So, it seems to me that what you describe here is not moving up a hierarchy of goals, unless there are serious issues with the mechanisms used to generate subgoals. It seems like slogans more appropriate to avoiding the demonstrated failure mode are:
“Beware affective death spirals on far-mode (sub)goals”
or
“Taboo specific terms in your goals to make them operationally useful”
or possibly even
“Check that your stated goals are not semantic stop-signs”
As presented, you are claiming that:
I wanted to be a perfectly honed instrument for realizing my goals, similar to the hyper-competent characters in my favorite fictions
was generated as a subgoal of specific concrete goals (you mention programming and business). This seems to be a massive failure of planning. I would compare it to stating you would develop calculus to solve a constant speed distance-time problem, having never solved any of the latter sort of question. There is no shape to such a goal; to such an individual “calculus” is a term without content. Similarly, unless you have already developed high competence in many concrete tasks, how would you recognise a mind that was a perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals? Taboo “perfectly honed instrument”, “hyper-competent” etc., and the goal dissolves.
On the other hand, going up the pyramid of goals seems more likely to induce this error. Generally my high level goals are in farer modes and less concrete. Certainly “acquire awesome skills” is not something that I have generated as a subgoal of other goals; I have it as a generalisation of past methods of success, in the (inductive) belief that acquiring such skills will be useful in general. As subgoals to that I attempt general self improvement, for example learning to code in new languages or pushing other skillsets. Going up the pyramid of goals in such a context is an active hinderance, because the higher goals are harder to make operational.
I am primarily referring to the unconscious drives underlying our actions, not our verbal goals. No matter what term I used to describe it, when I imagined myself doing very well in general relative to other people, spending every moment in focused and topical optimization, I was excited and driven to pursue the things I expected to make me like that. If I anticipated outcomes that did NOT involve me being that kind of person, there was far less unconscious drive to act.
Being hyper-competent was not a subgoal of programming or business, and if it were I would have your same critique. Being hyper-competent was a subgoal of having social success, having riches, being safe, a general assessment of “able to succeed even in difficult situations.” Programming and business were rather what seemed consciously to be the best specific routes for achieving these things, but they involved not being the sort of hyper-competent person, and because I unconsciously desired that so much I was not, in practice, driven to pursue programming or business.
Similarly, unless you have already developed high competence in many concrete tasks, how would you recognise a mind that was a perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals?
The term “perfectly honed instrument” is meant to convey an intuitive sense, not a technical description. But you would recognize such a person by them constantly engaging in what actually seemed to have the greatest marginal return on time, and probably by quickly developing unusually large amounts of skill.
Taboo “perfectly honed instrument”, “hyper-competent” etc., and the goal dissolves.
Those terms refer to particular patterns of reality and not others—Bourne, rational!Quirrell, arguably rational!Dumbledore are all extensions of this intension. The average person is not.
Going up the pyramid of goals in such a context is an active hinderance, because the higher goals are harder to make operational.
By “going up the pyramid of goals” I’m referring to understanding more precisely the rules generating the particular, concrete situations we desire, and following a rule higher up on that pyramid. In other words, are there some things we could think of concretely, that once thinking of them, we realized were the real reason we had been motivated by something else was that we unconsciously anticipated it to lead to the first thing? This is something for each person to discover on their own, but it is something to discover.
“Beware affective death spirals on far-mode (sub)goals” or “Taboo specific terms in your goals to make them operationally useful” or possibly even “Check that your stated goals are not semantic stop-signs”
Are you doing those things already? Do they leave something left for you to desire in your rationality? These are all descriptions of much more surface-level techniques than what’s being discussed here. This technique is about finding concrete things that make you think “hey, that’s awesome, how can I get that?”
I want to note that I may be confused: I have multiple hypotheses fitting some fraction of the data presented.
Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.
The first is what seems to be in the example. The second is what the strategy handles. The third is what I get when I try to interpret:
This technique is about finding concrete things that make you think “hey, that’s awesome, how can I get that?”
The third is a call for more luminosity; the second is bad goal choice. The first is more awkward to handle. You need to operationally notice which goals are not useful and which are. That means noticing surface level features of your apparent goals that are not optimal.
As I see it, speaking of an “intuitive notion” of “perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals”, or merely stopping at “particular patterns of reality” is the warning signal of this failure mode. Taboo these terms, make them operationally defined. If you have a sequence of definite concrete statements about what the world would look like if you were this kind of entity, then you have a functional definition of what you want from the goal.
Of course, the imprecise goal may shatter into a large number of actionable goals. It may be the case that the skills needed to achieve these subgoals have a larger scale skill to learn in them. Functionally, if that high level skill can’t be stated with sufficient precision to go out and know success when it’s seen, then more data is needed about this possible high-level skill before we can be confident it’s there in a form matching the imprecise goal. So note it, do the concrete things now, and look again when there is a better sense of the potential high level problem to solve.
The bit of the post that I find most awesome is the couple of days taken to audit your goals, and notice that achieving your goals were being hindered by this urge. I am aware that when I noticed how badly broken my goal structures were, I had to call “halt and catch fire” and keep a diary for a couple of months. Being able to perform an audit in a few days would be incredibly useful.
Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.
