I think this is the best, mostly clearly and accurately written explanation of this insight to appear within the rationalsphere so far. Most of us, myselfdefinitelyincluded, have focused our explanations largely on narrow ways to approach this point without doing justice to the breadth of it, and I’m not really sure why we’ve all done that, though my guess is we focus too much on our own entry points, and possibly you’ve done the same but your way into the insight happened to be one that naturally admits a general explanation. Either way, kudos.
That said, this wouldn’t be a very LessWrongy comment if I didn’t have few, possibly antithetical, things to say about it.
First, I agree that you get the model right, but it’s a model that is only very compelling from a certain stage of development, my strongest evidence being it was once very compelling to me and now it’s more like the kind of understanding I would have if I was asked to manifest my understanding without explaining below a certain level of detail, and the other being I think I’ve seen a similar pattern of discovering this and then focusing on other thing in the writing of others. That doesn’t make any of it wrong or not useful, but it does suggest it’s rather limited, as I think fellow commenter Romeo also points out. That is, what’s going on here is much deeper than it appears to you, and if you keep pushing to explain the opaque parts of this model (like, “where do the beliefs that power motivations come from?” and “why do you even prefer one thing to another?”) you’ll see it explode apart in a way that will make you go “oh, I had it right, but I didn’t really understand it before” the same way you might think you understand how any complex system like a watch or a computer program works until you start literally looking at the gears or electrical currents and then say “oh, I’m amazed I even had such good understanding before given how little I really understood”.
I say this not because I want to show off how great I am, even if it seems that way, but because I think you’re on the path and want to make it absolutely clear to you that you made progress and that there’s much, much deeper to go, whether you pursue that now or later. I say this too because I wish someone had said it to me sooner, as I might have wasted less time being complacent.
Second, just to set expectations, it’s unfortunately unlikely that having this model will actually help many people. Yes, it will definitely help some who are ready to see it, but years of trying to explain my insights has taught me that one of the great frustrations is that fundamental insights come in a particular order, they build on each other, and the deeper you go the smaller the audience of people explaining your insights to will help. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, as I think anyone who figures these thing out can attest because we’ve all had both the experience of reading or hearing something of someone else’s insight that helped us along and of figuring something out and then helping others see it through our explanations, but it also means we’re going to spend a lot of time writing things that people just won’t be ready to appreciate yet when they read it. Again, this is a pattern it took me a long while to accept, and once I understood what was going on I overcame much of my previous feelings that I was misunderstanding things despite clear evidence to the contrary because when I tried to explain my understanding it often was met with confusion, misunderstanding, or hostility (my Hegelian writing style not withstanding).
I very much look forward to seeing part 2, and hope it ends up helping many people towards gaining better understanding of how motivations work!
Thanks! It’s encouraging words like those which keep me writing.
I’d say one of the things I attempt to do with my writing (and in my thinking too) is clarify the foundations sufficiently clearly that you can never forget them and therefore always apply them appropriately. I find that points that initially feel obvious to me are actually still a bit murky, haven’t been fully absorbed, and therefore I don’t actually use them or appreciate their many applications. Getting clear and accurate explanations (just for myself) makes them accessible enough to my mind that become a lot more useful.
A further benefit and the original reason I found myself doing this style of writing is that clear foundations allow you then to express more complicated, profound, nuanced pieces within a solid context. Being clear on the foundations, at least for me, makes all the more advanced pieces fall into place and seem much more necessary than if I had them on their own. Gives you a framework to hang things on. The make your champion stronger vs make the competition weaker is an example of this.
The overall result is a bunch of writing that doesn’t register as particularly profound, but is very clear. Or so I’ve been told.
My entry point for this is actually thinking and writing about planning. I’ve been writing something of a sequence/book on planning and any practical planning book for humans would benefit greatly from a decent treatment of motivation (and planning around it). The insights/models in this post arose naturally from that context.
With that background, I think I can explain why I disagree with many of your points.
