Sorry I don’t have anything useful to comment, but just wanted to thank you profusely for this post. I relate pretty strongly to these very problems, especially the uncertainty of usefulness (often the certainty of uselessness) and the opportunity cost considerations. I don’t know any good article where someone talks about handling this issue.
I’m glad you like it! Something that I meant to point out in the post is that this pattern of mine implies that not only do I not have coherent preferences, they’re not even temporally coherent—that is, not only do different parts of me disagree on utility, but I disagree with myself at other times on it as well. I’m really about as non-agentic as it’s possible to be and still get things done occasionally!
Sorry I don’t have anything useful to comment, but just wanted to thank you profusely for this post. I relate pretty strongly to these very problems, especially the uncertainty of usefulness (often the certainty of uselessness) and the opportunity cost considerations. I don’t know any good article where someone talks about handling this issue.
I’m glad you like it! Something that I meant to point out in the post is that this pattern of mine implies that not only do I not have coherent preferences, they’re not even temporally coherent—that is, not only do different parts of me disagree on utility, but I disagree with myself at other times on it as well. I’m really about as non-agentic as it’s possible to be and still get things done occasionally!