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TheOtherDave comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
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Thanks for writing this. It has enabled me to articulate the rationales behind a lot of the "crazy" thoughts I have. For example:
People are horrible at choosing careers. They hardly explore their options at all, and thus limit themselves greatly.
People are bad at choosing who their girl/boyfriends are. They make decisions impulsively based on romantic love when the should really be considering the expected value of true attachment. A lot of times it seems that certain relationships "work", but are clearly suboptimal. Also, it seems that if people were genuinely interested in finding someone to enter a relationship with, that they should spend more time exploring their options.
Most philanthropists are lazy and impulsive. They don't think about how to best help society, they just make impulsive decisions based on what issues push their buttons.
The great majority of people are stupid. They don't think at all about how to best achieve the supergoal. They just make impulsive decisions based on their high level maps.
I think the reason behind these types of decisions is that humans are not automatically strategic.
Both choosing a career and choosing a mate seem to suffer from this weird expectation of finding the one that fits me perfectly. This sort of thinking has always been very alien to me, and to this day I don't understand what causes it. I suppose media has something to do with it.
It seems to me a special case of a broader habit of inferring individual agents where the reality is more distributed statistical patterns, which I expect pre-dates media in the modern sense (though I suppose we could say modern media has something to do with it in the sense of reinforcing a pre-existing tendency, if we wanted).