Parts of human mind are not little humans. They are allowed to be irrational. It can’t be rational subagents all the way down. Rationality itself is probably implemented as subagents saying “let’s observe the world and try to make a correct model” winning a reputational war against subagents proposing things like “let’s just think happy thoughts”.
But I can imagine how some subagents could have less trust towards “good intentions that didn’t bring actual good outcomes” than others. For example, if you live in an environment where it is normal to make dramatic promises and then fail to act on them. I think I have read some books long ago claiming that children of alcoholic parents are often like that. They just stop listening to promises and excuses, because they have already heard too many of them, and they learned that nothing ever happens. I can imagine that they turn this habitual mistrust against themselves, too. That “I tried something, and it was a good idea, but due to bad luck it failed” resembles too much the parent saying how they had the good insight that they need to stop drinking, but only due to some external factor they had to drink yet another bottle today. Shortly, if your environment fails you a lot, as a response you can become unrealistically harsh on yourself.
Another possible explanation is that different people’s attention is focused on different places. Some people pay more attention to the promises, some pay more attention to the material results, some pay more attention to their feelings. This itself can be a consequence of the previous experience with paying attention to different things.
Parts of human mind are not little humans. They are allowed to be irrational. It can’t be rational subagents all the way down. Rationality itself is probably implemented as subagents saying “let’s observe the world and try to make a correct model” winning a reputational war against subagents proposing things like “let’s just think happy thoughts”.
But I can imagine how some subagents could have less trust towards “good intentions that didn’t bring actual good outcomes” than others. For example, if you live in an environment where it is normal to make dramatic promises and then fail to act on them. I think I have read some books long ago claiming that children of alcoholic parents are often like that. They just stop listening to promises and excuses, because they have already heard too many of them, and they learned that nothing ever happens. I can imagine that they turn this habitual mistrust against themselves, too. That “I tried something, and it was a good idea, but due to bad luck it failed” resembles too much the parent saying how they had the good insight that they need to stop drinking, but only due to some external factor they had to drink yet another bottle today. Shortly, if your environment fails you a lot, as a response you can become unrealistically harsh on yourself.
Another possible explanation is that different people’s attention is focused on different places. Some people pay more attention to the promises, some pay more attention to the material results, some pay more attention to their feelings. This itself can be a consequence of the previous experience with paying attention to different things.