This summary of your post is exactly how I experienced it. From this reader’s perspective, you accomplished the goal of expressing this.
Also, I appreciate your agnosticism and acknowledgement that others may not have the same super goal. I do know quite a few people who have had or are having your experience.
I wonder if part of your experience is because you have a choice. Some do not, because, in their circumstances, complete attention must be focused on surviving. I wonder, also, if humans are a bit behind in their evolutionary adaptation to having this level of choice.
Your post also makes clear the incredible difficulty people face in AI alignment. It is difficult to align our own selves. We fall back on heuristics to save time and our own mental resources. There are multiple “right” answers. Rewards here have costs there. It’s difficult to assign weights. The weight values seem to fluctuate depending on where we focus our attention. If we spend too many resources trying to pick a direction, the paths meanwhile change and we have to reassess.
And there is the manipulation of incentives, particularly praise. Is the praise worth the cost? Did your start state set you up to put one foot in front of the next in response to praise? Do you always have to do a good job at being a CEO, a husband, a father? Is being in your wife’s company its own reward or are you doing the job of being a husband? Or do you feel both ways in fluctuating degrees? Also, it may be that the goal is not the only thing that directs your behavior. It may be that, sometimes, the push and pull of whatever small, repeated incentives are happening are guiding less planned behaviors. These less planned behaviors over time become your life.
Anyway, I appreciate what you have said and how you have said it.
This summary of your post is exactly how I experienced it. From this reader’s perspective, you accomplished the goal of expressing this.
Also, I appreciate your agnosticism and acknowledgement that others may not have the same super goal. I do know quite a few people who have had or are having your experience.
I wonder if part of your experience is because you have a choice. Some do not, because, in their circumstances, complete attention must be focused on surviving. I wonder, also, if humans are a bit behind in their evolutionary adaptation to having this level of choice.
Your post also makes clear the incredible difficulty people face in AI alignment. It is difficult to align our own selves. We fall back on heuristics to save time and our own mental resources. There are multiple “right” answers. Rewards here have costs there. It’s difficult to assign weights. The weight values seem to fluctuate depending on where we focus our attention. If we spend too many resources trying to pick a direction, the paths meanwhile change and we have to reassess.
And there is the manipulation of incentives, particularly praise. Is the praise worth the cost? Did your start state set you up to put one foot in front of the next in response to praise? Do you always have to do a good job at being a CEO, a husband, a father? Is being in your wife’s company its own reward or are you doing the job of being a husband? Or do you feel both ways in fluctuating degrees? Also, it may be that the goal is not the only thing that directs your behavior. It may be that, sometimes, the push and pull of whatever small, repeated incentives are happening are guiding less planned behaviors. These less planned behaviors over time become your life.
Anyway, I appreciate what you have said and how you have said it.