Summary: Random events can preclude or steal attention from the goals you set up to begin with, hormonal fluctuation inclines people to change some of their goals with time. A discussion on how to act more usefully given those potential changes follows, taking in consideration the likelihood of a goal's success in terms of difficulty and length.

Throughout I'll talk about postponing utilons into undetectable distances. Doing so (I'll claim), is frequently motivationally driven by a cognitive dissonance between what our effects on the near world are, and what we wish they were. In other words it is:

A Self-serving bias in which Loss aversion manifests by postponing one's goals, thus avoiding frustration through wishful thinking about far futures, big worlds, immortal lives, and in general, high numbers of undetectable utilons.

I suspect that some clusters of SciFi, Lesswrong, Transhumanists, and Cryonicists are particularly prone to postponing utilons into undetectable distances, and in the second post I'll try to specify which subgroups might be more likely to have done so. The phenomenon, though composed of a lot of biases, might even be a good thing depending on how it is handled.

 

Sections will be:

1. What Significantly Changes Life's Direction (lists)

2. Long Term Goals and Even Longer Term Goals

3. Proportionality Between Goal Achievement Expected Time and Plan Execution Time

4. A Hypothesis On Why We Became Long-Term Oriented

5. Adapting Bayesian Reasoning to Get More Utilons

6. Time You Can Afford to Wait, Not to Waste

7. Reference Classes that May Be Postponing Utilons Into Undetectable Distances

8. The Road Ahead

Sections 4-8 will be on a second post so that I can make changes based on commentary to this one.

 

1What Significantly Changes Life's Direction

1.1 Predominantly external changes

As far as I recall from reading old (circa 2004) large scale studies on happiness, the most important life events in how much they change your happiness for more than six months are: 

 

• Becoming the caretaker of someone in a chronic non-curable condition

• Separation (versus marriage)

• Death of a Loved One

• Losing your Job

• Child rearing per child including the first

• Chronic intermittent disease

• Separation (versus being someone's girlfriend/boyfriend) 

Roughly in descending order. 

That is a list of happiness changing events, I'm interested here in goal-changing events, and am assuming there will be a very high correlation.

 

From life experience, mine, of friends, and of academics I've met, I'll list some events which can change someone's goals a lot:

 

• Moving between cities/countries

• Changing your social class a lot (losing a fortune or making one) 

• Spending highschool/undergrad in a different country to return afterwards

• Having a child, in particular the first one 

• Trying to get a job or make money and noticing more accurately what the market looks like

• Alieving Existential Risk

• Alieving as true, universally or personally, the ethical theories called "Utilitarianism" and "Consequentialism"

• Noticing that a lot of people are better than you at your initial goals, specially when those goals are competitive non-positive sum goals to some extent. 

• Interestingly, noticing that a lot of people are worse than you, making the efforts you once thought necessary not worth doing, or impossible to find good collaborators for. 

• Getting to know those who were once your idols, or akin to them, and considering their lives not as awesome as their work

• ... which is sometimes caused by ...

• Reading Dan Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" and actually implementing his "advice that no one will follow" which is to think your happiness and emotions will correlate more with someone else who is already doing X which you plan to do than with your model of what it would feel like doing X. 

• Extreme social instability, such as wars, famine, etc...

• Having an ecstatic or traumatic experience, real or fictional. Such as seeing something unexpected, watching a life-changing movie, having a religious breakthrough, or a hallucinogenic one 

• Traveling to a place that is very different from your world and being amazed / shocked

• Not being admitted into your desired university / course

• Depression

• Surpassing a frustration threshold thus experiencing the motivational equivalent of learned helplessness

• Realizing your goals do not match the space-time you were born in, such as if making songs for CDs is your vocation, or if you are 30 years old in contemporary Kenya and want to teach medicine at a top 10 world college.

• Falling in love

That is long enough, if not exhaustive, so let's get going... 

