Jonathan_Graehl comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong

153 Post author: AnnaSalamon 08 September 2010 07:02AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (266)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 08 September 2010 09:55:17PM 0 points [-]

We: (1) tell ourselves and others stories of how we’re aiming for various “goals”; (2) search out modes of activity that are consistent with the role, and goal-seeking, that we see ourselves as doing (“learning math”; “becoming a comedian”; “being a good parent”); and sometimes even (3) feel glad or disappointed when we do/don’t achieve our “goals”.

Well put. I've realized that really planning (and acting) in order to reach hard goals, is something I almost never do. Most of the time I'm just working on what feels most rewarding locally.

humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence. Perhaps 5% of the population has enough abstract reasoning skill to verbally understand that the above heuristics would be useful once these heuristics are pointed out

Yes - but perhaps some of the unfortunate remainder could grow to understand (by acquiring some missing prerequisites first).

Our verbal, conversational systems are much better at abstract reasoning than are the motivational systems that pull our behavior

Yes. And I wonder how much non-task-specific training or tricking of the motivational systems is possible. There may be general tricks like (h), but I have no evidence for a sort of general "able to try harder" faculty that can be improved (even though it seems extremely plausible).