First, I agree that you get the model right, but it’s a model that is only very compelling from a certain stage of development, my strongest evidence being it was once very compelling to me and now it’s more like the kind of understanding I would have if I was asked to manifest my understanding without explaining below a certain level of detail, and the other being I think I’ve seen a similar pattern of discovering this and then focusing on other thing in the writing of others. That doesn’t make any of it wrong or not useful, but it does suggest it’s rather limited, as I think fellow commenter Romeo also points out. That is, what’s going on here is much deeper than it appears to you, and if you keep pushing to explain the opaque parts of this model (like, “where do the beliefs that power motivations come from?” and “why do you even prefer one thing to another?”) you’ll see it explode apart in a way that will make you go “oh, I had it right, but I didn’t really understand it before” the same way you might think you understand how any complex system like a watch or a computer program works until you start literally looking at the gears or electrical currents and then say “oh, I’m amazed I even had such good understanding before given how little I really understood”.
The insights in the post exist at a certain level of abstraction, as you say, it doesn’t manifest understanding below a certain level of detail. That’s quite intentional. I disagree that it is only compelling from a certain stage of development or is rather limited. Far from it.
I’ve been aware of underlying details (just see the references) for a lot longer than I’ve appreciated the high-level general points here because I think the lower-level points easily obscure the higher-level picture. This is perhaps related to your assertion that other writers haven’t done justice to the breadth of the ideas here. If you can’t stop thinking about transistors, you will find it hard to focus on and fully appreciate the boolean algebra you’re executing on your logic gates made out of transistors. It’d be even harder to teach someone to understand boolean algebra (let’s say minimizing digital circuits) if you want them to keep transistor operation in mind at all times. And if your abstractions are tight (not leaky) enough, you actually don’t need to understand the underlying complexity for them to be useful. Transistors and logic gates are human design though. A better example might be understanding evolutionary selection processes. If you can’t abstract away from the biological implementation of sexual reproduction for a few minutes, you’re likely to miss the higher-level picture of why sexual reproduction is even a thing. What problem was it trying to solve and what does it imply for the the implementation?
In this context though. Hmm. I think the insights/models here aren’t sufficient own their own to help you manage your motivation well, and perhaps that’s your point. The original post had to split into two parts because adding in the further models needed was going to balloon out the post to six thousand words easily. If you’re point is “there isn’t enough detail here to be practically useful”, that’s kind of true.
A major hope for this piece is that if you appreciate the abstraction at this level, you will understand why all the lower-level pieces look how they look. Many people have created lists of anti-akrasia/motivation-enhancing techniques and also highly-detailed reviews of how motivation work (just see Luke’s review). A goal with this post is that you see enough of the general picture that it is clear why various motivation-techniques work and when they’re needed. If I launched into talking about Hebbian learning and prospect theory, I assert you’d probably miss the very design problem that its heart the mind/motivation system is trying to solve. Hence holding off on that lower-level for other posts.
Second, just to set expectations, it’s unfortunately unlikely that having this model will actually help many people. Yes, it will definitely help some who are ready to see it, but years of trying to explain my insights has taught me that one of the great frustrations is that fundamental insights come in a particular order, they build on each other, and the deeper you go the smaller the audience of people explaining your insights to will help.
I think I’m more optimistic than you about communicating ideas, though perhaps I’m just sufficiently early in writing “career” to be naive. I’m working on the premise that sufficiently clear explanations delivered systemically in the write order can recreate in the minds of others much of the understanding you have in your own mind. That does require people are willing to invest the time, but I think people do invest in reading writing that is sufficiently enjoyable and valuable-seeming.
>If you can’t stop thinking about transistors, you will find it hard to focus on and fully appreciate the boolean algebra you’re executing on your logic gates made out of transistors.
I think the point Gordon was making was the opposite. you’ve described a leaky abstraction of logic gates that works at a base level, but that doesn’t hold muster when you actually look at the transistors.
For me for instance, a basic strategy of “make the alternatives I endorse really easy and highly rewarding, and the alternatives I don’t really hard and highly punishing” worked really really well for me for a long time, and was sufficient to overcome some of my most obvious bottlenecks.
