I do disagree with C (compelling only from a certain stage of development) in that I think even once you have much deeper understanding, the higher levels of abstraction remain crucially important. Just because you understand electromagnetism really well and know the limits of conventional circuit theory (e.g. designing super duper tiny transistors), doesn’t mean you want to throw out circuit theory and just solve Maxwell’s equations everywhere—even if eventually sometimes you have to.
So maybe it would help if I was a little more specific about this point. When I’m saying “compelling” here I meant to point to something like both intellectually interesting and useful because it feels new and like it’s engaging with the edge of development. Stuff like this becomes uncompelling as one gains mastery, so I think I was trying to pass on the wisdom of my accumulated experience in this area from building, learning, using, and presenting models like this one and then, upon reconsidering, finding them limiting but having been useful at one point because I didn’t have access to any deeper details to help me along.
My objective in pointing this out is tied in with the next bit, so we’ll just go ahead and segue to that.
To be honest, I did bristle at some of the way things were phrased, but that’s on me. It felt like there was some kind of implication that I personally didn’t have any deeper understanding and that felt.
To be honest, there is an implication like that, based on what I’ve read here. I could maybe believe you intentionally didn’t address some of the deeper points you might understand about the details that I think are relevant, but if that were the case I would expect your footnotes and asides to address topics more about beliefs, preferences, and especially perception and less about those things munged together and rounded off to “motivation”. Instead I read this as your honest best effort to explain what’s going on with motivation, and I’m telling you I think there’s much more going on in directions much more fine-grained than those you seem to have explored, even in the references.
“Motivation” and “intention” are huge, confounded concepts that I believe can be broken apart, thinking of yourself as having a “motivation system” is another confusion, but unfortunately I’ve not worked out all the details well enough for myself that I’m happy to share my current state of partial knowledge in this area. Unfair, I admit, but it’s where I stand. All I can point to is there’s a bunch of stuff going on that can be reified into the concept of “motivation” and working with motivation as a concept will be helpful for a while but ultimately “motivation” doesn’t cut reality at the joints so thinking in those terms has to be largely abandoned to go further.
Should I have publicly passed judgement on you in the comments section? Probably not, but for some reason I already did so we’ll just have to deal with it now. Sorry about that.
My goal here is to be encouraging, however it might come across, and to make clear there is a way forward. As I said to another person recently when I responded in a similar way to something they said, I’ve been realizing a lot recently the ways in which I limited myself by thinking I understood things. I see in this work clues that you having an understanding similar to how I thought about motivation maybe 3 years ago, and maybe I would already have a ready-at-hand alternative if I hadn’t spent so much time thinking I had it right. So I want you to explain what you’ve figured out, I think your way of explaining what you have is going to be useful for others, I don’t want to say anything that might put you off either of those goals, and I also want to push you along so you don’t suffer the worst of all calamities: thinking you understand something!
I also think D (unlikely to help many people) is somewhat false, depending on what counts as “many people”. Another commenter felt this post was quite useful, someone else on FB found it rather revelationary, and I’d infer from those who I know of that several more benefited even if I don’t know of it directly. That’s beyond the inside view that abstraction/model presented can be applied already. mr-hire also states simpler ideas worked well for a really long time (though I’m not sure which simpler ideas or what counts as “brute force”.
Sure, I guess I was hoping to set expectations appropriately, since I know I’ve been let down many times broaching these topics with folks. Yes, there will always be some people who you manage to connect with in part because of what you write and in part because of where they are, i.e. they are ready to listen to what you have to say and have it click. They are the cherished folks with little enough dust in their eyes that you write for. But for every person you help, there are probably 20 more who will read this and for one reason or another it won’t connect the way you’d hope it would. They might not hate it, and might say they get it, but then they’ll just keep on doing what they were doing, not changing anything really, not really having gained any understanding. I was demoralized a lot by this, thinking it must have been me, until I figured out the base rate of success for this kind of thing is pretty low unless you’re tackling stuff way down at the bottom of the developmental ladder. I suspect, based on the quality of your explanation, that this post will perform better than average, but that to me probably means something like connecting with 7% of the people who read it instead of 5%.
