Accumulate power, money or experiences. What for? I never understood that.
I’m not sure why you don’t understand this. It seems like the most straightforward goal to me. My own experience is that certain experiences are self-justifying: they bring us pleasure or are intrinsically rewarding in themselves. Why they have this property is perhaps tangentially interesting but it is not necessary to know the why to experience the intrinsic rewards. Pursuing experiences that you find rewarding seems like a perfectly good goal to me, I don’t know why anyone would feel they need anything beyond that.
Incidentally, accumulating money and power are mostly sub-goals of pursuing experiences. For me, money and power are largely enablers that broaden my options for accumulating rewarding experiences. The nature of the human motivational system is such that the accumulation of money and power can have a certain amount of intrinsic reward but it has often been observed that they are somewhat unfulfilling as root goals. The trappings of money and power are really the attraction, if you can attain them without first accumulating the money and power then that’s generally a good strategy.
Really all the other goals you suggest are just sub-goals of the pursuit of rewarding experiences in my opinion, or are intrinsically rewarding experiences in themselves.
My main interest in improving my rationality is to better focus my efforts at accumulating rewarding experiences. The goals set themselves by being intrinsically rewarding, rationality is just a better way to pursue those goals.
I’m not sure why you don’t understand this. It seems like the most straightforward goal to me. My own experience is that certain experiences are self-justifying: they bring us pleasure or are intrinsically rewarding in themselves. Why they have this property is perhaps tangentially interesting but it is not necessary to know the why to experience the intrinsic rewards. Pursuing experiences that you find rewarding seems like a perfectly good goal to me, I don’t know why anyone would feel they need anything beyond that.
Incidentally, accumulating money and power are mostly sub-goals of pursuing experiences. For me, money and power are largely enablers that broaden my options for accumulating rewarding experiences. The nature of the human motivational system is such that the accumulation of money and power can have a certain amount of intrinsic reward but it has often been observed that they are somewhat unfulfilling as root goals. The trappings of money and power are really the attraction, if you can attain them without first accumulating the money and power then that’s generally a good strategy.
Really all the other goals you suggest are just sub-goals of the pursuit of rewarding experiences in my opinion, or are intrinsically rewarding experiences in themselves.
My main interest in improving my rationality is to better focus my efforts at accumulating rewarding experiences. The goals set themselves by being intrinsically rewarding, rationality is just a better way to pursue those goals.