Therefore, many cases of the problem of motivation can be solved by discovering what you value, and carrying out goals that conform to your values.
This is pretty interesting, because that’s exactly what I did last week. I want to outline the process that I went through, in case it will be helpful to others.
I started writing what I want. (Examples: I want to have concrete accomplishments. I want to finish my game. I want to be healthy. I want FAI to be created successfully.) You can also do wants that you have for others, but I find those to be not as helpful or insightful.
The I take each ‘want’ and answer various questions about it. A lot of the questions I borrowed from worksheets provided by Academian at the rationality minicamp, and he asked us not to redistribute them. But the questions basically serve to analyze the ‘want’ and understand what you are trying to get from it. Eventually, you will break it down into goals, like so:
I want to have concrete accomplishments. ⇒ Goals: To get a sense of accomplishment, history, progress, self-worth. I want to finish my game. ⇒ Goals: Accomplishment, money, personal and professional experience. I want to be healthy. ⇒ Goals: Live longer, be adept at physical activities, fit, good looking.
Each goal becomes a want in its own right. You can take each one and see if you can break it down further. At the end I end up with an (almost) acyclical graph, whose leafs are the terminal values (big mysterious abstractions, just like you said). The ones I ended up listing for myself: accomplishments, life experiences, physical affection, immortality, fun/happiness, FAI, moral/social obligations. There is also a set of meta-skills that I have identified, which help me with a lot of things, and are therefore worthwhile to pursue almost in their own right: knowledge, rationality, fitness, social skills.
After I’ve determined my terminal values, I should have sorted them by how much I value them like you suggest, which I haven’t done. What I did was to look for any substitutions I could make. Example: to fulfill FAI and Accomplishments values, I could either create games to raise the sanity waterline, or I could do FAI research.
Another interesting thing you can do is find various sets of nodes in your graph, whose children (directly or indirectly) include all your terminal values. For example, just picking the Money node, covers almost every single terminal value I have.
This is pretty interesting, because that’s exactly what I did last week. I want to outline the process that I went through, in case it will be helpful to others.
I started writing what I want. (Examples: I want to have concrete accomplishments. I want to finish my game. I want to be healthy. I want FAI to be created successfully.) You can also do wants that you have for others, but I find those to be not as helpful or insightful.
The I take each ‘want’ and answer various questions about it. A lot of the questions I borrowed from worksheets provided by Academian at the rationality minicamp, and he asked us not to redistribute them. But the questions basically serve to analyze the ‘want’ and understand what you are trying to get from it. Eventually, you will break it down into goals, like so:
I want to have concrete accomplishments. ⇒ Goals: To get a sense of accomplishment, history, progress, self-worth.
I want to finish my game. ⇒ Goals: Accomplishment, money, personal and professional experience.
I want to be healthy. ⇒ Goals: Live longer, be adept at physical activities, fit, good looking.
Each goal becomes a want in its own right. You can take each one and see if you can break it down further. At the end I end up with an (almost) acyclical graph, whose leafs are the terminal values (big mysterious abstractions, just like you said). The ones I ended up listing for myself: accomplishments, life experiences, physical affection, immortality, fun/happiness, FAI, moral/social obligations. There is also a set of meta-skills that I have identified, which help me with a lot of things, and are therefore worthwhile to pursue almost in their own right: knowledge, rationality, fitness, social skills.
After I’ve determined my terminal values, I should have sorted them by how much I value them like you suggest, which I haven’t done. What I did was to look for any substitutions I could make. Example: to fulfill FAI and Accomplishments values, I could either create games to raise the sanity waterline, or I could do FAI research.
Another interesting thing you can do is find various sets of nodes in your graph, whose children (directly or indirectly) include all your terminal values. For example, just picking the Money node, covers almost every single terminal value I have.
See the ‘Meaning’ section here.