I think writing is in general helping me understand things about the world, often things about myself and processing emotions around ethics, effective altruism, work vs play, (and death and grief, so much omg), but also things like “how can a group of people coordinate to make rational decisions in response to confusing and fraught situations”. Interestingly, the parts of my fic that are most explicitly about understanding-the-world, like the politics or the parts that required me to read a bunch of Arbital AI safety stuff for research, are generally the least flow-y? That often feels like a thing I am doing to get to the shiny, and given that I’m doing it I should do it right, but it’s not necessarily the shiniest thing.
I think sometimes I’m practicing a skill that I already have by making the characters go through a scenario where they need it, and this ends up being pretty satisfying (I have been nerdsniped into doing so much logistics for fictional battles.) Probably writing fictional medical emergencies is satisfying for this reason too?
(It’s maybe slightly wireheading a desire-to-understand-the-world-and-people by creating a miniature world and people that I can understand perfectly by definition because I created them? Like, I find fantasy worldbuilding super shiny even though it’s literally not about our world. Maybe I feel on some level like I’m learning model-building-in-general? I sort of expect my deep attentional processes to not be that effectively oriented towards learning, though.)
I think it also is a social thing, in that I have a group of ~10 beta readers with whom I’ve become much closer friends as a result of writing this and their reading it, and a piece of the shininess is when I’m imagining how much a particular person will like a scene (when I finally finish writing the next book and send it out to my betas, anyway, so there’s a big delay, but I can imagine the deliciousness of them reading it later and get dopamine hits now). Sometimes I’ve also written stuff
It also just feels satisfying to make something exist, I think, to draw it out of my head in exactly the form I want– I remember getting into the same kind of flow drawing pictures or composing music, which have much less “content”, and I even get some of the thing from singing.
It also just feels satisfying to make something exist, I think, to draw it out of my head in exactly the form I want– I remember getting into the same kind of flow drawing pictures or composing music, which have much less “content”, and I even get some of the thing from singing.
I no longer feel this way about things, but the strong desire to make things exist because I can and it’s cool is definitely what motivated me to become a programmer. Over years I just kept at it because it was SO COOL to make the computer do what I told it, and I had all these daydreams about what I would make the computer do next. Now that it feels like there is nothing computable I can’t in principle make a computer do, it’s kind of boring on its own.
Very interesting comments, any thoughts on how you might make a certain activity compelling again? Would explicitly framing an activity such that it highlights a particularly important feedback loop be worthwhile? Minimising the impact/importance of your other desired loops?
Do you believe a manipulation like this is possible or do you think it would have to organically align with the types of loops you deem to be necessary at the time?
Just thinking from the point of, say, getting back into the gym...compelling myself to go seems to be overrided by other loops, at least until the point where my health has sufficiently declined to warrant a re-prioritisation.
So I don’t think you can go back to the way things were. The kind of thing I’m describing causing these changes is a thing that once seen cannot be unseen. You might say there’s no blue pill for the kind of change of relationship to reality that made something cease to be a super powerful motivator.
What I do think you can do is find new way to do the things you did before, if they make sense to do where you are now.
To take your case of the gym, maybe in the past you went because it was super stimulating in that you were constantly satisfying many set points at once and were minimizing prediction error, possibly strongly in the form of taking actions to bring your model of yourself in line with your observations of yourself via changing your observations by changing your body so that they matched the model. Or maybe it was some other specific predictions powering things.
If that’s fallen away for some reason and you want to go back to the gym, I can think of at least two questions:
Do you really want to be going to the gym, or do you just want to want to go to the gym?
If you really want to go to the gym, why don’t you?
I think failures of motivation often come from mixing up genuine wanting with wanting to want (and then suffering because you think you want something and then you don’t do it because you don’t realize you don’t really want it). If that’s the case, the problem is you are not convinced going to the gym is worthwhile. Maybe it’s not for you, I don’t know; I heard all the arguments and didn’t start going to the gym regularly (twice a week) until I was reminded a few years ago that I could go to the climbing gym and just climb walls instead of “working out” and since I find climbing fun (something we could expand but I’ll leave be for now) it made gym going appealing and even “working out” like strength training desirable since it makes me better at and have more fun climbing. To return to the gym you probably need something similar that makes it viscerally appealing.
Excellent reply, strong upvote. Have a feeling I really want to go to the gym but because nutrition is poor (not eating enough), my gym feedback loops have been spiralling downward to the point where I have given up.
Will certainly look into how to make my nutrition more compelling now, perhaps that means learning to cook better or something similar. Very much appreciate your comment and may actually look at looking more deeply into this idea, maybe I will turn it into a blog post.
