I want to note that I may be confused: I have multiple hypotheses fitting some fraction of the data presented.
Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.
The first is what seems to be in the example. The second is what the strategy handles. The third is what I get when I try to interpret:
This technique is about finding concrete things that make you think “hey, that’s awesome, how can I get that?”
The third is a call for more luminosity; the second is bad goal choice. The first is more awkward to handle. You need to operationally notice which goals are not useful and which are. That means noticing surface level features of your apparent goals that are not optimal.
As I see it, speaking of an “intuitive notion” of “perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals”, or merely stopping at “particular patterns of reality” is the warning signal of this failure mode. Taboo these terms, make them operationally defined. If you have a sequence of definite concrete statements about what the world would look like if you were this kind of entity, then you have a functional definition of what you want from the goal.
Of course, the imprecise goal may shatter into a large number of actionable goals. It may be the case that the skills needed to achieve these subgoals have a larger scale skill to learn in them. Functionally, if that high level skill can’t be stated with sufficient precision to go out and know success when it’s seen, then more data is needed about this possible high-level skill before we can be confident it’s there in a form matching the imprecise goal. So note it, do the concrete things now, and look again when there is a better sense of the potential high level problem to solve.
The bit of the post that I find most awesome is the couple of days taken to audit your goals, and notice that achieving your goals were being hindered by this urge. I am aware that when I noticed how badly broken my goal structures were, I had to call “halt and catch fire” and keep a diary for a couple of months. Being able to perform an audit in a few days would be incredibly useful.
Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.
You bring up a really good point here. I would say that my unconscious thinking was making oversights and unexamined assumptions in the pursuit of goals. For example, thinking “Okay there’s a bunch of stuff that I want, but if I just become super effective at reaching goals generally, then I’ll get those things automatically.” Because it was overlooking other ways of reaching these goals, it both failed to be motivated by some helpful things, like programming study even if not impressive, and it also thought less creatively about how to hit the supergoal.
I want to note that I may be confused: I have multiple hypotheses fitting some fraction of the data presented.
Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.
The first is what seems to be in the example. The second is what the strategy handles. The third is what I get when I try to interpret:
The third is a call for more luminosity; the second is bad goal choice. The first is more awkward to handle. You need to operationally notice which goals are not useful and which are. That means noticing surface level features of your apparent goals that are not optimal.
As I see it, speaking of an “intuitive notion” of “perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals”, or merely stopping at “particular patterns of reality” is the warning signal of this failure mode. Taboo these terms, make them operationally defined. If you have a sequence of definite concrete statements about what the world would look like if you were this kind of entity, then you have a functional definition of what you want from the goal.
Of course, the imprecise goal may shatter into a large number of actionable goals. It may be the case that the skills needed to achieve these subgoals have a larger scale skill to learn in them. Functionally, if that high level skill can’t be stated with sufficient precision to go out and know success when it’s seen, then more data is needed about this possible high-level skill before we can be confident it’s there in a form matching the imprecise goal. So note it, do the concrete things now, and look again when there is a better sense of the potential high level problem to solve.
The bit of the post that I find most awesome is the couple of days taken to audit your goals, and notice that achieving your goals were being hindered by this urge. I am aware that when I noticed how badly broken my goal structures were, I had to call “halt and catch fire” and keep a diary for a couple of months. Being able to perform an audit in a few days would be incredibly useful.
You bring up a really good point here. I would say that my unconscious thinking was making oversights and unexamined assumptions in the pursuit of goals. For example, thinking “Okay there’s a bunch of stuff that I want, but if I just become super effective at reaching goals generally, then I’ll get those things automatically.” Because it was overlooking other ways of reaching these goals, it both failed to be motivated by some helpful things, like programming study even if not impressive, and it also thought less creatively about how to hit the supergoal.