I think you rather overstate your case here. When you say:
But there are clearly also heuristics that would be useful to goal-achievement (or that would be part of what it means to “have goals” at all) that we do not automatically carry out. We do not automatically:
I’m not sure who you are referring to by ‘we’. Most of these tactics are fairly commonly advised by everything from management and business books to self help and sports training. Some of them are things that come naturally to me and seem to come naturally to quite a few other people I know (though certainly not everybody).
(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
This comes naturally to me but I’ve noticed it doesn’t seem to to everybody. It is something I’ve seen others do (and talk about doing) fairly often however.
(b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
Very common advice in business/management and in programming. It does seem to require a bit of practice for most people to acquire this habit and it is one of the things I notice separating more experienced programmers from less experienced. It needs pointing out however that this is often very difficult and/or time consuming in practice for many real world goals and is easy to get wrong.
(c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
Comes naturally to me and seems to be reasonably common in others but I’d agree that there are many people for whom it doesn’t seem to come naturally.
(d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
Seems obvious and natural to me and pretty common in others. In fact I think this is how most people approach most of their goals. Many people fall down by being too undiscriminating in who they ask for advice and what evidence they require from others that said advice is effective however. Again it should be pointed out that this is much more difficult in practice for many real world problems than is implied here. There are many goals for which there is no straightforward and uncontroversial answer to how best to achieve them.
(e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;
This is one where I could stand to improve. I think it’s a common failing and few people do this as much as they should. It is another case of something that is quite difficult in practice however—tracking can be time consuming and difficult for many goals and it can be difficult to gather ‘clean’ data on what really works best.
(f) Focus most of the energy that isn’t going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;
Seems fairly obvious and I think is reasonably common but people are easily distracted from their goals. Sometimes distraction can be a signal that goals need re-evaluating however.
(g) Make sure that our “goal” is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won’t continually sap our energies;
Seems fairly obvious but is something it is useful to get into a mental habit of reminding oneself of periodically. Another one that can be incredibly difficult in practice however. I’d say that figuring out what our ‘real’ goals are and how to achieve them is the central problem of most people’s lives. I know I consciously think about this a lot, I think to a greater extent than is typical, and have yet to reach any entirely satisfactory conclusions.
(h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;
This strikes me as pretty common advice but it is useful advice and bears repeating.
Overall I don’t think you are saying anything here that isn’t already fairly widely known and talked about in many contexts. Some of these things come naturally, others require conscious effort to develop as habits. There is clear variation in the population when it comes to which of these come naturally however and certainly there are many people who do few of these things as a matter of course. The real trick is in the execution however—many of these things are difficult to do and failure to do them is just as often a result of this inherent difficulty as it is of a lack of awareness of these heuristics.
I agree that many of these heuristics are discussed in the business and self-help literatures reasonably often. My point was simply that we for the most part do not automatically implement them—humans seem not to come with goal-achievement software in that sense—and so it should not be surprising that most human “goal-achievement” efforts are tremendously inefficient. These heuristics are relatively obvious to our verbal/analytic reasoning faculties when we bother to think about them, but, absent training, are mostly not part of our automatic reward-gradients and motives.
If you find that e.g. (a) and (c) come fairly naturally to you, ask yourself why, and see if you can spell out the mechanics in ways that may work for more of us. The question here isn’t “are (a)-(h) novel ideas that demonstrate amazing original insight?” but rather: “how can we get our brains to automatically, habitually, reliably, carry out heuristics such as (a)-(h), which seem to offer straight-forward gains in goal-achievement but seem not to be what we automatically find ourselves doing”.
These heuristics are relatively obvious to our verbal/analytic reasoning faculties when we bother to think about them, but, absent training, are mostly not part of our automatic reward-gradients and motives.
I think d) for example (gather information) is pretty ‘automatic’ for many (if not most) people. It is the natural first step for many people. It is often difficult to find accurate information and detect and ignore misinformation so simply taking this step is not sufficient on its own however and I think it is in the execution that most people fail.
If you find that e.g. (a) and (c) come fairly naturally to you, ask yourself why, and see if you can spell out the mechanics in ways that may work for more of us.
Both a) and c) have come naturally to me for as long as I can remember. I’m afraid I can’t offer any more detail through introspection. It still strikes me as odd when people don’t do these automatically even though I’ve learned over time that many people do not.
For some of the other heuristics, e) for example, I’ve had to consciously work to develop them as habits of thought (still imperfectly in this case). My general approach has been to consciously think through what other heuristics I could apply periodically (usually prompted by getting stuck / not making progress on some goal) and then apply any heuristics that I realize I have neglected. Over time some things can move from this ‘meta’ level of analysis to become more automatic habits.