Edit: In the spirit or learning this idea more deeply, I am very interested in anything else you would be willing to disclose about what it is that was your turning point for stopping finding Civilisation enjoyable—feel free to send me a message if willing (no pressure whatsoever)
Oh, the answer to that is pretty esoteric, which is why I was vague about it. I’ll just say here that I attained to what I would call second path, but also identify with Kegan stage 5 or the “teal” level of development.
I could imagine an intersection between the thing Gordon’s saying about learning stuff, but also flow, where people get into flow states easiest when the difficult is juuust in that narrow range between “challenging, but doable at your current skillset.”
Like, solving a particularly hard puzzle is rewarding. But I don’t get into flowstates doing it. But puzzles that are hard-but-consistently-doable I might get into flow more easily.
So: “how can a group of people coordinate to make rational decisions in response to confusing and fraught situations” might be something that’s hard-enough-you-to-be-REAL-challenging instead of ‘flow-state-level-challenging.’
(You could potentially also map the “my friend will really love this part” thing into Gordon’s model. I think Gordon’s model predicts that you’d stop finding that rewarding if you hit a point where you were able to do that effortlessly all the time, because it’s no longer an interesting learning challenge)
I think I am not actually in flow the majority of the time I’m writing? Like, I get very rare periods where I lose track of time and suddenly it’s the end of the day and 10K words have appeared, and I get shorter snippets of forgetting-the-outside-world, but in the second-to-second timescale there’s often a feeling of effort and of deliberately staying on task. It just seems to be overall reinforcing enough that I will continue to block out time to do it and throw myself at getting through the hard parts, even if it’s been effortful and not felt rewarding in realtime for days or weeks. (I think this has happened more and more as I’ve gotten further into my fanfic, actually, because I’m writing situations that are harder to model.)
Probably another factor is that when I am sufficiently deep in writingmode, not writing is kind of painful and getting it off my mind enough to do other things is even more so.
You might keep doing things even if they are effortless if they satisfy some other set point. After all, breathing is pretty boring to most people and you keep doing it. But once it is no longer something you have enough uncertainty about it will certainly become less interesting and so maybe not a super stimulus.
I agree there is something where if stuff is too hard we don’t seem to view it as a chance to update and instead view it as just requiring more effort than is worthwhile...except in these supercharged states where we’ll put up with more to get what we want. I haven’t thought much about how this might interact with naturally arising flow states people get into. My theory says that should somehow be powered by minimization of prediction error since it says everything ultimately is, I just haven’t thought about how that might work.
I think writing is in general helping me understand things about the world, often things about myself and processing emotions around ethics, effective altruism, work vs play, (and death and grief, so much omg), but also things like “how can a group of people coordinate to make rational decisions in response to confusing and fraught situations”. Interestingly, the parts of my fic that are most explicitly about understanding-the-world, like the politics or the parts that required me to read a bunch of Arbital AI safety stuff for research, are generally the least flow-y? That often feels like a thing I am doing to get to the shiny, and given that I’m doing it I should do it right, but it’s not necessarily the shiniest thing.
I think sometimes I’m practicing a skill that I already have by making the characters go through a scenario where they need it, and this ends up being pretty satisfying (I have been nerdsniped into doing so much logistics for fictional battles.) Probably writing fictional medical emergencies is satisfying for this reason too?
(It’s maybe slightly wireheading a desire-to-understand-the-world-and-people by creating a miniature world and people that I can understand perfectly by definition because I created them? Like, I find fantasy worldbuilding super shiny even though it’s literally not about our world. Maybe I feel on some level like I’m learning model-building-in-general? I sort of expect my deep attentional processes to not be that effectively oriented towards learning, though.)
I think it also is a social thing, in that I have a group of ~10 beta readers with whom I’ve become much closer friends as a result of writing this and their reading it, and a piece of the shininess is when I’m imagining how much a particular person will like a scene (when I finally finish writing the next book and send it out to my betas, anyway, so there’s a big delay, but I can imagine the deliciousness of them reading it later and get dopamine hits now). Sometimes I’ve also written stuff
It also just feels satisfying to make something exist, I think, to draw it out of my head in exactly the form I want – I remember getting into the same kind of flow drawing pictures or composing music, which have much less “content”, and I even get some of the thing from singing.
I no longer feel this way about things, but the strong desire to make things exist because I can and it’s cool is definitely what motivated me to become a programmer. Over years I just kept at it because it was SO COOL to make the computer do what I told it, and I had all these daydreams about what I would make the computer do next. Now that it feels like there is nothing computable I can’t in principle make a computer do, it’s kind of boring on its own.
Very interesting comments, any thoughts on how you might make a certain activity compelling again? Would explicitly framing an activity such that it highlights a particularly important feedback loop be worthwhile? Minimising the impact/importance of your other desired loops?