If you don’t know that going in and depending on what your expectations are that can be pretty brutal when you realize it (especially if, unlike it sounds like for you, you focus more on the people it doesn’t work for that the people it does), and I feel like you did well enough on this post that you might do more and you deserve to know this in case it will affect your self-esteem and your likelihood of doing writing more things like this. Again, this is in the category of “things I wish someone had told me 5 years ago because then I wouldn’t have had to figure it out the hard way for myself”.
So maybe it would help if I was a little more specific about this point. When I’m saying “compelling” here I meant to point to something like both intellectually interesting and useful because it feels new and like it’s engaging with the edge of development. Stuff like this becomes uncompelling as one gains mastery, so I think I was trying to pass on the wisdom of my accumulated experience in this area from building, learning, using, and presenting models like this one and then, upon reconsidering, finding them limiting but having been useful at one point because I didn’t have access to any deeper details to help me along.
My objective in pointing this out is tied in with the next bit, so we’ll just go ahead and segue to that.
To be honest, there is an implication like that, based on what I’ve read here. I could maybe believe you intentionally didn’t address some of the deeper points you might understand about the details that I think are relevant, but if that were the case I would expect your footnotes and asides to address topics more about beliefs, preferences, and especially perception and less about those things munged together and rounded off to “motivation”. Instead I read this as your honest best effort to explain what’s going on with motivation, and I’m telling you I think there’s much more going on in directions much more fine-grained than those you seem to have explored, even in the references.
“Motivation” and “intention” are huge, confounded concepts that I believe can be broken apart, thinking of yourself as having a “motivation system” is another confusion, but unfortunately I’ve not worked out all the details well enough for myself that I’m happy to share my current state of partial knowledge in this area. Unfair, I admit, but it’s where I stand. All I can point to is there’s a bunch of stuff going on that can be reified into the concept of “motivation” and working with motivation as a concept will be helpful for a while but ultimately “motivation” doesn’t cut reality at the joints so thinking in those terms has to be largely abandoned to go further.
Should I have publicly passed judgement on you in the comments section? Probably not, but for some reason I already did so we’ll just have to deal with it now. Sorry about that.
My goal here is to be encouraging, however it might come across, and to make clear there is a way forward. As I said to another person recently when I responded in a similar way to something they said, I’ve been realizing a lot recently the ways in which I limited myself by thinking I understood things. I see in this work clues that you having an understanding similar to how I thought about motivation maybe 3 years ago, and maybe I would already have a ready-at-hand alternative if I hadn’t spent so much time thinking I had it right. So I want you to explain what you’ve figured out, I think your way of explaining what you have is going to be useful for others, I don’t want to say anything that might put you off either of those goals, and I also want to push you along so you don’t suffer the worst of all calamities: thinking you understand something!
Sure, I guess I was hoping to set expectations appropriately, since I know I’ve been let down many times broaching these topics with folks. Yes, there will always be some people who you manage to connect with in part because of what you write and in part because of where they are, i.e. they are ready to listen to what you have to say and have it click. They are the cherished folks with little enough dust in their eyes that you write for. But for every person you help, there are probably 20 more who will read this and for one reason or another it won’t connect the way you’d hope it would. They might not hate it, and might say they get it, but then they’ll just keep on doing what they were doing, not changing anything really, not really having gained any understanding. I was demoralized a lot by this, thinking it must have been me, until I figured out the base rate of success for this kind of thing is pretty low unless you’re tackling stuff way down at the bottom of the developmental ladder. I suspect, based on the quality of your explanation, that this post will perform better than average, but that to me probably means something like connecting with 7% of the people who read it instead of 5%.
If you don’t know that going in and depending on what your expectations are that can be pretty brutal when you realize it (especially if, unlike it sounds like for you, you focus more on the people it doesn’t work for that the people it does), and I feel like you did well enough on this post that you might do more and you deserve to know this in case it will affect your self-esteem and your likelihood of doing writing more things like this. Again, this is in the category of “things I wish someone had told me 5 years ago because then I wouldn’t have had to figure it out the hard way for myself”.