I think d) for example (gather information) is pretty ‘automatic’ for many (if not most) people. It is the natural first step for many people. It is often difficult to find accurate information and detect and ignore misinformation so simply taking this step is not sufficient on its own however and I think it is in the execution that most people fail.
I disagree for everything people have enough information of to have performed a prior opinion. Gathering information is predicated on the idea that you do not have enough information. Most people believe they already know what they need to know, and all that is left are the details.
The perfect example is the one in the article: I want to become a comedian, so I will watch Garfield. Where is the intermediate step of finding out whether or not watching a funny show is a good way to learn how to be funny? You need more information to even begin to answer that, yet he skips this step. Why? It is almost certainly because he has already decided that the way to learn to be funny is to study funny things, and he thinks Garfield is funny, so he is going to study.
Now, it is entirely possible he could learn to be funny just by watching Garfield and asking the right questions, but given his track record I seriously doubt it. It’s also re-inventing the wheel, because other people have figured out the secret of funny before him (else there would be no one funny to study) and the information is available for those who seek it.
If a person is aware he lacks information, then yes I would agree that gathering information is automatic. However, most people in most situations where this comes up are not aware that they lack information. They believe they know exactly how to do what it is they want to do, even though they are almost certainly wrong, and even though they are wrong on these matters all the time (the many failures to achieve their goals). Therefore, there is no need to seek new information, so seeking information is not automatic.
Another way of putting it is that you can’t seek the right information if you aren’t looking for it.
I would agree that, when people are aware that they lack information, they generally try to inform themselves.
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I’d say that figuring out what our ‘real’ goals are and how to achieve them is the central problem of most people’s lives. I know I consciously think about this a lot, I think to a greater extent than is typical, and have yet to reach any entirely satisfactory conclusions.
Likewise. I somewhat envy those who can form or decide “doing (or achieving) X will make me happy”, and it really turns out to be true (whether it’s an accurate or merely self-fulfilling prophecy doesn’t matter too much).
I’ve considered whether this sort of confusion (about what goals will give lasting happiness in their pursuit or accomplishment) might have a solution in caring less about some things (to lessen constraints until there’s a reachable solution).
For example, I like to do things that give me evidence that I’m unusually talented. Perhaps if I gave up that reward, I would find myself doing things that are more pleasurable or valuable.
I definitely don’t think scorched earth Buddhist “don’t care about anything” is a good move for me. I’m trying to give up just what seems optional and harmful (while expecting sometimes to find that I can’t and so shouldn’t try to, even though a hyper-rational person would be able to).
I somewhat envy those who can form or decide “doing (or achieving) X will make me happy”, and it really turns out to be true (whether it’s an accurate or merely self-fulfilling prophecy doesn’t matter too much).
Don’t ask what will make you happy, ask what future conditions you would prefer to experience, and what self-descriptions you would prefer to judge yourself as having.
Why? Because our brains aren’t evolved to optimize happiness, they’re evolved to steer the world to more-preferred states, and to optimize our expectations of others’ perception of us. So if you start from those points, your inquiry (and subsequent optimizations) will benefit from hardware assistance.
(Whereas, if you try to optimize “what will make me happy”, your brain will get confused, and/or try to optimize what things, socially speaking are “supposed to” make you happy, i.e. what your brain expects would cause your peers/tribe members to judge you as being happy.)
Why? Because our brains aren’t evolved to optimize happiness, they’re evolved to steer the world to more-preferred states, and to optimize our expectations of others’ perception of us. So if you start from those points, your inquiry (and subsequent optimizations) will benefit from hardware assistance.
Have you written elsewhere in more detail about this? I’m particularly interested in any tips you have on using our social expectation machinery successfully.
Have you written elsewhere in more detail about this?
Well, I did a multi-part video series/audio CD on this topic a couple months ago (called, “The Secrets of ‘Meaning’ and ‘Purpose’”); my comment above was more or less an attempt to summarize one of its key ideas in a couple of sentences. I’ve also written about it in my newsletter before, but none of these materials are publicly available at the moment, even for sale.
(I keep meaning to put them up for sale but I’m usually too busy getting my current month CD, newsletter, and workshop put together to spend much time on trying to get more business. Probably I should think more strategically and move “posting on LW” a bit lower on my priorities… ;-) )
I’m particularly interested in any tips you have on using our social expectation machinery successfully.
