LessWrong’s Gordon Worley Has a Radical Claim: Minds Differ More Than Ice Cream Flavors

Gordon Seidoh Worley's essay "Typical Minds Aren't" challenges the common assumption that other people's minds are basically like our own. He frames this as the typical mind fallacy: a deep-rooted bias born from relying on our own subjective experience as the primary evidence for what minds are like. Even when we study personality psychology—learning about introversion, extraversion, openness, and neuroticism—Worley argues that these traits remain surface-level, like different flavors of ice cream: they are mutable and don't capture the core generators of behavior.

To illustrate the true diversity of human minds, Worley turns to the Enneagram, a system that posits 9 or 27 types, each driven by a strong inborn prior or 'essence' woven into the brain and body. Unlike MBTI or Big Five, the Enneagram aims to describe fundamental, often immutable differences in what people most deeply desire and how they approach life. While acknowledging the model is imperfect, Worley believes its value lies in humbling us to the vast 'mind design space'—showing that no two souls are alike and that we should stop assuming our own mind is typical.