You bring up a really good point here. I would say that my unconscious thinking was making oversights and unexamined assumptions in the pursuit of goals. For example, thinking “Okay there’s a bunch of stuff that I want, but if I just become super effective at reaching goals generally, then I’ll get those things automatically.” Because it was overlooking other ways of reaching these goals, it both failed to be motivated by some helpful things, like programming study even if not impressive, and it also thought less creatively about how to hit the supergoal.
So, it seems to me that what you describe here is not moving up a hierarchy of goals, unless there are serious issues with the mechanisms used to generate subgoals. It seems like slogans more appropriate to avoiding the demonstrated failure mode are:
“Beware affective death spirals on far-mode (sub)goals” or “Taboo specific terms in your goals to make them operationally useful” or possibly even “Check that your stated goals are not semantic stop-signs”
As presented, you are claiming that:
was generated as a subgoal of specific concrete goals (you mention programming and business). This seems to be a massive failure of planning. I would compare it to stating you would develop calculus to solve a constant speed distance-time problem, having never solved any of the latter sort of question. There is no shape to such a goal; to such an individual “calculus” is a term without content. Similarly, unless you have already developed high competence in many concrete tasks, how would you recognise a mind that was a perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals? Taboo “perfectly honed instrument”, “hyper-competent” etc., and the goal dissolves.
On the other hand, going up the pyramid of goals seems more likely to induce this error. Generally my high level goals are in farer modes and less concrete. Certainly “acquire awesome skills” is not something that I have generated as a subgoal of other goals; I have it as a generalisation of past methods of success, in the (inductive) belief that acquiring such skills will be useful in general. As subgoals to that I attempt general self improvement, for example learning to code in new languages or pushing other skillsets. Going up the pyramid of goals in such a context is an active hinderance, because the higher goals are harder to make operational.
I am primarily referring to the unconscious drives underlying our actions, not our verbal goals. No matter what term I used to describe it, when I imagined myself doing very well in general relative to other people, spending every moment in focused and topical optimization, I was excited and driven to pursue the things I expected to make me like that. If I anticipated outcomes that did NOT involve me being that kind of person, there was far less unconscious drive to act.
Being hyper-competent was not a subgoal of programming or business, and if it were I would have your same critique. Being hyper-competent was a subgoal of having social success, having riches, being safe, a general assessment of “able to succeed even in difficult situations.” Programming and business were rather what seemed consciously to be the best specific routes for achieving these things, but they involved not being the sort of hyper-competent person, and because I unconsciously desired that so much I was not, in practice, driven to pursue programming or business.
The term “perfectly honed instrument” is meant to convey an intuitive sense, not a technical description. But you would recognize such a person by them constantly engaging in what actually seemed to have the greatest marginal return on time, and probably by quickly developing unusually large amounts of skill.
Those terms refer to particular patterns of reality and not others—Bourne, rational!Quirrell, arguably rational!Dumbledore are all extensions of this intension. The average person is not.
By “going up the pyramid of goals” I’m referring to understanding more precisely the rules generating the particular, concrete situations we desire, and following a rule higher up on that pyramid. In other words, are there some things we could think of concretely, that once thinking of them, we realized were the real reason we had been motivated by something else was that we unconsciously anticipated it to lead to the first thing? This is something for each person to discover on their own, but it is something to discover.
Are you doing those things already? Do they leave something left for you to desire in your rationality? These are all descriptions of much more surface-level techniques than what’s being discussed here. This technique is about finding concrete things that make you think “hey, that’s awesome, how can I get that?”
I want to note that I may be confused: I have multiple hypotheses fitting some fraction of the data presented.
Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.
The first is what seems to be in the example. The second is what the strategy handles. The third is what I get when I try to interpret:
The third is a call for more luminosity; the second is bad goal choice. The first is more awkward to handle. You need to operationally notice which goals are not useful and which are. That means noticing surface level features of your apparent goals that are not optimal.
As I see it, speaking of an “intuitive notion” of “perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals”, or merely stopping at “particular patterns of reality” is the warning signal of this failure mode. Taboo these terms, make them operationally defined. If you have a sequence of definite concrete statements about what the world would look like if you were this kind of entity, then you have a functional definition of what you want from the goal.
Of course, the imprecise goal may shatter into a large number of actionable goals. It may be the case that the skills needed to achieve these subgoals have a larger scale skill to learn in them. Functionally, if that high level skill can’t be stated with sufficient precision to go out and know success when it’s seen, then more data is needed about this possible high-level skill before we can be confident it’s there in a form matching the imprecise goal. So note it, do the concrete things now, and look again when there is a better sense of the potential high level problem to solve.
The bit of the post that I find most awesome is the couple of days taken to audit your goals, and notice that achieving your goals were being hindered by this urge. I am aware that when I noticed how badly broken my goal structures were, I had to call “halt and catch fire” and keep a diary for a couple of months. Being able to perform an audit in a few days would be incredibly useful.
You bring up a really good point here. I would say that my unconscious thinking was making oversights and unexamined assumptions in the pursuit of goals. For example, thinking “Okay there’s a bunch of stuff that I want, but if I just become super effective at reaching goals generally, then I’ll get those things automatically.” Because it was overlooking other ways of reaching these goals, it both failed to be motivated by some helpful things, like programming study even if not impressive, and it also thought less creatively about how to hit the supergoal.