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cousin_it comments on Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model - Less Wrong
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This theory seems to make a testable prediction: you will have less akrasia if your signaling requires you to reach your goal, not just show that you're working towards it. Looking at my life, I'm not sure if that's true.
One inspiration for this line of thinking was Michael Vassar complaining about how many people volunteer to help SIAI, versus how few people actually go through with helping them once he's given them projects. I noticed I do this sort of thing all the time.
I find signaling to others a useful way to meet goals. A lot of the time, I will tell other people about something that I'm working on, so I am more motivated to impress that person, and avoid looking bad if they ask me about it later and I haven't done any work on it.
All these systems evolved in the ancestral environment. "Go to the moon" might not even be parseable by other processes as something you can do or not do, or something that signals anything.
People get more done if they find the activity expression of their status-seeking, developing mastery.
Developing mastery is itself rewarding. Babies will be interested in pushing a foot pedal in their crib until they are satisfied they can predict/control the movement of a mobile above that is operated by the pedal, and will then lose interest.
Or, to put it another way, humans value dopamine (stimulation) rewards as well as serotonin (status) rewards.
(I could be wrong, but ISTR that serotonin levels change in response to social status changes in monkeys -- maybe someone can correct me if it's a different neurotransmitter.)
Seratonin is the right one (and dopamine a bit too, as can be expected by dopamine's general role as a 'reward' neurotransmitter.)
Why choose to master A and not B?
Why do babies try to master a foot pedal-and-mobile combination?
For the same reason people climb mountains: because it's there.
IOW, opportunity and interest. (One might reasonably say there are people who climb mountains for status, but it's hard to pin a status motive on babies.)
In my observation, there are at least four major categories of reward mechanism: what I refer to as status, affiliation, safety, and stimulation, or S.A.S.S. for short. These likely correspond to major chemical pathways - maybe serotonin, oxytocin, ?, and dopamine.
Trying to make everything about human motivation into a single drive (status) makes it really hard to actually predict behavior, in my experience, since there are plenty of examples of people lowering their status to get one or more of the other kinds of reward.