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army1987 comments on Rationally Irrational - Less Wrong
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Comments (414)
What would that even mean? Do you by detrimental mean something different than ‘making it harder to achieve your goals’?
Detrimental means damaging, but you could definitely read it as damaging to goals.
So do you think it is ever damaging or ever harmful to have goals?
Goals can be damaging or harmful to each other, but not to themselves. And if you have no goal at all, there's nothing to be damaged or harmed.
I think goals can be damaging to themselves. For example, I think anyone who has the explicit goal of becoming the strongest they can be, effectively limits their strength by the very nature of this type of statement.
Can you clarify this? What do you think is the goal other than 'be the strongest I can be' that would result in me ending up stronger? (Also, not sure what sort of strength you are talking about here: physical? psychological?)
To me true strength is a physical and physiological balance. I feel that anyone who has the goal of being "the strongest" (whether they mean physically, mentally, in a game, etc) is seeking strength out of a personally insecurity about their strength. Being insecure is a type of weakness. Therefore by having the goal of being the strongest will never allow them to be truly strong. Does that make sense? It is a very Daoist idea.
Do you mean someone who wants to be 'the strongest' compared to others. I don't think that's ever a good goal, because whether or not it is achievable doesn't depend on you. But 'be the strongest' is also an incredibly non-specific goal, and problematic for that reason. If you break it down, you could say "right now, my weaknesses are that a) I'm out of shape and can't jog more than 1 mile, and b) I'm insecure about it" then you could set sub-goals in both these areas, prioritize them, make plans on how to accomplish them, and evaluate afterwards whether they had been accomplished...and then make a new list of weaknesses, and a new list of goals, and a new list of plans. You're doing a lot more than just trying to be as strong as you can, but you're not specifically holding back or trying not to be as strong as you can either, which is what your comment came across as recommending.
No not compared to others. Just someone whose goal is to be the strongest. It is the fact that it is an "est" based goal that makes it damaging to itself. I suppose if I were to take all the poetry out of the above mentioned statement I would say that any goal that involves "ests" (fastest, strongest, smartest, wealthiest, etc) involves a degree of abstraction that signifies a lack of true understanding of what the actual quality/ state of being they are targeting encompasses, and that until said person better understands that quality/state they will never be able to achieve said goal.
Note that all your examples take my goal and rewrite to have incredibly practical parameters. You define reachable objectives as targets for your examples, but the point of my example was that it was a goal that lacked such empirically bounded markers.
OK. Makes sense. As I said in this comment, apparently my brain automatically converts abstract goals into sub-goals...so automatically that I hadn't even imagined someone could have a goal as abstract as 'be as strong as I can' without breaking it down and making it measurable and practicable, etc. I think I understand your point; it's the format of the goal that is damaging, not the content in itself.
Ahhh I am a moron, I did not even read that. I read dave's post prior to it and assumed it was irrelevant to the idea I was trying to convey. X_X
Yes, exactly. And if you do convert abstract goals into sub-goals you are abnormally brilliant. I don't know if you were taught to do that, or you just deduced such a technique on your own, but the majority of people, the vast majority, is unable to do that. It is a huge problem, one many self-health programs address, and also one that the main paradigms of American education are working to counteract.
It really is no small feat.
Well, there's "be stronger than I am right now."
OK, clarify: If I follow the goal 'be the strongest I can be' I will reach a level of strength X. What other goal would allow me to surpass the level of strength X (not just my initial level)?
Again: "be stronger than I am right now."
Of course, I need to keep that goal over time, as phrased, rather than unpack it to mean "be stronger than I was back then".
Some context: when I was recovering from my stroke a few years back, one of the things I discovered was that having the goal of doing a little bit better every day than the day before was a lot more productive for me (in terms of getting me further along in a given time period) than setting some target far from my current state and moving towards it. If I could lift three pounds with my right arm this week, I would try for 3.5 next week. If I could do ten sit-ups this week, I would try for 12 next week. And so forth.
Sure, I could have instead had a goal of "do as many situps as I can", but for me, that goal resulted in my being able to do fewer situps.
I suspect people vary in this regard.
I guess to me it seems automatic to 'unpack' a general goal like that into short-term specific goals. 'Be as fit as I can' became 'Improve my fitness' became 'improve my flexibility and balance' became 'start a martial art and keep doing it until I get my black belt' became a whole bunch of subgoals like 'keep practicing my back kick until I can use it in a sparring match'. It's automatic for me to think about the most specific level of subgoals while I'm actually practising, and only think about the higher-level goals when I'm revising whether to add new subgoals.
I guess, because this is the way my goal structure has always worked, I assume that my highest-level goal is by definition to become as good as X as I can. ('Be the strongest I can' has problems for other reasons, namely its non-specificity, so I'll replace it with something specific, so let's say X=swimming speed.)