However, that kind of thinking actively became harmful at a certain point in my development, when I hit diminishing returns on brute forcing my motivation system (I encountered problems that couldn’t be brute forced that way, and these problems were my bottlenecks) and had to take a step back to understand what was actually going on, understanding my internal parts, belief orientations and awareness, etc.
And if your abstractions are tight (not leaky) enough, you actually don’t need to understand the underlying complexity for them to be useful.
This sounds like the crux of the disagreement: I think no abstraction is sufficiently non-leaky that you don’t (eventually) need to understand more of the underlying complexity within the context I see this post sitting in, which is the context of what we might call cognitive, personal, psychological, or personal development (or to put it in non-standard term, the skill of being human). Unless your purpose is only to unlock a little of what you can potentially do as a human and not all of it, every abstraction is eventually a hindrance to progress, even if it is a skillful hinderance during certain phases along the path that helps you progress until it doesn’t.
For what it’s worth, I also suspect the biggest hurdle we have to overcome to make progress on being better at being humans is gaining enough cognitive capacity to handle more complex, multi-layered abstractions at once, i.e. to see both the machine and the gears at the same time. Put another way, it’s gaining the ability to not simply abstract “away” details but to see the details and the abstraction all at once, and then do this again and again with more layers of abstractions and more fine-grained details.
Hmm, I’d like to step back and tally the different claims that have been surfaced so we can at least be clear where we disagree, even if we don’t end up agreeing. Among the claims:
A: Abstractions are sometimes useful.
B: Abstractions eventually break down and the underlying complexity needs to be understood for further usefulness.
C: The abstraction in my post is only compelling from a certain stage of development / it’s limited (but this assertion was accompanied by the statement that this doesn’t mean it was wrong or useful).
D: The abstraction in my post is unlikely to help many people.
E: The particular abstraction in my post is leaky, is limited, and can become harmful after a certain point in development.
F: That abstractions are indispensable and are needed to guide understanding even when you dip to lower layers.
G: That it’s harmful to always be trying to look at lower levels of abstraction without higher levels.
H. That not understanding lower levels means that you don’t understand very much at all.
That’s not every assertion, but it’s maybe enough to start getting some clarity. I think that Gordon, mr-hire, and myself all agree on A and B broadly, though we might disagree on where the line is drawn for each. Gordon, you write:
This sounds like the crux of the disagreement: I think no abstraction is sufficiently non-leaky that you don’t (eventually) need to understand more of the underlying complexity within the context I see this post sitting in, which is the context of what we might call cognitive, personal, psychological, or personal development (or to put it in non-standard term, the skill of being human). Unless your purpose is only to unlock a little of what you can potentially do as a human and not all of it, every abstraction is eventually a hindrance to progress, even if it is a skillful hinderance during certain phases along the path that helps you progress until it doesn’t.
I mean, I wouldn’t disagree with that in general. Though I think a lot of work is being done by the word “eventually” and “sufficiently non-leaky”. I think there are contexts where you get away without needing to go all the way deep. Most (I would think overwhelming majority) of people who code don’t know assembly and certainly don’t understand how logic gates are implemented—and this is pretty fine 99.99% of the time.
It is fair to say that the abstraction/model in my post is not nearly as good as the abstraction of high-level computer languages. That’s true. I mean, actually it breaks pretty quickly. Part 2 of this post will dive deeper. Nonetheless, I do think it’s quite useful even if one don’t read further. Gordon, I’m unclear what your stance is—you first state that it’s useful and then state that it’s unlikely to help many people, so I’m not sure of your actual thought.
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.
I don’t disagree that you need more detail for a lot of applications. As mentioned, this unfortunately couldn’t make it into the first single post. As I wrote:
Saying that motivation is a matter of winning in the moment is all very good, but how does one actually do that?
Unfortunately, a proper treatment of this not-so-small topic will make this past far too long and instead requires its own post (Motivation Part 2: How to Win, coming soon to a screen near you!). Nonetheless, I can offer a high-level summary here:
But again, I don’t think what was presented here stops being compelling later on.
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”.
Back to B (abstractions break down, eventually become a hindrance). Definitely agree here.
