Reply to: A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy
Lionhearted writes:
[A] large majority of otherwise smart people spend time doing semi-productive things, when there are massively productive opportunities untapped.
A somewhat silly example: Let's say someone aspires to be a comedian, the best comedian ever, and to make a living doing comedy. He wants nothing else, it is his purpose. And he decides that in order to become a better comedian, he will watch re-runs of the old television cartoon 'Garfield and Friends' that was on TV from 1988 to 1995....
I’m curious as to why.
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:
- (a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
- (b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
- (c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
- (d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
- (e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;
- (f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;
- (g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;
- (h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;
.... 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?
I can think of at least 3 ways that people fail to make strategic, effective decisions.
(as the above post pointed out) it's difficult to analyze options (or even to come up with some of them), for any number of reasons: too many of them (and too little time), lack of information, unforeseeable secondary consequences, etc.. One can do one's best in the most rational fashion, but still comes out with a wrong choice. That's unfortunate, but if this is the only kind of mistakes I am making, i am not too worried. it's a matter of learning better heuristics, building better models, gathering more data... or, in the limit, admitting that there's a limit to how much human intelligence and limited time/resources can go, even if correctly applied to problems.
A second, more worrisome, mistake is not to even realize that one can step out of one's immediate reactions, stop whatever one's doing, and think about the rationality of it, and alternatives. This mistake differs from (1). As a hypothetical example, suppose the wannabe comedian generated a list of things he could do, and decided to watch the Garfield cartoon. His choice might be wrong, but it's a conscious, deliberate choice that he made. This is mistake of type (1).
Suppose however, the Garfield idea was the first thing that came to his mind, and after 3 months he was still at it, never stopping to question his own logic. This is mistake of type (2).
Type (2) is more worrisome, because there doesn't seem to be a reliable way that, if left alone, one can break out of it. Douglas Hofstadter (of GEB fame) invented a word "sphexishness", which I think describes this vividly. It's a wonderful label, and I use it to catch myself in the act. Hofstadter coined the word from sphex's (digger wasp) inability to break out from a fixed routine of laying eggs when disturbed by human. Hofstadter gave a spectrum of sphexish behaviors, from a stuck music record to teenagers addicted to video games to mathematicians applying the same trick for new discoveries. (Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas. "On the seeming paradox of mechanizing creativity").
A lot of the 'unstrategic' decisions people make smell of sphexishness. (decision here is a misnomer, as it's a lack of conscious decision that lead them to taking ill-effective actions.)
How do you correct mistakes of such a type? It requires self-awareness. Some kind of an interrupt to break one out of a loop. The ability to spot patterns in unexpected places. Ways to help yourself: hang out with intelligent, observant people (who would do you the favor to point it out for you; return the favor when you see others trapped in such a behavior). Try to develop a mental habit of self-watching.
3.There is yet a third way that people don't do what's best for them: unlike in (1) & (2), they know what they should do, but just can't bring themselves to doing it. Taking the aspiring comedian example again. Does he really think watching Garfield is the best thing to do? I doubt it. He might know that going to an open mike event is better learning, but it's so painful (the anxiety of first time performers, fear of failure) that he procrastinates -- and in the worst way too, by doing something that seems like progress (so he doesn't feel guilty from it), but actually is very ineffective. (The irony is that, the mind is actually doing the rational thing, but on a small scale: pain avoidance. but of course on the larger scale this is detrimental to individual survival, hence irrational.)
This is a situation where the best choice is not hard to figure out, but so difficult (often the difficulty is psychological, but difficult nonetheless) that the mind avoids it. The solutions seems to trick the mind into undertaking it. E.g. some people avoid thinking of taking on a large project (because it would be overwhelming), but work on small pieces of it until they built up momentum (in the form of confidence, or having made too much investment to turn back, or having expectations places on them...).
I suspect type (3) exist because rationality is a recently evolved phenomenon. Our psychology is still by and large that of an unconscious, reactive animal. Rationality and consciousness have to fight every step of the way against some hundreds of thousands of years (much longer if you count the time when we were fish and even before that) of evolved behaviors that were once useful and hard-wired.
Yet therein lies hope too. If we can find the right tricks, push the primitive buttons, we can get such amazing, barbaric, uncontrollable motivation and energy out of ourselves. The buttons might be designed for something else, but our intelligence can use them to achieve what we know is good for us. The image is using sex to encourage people to learn and act rationally (I have no idea how that might work). But the hope is that, consciousness triumphs over the lizard brain in us.
Once I held passing interest in Mensa, thinking that an org of super-smart people would surely self-organize to impact the world (positively perhaps, but taking it over as a gameboard for the new uberkind would work too). I was disappointed to learn that mostly Mensa does little, and when they get together in meatspace it is for social mixers and such. I also looked at Technocracy, which seemed like a reasonable idea, and that was different but no better.
Now I'm a few decades on in my tech career, and I have learned that most technical problems are reall... (read more)