Excellent point. Most people aren’t trying and failing to achieve their dreams. We aren’t even trying. We don’t have well-articulated dreams, so trying isn’t even a reasonable course of action until we have a clear objective. I’d guess that most adults still don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, and still haven’t figured it out by the time they retire.
Guilty. I’ve spent most of my life trying to articulate and rigorously define what our goals should be. It takes an extra little bit of cognitive effort to model others as lacking that sense of purpose, rather than merely having lots of different well-defined goals.
(EDIT, to avoid talking past each other: Not that people don’t have any well defined sub-goals, mind you. Just not well defined terminal values, and well defined knowledge of their utility function. No well-defined answers to Life, The Universe, And Everything.)
The biggest problem isn’t System 1 dominating System 2. It’s system 2′s being filled with BS and falsehoods.
Excellent point. Most people aren’t trying and failing to achieve their dreams. We aren’t even trying. We don’t have well-articulated dreams, so trying isn’t even a reasonable course of action until we have a clear objective. I’d guess that most adults still don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, and still haven’t figured it out by the time they retire.
Or have dreams that would be horrific if actually implemented because they haven’t thought through the implications.
Evidence or typical mind fallacy..? X-)
Guilty. I’ve spent most of my life trying to articulate and rigorously define what our goals should be. It takes an extra little bit of cognitive effort to model others as lacking that sense of purpose, rather than merely having lots of different well-defined goals.
(EDIT, to avoid talking past each other: Not that people don’t have any well defined sub-goals, mind you. Just not well defined terminal values, and well defined knowledge of their utility function. No well-defined answers to Life, The Universe, And Everything.)
“Well-defined terminal values” are a very different thing from “well-articulated dreams”.
P.S. People with “well-defined answers to Life, The Universe, And Everything” are usually pretty scary.