I think if your initial comment, Gordon, had been something like:
I think this model/abstraction is correct and useful to an extent, but I want to flag that it is just a very high-level abstraction which is missing a lot of the very messy detail that is relevant (and quite necessary) detail for this domain. It’ll help you on it’s own at a certain stage, but after that you’ll need more.
Then I wouldn’t have disagreed at all. I think the disagreement might mostly be around a) how quickly abstractions break down, b) how much you still need them even once you understand.
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.
That is, what’s going on here is much deeper than it appears to you, and if you keep pushing to explain the opaque parts of this model (like, “where do the beliefs that power motivations come from?” and “why do you even prefer one thing to another?”) you’ll see it explode apart in a way that will make you go “oh, I had it right, but I didn’t really understand it before” the same way you might think you understand how any complex system like a watch or a computer program works until you start literally looking at the gears or electrical currents and then say “oh, I’m amazed I even had such good understanding before given how little I really understood”.
This felt a like sleight since I think the post references much more detailed resources and even flags in the opening lines that what’s presented is the “crudest simplification”. Yet quite possibly you were addressing the hypothetical reader rather than me. But even if not, still shouldn’t let that influence my response too much. The additionals words of caution about the limitation of abstractions (especially here) are worthwhile. I regret perhaps that because of these very long comments, readers might not see this point and our overall agreement on it.
Hmm, I do think the thing I haven’t addressed here is more on my stance that better abstractions and better understanding of abstractions (something I think is neglected in the domain of self-understand and self-improvement) is actually key to using lower-level understanding more systematically and in a less ad-hoc way. Perhaps save that for another very long comment :P
By the way, thanks for engaging so much. Don’t think I’ve ever dived into such a detailed discussion.
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”.
I’m very much interested in the object level of this post, and want to return to that.
To be more explicit about the levels of development here.
At some point, I was all about pragmatics. Every single thing change I could make that made me more likely to take my endorsed actions and less likely to take my unendorsed actions was used. I had a Pavlok. I used Beeminder. I had blocking software. I used social pressure when it helped and avoided it when it didn’t. I reframed my beliefs to be more powerful. Comfort zone expansion was my default—when something scared me, I felt the fear and did it anyway. I even used techniques that would become central in the next stage of development—looking at beliefs, using introspection, using mindfulness and being in the moment—but the framing of it was all in the idea of a big pragmatic “use the things that make me more likely to take my intended actions.”
At some point, this type of thinking just hit a brick wall. It led me to crashes, where I would follow my endorsed actions for months, and then crash, unable to force myself to go forward even with all of the pragmatic motivation tools I had set up. It also caused me to get myself into trouble one too many times—one too many subconscious Chesterton fences that I ignored in the pursuit of taking the action that was “obviously correct.”
It became clear that there was something being missed in the simple piling on of pragmatic motivational tools. At this point, it became necessary to delve deeper into the relation between subconscious beliefs and actions taken. Introspection became very important. Understanding how tools like mindfulness related to how I oriented to my internal beliefs. Tools like the part’s model became much more useful, and understanding the good that came from situations became important. I started seeing the previous motivational tools as “brute forcing”, trying to go against the grain of the more fundamental influences of beliefs, parts, belief orientations. I used them more sparingly, surgically, here and there as tools to shape beliefs and get things done pragmatically, while being aware of the pitfalls.
Hopefully that gives a bit of more clear picture of where I (and I suspect Gordon) am coming from.
Thanks for the elaboration. Yes, I see what you mean by brute force, and I also see how my post might be read to be advising an approach similar to what you described. I don’t know whether a pragmatic approach like that is a good developmental stage to go through? Maybe for a bit, but I’m not sure.
If the post didn’t shed any light on how a brute force approach is not the only option and not necessarily the best, I think it’s because I forgot that someone might approach motivation in that way. Only reading your description brought it back into my mind.
Go back five to six years I did have a phase when I was very big on “discipline”, I certainly tried to muster willpower to make myself do things—but it was never that successful or systematized. Around the time I did begin making more serious efforts to be productive I was already engaged with CFAR, reading mindingourway.com, and generally being coached into an approach of non-willpower-reliance and non-self-coercion. Yet it must have been long enough ago that I think I’d forgotten that there’s a very a natural approach to motivation where you pile on productivity tricks in a not quite sustainable/healthy way.
