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Davidmanheim comments on Highlights and Shadows - Less Wrong
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I'm wondering what the point is of investing significant time in something if you don't have a goal specified. Not that I don't ever do this, but I like to think that it's a non-endorsed behavior. When I notice myself doing this, I should assess my implicit motives, and try to find what I want, and whether what I'm doing makes sense.
If the goal of a relationship is to be happy and enjoy the time together, it can be successful and short term. If the goal is to find a life-partner, it can't be successful and short term.
Exploration.
It's a fair thing to wonder.
In my case, I endorse it within limits because in my experience sometimes the best I seem able to do with respect to some goal X is establish that I do in fact seem to want to do X, that I don't object to doing X, that doing X doesn't seem to be causing me any problems, and that my desire to do X is reasonably persistent. When I try to dig "below" that to get at "what other goal, beyond simply doing X for its own sake, does doing X accomplish?" I sometimes get answers, but I often get nothing at all. If I push past that point I'm more likely to confabulate a plausible-sounding answer than discover a real one.
Of course, another option at that point is to give up on X on the grounds that if I can't articulate the goal of X, then I shouldn't value that goal (nor, therefore, X) in the first place.
But those grounds seem shaky to me; I haven't found much evidence to support the idea that only the parts of my brain that are capable of articulating things explicitly store/process/manifest/whatever goals worth pursuing.
That makes sense to me. I think that there are things we can't articulate that matter, but I generally prefer to work on my ability to articulate them; it probably relays to me conception of Eliezer's idea of luminosity.
On the other hand, I feel like I might be oversubscribed on goals, making exploration difficult. I don't know if I have time for general activity that doesn't further a goal, since I have many that are already high priority.