, at the very least…Third, we want to keep the list of words in our memory. That way, when we will need to express the relevant concepts, we will be able to think hard about them (instead of having the words come naturally), recall the relevant words, and construct our sentences with a bit of effort.All of this, knowing that the more we practice, the more fluent we’ll get.But the changes do not stop there.Fourth, we develop familiarity with the language.We get a feeling of its etymology: does the language mostly come from Greek, Latin, Chinese or Arabic?We get a feeling of how it sounds, and what it looks like. Does it have an alphabet, or ideograms? Does it have a simple set of sounds, or a large variety of throat consonants?We get vibes of how the words are constructed. There’s quite a difference between the 3-root-letters words of Arabic (kataba ~ writing) with German’s compound words (Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung = speed limit).Even with something as direct and directed as a dumb vocabulary list learnt by heart, there’s a lot to say.American DinerHowever, most changes to our brain are not purposeful and directed.As I was writing this, I remembered a fun anecdote.When I was younger, I had seen many American diners in movies – or TV Shows, it’s hard to remember and that’s kind-of the point.<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/bcLQD5QYMW4Af4sYm/aj9wesw7iwgtqolsy73t" alt="Nighthawks (Hopper) - Wikipedia">Nighthawks.I never thought much about these diners. I’d see them, largely ignore them, and focus on the plot instead.I hadn’t even learnt the word “diner”. As a Frenchman, and because of their ever-present context, I simply assumed it referred to a special type of restaurant (which it did!), never paying much attention to it.But nevertheless, in the background, a lot happened.Even though I never paid the word “diner” much attention, I had a feeling the US would be filled with these recognisable restaurants: pancakes, coffee, nice waitresses, cozy booths with their red-vinyl benches, a counter with its typical wooden stools.Coincidentally, 10 years ago, a friend invited me to a French “diner”. Or let’s say, a pale imitation of one. It was much too clean! The red vinyl was not cracked: it was shiny. It didn’t feel cozy at all, it was artificial, the music was slightly too loud, and the neon lights were a bit too kitsch.I didn’t think much of it back then. But reflecting on it, it is actually quite impressive.I had built an opinionated aesthetic sense of a thing that I had never experienced myself. That I had never even named.Just from seeing them from time to time in movies, I came to associate them with certain attributes, certain feelings. And visiting the one in France; it felt dissonant. Or more than dissonant, it felt wrong.I don’t think there was a big conspiracy, where Big Diner was trying to sell me more Diner, where diner chains lobbied all of Hollywood to systematically feature them in movies and show specific qualities.It just happened. The aesthetics of a French kid fed on Hollywood movies was moulded in a meaningless way. That’s just the way the world and our brains work.But it happens to everyone, constantly. Simply by exposing ourselves to pieces of art and media, we build strong opinions about everything. Said opinions inform our experience of the world and thus our actions, without us noticing that we even formed them.LossSo far, I have been pointing at minor changes. But sometimes, these changes can be big.Like most people who have the chance to live long enough and build meaningful relationships, I experienced loss a few times.My latest loss experience hit close to home, was particularly violent, and had a sizeable blast radius.Loss hurts everyone, both in similar and different ways.But what personally hurt me was having to witness people close to me lose a part of themselves. Each of them had been durably changed, and for the worse.A visible hole had been carved in their soul. I can see the sadness through their eyes whenever a topic directly reminds them of the loss. They visibly carry more weight: they stand less straight, they are more tired, and they are less optimistic.It is tragic. Violent loss is of one of these few experiences that make people into a durably worse version of themselves.Why am I writing about this? Not to make you sad. I promise there is an actual point.