So, thanks for pointing that all out. That’s a good reminder.
For the public record, I think ideal motivation is attained when you have something resembling a state of harmony in your mind and with yourself. You might take actions to make actions seem more attractive and/or do things to decrease temptation, but it isn’t coercive or depleting. This is difficult to achieve and requires a lot introspection, self-awareness, resolving inner conflicts, etc., etc. If you’re doing it right, you’re not suffering. You don’t crash. It doesn’t feel like you’re coercing yourself.
It’s possible I should have stated something like that in the post itself.
I still think there’s cruxes there that you’re not seeing. My approach just accentuated the problems of looking at things at the level of a motivation system, they’re still there even if you have the idea of harmony… they stick until you realize that the harmony is the thing, and the motivation system analogy is just crudely approximating that. (of course, I’m sure the harmony is just crudely approximating something even more fundamental). Note that this is the same thing that stuck out to me during your ACT presentation—missing that the harmony was the thing, not the ability to take actions.
I don’t think there’s much much more of a gap that can be bridged here, at least not with my skills. I won’t be replying anymore but I appreciate you engaging :).
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”.
I think this is the best, mostly clearly and accurately written explanation of this insight to appear within the rationalsphere so far. Most of us, myself definitely included, have focused our explanations largely on narrow ways to approach this point without doing justice to the breadth of it, and I’m not really sure why we’ve all done that, though my guess is we focus too much on our own entry points, and possibly you’ve done the same but your way into the insight happened to be one that naturally admits a general explanation. Either way, kudos.
That said, this wouldn’t be a very LessWrongy comment if I didn’t have few, possibly antithetical, things to say about it.
First, I agree that you get the model right, but it’s a model that is only very compelling from a certain stage of development, my strongest evidence being it was once very compelling to me and now it’s more like the kind of understanding I would have if I was asked to manifest my understanding without explaining below a certain level of detail, and the other being I think I’ve seen a similar pattern of discovering this and then focusing on other thing in the writing of others. That doesn’t make any of it wrong or not useful, but it does suggest it’s rather limited, as I think fellow commenter Romeo also points out. That is, what’s going on here is much deeper than it appears to you, and if you keep pushing to explain the opaque parts of this model (like, “where do the beliefs that power motivations come from?” and “why do you even prefer one thing to another?”) you’ll see it explode apart in a way that will make you go “oh, I had it right, but I didn’t really understand it before” the same way you might think you understand how any complex system like a watch or a computer program works until you start literally looking at the gears or electrical currents and then say “oh, I’m amazed I even had such good understanding before given how little I really understood”.
I say this not because I want to show off how great I am, even if it seems that way, but because I think you’re on the path and want to make it absolutely clear to you that you made progress and that there’s much, much deeper to go, whether you pursue that now or later. I say this too because I wish someone had said it to me sooner, as I might have wasted less time being complacent.
Second, just to set expectations, it’s unfortunately unlikely that having this model will actually help many people. Yes, it will definitely help some who are ready to see it, but years of trying to explain my insights has taught me that one of the great frustrations is that fundamental insights come in a particular order, they build on each other, and the deeper you go the smaller the audience of people explaining your insights to will help. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, as I think anyone who figures these thing out can attest because we’ve all had both the experience of reading or hearing something of someone else’s insight that helped us along and of figuring something out and then helping others see it through our explanations, but it also means we’re going to spend a lot of time writing things that people just won’t be ready to appreciate yet when they read it. Again, this is a pattern it took me a long while to accept, and once I understood what was going on I overcame much of my previous feelings that I was misunderstanding things despite clear evidence to the contrary because when I tried to explain my understanding it often was met with confusion, misunderstanding, or hostility (my Hegelian writing style not withstanding).
I very much look forward to seeing part 2, and hope it ends up helping many people towards gaining better understanding of how motivations work!
Thanks! It’s encouraging words like those which keep me writing.