Do you believe a manipulation like this is possible or do you think it would have to organically align with the types of loops you deem to be necessary at the time?
Just thinking from the point of, say, getting back into the gym...compelling myself to go seems to be overrided by other loops, at least until the point where my health has sufficiently declined to warrant a re-prioritisation.
So I don’t think you can go back to the way things were. The kind of thing I’m describing causing these changes is a thing that once seen cannot be unseen. You might say there’s no blue pill for the kind of change of relationship to reality that made something cease to be a super powerful motivator.
What I do think you can do is find new way to do the things you did before, if they make sense to do where you are now.
To take your case of the gym, maybe in the past you went because it was super stimulating in that you were constantly satisfying many set points at once and were minimizing prediction error, possibly strongly in the form of taking actions to bring your model of yourself in line with your observations of yourself via changing your observations by changing your body so that they matched the model. Or maybe it was some other specific predictions powering things.
If that’s fallen away for some reason and you want to go back to the gym, I can think of at least two questions:
Do you really want to be going to the gym, or do you just want to want to go to the gym?
If you really want to go to the gym, why don’t you?
I think failures of motivation often come from mixing up genuine wanting with wanting to want (and then suffering because you think you want something and then you don’t do it because you don’t realize you don’t really want it). If that’s the case, the problem is you are not convinced going to the gym is worthwhile. Maybe it’s not for you, I don’t know; I heard all the arguments and didn’t start going to the gym regularly (twice a week) until I was reminded a few years ago that I could go to the climbing gym and just climb walls instead of “working out” and since I find climbing fun (something we could expand but I’ll leave be for now) it made gym going appealing and even “working out” like strength training desirable since it makes me better at and have more fun climbing. To return to the gym you probably need something similar that makes it viscerally appealing.
Excellent reply, strong upvote. Have a feeling I really want to go to the gym but because nutrition is poor (not eating enough), my gym feedback loops have been spiralling downward to the point where I have given up.
Will certainly look into how to make my nutrition more compelling now, perhaps that means learning to cook better or something similar. Very much appreciate your comment and may actually look at looking more deeply into this idea, maybe I will turn it into a blog post.
Edit: In the spirit or learning this idea more deeply, I am very interested in anything else you would be willing to disclose about what it is that was your turning point for stopping finding Civilisation enjoyable—feel free to send me a message if willing (no pressure whatsoever)
Oh, the answer to that is pretty esoteric, which is why I was vague about it. I’ll just say here that I attained to what I would call second path, but also identify with Kegan stage 5 or the “teal” level of development.
I could imagine an intersection between the thing Gordon’s saying about learning stuff, but also flow, where people get into flow states easiest when the difficult is juuust in that narrow range between “challenging, but doable at your current skillset.”
Like, solving a particularly hard puzzle is rewarding. But I don’t get into flowstates doing it. But puzzles that are hard-but-consistently-doable I might get into flow more easily.
So: “how can a group of people coordinate to make rational decisions in response to confusing and fraught situations” might be something that’s hard-enough-you-to-be-REAL-challenging instead of ‘flow-state-level-challenging.’
(You could potentially also map the “my friend will really love this part” thing into Gordon’s model. I think Gordon’s model predicts that you’d stop finding that rewarding if you hit a point where you were able to do that effortlessly all the time, because it’s no longer an interesting learning challenge)
I think I am not actually in flow the majority of the time I’m writing? Like, I get very rare periods where I lose track of time and suddenly it’s the end of the day and 10K words have appeared, and I get shorter snippets of forgetting-the-outside-world, but in the second-to-second timescale there’s often a feeling of effort and of deliberately staying on task. It just seems to be overall reinforcing enough that I will continue to block out time to do it and throw myself at getting through the hard parts, even if it’s been effortful and not felt rewarding in realtime for days or weeks. (I think this has happened more and more as I’ve gotten further into my fanfic, actually, because I’m writing situations that are harder to model.)
Probably another factor is that when I am sufficiently deep in writingmode, not writing is kind of painful and getting it off my mind enough to do other things is even more so.
You might keep doing things even if they are effortless if they satisfy some other set point. After all, breathing is pretty boring to most people and you keep doing it. But once it is no longer something you have enough uncertainty about it will certainly become less interesting and so maybe not a super stimulus.
I agree there is something where if stuff is too hard we don’t seem to view it as a chance to update and instead view it as just requiring more effort than is worthwhile...except in these supercharged states where we’ll put up with more to get what we want. I haven’t thought much about how this might interact with naturally arising flow states people get into. My theory says that should somehow be powered by minimization of prediction error since it says everything ultimately is, I just haven’t thought about how that might work.