—The point is that young enough, I had noticed that adults looked like they were missing a bunch of obvious things.They had lived their entire lives without learning a facet of engineering and building things, without ever pursuing an art form and creating, without trying to get into politics.When discussing and debating, they would miss obvious arguments, and would get angry when I’d try to correct them.They were missing so much. Experiences, lines of reasonings, courses of actions; which all seemed obviously important to me. It felt like adults were dumb, for no good reason, and in a way that resisted me trying to help them.Over time, I figured out what was happening. It’s not that they were dumb and missing the obvious things. It’s that they were explicitly avoiding them. These things made them feel bad.They knew their artistic pursuit would be a struggle, they knew they were likely to fail any ambitious political endeavour, and they wanted to avoid that.Later, I learnt about the word trauma in the context of PTSD.Even later, I learnt its more generalised meaning of emotional damage.This made it easier to communicate the observation from above.People get traumatised. As a result, they become behaviourally stupider versions of themselves, in a way that resists mending.From my point of view, people accumulate chip damage over time. And ultimately, they die of a thousand cuts. They are too damaged to willingly try new things and put themselves out there.This has been one of the sadder parts of my life. Seeing people slowly lose Their Spark as they internalise all the bad things that happen around them.Mechanical AnalysisAll of these are examples of Human Fine-Tuning, situations where merely existing and experiencing the world changed who we are.These situations are all different. Some are happenstance, and others are purposefully directed. Some are purely logical word-level associations, and others are deep changes to who we are.More often than not though, we naturally mould ourselves into what we perceive.This general process of “a brain changing” doesn’t really have a name. So I am going to apply to people the closest term that I know: Human Fine-Tuning (HFT).<a href="#fne5yfdsexkhf" rel="nofollow">[1]</a>As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuning_(deep_learning)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bcLQD5QYMW4Af4sYm/human-fine-tuning-1
Published on February 20, 2026 10:20 AM GMTWe constantly change, as time passes and we experience the world.We learn and we forget.We get addicted and traumatised.We build habits and lose them.We discover new facets of reality, and start ignoring them.Our personality changes. We change.The question of how people change is complex. But it is critical for understanding the world, how it shapes us, and how we shape ourselves.This question is among the most important ones in psychology. It underpins memory, trauma, our sense of self-worth, our relations to others, AI psychosis, and so much more.—Paradoxically, despite how pervasive it is, there is no name for this phenomenon.For the change we go through as a result of experiencing something.There are more specific words, like “conditioning” or “learning”.There are more generic ones, like “change” and “transformation”.But there is none for the actual thing. So I will arbitrarily pick one: Human Fine-Tuning”.Before analysing Human Fine-Tuning in depth, let’s start with a few examples.A Few ExamplesVocabulary ListSometimes, the changes to our brains are directed and purposeful. In which case we call it learning.For instance, we set out to learn a vocabulary list in a language in which we hope to become fluent. By doing so, we hope to enact many changes on our brains.<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/bcLQD5QYMW4Af4sYm/sxa0bbwn7hfnxdv26jsy" alt="No photo description available.">I hated these when I was a child.First, we want to learn to understand that new language. More precisely, we want our brain to naturally conjure the relevant concepts when faced with the words.Second, we want to learn to speak fluently in this language. When we need to express the concepts from the list, we want the words to come naturally. However, this is hard to get just from working on a vocabulary list. So, at the very least…Third, we want to keep the list of words in our memory. That way, when we will need to express the relevant concepts, we will be able to think hard about them (instead of having the words come naturally), recall the relevant words, and construct our sentences with a bit of effort.All of this, knowing that the more we practice, the more fluent we’ll get.But the changes do not stop there.Fourth, we develop familiarity with the language.We get a feeling of its etymology: does the language mostly come from Greek, Latin, Chinese or Arabic?We get a feeling of how it sounds, and what it looks like. Does it have an alphabet, or ideograms? Does it have a simple set of sounds, or a large variety of throat consonants?We get vibes of how the words are constructed. There’s quite a difference between the 3-root-letters words of Arabic (kataba ~ writing) with German’s compound words (Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung = speed limit).Even with something as direct and directed as a dumb vocabulary list learnt by heart, there’s a lot to say.American DinerHowever, most changes to our brain are not purposeful and directed.As I was writing this, I remembered a fun anecdote.When I was younger, I had seen many American diners in movies – or TV Shows, it’s hard to remember and that’s kind-of the point.