Think character/identity-priming. What “kind of person” do you want to be, in the sense of “the kind of person who would X”… where X is whatever you would like to motivate yourself to be/do. What kind of person do you want to see yourself as? Be sure to see it from the outside, as if it were someone else.
Experiments show that “kind-of-personness” priming has a big effect on people’s decisions; when our identity is primed as belonging to a particular group, we automatically behave more like a stereotype of that group. So, pick what group(s) you want to prime yourself as a member of, and go for it. ;-)
This seems right. The things people have described to me as being goals they have reached that, as they predicted, made them happy, were definitely of the two broad types you described.
If you construe hedonic experiences as falling under “future conditions you would prefer”, then perhaps your dichotomy is exhaustive.
For sure nobody needs to be told to do what feels best locally—and most of us have reached a limit in that respect (there are only so many cheesecakes you can benefit from).
Some complaints, however:
(A) what future conditions you would prefer to experience
seems just as hard as predicting what I can accomplish that will make me happy
also,
(B) what self-descriptions you would prefer to judge yourself as having
I have been hesitant to indulge in such satisfactions, because it seems to me that they’re most often achieved by or result in hypocrisy. However, I should probably just do it if it feels good.
Because our brains aren’t evolved to optimize happiness, they’re evolved to steer the world to more-preferred states, and to optimize our expectations of others’ perception of us. So if you start from those points, your inquiry (and subsequent optimizations) will benefit from hardware assistance.
You seem to contradict yourself. Other than (A) and (B), are there any other things that can make me happy? If not, then you seem to be arguing that evolved human brain-nature does in fact help me become happy. Also, why do you argue only from evopsych/biology? I’m mostly limited by the options permitted by the society I live in, and may still be crippled by some religious upbringing or other social programming that lacks force of law or threatened violence.
evolved to steer the world to more-preferred states, and to optimize our expectations of others’ perception of us
The second is a subcategory of the first. I assume you mean preferred for various genes’ survival. I think there is a lot about us that is accidental and serving no particular gene (it’s just some artifact of the reachable or actually reached evolutionary “design”).
I do think it’s fine to ask of my present state “am I happy (in other words, how do I feel)?”, and to wonder “what will make me happier if I get it?” For the latter, I do like your two suggested (vague) subgoals. I think the former is still essential, although I suppose you could ask how you feel in relation to your two general happiness subgoals.
You seem to contradict yourself. Other than (A) and (B), are there any other things that can make me happy? If not, then you seem to be arguing that evolved human brain-nature does in fact help me become happy.
What I’m saying is that the machinery is better at answering concrete questions relating to these matters, than abstract ones. To our abstract thinking machinery, it seems like there should be no logical difference between “what will make me happy?” and A) “what kind of world do I want to live in?” or B) “what kind of person do I want to be?”
However, as the saying goes, the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there’s no difference, but in practice, there is. ;-)
I assume you mean preferred for various genes’ survival.
No, I meant, “preferred”, as in “what would you prefer?” Not your genes. (Your genes already have another level of control over what sort of preferences you’re able to learn, but that’s not relevant to the issue at hand.)
I do think it’s fine to ask of my present state “am I happy (in other words, how do I feel)?”, and to wonder “what will make me happier if I get it?”
This is another one of those seemingly nitpicky things that actually makes a difference: try asking what you want, not what will make you happier. (Also, what you feel, not whether you’re happy.)
The problem with asking “am I happy” is that it discards information that would be useful to you about what you do feel, in favor of a one-bit, yes-or-no answer. (At minimum, knowing the difference between the broad non-happy categories of sad, afraid, and mad would be good!)
Next, the problem with “what will make me happier” is that it presupposes (“have you stopped beating your wife?”-style) that there is something that will “make” you happy, as though it’s something you don’t have any control over. Essentially, the question itself is continually re-priming the idea that you are not in control of your happiness!
Keep that up, and pretty soon you’ll be thinking things like:
I’m mostly limited
Oops. Too late. ;-)
Truth be told, the question is more a symptom than a cause; I’m not saying you feel limited or stuck because you asked the question, so much as that the question is both an expression and reinforcement of the stuckness you already feel.
To change your answers, change your questions! (And be aware of what those questions are priming, because the questions you habitually ask yourself are the #1 source of priming affecting your thought processes and emotions.)
In contrast, asking “what do I want?” carries a different prime, by implying that what you want matters, and that you intend to go after it and get it. It also does not call for your brain to figure anything out. Either you want a thing or you do not; there is nothing to “figure out” or strategize. Simply tell the truth about what you do or do not want, do or do not know whether you want. Repeat telling the truth until you know.