I’d say one of the things I attempt to do with my writing (and in my thinking too) is clarify the foundations sufficiently clearly that you can never forget them and therefore always apply them appropriately. I find that points that initially feel obvious to me are actually still a bit murky, haven’t been fully absorbed, and therefore I don’t actually use them or appreciate their many applications. Getting clear and accurate explanations (just for myself) makes them accessible enough to my mind that become a lot more useful.
A further benefit and the original reason I found myself doing this style of writing is that clear foundations allow you then to express more complicated, profound, nuanced pieces within a solid context. Being clear on the foundations, at least for me, makes all the more advanced pieces fall into place and seem much more necessary than if I had them on their own. Gives you a framework to hang things on. The make your champion stronger vs make the competition weaker is an example of this.
The overall result is a bunch of writing that doesn’t register as particularly profound, but is very clear. Or so I’ve been told.
My entry point for this is actually thinking and writing about planning. I’ve been writing something of a sequence/book on planning and any practical planning book for humans would benefit greatly from a decent treatment of motivation (and planning around it). The insights/models in this post arose naturally from that context.
With that background, I think I can explain why I disagree with many of your points.
The insights in the post exist at a certain level of abstraction, as you say, it doesn’t manifest understanding below a certain level of detail. That’s quite intentional. I disagree that it is only compelling from a certain stage of development or is rather limited. Far from it.
I’ve been aware of underlying details (just see the references) for a lot longer than I’ve appreciated the high-level general points here because I think the lower-level points easily obscure the higher-level picture. This is perhaps related to your assertion that other writers haven’t done justice to the breadth of the ideas here. If you can’t stop thinking about transistors, you will find it hard to focus on and fully appreciate the boolean algebra you’re executing on your logic gates made out of transistors. It’d be even harder to teach someone to understand boolean algebra (let’s say minimizing digital circuits) if you want them to keep transistor operation in mind at all times. And if your abstractions are tight (not leaky) enough, you actually don’t need to understand the underlying complexity for them to be useful. Transistors and logic gates are human design though. A better example might be understanding evolutionary selection processes. If you can’t abstract away from the biological implementation of sexual reproduction for a few minutes, you’re likely to miss the higher-level picture of why sexual reproduction is even a thing. What problem was it trying to solve and what does it imply for the the implementation?
In this context though. Hmm. I think the insights/models here aren’t sufficient own their own to help you manage your motivation well, and perhaps that’s your point. The original post had to split into two parts because adding in the further models needed was going to balloon out the post to six thousand words easily. If you’re point is “there isn’t enough detail here to be practically useful”, that’s kind of true.
A major hope for this piece is that if you appreciate the abstraction at this level, you will understand why all the lower-level pieces look how they look. Many people have created lists of anti-akrasia/motivation-enhancing techniques and also highly-detailed reviews of how motivation work (just see Luke’s review). A goal with this post is that you see enough of the general picture that it is clear why various motivation-techniques work and when they’re needed. If I launched into talking about Hebbian learning and prospect theory, I assert you’d probably miss the very design problem that its heart the mind/motivation system is trying to solve. Hence holding off on that lower-level for other posts.
I think I’m more optimistic than you about communicating ideas, though perhaps I’m just sufficiently early in writing “career” to be naive. I’m working on the premise that sufficiently clear explanations delivered systemically in the write order can recreate in the minds of others much of the understanding you have in your own mind. That does require people are willing to invest the time, but I think people do invest in reading writing that is sufficiently enjoyable and valuable-seeming.
>If you can’t stop thinking about transistors, you will find it hard to focus on and fully appreciate the boolean algebra you’re executing on your logic gates made out of transistors.
I think the point Gordon was making was the opposite. you’ve described a leaky abstraction of logic gates that works at a base level, but that doesn’t hold muster when you actually look at the transistors.
For me for instance, a basic strategy of “make the alternatives I endorse really easy and highly rewarding, and the alternatives I don’t really hard and highly punishing” worked really really well for me for a long time, and was sufficient to overcome some of my most obvious bottlenecks.
