Talking to a friend today, she complained about someone wanting her help with a project when that person didn’t even know what the point of the project was.
Prima facie that does sound kind of objectionable. But is it?
People definitely do a lot of things without much explicit account of the point of each of them. For instance, many people go to university without taking a stance on whether it is primarily fulfills a learning function or a signaling function or an associating-with-elites function or or a getting the hell away from whatever they have been up to so far function.
It’s not that people think of going to university as pointless, they just have a vague sense of it being good in some rich array of ways.
Are activities motivated in this way much less useful than ones done with a distinct purpose?
I doubt it. But it seems complicated.
I’d guess that if a person thinks explicitly about their purposes in university, they might make university-related choices somewhat better. For instance, if they clarify with themselves that a big component is meeting like-minded peers, that might change which courses they do in counterintuitive ways.
But on the other hand, if they too much trust their breakdown of purposes, I expect things to get worse again: I’d guess a teenager who decides on a specific purpose for their university attendance to make worse choices than one just heuristically and hand-wavily trying to do what seems nebulously good.
Likewise, if I’m running a party, I don’t think it should have a point. Though I do think considering the possible sources of value from it might help.
On the other hand, if someone really wanted to cause a specific unusual event, and could give no account of why they wanted to do that except for evidently thinking it ‘would be good’, I might not be that excited to help them.
When should you know the point of your actions?
I propose a multi-armed bandit strategy:
Mostly, do things without paying attention to what the point is.
For a random subset of things, do things that have a specific point.
Many of the best things people have done started out as having no point. But surely we should give some attention to things having a point, right? People who try to do things with a point accomplish more on average than people who don’t.
Some things I can’t nail down the point of but do:
Voting. Correctly working out the point of an individual voting requires a working decision theory but even though I don’t have that I’m happy to basically pascal’s wager it. I picked this as an interesting example as I would have no qualms asking someone to help me go vote if I needed a ride or something.
I’m writing a new programming language, even though I’m not sure what the point is. On base rates the world doesn’t need this. I haven’t strictly asked for help with this before I work out what the point is, but I have definitely “Hey look at this thing I’m making”ed my friends with it enough that they could ask me why. I picked this as an example in the hopes that someone would ask for details, after which I would “Hey look at this thing I’m making” them.
Reddit: this doesn’t have a point and I would ask for help to not do this if I thought anyone could help.