“What do I want?” is a question about the current state of reality, in other words, and you can keep asking it as much as you want. The answers may change over time, but that’s okay, because that’s the truth. You need not expect one answer or “the” answer, because there is no one answer.
“What will make me happy(er)?” is problematic precisely because it causes you to think that there is a problem to be solved, a riddle to be answered or a puzzle to be figured out. It engages the parts of your brain that solve that kind of question, but which have absolutely no idea what you want.
That’s why I said the questions matter: because it makes a huge difference which parts of your brain are engaged in finding the answer, and therefore what kind of answers you will get.
It feels like you’re obsessed with the specific words I’ve used to express a line of introspection/deciding/planning, as if I’m going to verbally ask myself a question, and parts of me will react very superficially to the phrasing. I don’t think I need to worry about it, because when I think about something in depth, I really think about it. If I’m really thinking, then it doesn’t matter what words I use to describe the topic.
However, I am in general willing to experiment with priming tricks, because it’s true that I can’t afford to think deeply all the time. I haven’t found any such trick yet that I can definitely say works.
You quoted a phrase “I’m mostly limited …” from my claim that social constraints and programming matter as much as brain architecture, but didn’t respond to the substance. I’ll assume this means that you agree. Do you have any advice on exploiting those factors? What you’ve given here is based only on evopsych brain-architecture guesses (a “hardware advantage” reachable by well-phrased self questioning)?
It feels like you’re obsessed with the specific words I’ve used to express a line of introspection/deciding/planning, as if I’m going to verbally ask myself a question, and parts of me will react very superficially to the phrasing.
Not quite—I’m also saying that people’s choice of words is rarely random or superficial, and tends to reflect the deeper processes by which they are reasoning… and vice versa. (i.e., the choice of words tends to have non-random, non-superficial effects on the thinking process).
Note that how a question is phrased makes a big difference to survey results, so if you think this somehow doesn’t apply to you, then you are mistaken.
It only feels like such things don’t apply to ourselves, like the people in the “Mindless Eating” popcorn experiments who insist that the size of the popcorn container had nothing to do with how much they ate. They (and you) only think this because of the limited point of view from which the observation is made.
I haven’t found any such trick yet that I can definitely say works.
Of course—for the same reason that people don’t think the size of the container makes any difference to how much they eat. It’s easy to write off unconscious influences.
That being said, choice of questions makes a big difference to answers, but it’s not solely a matter of priming. After all, if you use the words “What do I want?” and go on internally translating that in the same way as you asked, “What will make me happy?”, then of course nothing will change!
So, it’s not merely the surface linguistics that matter, but the deep structure of how you ask yourself, and the kind of thinking you intend to apply. Based on the challenge you described, my guess is that the surface structure of your questions is in fact a reflection of how you’re doing the questioning… because for most people, most of the time, it is.
You quoted a phrase “I’m mostly limited …”
The reason I quoted “I’m mostly limited” is because I wanted to highlight that the thought process you appeared to be using was one in which you already assume you’re limited, before you even know what it is that you want! (It sounded to me as though you were implying that it doesn’t matter if you know what you want, because you’re not really going to get it anyway—and that wasn’t just from that one phrase; that was just the easiest one to highlight.)
This sort of assumption is not a trivial matter; it is inherent to how we limit ourselves. When we make an assumption, our brains do not challenge the assumption, they instead filter out disconfirming evidence. That applies even to things like thinking you’re not good at knowing what you want!
social constraints and programming matter as much as brain architecture,
Social constraints aren’t that important, since people with the appropriate programming can work around them. And choosing effective questions to ask yourself falls under the heading of “programming”, in the verb sense of the word.
Do you have any advice on exploiting those factors? What you’ve given here is based only on evopsych brain-architecture guesses (a “hardware advantage” reachable by well-phrased self questioning)?
I have tons of “programming” tricks, especially ones for removing social programming. Teaching them, however, is a non-trivial task, for reasons I’ve explained here before.
One of the key problems is that people confabulate things and then deny having done so. Alicorn’s notion of “luminosity” is closely akin to the required skill, but it is very easy for people to convince themselves they are doing it when they are actually not even close. What’s more, unless somebody is seriously motivated to learn, they won’t be able to pick it up from a few text comments.
(Contra to MoR!Harry’s statement that admitting you’re wrong is the hardest thing to learn, IMO the hardest thing to learn is to take seriously the idea that you don’t already know the answers to what’s going on in your head… on an emotional and experiential basis, rather than merely an intellectual abstraction that you don’ t really believe. Or, to put it another way, most people claim to “believe” the idea, while still anticipating as if they already know how things in their head work.)