However, that kind of thinking actively became harmful at a certain point in my development, when I hit diminishing returns on brute forcing my motivation system (I encountered problems that couldn’t be brute forced that way, and these problems were my bottlenecks) and had to take a step back to understand what was actually going on, understanding my internal parts, belief orientations and awareness, etc.
This sounds like the crux of the disagreement: I think no abstraction is sufficiently non-leaky that you don’t (eventually) need to understand more of the underlying complexity within the context I see this post sitting in, which is the context of what we might call cognitive, personal, psychological, or personal development (or to put it in non-standard term, the skill of being human). Unless your purpose is only to unlock a little of what you can potentially do as a human and not all of it, every abstraction is eventually a hindrance to progress, even if it is a skillful hinderance during certain phases along the path that helps you progress until it doesn’t.
For what it’s worth, I also suspect the biggest hurdle we have to overcome to make progress on being better at being humans is gaining enough cognitive capacity to handle more complex, multi-layered abstractions at once, i.e. to see both the machine and the gears at the same time. Put another way, it’s gaining the ability to not simply abstract “away” details but to see the details and the abstraction all at once, and then do this again and again with more layers of abstractions and more fine-grained details.
Hmm, I’d like to step back and tally the different claims that have been surfaced so we can at least be clear where we disagree, even if we don’t end up agreeing. Among the claims:
A: Abstractions are sometimes useful.
B: Abstractions eventually break down and the underlying complexity needs to be understood for further usefulness.
C: The abstraction in my post is only compelling from a certain stage of development / it’s limited (but this assertion was accompanied by the statement that this doesn’t mean it was wrong or useful).
D: The abstraction in my post is unlikely to help many people.
E: The particular abstraction in my post is leaky, is limited, and can become harmful after a certain point in development.
F: That abstractions are indispensable and are needed to guide understanding even when you dip to lower layers.
G: That it’s harmful to always be trying to look at lower levels of abstraction without higher levels.
H. That not understanding lower levels means that you don’t understand very much at all.
That’s not every assertion, but it’s maybe enough to start getting some clarity. I think that Gordon, mr-hire, and myself all agree on A and B broadly, though we might disagree on where the line is drawn for each. Gordon, you write:
I mean, I wouldn’t disagree with that in general. Though I think a lot of work is being done by the word “eventually” and “sufficiently non-leaky”. I think there are contexts where you get away without needing to go all the way deep. Most (I would think overwhelming majority) of people who code don’t know assembly and certainly don’t understand how logic gates are implemented—and this is pretty fine 99.99% of the time.
It is fair to say that the abstraction/model in my post is not nearly as good as the abstraction of high-level computer languages. That’s true. I mean, actually it breaks pretty quickly. Part 2 of this post will dive deeper. Nonetheless, I do think it’s quite useful even if one don’t read further. Gordon, I’m unclear what your stance is—you first state that it’s useful and then state that it’s unlikely to help many people, so I’m not sure of your actual thought.
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.
I don’t disagree that you need more detail for a lot of applications. As mentioned, this unfortunately couldn’t make it into the first single post. As I wrote:
But again, I don’t think what was presented here stops being compelling later on.
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”.
Back to B (abstractions break down, eventually become a hindrance). Definitely agree here.
I think if your initial comment, Gordon, had been something like:
Then I wouldn’t have disagreed at all. I think the disagreement might mostly be around a) how quickly abstractions break down, b) how much you still need them even once you understand.
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.
This felt a like sleight since I think the post references much more detailed resources and even flags in the opening lines that what’s presented is the “crudest simplification”. Yet quite possibly you were addressing the hypothetical reader rather than me. But even if not, still shouldn’t let that influence my response too much. The additionals words of caution about the limitation of abstractions (especially here) are worthwhile. I regret perhaps that because of these very long comments, readers might not see this point and our overall agreement on it.
Hmm, I do think the thing I haven’t addressed here is more on my stance that better abstractions and better understanding of abstractions (something I think is neglected in the domain of self-understand and self-improvement) is actually key to using lower-level understanding more systematically and in a less ad-hoc way. Perhaps save that for another very long comment :P
By the way, thanks for engaging so much. Don’t think I’ve ever dived into such a detailed discussion.