 

1.2 Predominantly Internal Changes

 

I'm not a social endocrinologist but I think this emerging science agrees with folk wisdom that a lot changes in our hormonal systems during life (and during the menstrual cycle) and of course this changes our eagerness to do particular things. Not only hormones but other life events which mostly relate to the actual amount of time lived change our psychology. I'll cite some of those in turn:

 

• Exploitation increases and Exploration decreases with age

• Sex-Drive

• Maternity Drive - we have in portuguese an expression that “a woman's clock started ticking” which evidentiates a folk psychological theory that some part of it at least is binary

• Risk-proneness gives way to risk aversion, predominantly in males

• Premenstrual Syndrome - I always thought the acronym stood for 'Stress' until checking for this post.

• Hormonal diseases

• Middle Age crisis – recent controversy about other apes having it

• U shaped happiness curve through time – well, not quite

• Menstrual cycle events

 

 

2 Long Term Goals and Even Longer Term Goals

 

I have argued sometimes here and elsewhere that selves are not as agenty as most of the top writers in this website seem to me to claim they should be, and that though in part this is indeed irrational, an ontology of selves which had various sized selves would decrease the amount of short term actions considered irrational, even though that would not go all the way into compensating hyperbolic discounting, scrolling 9gag or heroin consumption. That discussion, for me, was entirely about choosing between doing now something that benefits 'you_now' _, 'you_today', 'you_tomorrow', 'you_{this weekend}' or maybe a month from now. Anything longer than that was encompassed in a “Far Future” mental category. The interest here to discuss life-changing events is only in those far future ones which I'll split into arbitrary categories:

1) Months 2) Years 3) Decades 4) Bucket List or Lifelong and 5) Time Insensitive or Forever.

I have known more than ten people from LW whose goals are centered almost completely at the Time Insensitive and Lifelong categories, I recall hearing :

"I see most of my expected utility after the singularity, thus I spend my willpower entirely in increasing the likelihood of a positive singularity, and care little about my current pre-singularity emotions", “My goal is to have a one trillion people world with maximal utility density where everyone lives forever”, “My sole goal in life is to live an indefinite life-span”, “I want to reduce X-risk in any way I can, that's all”.

I myself stated once my goal as

“To live long enough to experience a world in which human/posthuman flourishing exceeds 99% of individuals and other lower entities suffering is reduced by 50%, while being a counterfactually significant part of such process taking place.”

Though it seems reasonable, good, and actually one of the most altruistic things we can do, caring only about Bucket Lists and Time Insensitive goals has two big problems

1. There is no accurate feedback to calibrate our goal achieving tasks

2. The Goals we set for ourselves require very long term instrumental plans, which themselves take longer than the time it takes for internal drives or external events to change our goals.

 

The second one has been said in a remarkable Pink Floyd song about which I wrote a motivational text five years ago: Time.

You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

 

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking

And racing around to come up behind you again

The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

 

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time

Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

 

Okay, maybe the song doesn't say exactly (2) but it is within the same ballpark. The fact remains that those of us inclined to care mostly about very long term are quite likely to end up with a half baked plan because one of those dozens of life-changing events happened, and that agent with the initial goals will have died for no reason if she doesn't manage to get someone to continue her goals before she stops existing.

 

This is very bad. Once you understand how our goal-structures do change over time – that is, when you accept the existence of all those events that will change what you want to steer the world into – it becomes straightforward irrational to pursue your goals as if that agent would live longer than it's actual life expectancy. Thus we are surrounded by agents postponing utilons into undetectable distances. Doing this is kind of a bias in the opposite direction of hyperbolic discounting. Having postponed utilons into undetectable distances is predictably irrational because it means we care about our Lifelong, Bucket List, and Time Insensitive goals as if we'd have enough time to actually execute the plans for these timeframes, while ignoring the likelihood of our goals changing in the meantime and factoring that in.

 

I've come to realize that this was affecting me with my Utility Function Breakdown which was described in the linked post about digging too deep into one's cached selves and how this can be dangerous. As I predicted back then, stability has returned to my allocation of attention and time and the whole zig-zagging chaotic piconomical neural Darwinism that had ensued has stopped. Also  relevant is the fact that after about 8 years caring about more or less similar things, I've come to understand how frequently my motivation changed direction (roughly every three months for some kinds of things, and 6-8 months for other kinds). With this post I intend to learn to calibrate my future plans accordingly, and help others do the same. Always beware of other-optimizing though.

 

Citizen: But what if my goals are all Lifelong or Forever in kind? It is impossible for me to execute in 3 months what will make centenary changes.