I don't know the fastest speed is that my body is capable of, but I certainly want to attain that speed, not 0.5 km/h slower. But when I'm actually in the water training, or in bed at home trying to decide whether to get up and go train, I'm thinking about wanting to take 5 seconds off my 100 freestyle time. Once I've taken that 5 seconds off, I'll want to take another 5 seconds off. Etc.
I think the way I originally interpreted HungryTurtle's comment was that he thought you should moderate your goals to be less ambitious than 'be as good at X as you can' because having a goal that ambitious will cause you to lose. But you can also interpret it to mean that non-specific goals without measurable criteria, and not broken down into subgoals, aren't the most efficient way to improve. Which is very likely true, and I guess it's kind of silly of me to assume that everyone's brain creates an automatic subgoal breakdown like mine does.
Sure, I can see that. Were it similarly automatic for me, I'd probably share your intuitions here.
Hm.
If I have a goal G1, and then I later develop an additional goal G2, it seems likely that having G2 makes it harder for me to achieve G1 (due to having to allocate limited resources across two goals). So having G2 would be detrimental by that definition, wouldn't it?
Hm... Yeah. So, having goals other than your current goals is detrimental (to your current goals). (At least for ideal agents: akrasia etc. mean that it's not necessarily true for humans.) But I took HungryTurtle to mean ‘having any goals at all’. (Probably I was primed by this.)
Yes.
This is very interesting, but I was actually thinking about it in a different manner. I like your idea too, but this is more along the lines of what I meant:
Ultimately, I have goals for the purpose of arriving at some desired state of being. Overtime goals should change rationally to better reach desired states. However, what is viewed as a desired state of being also changes over time.
When I was 12 I wanted to be the strongest person in the world, when I was 18 I wanted to be a world famous comedian. Both of these desired states undoubtedly have goals that the achievement of would more readily and potently produce such desired states. If I had adopted the most efficient methods of pursuing these dreams, I would have been making extreme commitments for the sake of something that later would turn out to be a false desired state. Until one knows their end desired state, any goal that exceeds a certain amount of resources is damaging to the long term achievement of a desired state. Furthermore, I think people rarely know when to cut their losses. It could be that after investing X amount into desired state Y, the individual is unwilling to abandon this belief, even if in reality it is no longer their desired state. People get into relationships and are too afraid of having wasted all that time and resources to get out. I don’t know if I am being clear, but the train of my logic is roughly
Throughout the progression of time what a person finds to be a desired state changes. (Perhaps the change is more drastic in some than others, but I believe this change is normal. Just as through trial and error you refine your methods of goal achievement, through the trials and errors of life you reshape your beliefs and desires. )
If desired states of being are dynamic, then it not wise to commit to too extreme goals or methods for the sake of my current desired state of being. (There needs to be some anticipation of the likelihood that my current desired state might not be in agreement with my final/ actual desired state of being.)
(nods)
I certainly agree that the goals people can articulate (e.g., "become a world-famous comedian" or "make a trillion dollars" or whatever) are rarely stable over time, and are rarely satisfying once achieved, such that making non-reversible choices (including, as you say, the consumption of resources) to achieve those goals may be something we regret later.
That said, it's not clear that we have alternatives we're guaranteed not to regret.
Incidentally, it's conventional on LW to talk about this dichotomy in terms of "instrumental" and "terminal" goals, with the understanding that terminal goals are stable and worth optimizing for but mostly we just don't know what they are. That said, I'm not a fan of that convention myself, except in the most metaphorical of senses, as I see no reason for believing terminal goals exist at all.
But do you believe that most people pretty predictably experience shifts in goal orientation over a lifetime?
I'd have to know more clearly what you mean by "goal orientation" to answer that.
I certainly believe that most (actually, all) people, if asked to articulate their goals at various times during their lives, would articulate different goals at different times. And I'm pretty confident that most (and quite likely all, excepting perhaps those who die very young) people express different implicit goals through their choices at different times during their lives.
Are either of those equivalent to "shifts in goal orientation"?
Yes
Then yes, I believe that most people pretty predictably experience shifts in goal orientation over a lifetime.
Ok, me to.
Then if you believe that, does it seem logical to set up some system of regulation or some type of limitations on the degree of accuracy you are willing to strive for any current goal orientation?
Again, I'm not exactly sure I know what you mean.
But it certainly seems reasonable for me to, for example, not consume all available resources in pursuit of my currently articulable goals without some reasonable expectation of more resources being made available as a consequence of achieving those goals.
Is that an example of a system of regulation or type of limitation on the degree of accuracy I am willing to strive for my current goal orientation?
Preventing other people from consuming all available resources in pursuit of their currently articulable goals might also be a good idea, though it depends a lot on the costs of prevention and the likelihood that they would choose to do so and be able to do so in the absence of my preventing them.