Anyway, for that reason, I mostly don’t bother discussing such things on LW in the abstract, as it quickly leads to attempts to have an intellectual discussion about experiential phenomena: dancing about architecture, so to speak.
Instead, I usually try to limit myself to throwing out cryptic hints so that people with the necessary motivation and/or skill can reconstruct the bigger picture for themselves, a bit like Harry and the “42” envelope. ;-)
While it’s true that I can’t rule out things that I can’t detect, I can’t really believe in them, either.
I understand where you’re coming from. You’ve tried much harder than most people do to understand your own emotions and motivations, and you’re pretty sure you’ve actually done so. I agree that there are many people who think they have, but haven’t. Similarly, sometimes people think they’re really trying, but aren’t.
I’m impressed with how much you know about my thoughts :)
I won’t suggest that we’re fundamentally different in any way, but I do sometimes wonder if there are significant architectural emotion/motivation differences in “normal” people, other than the obvious (male/female).
The popcorn container example doesn’t surprise me or change my views in any way—but cool.
I feel like I’m pretty flexible in what I want—that is, I can ask what it is I currently want, but I also ask what I maybe should want, because I’ve had some success simply provisionally choosing to care more or less about particular things. I sometimes find out that I couldn’t actually maintain that level of (dis)interest, and I take this as evidence (not certainty; just some evidence) that such a (lack of) desire is a fixed part of my personality.
I think you rather overstate your case here. When you say:
I’m not sure who you are referring to by ‘we’. Most of these tactics are fairly commonly advised by everything from management and business books to self help and sports training. Some of them are things that come naturally to me and seem to come naturally to quite a few other people I know (though certainly not everybody).
This comes naturally to me but I’ve noticed it doesn’t seem to to everybody. It is something I’ve seen others do (and talk about doing) fairly often however.
Very common advice in business/management and in programming. It does seem to require a bit of practice for most people to acquire this habit and it is one of the things I notice separating more experienced programmers from less experienced. It needs pointing out however that this is often very difficult and/or time consuming in practice for many real world goals and is easy to get wrong.
Comes naturally to me and seems to be reasonably common in others but I’d agree that there are many people for whom it doesn’t seem to come naturally.
Seems obvious and natural to me and pretty common in others. In fact I think this is how most people approach most of their goals. Many people fall down by being too undiscriminating in who they ask for advice and what evidence they require from others that said advice is effective however. Again it should be pointed out that this is much more difficult in practice for many real world problems than is implied here. There are many goals for which there is no straightforward and uncontroversial answer to how best to achieve them.
This is one where I could stand to improve. I think it’s a common failing and few people do this as much as they should. It is another case of something that is quite difficult in practice however—tracking can be time consuming and difficult for many goals and it can be difficult to gather ‘clean’ data on what really works best.
Seems fairly obvious and I think is reasonably common but people are easily distracted from their goals. Sometimes distraction can be a signal that goals need re-evaluating however.
Seems fairly obvious but is something it is useful to get into a mental habit of reminding oneself of periodically. Another one that can be incredibly difficult in practice however. I’d say that figuring out what our ‘real’ goals are and how to achieve them is the central problem of most people’s lives. I know I consciously think about this a lot, I think to a greater extent than is typical, and have yet to reach any entirely satisfactory conclusions.
This strikes me as pretty common advice but it is useful advice and bears repeating.
Overall I don’t think you are saying anything here that isn’t already fairly widely known and talked about in many contexts. Some of these things come naturally, others require conscious effort to develop as habits. There is clear variation in the population when it comes to which of these come naturally however and certainly there are many people who do few of these things as a matter of course. The real trick is in the execution however—many of these things are difficult to do and failure to do them is just as often a result of this inherent difficulty as it is of a lack of awareness of these heuristics.
I agree that many of these heuristics are discussed in the business and self-help literatures reasonably often. My point was simply that we for the most part do not automatically implement them—humans seem not to come with goal-achievement software in that sense—and so it should not be surprising that most human “goal-achievement” efforts are tremendously inefficient. These heuristics are relatively obvious to our verbal/analytic reasoning faculties when we bother to think about them, but, absent training, are mostly not part of our automatic reward-gradients and motives.
If you find that e.g. (a) and (c) come fairly naturally to you, ask yourself why, and see if you can spell out the mechanics in ways that may work for more of us. The question here isn’t “are (a)-(h) novel ideas that demonstrate amazing original insight?” but rather: “how can we get our brains to automatically, habitually, reliably, carry out heuristics such as (a)-(h), which seem to offer straight-forward gains in goal-achievement but seem not to be what we automatically find ourselves doing”.
