I believe this comment is along the lines of what I would have written yesterday..
If you measure intelligence against the goals we haven’t met, we certainly come up short. However, zooming out to look at humanity as a whole, I am impressed by how productive we are. Huge cities, dozens of them, with gorgeous and functional buildings and everyone milling about being productive, all over the world. The infrastructure of our civilization is enormous. And all the art we output – books, movies, gardens. I think we’re amazingly successful at achieving some types of goals, when seen as a single complex system.
When you zoom in to the individual, I think it becomes more difficult to judge from among the small-scale effects if humans are meeting their goals. The problem of individual success is so complex not only because we have trouble achieving our goals, but because it is a much more difficult task to decide on appropriate goals, and distribute resources among them.
Whatever our goals are, x,y,z; our goal is rarely to “have x, no matter what”. There’s always a trade-off and a limit to the resources we’re willing to expend towards x. Several comments have already mentioned the cost considerations in decision-making about goals. In particular, it can be argued that considering resource costs, one might better pursue nothing than pursue sub-optimal goals – pursuing goals of unknown value sub-optimally may be a reasonable middle ground.
Choosing goals appropriately so as to not waste effort depends upon an environment we have limited information about. Unknown variables and chance play a very large role in whether you will be successful or not. Instead of choosing a goal and directly pursuing it, it can be wise to do nothing and wait for opportunities. In life philosophies, this is described as ‘not fighting the universe’ or ‘yang instead of yin’.
There is a mind-body ‘wholistic’ aspect to meeting our goals, which unfortunately gives the impression that success in meeting goals is a quality or a talent rather than rationality. Only certain goals can be straight-forwardly achieved by designing and following a ‘plan’. I recently finished a terrific book and wondered how that book was written. I doubt the author himself knows. Certainly, there are ingredients: having something to say and recognizing an aptitude for writing, the discipline to keep a writing schedule, etc., but presumably many components of the author’s personality needed to come together to write that book, something that couldn’t be forced but which was permitted. This kind of success in life makes it very difficult to make a connection between ‘plans’ and ‘success’. I personally wasted a lot of mental energy as a child wondering why sometimes things seemed easy and sometimes they seemed hard, because I suspected fate or external intervention. There are many components of our personality we don’t seem to have control of, and the importance of integrating your personality behind a goal eclipses— often – the importance of the having a rational plan. (The point I am making here echoes what was said in this thread.)
Reply to: A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy
Lionhearted writes:
Why will a randomly chosen eight-year-old fail a calculus test? Because most possible answers are wrong, and there is no force to guide him to the correct answers. (There is no need to postulate a “fear of success”; most ways writing or not writing on a calculus test constitute failure, and so people, and rocks, fail calculus tests by default.)
Why do most of us, most of the time, choose to "pursue our goals" through routes that are far less effective than the routes we could find if we tried?[1] My guess is that here, as with the calculus test, the main problem is that most courses of action are extremely ineffective, and that there has been no strong evolutionary or cultural force sufficient to focus us on the very narrow behavior patterns that would actually be effective.
To be more specific: there are clearly at least some limited senses in which we have goals. 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”.
But there are clearly also heuristics that would be useful to goal-achievement (or that would be part of what it means to “have goals” at all) that we do not automatically carry out. We do not automatically:
.... or carry out any number of other useful techniques. Instead, we mostly just do things. We act from habit; we act from impulse or convenience when primed by the activities in front of us; we remember our goal and choose an action that feels associated with our goal. We do any number of things. But we do not systematically choose the narrow sets of actions that would effectively optimize for our claimed goals, or for any other goals.
Why? Most basically, because 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. That is not at all the same as the ability to automatically implement these heuristics. Our verbal, conversational systems are much better at abstract reasoning than are the motivational systems that pull our behavior. I have enough abstract reasoning ability to understand that I’m safe on the glass floor of a tall building, or that ice cream is not healthy, or that exercise furthers my goals... but this doesn’t lead to an automatic updating of the reward gradients that, absent rare and costly conscious overrides, pull my behavior. I can train my automatic systems, for example by visualizing ice cream as disgusting and artery-clogging and yucky, or by walking across the glass floor often enough to persuade my brain that I can’t fall through the floor... but systematically training one’s motivational systems in this way is also not automatic for us. And so it seems far from surprising that most of us have not trained ourselves in this way, and that most of our “goal-seeking” actions are far less effective than they could be.
Still, I’m keen to train. I know people who are far more strategic than I am, and there seem to be clear avenues for becoming far more strategic than they are. It also seems that having goals, in a much more pervasive sense than (1)-(3), is part of what “rational” should mean, will help us achieve what we care about, and hasn't been taught in much detail on LW.
So, to second Lionhearted's questions: does this analysis seem right? Have some of you trained yourselves to be substantially more strategic, or goal-achieving, than you started out? How did you do it? Do you agree with (a)-(h) above? Do you have some good heuristics to add? Do you have some good ideas for how to train yourself in such heuristics?
[1] For example, why do many people go through long training programs “to make money” without spending a few hours doing salary comparisons ahead of time? Why do many who type for hours a day remain two-finger typists, without bothering with a typing tutor program? Why do people spend their Saturdays “enjoying themselves” without bothering to track which of their habitual leisure activities are *actually* enjoyable? Why do even unusually numerate people fear illness, car accidents, and bogeymen, and take safety measures, but not bother to look up statistics on the relative risks? Why do most of us settle into a single, stereotyped mode of studying, writing, social interaction, or the like, without trying alternatives to see if they work better -- even when such experiments as we have tried have sometimes given great boosts?