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?
In common with all animal species, our sensory perceptual interpretation and behavioural action is also recognisable in basic physiological structure of (a) the peripheral nervous system, in our case the eyes, ears etc., and (b) parts of the central nervous systems, frontal lobes, the visual cortex, hypothalamus, amygdala, etc. that are within the brain. These are significant and extensive hardwired components. Using these structures, we can detect, recognise and evaluate a huge number of sensory patterns. For each of us these patterns are given emotional value. This is perception and learning at a distributed physiological level, on fine-grained scale that works in response to all the changes in our environment as they occur. We have a large memory to store the patterns we ‘see’, with a facility to recall and match. Emotional experience attaches new or revised values to each pattern. Where it is novel, innate curiosity is aroused. If it is seen as an unexplainable or a threat we avoid, if it is seen as an opportunity we approach. If, as is the case most of the time, it is determined as neutral we are initially attentive but tend to ignore or habituate to most of it. Moreover we physiologically tend to seek situations where our environment is largely ‘known’ and not one where the unknown continually confronts us. It is very demanding having to make highly aroused conscious decisions. There are only so many we are capable of dealing with in a period of time. However some degree of non-threatening novelty can brighten a routine day. For any individual our daily waking lives are dominated by fine grained decision-making and action instigating mechanisms constructed from our perceptions and affective memory. By about 10 years of age these collective processes are extremely well developed . Dependent upon circumstances they could be the basis of an independent survivable life though in western society another 6 to 12 years social support is the norm. Nevertheless despite extensive experience there is an innate requirement to make decisions. This is dominant and continuously operational and manifest many individual discrete decisions. As the world is ever changing we remember the pattern and the experience of our interaction. Second time round the response maybe quicker, eventually our action becoming almost sub-conscious; we gradually habituate to a potential changing complex environment. This gives rise to our almost unbounded ability to 'see' and easily decide what to do in the complex world about us - most of the time. Thus given an appropriate worldly experience then – scratching an itch, avoiding cars in traffic, jumping on busses, keeping clear of alligators, buying and selling stocks and shares, eating lunch in the park on a sunny day, flying planes, performing surgery or kicking pigeons in Trafalgar Square – all seems routine. In fact it is. It is the basis of living our everyday life.
The consequences of the innate and engrained nature of ‘decision making’ means that for most of the time we are not very interested in decisions we don't have to make and by things we can’t actually see. We are 'aroused' or 'activated' by what we see and hence do; by what the environment 'tells' us we need to do, now. We do not easily see the inevitability of something that happens in two years’ time, in fact we hardly see beyond two weeks into the future. How often do we wish we could replay a situation? With hind sight surely we could do better. For hind sight read planning - strategy -working out how a situation might play before it happens. There is an unconscious acceptance of an unfolding world to be negotiated. Most of the time this may appear as rational considered thought but in reality it is action man who is king and planning beyond the weekend is for nerds.
The perception, arousal, appraisal decision, action sequence is the basis of what we do every day maybe 99% of the time. Sometimes there are nuances of difference, new things to accept as for example when we travel to new places on business or on holiday. The bed room and bath room are not the same. Which side do I get out of bed? Where have I put the tooth brush? Where can I get a hot drink? In such circumstances we have to make lots of simple every day decisions. The regular business traveller is frustrated by those starting out on our once a year holiday. He knows how airport systems work – we don’t. However we quickly learn and habituate to this and drift with the flow.
Rarely are we stimulated to consider any major discontinuity. When this rare occurrence happens we are usually required to deal with an urgent threatening or opportunistic situation. In the modern world our usual range of innate coping mechanisms are inadequate. Unless we have been trained to perform in unusual situations as are soldiers or airline pilots we tend to do something immediate rather than something appropriate. Those with psychological and physiological processes that arouse significant longer-term consideration in their perceptual decision-making actions are the exception and not the rule. They are aroused by curiosity and an even smaller number by abstraction and formalism. Nevertheless we are all susceptible to our increasing complex world that requires more of us to think before we act rather than the acting before we think. However we are not very proficient at this latter course since in past time it was the least conducive to survival. Now we need to better understand factors that moderate decisions and improve our scope for performance and learning. How we do this is critically important and what this list is about. However the list alone is not sufficient. It is necessary to take the majority and human neurophysiology is not in our favour.