I think d) for example (gather information) is pretty ‘automatic’ for many (if not most) people. It is the natural first step for many people. It is often difficult to find accurate information and detect and ignore misinformation so simply taking this step is not sufficient on its own however and I think it is in the execution that most people fail.
Both a) and c) have come naturally to me for as long as I can remember. I’m afraid I can’t offer any more detail through introspection. It still strikes me as odd when people don’t do these automatically even though I’ve learned over time that many people do not.
For some of the other heuristics, e) for example, I’ve had to consciously work to develop them as habits of thought (still imperfectly in this case). My general approach has been to consciously think through what other heuristics I could apply periodically (usually prompted by getting stuck / not making progress on some goal) and then apply any heuristics that I realize I have neglected. Over time some things can move from this ‘meta’ level of analysis to become more automatic habits.
I disagree for everything people have enough information of to have performed a prior opinion. Gathering information is predicated on the idea that you do not have enough information. Most people believe they already know what they need to know, and all that is left are the details.
The perfect example is the one in the article: I want to become a comedian, so I will watch Garfield. Where is the intermediate step of finding out whether or not watching a funny show is a good way to learn how to be funny? You need more information to even begin to answer that, yet he skips this step. Why? It is almost certainly because he has already decided that the way to learn to be funny is to study funny things, and he thinks Garfield is funny, so he is going to study.
Now, it is entirely possible he could learn to be funny just by watching Garfield and asking the right questions, but given his track record I seriously doubt it. It’s also re-inventing the wheel, because other people have figured out the secret of funny before him (else there would be no one funny to study) and the information is available for those who seek it.
If a person is aware he lacks information, then yes I would agree that gathering information is automatic. However, most people in most situations where this comes up are not aware that they lack information. They believe they know exactly how to do what it is they want to do, even though they are almost certainly wrong, and even though they are wrong on these matters all the time (the many failures to achieve their goals). Therefore, there is no need to seek new information, so seeking information is not automatic.
Another way of putting it is that you can’t seek the right information if you aren’t looking for it.
I would agree that, when people are aware that they lack information, they generally try to inform themselves.
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Likewise. I somewhat envy those who can form or decide “doing (or achieving) X will make me happy”, and it really turns out to be true (whether it’s an accurate or merely self-fulfilling prophecy doesn’t matter too much).
I’ve considered whether this sort of confusion (about what goals will give lasting happiness in their pursuit or accomplishment) might have a solution in caring less about some things (to lessen constraints until there’s a reachable solution).
For example, I like to do things that give me evidence that I’m unusually talented. Perhaps if I gave up that reward, I would find myself doing things that are more pleasurable or valuable.
I definitely don’t think scorched earth Buddhist “don’t care about anything” is a good move for me. I’m trying to give up just what seems optional and harmful (while expecting sometimes to find that I can’t and so shouldn’t try to, even though a hyper-rational person would be able to).
Don’t ask what will make you happy, ask what future conditions you would prefer to experience, and what self-descriptions you would prefer to judge yourself as having.
Why? Because our brains aren’t evolved to optimize happiness, they’re evolved to steer the world to more-preferred states, and to optimize our expectations of others’ perception of us. So if you start from those points, your inquiry (and subsequent optimizations) will benefit from hardware assistance.
(Whereas, if you try to optimize “what will make me happy”, your brain will get confused, and/or try to optimize what things, socially speaking are “supposed to” make you happy, i.e. what your brain expects would cause your peers/tribe members to judge you as being happy.)
Have you written elsewhere in more detail about this? I’m particularly interested in any tips you have on using our social expectation machinery successfully.
Well, I did a multi-part video series/audio CD on this topic a couple months ago (called, “The Secrets of ‘Meaning’ and ‘Purpose’”); my comment above was more or less an attempt to summarize one of its key ideas in a couple of sentences. I’ve also written about it in my newsletter before, but none of these materials are publicly available at the moment, even for sale.
(I keep meaning to put them up for sale but I’m usually too busy getting my current month CD, newsletter, and workshop put together to spend much time on trying to get more business. Probably I should think more strategically and move “posting on LW” a bit lower on my priorities… ;-) )
Think character/identity-priming. What “kind of person” do you want to be, in the sense of “the kind of person who would X”… where X is whatever you would like to motivate yourself to be/do. What kind of person do you want to see yourself as? Be sure to see it from the outside, as if it were someone else.
