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.
After reading your post, I realize don’t like the framing implied by “what is the point?”. It feels like a leading question, where what it’s leading the respondent towards is picking a single answer, where as you point out, the things we do often serve multiple purposes at the same time. “Why are you doing this/why do you want to do this?” is a similar but more open-ended version, which doesn’t have this issue.
Asking when someone should know why they are doing what they are doing, seems to me to have the answer “almost always”, even very early on—although one can discover new reasons as one proceeds, that were not predicted in advance. I mean, it’s fine to feel like doing something and not understand why you feel that way, at first, but introspection and deeper understanding of one’s motivations is broadly helpful, in my experience.
On the other hand, having clarity about the dominant reason for doing something, being able to pick just one when asked “what is the point?”, may never happen for a particular action, or may involve suppressing useful information. E. G., if the truth is that university provides both job market value and social value and you commit to an answer where only one of those is what you focus on, you’ll have a worse time. Potentially as a result of someone asking you what the point of it was, and you then feeling like you’d be wrong to focus on something that isn’t the point you’d reasoned your way to earlier.