Important and timely (the next Melbourne LW meetup will focus on setting good goals, an exercise which has always confounded me).
I find particularly interesting the “wedding gift todo” example, where imagined achievement of the goal stands-in for actually achieving the stated goal (giving a wedding gift). We want to have and act on “goals” rather than “urges”. But setting goals is the kind of activity where “urges” can dominate. To me this looks like the analogue of belief-in-belief. We want our reasoning processes to be reflexively consistent, but in practice they often fail to work that way.
Edit: And when I go back and look at “Belief in Belief”, that’s where Eliezer outlines the “invisible dragon” example, so my main point is already implicit in this post!
Important and timely (the next Melbourne LW meetup will focus on setting good goals, an exercise which has always confounded me).
I find particularly interesting the “wedding gift todo” example, where imagined achievement of the goal stands-in for actually achieving the stated goal (giving a wedding gift). We want to have and act on “goals” rather than “urges”. But setting goals is the kind of activity where “urges” can dominate. To me this looks like the analogue of belief-in-belief. We want our reasoning processes to be reflexively consistent, but in practice they often fail to work that way.
Edit: And when I go back and look at “Belief in Belief”, that’s where Eliezer outlines the “invisible dragon” example, so my main point is already implicit in this post!