 

Well, not exactly. Some problems require chunks of plans which can be separated and executed either in parallel or in series. And yes, everyone knows that, also AI planning is a whole area dedicated to doing just that in non-human form. It is still worth mentioning, because it is much more simply true than actually done.

 

This community in general has concluded in its rational inquiries that being longer term oriented is generally a better way to win, that is, it is more rational. This is true. What would not be rational is to in every single instance of deciding between long term or even longer term goals, choose without taking in consideration how long will the choosing being exist, in the sense of being the same agent with the same goals. Life-changing events happen more often than you think, because you think they happen as often as they did in the savannahs in which your brain was shaped.

 

 

3 Proportionality Between Goal Achievement Expected Time and Plan Execution Time

 

So far we have been through the following ideas. Lots of events change your goals, some externally some internally, if you are a rationalist, you end up caring more about events that take longer to happen in detectable ways (since if you are average you care in proportion to emotional drives that execute adaptations but don't quite achieve goals). If you know that humans change and still want to achieve your goals, you'd better account for the possibility of changing before their achievement. Your kinds of goals are quite likely prone to the long-term since you are reading a Lesswrong post.

 

Citizen: But wait! Who said that my goals happening in a hundred years makes my specific instrumental plans take longer to be executed?

I won't make the case for the idea that having long term goals increases the likelihood of the time it takes to execute your plans being longer. I'll only say that if it did not take that long to do those things your goal would probably be to have done the same things, only sooner.

 

To take one example: “I would like 90% of people to surpass 150 IQ and be in a bliss gradient state of mind all the time”

Obviously, the sooner that happens, the better. Doesn't look like the kind of thing you'd wait for college to end to begin doing, or for your second child to be born. The reason for wanting this long-term is that it can't be achieved in the short run.

 

Take Idealized Fiction of Eliezer Yudkosky: Mr Ifey had this supergoal of making a Superintelligence when he was very young. He didn't go there and do it. Because he could not. If he could do it he would. Thank goodness, for we had time to find out about FAI after that. Then his instrumental goal was to get FAI into the minds of the AGI makers. This turned out to be to hard because it was time consuming. He reasoned that only a more rational AI community would be able to pull it off, all while finding a club of brilliant followers in this peculiar economist's blog. He created a blog to teach geniuses rationality, a project that might have taken years. It did, and it worked pretty well, but that was not enough, Ifey soon realized more people ought to be more rational, and wrote HPMOR to make people who were not previously prone to brilliance as able to find the facts as those who were lucky enough to have found his path. All of that was not enough, an institution, with money flow had to be created, and there Ifey was to create it, years before all that. A magnet of long-term awesomeness of proportions comparable only to the Best Of Standing Transfinite Restless Oracle Master, he was responsible for the education of some of the greatest within the generation that might change the worlds destiny for good. Ifey began to work on a rationality book, which at some point pivoted to research for journals and pivoted back to research for the Lesswrong posts he is currently publishing. All that Ifey did by splitting that big supergoal in smaller ones (creating Singinst, showing awesomeness in Overcoming Bias, writing the sequences, writing the particular sequence “Misterious Answers to Misterious Questions” and writing the specific post “Making Your Beliefs Pay Rent”). But that is not what I want to emphasize, what I'd like to emphasize is that there was room for changing goals every now and then. All of that achievement would not have been possible if at each point he had an instrumental goal which lasts 20 years whose value is very low uptill the 19th year. Because a lot of what he wrote and did remained valuable for others before the 20th year, we now have a glowing community of people hopefully becoming better at becoming better, and making the world a better place in varied ways.

 

So yes, the ubiquitous advice of chopping problems into smaller pieces is extremely useful and very important, but in addition to it, remember to chop pieces with the following properties:

 

(A) Short enough that you will actually do it.

 

(B) Short enough that the person at the end, doing it, will still be you in the significant ways.

 

(C) Having enough emotional feedback that your motivation won't be capsized before the end. and

 

(D) Such that others not only can, but likely will take up the project after you abandon it in case you miscalculated when you'd change, or a change occurred before expected time.

 

 

Sections 4-8 will be on a second post so that I can make changes based on commentary to this one.