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lionhearted comments on A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy - Less Wrong
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I suspect (perhaps "fear") that, outside of very specific goal-oriented fields like entrepreneurship, this is more likely a symptom self-deception about our goals.
You tell yourself that your ultimate goal is, for example, to make the world a happier place. And so it is for this ultimate reason, that you decide to be a video game programmer. What a coincidence that you're a video game enthusiast that always dreamed of making the next Mario Bros. What a coincidence that it happens to pay extraordinarily well.
And if someone points out that you could probably increase world happiness more by, say, donating some of that money to charity, naturally you can come up with some convoluted explanation of why this is not (at least provably) so.
I think even more so though, it happens on a small scale. When I'm working, I take breaks to cruise the internet. Ostensibly, to recharge and give my brain a break. While this is indeed what I'm doing, this explanation has usually run dry within 10 minutes. After this point, my actual goal has become putting off work because something else seems more interesting, and I'd be lying to myself to claim otherwise.
In short, we sometimes fall short of our "goals" because they're actually not our goals. Canonically, this.
This is a good point, yes. A lot of times the finish line is not well-defined, and you have to choose. Or people self deceive for self esteem reasons or for signalling reasons. Yes, this could be a major reason it happens. Good point. There's still an open question of why people do it when they do have very clear purpose that they honestly want... for instance, the would-be comedian who really really does want to do comedy and is taking lower gains... that said, I think you just uncovered a big reason it happens - self-deception about goals, indeed.
For clear cut examples, the question certainly remains. Your example of the comedian is what got me thinking about this though, because if I heard of a person doing what he's doing, the "fake justifications" explanation would seem like the vastly more likely one to me.
There's no way he actually thinks Garfield is the best way to comedy superstardom, or even a reasonable use of his time at all. In your example, we can look into his mind and see that he's doing comedian training. If I met this guy in reality though, my explanation of his behavior would be "He's lazy and just wants to watch tv all day. He tells himself it's training because he doesn't want to admit this".
If he just wanted to watch TV all day, I'm sure he could find something more entertaining. After a while, the jokes about mailing Nermal to Abu Dhabi get really old. This sounds like a case where he somehow convinced himself that watching Garfield and Friends was a good way to become a better comedian.
I liked Garfield and Friends...
So did I, but while I'm sure a comedian-in-training could learn something from it, it's far from optimal.
Actually, most possible things people do are obviously far from optimal. Just look at how much time students spend zoning out in class, "learning". It's trivial to come up with a better way to use that time. Thinking about this scares me, because I could probably be doing something better most of the time, if I had a better idea of how to win at life.
School isn't about learning. Zoning out in class can be a rational choice on the part of a student. If your goal is to acquire the credentials school provides and a required component of that is a certain attendance level but you get little of value from the class then zoning out can be a rational response. This describes much of my school career.
Maybe we should put the X-is-not-about-X stuff on the wiki so we can accumulate datapoints. I mean, for schooling I have 2 (lack of use of the proven superior spaced presentation/spaced repetition over the prevalent massed presentation; lack of sensible school hours for high schools), but most people interested in the topic will never come across these.
When I was in those situations, I would usually read a book, or ponder something, and periodically check to see if the teacher was saying anything important. It was like an enforced study time. That's more rational than sitting there vegetating. (The downside is that some of the most boring teachers would get ticked off. Still worth it, though.)
I would usually pay attention to the actual lesson unless it was review over what we'd already been assigned to read or otherwise not new information. At that point, and otherwise when question and answer or assignment writing was going on and I was finished the assignment, I would mostly tune out the teacher and spend my time drawing on the backs and margins of my worksheets. I never in any other period of my life did as much artwork as I did while bored or distracted in high school, and I think it's because for many reasons I don't bother with well enough to control I am usually tired, and prefer to piss away my time with small "entertainments" like YouTube videos which are almost always available than invest my time in things which require more of an energy commitment despite also being more rewarding.
Or I would nap on my desk. Got in trouble for it surprisingly rarely.
Definitely. And I'm sure that you'd learn a lot more about television than about how to do stand-up comedy by studying a television series that isn't itself about stand-up.