Experiments show that “kind-of-personness” priming has a big effect on people’s decisions; when our identity is primed as belonging to a particular group, we automatically behave more like a stereotype of that group. So, pick what group(s) you want to prime yourself as a member of, and go for it. ;-)
This seems right. The things people have described to me as being goals they have reached that, as they predicted, made them happy, were definitely of the two broad types you described.
If you construe hedonic experiences as falling under “future conditions you would prefer”, then perhaps your dichotomy is exhaustive.
For sure nobody needs to be told to do what feels best locally—and most of us have reached a limit in that respect (there are only so many cheesecakes you can benefit from).
Some complaints, however:
seems just as hard as predicting what I can accomplish that will make me happy
also,
I have been hesitant to indulge in such satisfactions, because it seems to me that they’re most often achieved by or result in hypocrisy. However, I should probably just do it if it feels good.
You seem to contradict yourself. Other than (A) and (B), are there any other things that can make me happy? If not, then you seem to be arguing that evolved human brain-nature does in fact help me become happy. Also, why do you argue only from evopsych/biology? I’m mostly limited by the options permitted by the society I live in, and may still be crippled by some religious upbringing or other social programming that lacks force of law or threatened violence.
The second is a subcategory of the first. I assume you mean preferred for various genes’ survival. I think there is a lot about us that is accidental and serving no particular gene (it’s just some artifact of the reachable or actually reached evolutionary “design”).
I do think it’s fine to ask of my present state “am I happy (in other words, how do I feel)?”, and to wonder “what will make me happier if I get it?” For the latter, I do like your two suggested (vague) subgoals. I think the former is still essential, although I suppose you could ask how you feel in relation to your two general happiness subgoals.
What I’m saying is that the machinery is better at answering concrete questions relating to these matters, than abstract ones. To our abstract thinking machinery, it seems like there should be no logical difference between “what will make me happy?” and A) “what kind of world do I want to live in?” or B) “what kind of person do I want to be?”
However, as the saying goes, the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there’s no difference, but in practice, there is. ;-)
No, I meant, “preferred”, as in “what would you prefer?” Not your genes. (Your genes already have another level of control over what sort of preferences you’re able to learn, but that’s not relevant to the issue at hand.)
This is another one of those seemingly nitpicky things that actually makes a difference: try asking what you want, not what will make you happier. (Also, what you feel, not whether you’re happy.)
The problem with asking “am I happy” is that it discards information that would be useful to you about what you do feel, in favor of a one-bit, yes-or-no answer. (At minimum, knowing the difference between the broad non-happy categories of sad, afraid, and mad would be good!)
Next, the problem with “what will make me happier” is that it presupposes (“have you stopped beating your wife?”-style) that there is something that will “make” you happy, as though it’s something you don’t have any control over. Essentially, the question itself is continually re-priming the idea that you are not in control of your happiness!
Keep that up, and pretty soon you’ll be thinking things like:
Oops. Too late. ;-)
Truth be told, the question is more a symptom than a cause; I’m not saying you feel limited or stuck because you asked the question, so much as that the question is both an expression and reinforcement of the stuckness you already feel.
To change your answers, change your questions! (And be aware of what those questions are priming, because the questions you habitually ask yourself are the #1 source of priming affecting your thought processes and emotions.)
In contrast, asking “what do I want?” carries a different prime, by implying that what you want matters, and that you intend to go after it and get it. It also does not call for your brain to figure anything out. Either you want a thing or you do not; there is nothing to “figure out” or strategize. Simply tell the truth about what you do or do not want, do or do not know whether you want. Repeat telling the truth until you know.
“What do I want?” is a question about the current state of reality, in other words, and you can keep asking it as much as you want. The answers may change over time, but that’s okay, because that’s the truth. You need not expect one answer or “the” answer, because there is no one answer.
“What will make me happy(er)?” is problematic precisely because it causes you to think that there is a problem to be solved, a riddle to be answered or a puzzle to be figured out. It engages the parts of your brain that solve that kind of question, but which have absolutely no idea what you want.
That’s why I said the questions matter: because it makes a huge difference which parts of your brain are engaged in finding the answer, and therefore what kind of answers you will get.
It feels like you’re obsessed with the specific words I’ve used to express a line of introspection/deciding/planning, as if I’m going to verbally ask myself a question, and parts of me will react very superficially to the phrasing. I don’t think I need to worry about it, because when I think about something in depth, I really think about it. If I’m really thinking, then it doesn’t matter what words I use to describe the topic.
