In my model, that’s not how someone in her position thinks at all. She has no coherent utility function. She doesn’t have one because, to the extent she ever did have one, it was trained out of her long ago, by people who were rewarding lack of utility functions and punishing those who had coherent utility functions with terms for useful things. The systems and people around her kept rewarding instinctive actions and systems, and punishing intentional actions and goals.
IMO a more accurate model is: such people do have a utility function, but how to use your brain’s CPU cycles is part of your strategy. If you’re in an environment where solving complex politics is essential to survival, you will spend all your cycles on solving complex politics. Moreover, if your environment gives you little slack then you have to do it myopically because there’s no time for long-term planning while you’re parrying the next sword thrust. At some point you don’t have enough free cycles to re-evaluate your strategy of using cycles, and then you’ll keep doing this even if it’s no longer beneficial.
IMO a more accurate model is: such people do have a utility function, but how to use your brain’s CPU cycles is part of your strategy. If you’re in an environment where solving complex politics is essential to survival, you will spend all your cycles on solving complex politics. Moreover, if your environment gives you little slack then you have to do it myopically because there’s no time for long-term planning while you’re parrying the next sword thrust. At some point you don’t have enough free cycles to re-evaluate your strategy of using cycles, and then you’ll keep doing this even if it’s no longer beneficial.
Having a strategy is not the same thing as having a utility function.