Real limitations on your drive and morale don’t feel from the inside like “running out of hit points”, they feel like akrasia.
I am reluctant to generalize to the internal experience of others, especially if the difference between my and someone else’s internal experience are the cause of those externally observable drive and morale differences.
So as long as you can choose, from the inside, to keep going, you haven’t run out of drive yet.
I feel like this is contentless. Suppose you and I are observing a third person, and they do not keep going. Can either of us state whether or not they could choose to keep going from the inside?
Now, if you are struggling, and say to yourself “this sucks, but I will keep going,” and you do keep going for longer having said that to yourself, then great! As you point out, that’s part of your overall drive, and so is irrelevant once we step outside how you get the drive you have and are instead quantifying how much drive you have.
Now, if you are struggling, and say to yourself “this sucks, but I will keep going,” and you do keep going for longer having said that to yourself, then great! As you point out, that’s part of your overall drive, and so is irrelevant once we step outside how you get the drive you have and are instead quantifying how much drive you have.
Unfortunately, the key word there is outside: reasoning about some other system than one’s self encounters no Loebian obstacles. Reasoning about one’s self usually tends to involve reasoning about one’s self-model, which is actually a necessarily less accurate description of your state of being than the raw data of how things feel-from-the-inside to Objectively Be.
When you are going “UUUUGGGGGH, THIS IS FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE GODDAMNIT!” you may have hit your limit for the time being. When you are frustrated and thinking, “I probably just have limited ability at maths”, that’s just anxiety.
When you are frustrated and thinking, “I probably just have limited ability at maths”, that’s just anxiety.
I’m not sure I buy this, though. If you view the ability as learning ability, or what I call elasticity over here, then it seems like I can say “I find it more difficult than I expect to learn a foreign language; I’ll downgrade my expected elasticity for foreign languages” and that might switch the EV of spending more effort on learning foreign languages from positive to negative. If there are multiple things I could do, and which thing is wisest depends on the relative elasticities, then trying to estimate those elasticities seems useful and doable without hitting the hard limit.
I am reluctant to generalize to the internal experience of others, especially if the difference between my and someone else’s internal experience are the cause of those externally observable drive and morale differences.
I feel like this is contentless. Suppose you and I are observing a third person, and they do not keep going. Can either of us state whether or not they could choose to keep going from the inside?
Now, if you are struggling, and say to yourself “this sucks, but I will keep going,” and you do keep going for longer having said that to yourself, then great! As you point out, that’s part of your overall drive, and so is irrelevant once we step outside how you get the drive you have and are instead quantifying how much drive you have.
Unfortunately, the key word there is outside: reasoning about some other system than one’s self encounters no Loebian obstacles. Reasoning about one’s self usually tends to involve reasoning about one’s self-model, which is actually a necessarily less accurate description of your state of being than the raw data of how things feel-from-the-inside to Objectively Be.
When you are going “UUUUGGGGGH, THIS IS FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE GODDAMNIT!” you may have hit your limit for the time being. When you are frustrated and thinking, “I probably just have limited ability at maths”, that’s just anxiety.
I’m not sure I buy this, though. If you view the ability as learning ability, or what I call elasticity over here, then it seems like I can say “I find it more difficult than I expect to learn a foreign language; I’ll downgrade my expected elasticity for foreign languages” and that might switch the EV of spending more effort on learning foreign languages from positive to negative. If there are multiple things I could do, and which thing is wisest depends on the relative elasticities, then trying to estimate those elasticities seems useful and doable without hitting the hard limit.