<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/bcLQD5QYMW4Af4sYm/aj9wesw7iwgtqolsy73t" alt="Nighthawks (Hopper) - Wikipedia">Nighthawks.I never thought much about these diners. I’d see them, largely ignore them, and focus on the plot instead.I hadn’t even learnt the word “diner”. As a Frenchman, and because of their ever-present context, I simply assumed it referred to a special type of restaurant (which it did!), never paying much attention to it.But nevertheless, in the background, a lot happened.Even though I never paid the word “diner” much attention, I had a feeling the US would be filled with these recognisable restaurants: pancakes, coffee, nice waitresses, cozy booths with their red-vinyl benches, a counter with its typical wooden stools.Coincidentally, 10 years ago, a friend invited me to a French “diner”. Or let’s say, a pale imitation of one. It was much too clean! The red vinyl was not cracked: it was shiny. It didn’t feel cozy at all, it was artificial, the music was slightly too loud, and the neon lights were a bit too kitsch.I didn’t think much of it back then. But reflecting on it, it is actually quite impressive.I had built an opinionated aesthetic sense of a thing that I had never experienced myself. That I had never even named.Just from seeing them from time to time in movies, I came to associate them with certain attributes, certain feelings. And visiting the one in France; it felt dissonant. Or more than dissonant, it felt wrong.I don’t think there was a big conspiracy, where Big Diner was trying to sell me more Diner, where diner chains lobbied all of Hollywood to systematically feature them in movies and show specific qualities.It just happened. The aesthetics of a French kid fed on Hollywood movies was moulded in a meaningless way. That’s just the way the world and our brains work.But it happens to everyone, constantly. Simply by exposing ourselves to pieces of art and media, we build strong opinions about everything. Said opinions inform our experience of the world and thus our actions, without us noticing that we even formed them.LossSo far, I have been pointing at minor changes. But sometimes, these changes can be big.Like most people who have the chance to live long enough and build meaningful relationships, I experienced loss a few times.My latest loss experience hit close to home, was particularly violent, and had a sizeable blast radius.Loss hurts everyone, both in similar and different ways.But what personally hurt me was having to witness people close to me lose a part of themselves. Each of them had been durably changed, and for the worse.A visible hole had been carved in their soul. I can see the sadness through their eyes whenever a topic directly reminds them of the loss. They visibly carry more weight: they stand less straight, they are more tired, and they are less optimistic.It is tragic. Violent loss is of one of these few experiences that make people into a durably worse version of themselves.Why am I writing about this? Not to make you sad. I promise there is an actual point.—The point is that young enough, I had noticed that adults looked like they were missing a bunch of obvious things.They had lived their entire lives without learning a facet of engineering and building things, without ever pursuing an art form and creating, without trying to get into politics.When discussing and debating, they would miss obvious arguments, and would get angry when I’d try to correct them.They were missing so much. Experiences, lines of reasonings, courses of actions; which all seemed obviously important to me. It felt like adults were dumb, for no good reason, and in a way that resisted me trying to help them.Over time, I figured out what was happening. It’s not that they were dumb and missing the obvious things. It’s that they were explicitly avoiding them. These things made them feel bad.They knew their artistic pursuit would be a struggle, they knew they were likely to fail any ambitious political endeavour, and they wanted to avoid that.Later, I learnt about the word trauma in the context of PTSD.Even later, I learnt its more generalised meaning of emotional damage.This made it easier to communicate the observation from above.People get traumatised. As a result, they become behaviourally stupider versions of themselves, in a way that resists mending.From my point of view, people accumulate chip damage over time. And ultimately, they die of a thousand cuts. They are too damaged to willingly try new things and put themselves out there.This has been one of the sadder parts of my life. Seeing people slowly lose Their Spark as they internalise all the bad things that happen around them.Mechanical AnalysisAll of these are examples of Human Fine-Tuning, situations where merely existing and experiencing the world changed who we are.These situations are all different. Some are happenstance, and others are purposefully directed. Some are purely logical word-level associations, and others are deep changes to who we are.More often than not though, we naturally mould ourselves into what we perceive.This general process of “a brain changing” doesn’t really have a name. So I am going to apply to people the closest term that I know: Human Fine-Tuning (HFT).<a href="#fne5yfdsexkhf" rel="nofollow">[1]</a>As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuning_(deep_learning)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bcLQD5QYMW4Af4sYm/human-fine-tuning-1
2