I’m very much interested in the object level of this post, and want to return to that.
To be more explicit about the levels of development here.
At some point, I was all about pragmatics. Every single thing change I could make that made me more likely to take my endorsed actions and less likely to take my unendorsed actions was used. I had a Pavlok. I used Beeminder. I had blocking software. I used social pressure when it helped and avoided it when it didn’t. I reframed my beliefs to be more powerful. Comfort zone expansion was my default—when something scared me, I felt the fear and did it anyway. I even used techniques that would become central in the next stage of development—looking at beliefs, using introspection, using mindfulness and being in the moment—but the framing of it was all in the idea of a big pragmatic “use the things that make me more likely to take my intended actions.”
At some point, this type of thinking just hit a brick wall. It led me to crashes, where I would follow my endorsed actions for months, and then crash, unable to force myself to go forward even with all of the pragmatic motivation tools I had set up. It also caused me to get myself into trouble one too many times—one too many subconscious Chesterton fences that I ignored in the pursuit of taking the action that was “obviously correct.”
It became clear that there was something being missed in the simple piling on of pragmatic motivational tools. At this point, it became necessary to delve deeper into the relation between subconscious beliefs and actions taken. Introspection became very important. Understanding how tools like mindfulness related to how I oriented to my internal beliefs. Tools like the part’s model became much more useful, and understanding the good that came from situations became important. I started seeing the previous motivational tools as “brute forcing”, trying to go against the grain of the more fundamental influences of beliefs, parts, belief orientations. I used them more sparingly, surgically, here and there as tools to shape beliefs and get things done pragmatically, while being aware of the pitfalls.
Hopefully that gives a bit of more clear picture of where I (and I suspect Gordon) am coming from.
Edit: This post gives some more explicit pointers towards my current model, although it’s obviously a bit behind: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mFvuQTzHQiBCDEKw6/a-framework-for-internal-debugging
Thanks for the elaboration. Yes, I see what you mean by brute force, and I also see how my post might be read to be advising an approach similar to what you described. I don’t know whether a pragmatic approach like that is a good developmental stage to go through? Maybe for a bit, but I’m not sure.
If the post didn’t shed any light on how a brute force approach is not the only option and not necessarily the best, I think it’s because I forgot that someone might approach motivation in that way. Only reading your description brought it back into my mind.
Go back five to six years I did have a phase when I was very big on “discipline”, I certainly tried to muster willpower to make myself do things—but it was never that successful or systematized. Around the time I did begin making more serious efforts to be productive I was already engaged with CFAR, reading mindingourway.com, and generally being coached into an approach of non-willpower-reliance and non-self-coercion. Yet it must have been long enough ago that I think I’d forgotten that there’s a very a natural approach to motivation where you pile on productivity tricks in a not quite sustainable/healthy way.
So, thanks for pointing that all out. That’s a good reminder.
For the public record, I think ideal motivation is attained when you have something resembling a state of harmony in your mind and with yourself. You might take actions to make actions seem more attractive and/or do things to decrease temptation, but it isn’t coercive or depleting. This is difficult to achieve and requires a lot introspection, self-awareness, resolving inner conflicts, etc., etc. If you’re doing it right, you’re not suffering. You don’t crash. It doesn’t feel like you’re coercing yourself.
It’s possible I should have stated something like that in the post itself.
I still think there’s cruxes there that you’re not seeing. My approach just accentuated the problems of looking at things at the level of a motivation system, they’re still there even if you have the idea of harmony… they stick until you realize that the harmony is the thing, and the motivation system analogy is just crudely approximating that. (of course, I’m sure the harmony is just crudely approximating something even more fundamental). Note that this is the same thing that stuck out to me during your ACT presentation—missing that the harmony was the thing, not the ability to take actions.
I don’t think there’s much much more of a gap that can be bridged here, at least not with my skills. I won’t be replying anymore but I appreciate you engaging :).
No worries! Maybe we can get to the bottom of it another time, maybe another place. :)
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”.