However, I am in general willing to experiment with priming tricks, because it’s true that I can’t afford to think deeply all the time. I haven’t found any such trick yet that I can definitely say works.
You quoted a phrase “I’m mostly limited …” from my claim that social constraints and programming matter as much as brain architecture, but didn’t respond to the substance. I’ll assume this means that you agree. Do you have any advice on exploiting those factors? What you’ve given here is based only on evopsych brain-architecture guesses (a “hardware advantage” reachable by well-phrased self questioning)?
Not quite—I’m also saying that people’s choice of words is rarely random or superficial, and tends to reflect the deeper processes by which they are reasoning… and vice versa. (i.e., the choice of words tends to have non-random, non-superficial effects on the thinking process).
Note that how a question is phrased makes a big difference to survey results, so if you think this somehow doesn’t apply to you, then you are mistaken.
It only feels like such things don’t apply to ourselves, like the people in the “Mindless Eating” popcorn experiments who insist that the size of the popcorn container had nothing to do with how much they ate. They (and you) only think this because of the limited point of view from which the observation is made.
Of course—for the same reason that people don’t think the size of the container makes any difference to how much they eat. It’s easy to write off unconscious influences.
That being said, choice of questions makes a big difference to answers, but it’s not solely a matter of priming. After all, if you use the words “What do I want?” and go on internally translating that in the same way as you asked, “What will make me happy?”, then of course nothing will change!
So, it’s not merely the surface linguistics that matter, but the deep structure of how you ask yourself, and the kind of thinking you intend to apply. Based on the challenge you described, my guess is that the surface structure of your questions is in fact a reflection of how you’re doing the questioning… because for most people, most of the time, it is.
The reason I quoted “I’m mostly limited” is because I wanted to highlight that the thought process you appeared to be using was one in which you already assume you’re limited, before you even know what it is that you want! (It sounded to me as though you were implying that it doesn’t matter if you know what you want, because you’re not really going to get it anyway—and that wasn’t just from that one phrase; that was just the easiest one to highlight.)
This sort of assumption is not a trivial matter; it is inherent to how we limit ourselves. When we make an assumption, our brains do not challenge the assumption, they instead filter out disconfirming evidence. That applies even to things like thinking you’re not good at knowing what you want!
Social constraints aren’t that important, since people with the appropriate programming can work around them. And choosing effective questions to ask yourself falls under the heading of “programming”, in the verb sense of the word.
I have tons of “programming” tricks, especially ones for removing social programming. Teaching them, however, is a non-trivial task, for reasons I’ve explained here before.
One of the key problems is that people confabulate things and then deny having done so. Alicorn’s notion of “luminosity” is closely akin to the required skill, but it is very easy for people to convince themselves they are doing it when they are actually not even close. What’s more, unless somebody is seriously motivated to learn, they won’t be able to pick it up from a few text comments.
(Contra to MoR!Harry’s statement that admitting you’re wrong is the hardest thing to learn, IMO the hardest thing to learn is to take seriously the idea that you don’t already know the answers to what’s going on in your head… on an emotional and experiential basis, rather than merely an intellectual abstraction that you don’ t really believe. Or, to put it another way, most people claim to “believe” the idea, while still anticipating as if they already know how things in their head work.)
Anyway, for that reason, I mostly don’t bother discussing such things on LW in the abstract, as it quickly leads to attempts to have an intellectual discussion about experiential phenomena: dancing about architecture, so to speak.
Instead, I usually try to limit myself to throwing out cryptic hints so that people with the necessary motivation and/or skill can reconstruct the bigger picture for themselves, a bit like Harry and the “42” envelope. ;-)
While it’s true that I can’t rule out things that I can’t detect, I can’t really believe in them, either.
I understand where you’re coming from. You’ve tried much harder than most people do to understand your own emotions and motivations, and you’re pretty sure you’ve actually done so. I agree that there are many people who think they have, but haven’t. Similarly, sometimes people think they’re really trying, but aren’t.
I’m impressed with how much you know about my thoughts :)
I won’t suggest that we’re fundamentally different in any way, but I do sometimes wonder if there are significant architectural emotion/motivation differences in “normal” people, other than the obvious (male/female).
The popcorn container example doesn’t surprise me or change my views in any way—but cool.
I feel like I’m pretty flexible in what I want—that is, I can ask what it is I currently want, but I also ask what I maybe should want, because I’ve had some success simply provisionally choosing to care more or less about particular things. I sometimes find out that I couldn’t actually maintain that level of (dis)interest, and I take this as evidence (not certainty; just some evidence) that such a (lack of) desire is a fixed part of my personality.