I wouldn’t say the subsconscious calibrating on more substantial measures of success, such has “how happy something made me” or “how much status that seems to have brought” is irrational. What you’re proposing, it seems to me, is calibrating only on how good of an idea it was from the predictor part / System 2. Which gets calibrated, I would guess, when the person analyses the situation? But if the system 2 is sufficiently bad, calibrating on pure results is a good idea to shield against pursuing some goal, the pursuit of which yields nothing but evaluations of System 2, that the person did well. Which is bad, if one of the end goals of the subconscious is “objective success”.
For example, a situation I could easily imagine myself to have been in: Every day I struggle to go to bed, because I can’t put away my phone. But when I do, at 23:30, I congratulate myself—it took a lot of effort, and I did actually succeed in giving myself enough time to sleep almost long enough.
If I didn’t recalibrate rationally, and “me-who-uses-internal-metrics-of-success” were happy with good effort every day, I’d keep doing it.
All while real me would get fed up soon, and get a screen blocker app to turn on at 23:00 every day to sleep well every day at no willpower cost. (+- the other factors and supposing phone after 23 isn’t very important for some parts of me)
I wouldn’t say the subsconscious calibrating on more substantial measures of success, such has “how happy something made me” or “how much status that seems to have brought” is irrational. What you’re proposing, it seems to me, is calibrating only on how good of an idea it was from the predictor part / System 2. Which gets calibrated, I would guess, when the person analyses the situation? But if the system 2 is sufficiently bad, calibrating on pure results is a good idea to shield against pursuing some goal, the pursuit of which yields nothing but evaluations of System 2, that the person did well. Which is bad, if one of the end goals of the subconscious is “objective success”.
For example, a situation I could easily imagine myself to have been in: Every day I struggle to go to bed, because I can’t put away my phone. But when I do, at 23:30, I congratulate myself—it took a lot of effort, and I did actually succeed in giving myself enough time to sleep almost long enough. If I didn’t recalibrate rationally, and “me-who-uses-internal-metrics-of-success” were happy with good effort every day, I’d keep doing it. All while real me would get fed up soon, and get a screen blocker app to turn on at 23:00 every day to sleep well every day at no willpower cost. (+- the other factors and supposing phone after 23 isn’t very important for some parts of me)