For me, a strong reason why I do not see myself[1] doing deliberate practice as you (very understandably) suggest is that, on some level, the part of my mind which decides on how much motivational oomph and thus effort is put into activities just in fact does not care much about all of these abstract and long-term goals.
Deliberate practice is a lot of hard work and the part of my mind which makes decisions about such levels of mental effort just does not see the benefits. There is a way in which a system that circumvents this motivational barrier is working against my short-term goals and and it is the latter who significantly controls motivation: Thus, such a system will “just sort of sputter and fail” in such a way that, consciously, I don’t even want to think about what went wrong.
If Feedbackloop Rationality wants to move me to be more rational, it has to work with my current state of irrationality. And this includes my short-sighted motivations.
And I think you do describe a bunch of the correct solutions: Building trust between one’s short-term motivations and long-term goals. Starting with lower-effort small-scale goals where both perspectives can get a feel for what cooperation actually looks like and can learn that it can be worth the compromises. In some sense, it seems to me that once one is capable of the kind of deliberate practice that you suggest, much of this boot strapping of agentic consistency between short-term motivation and deliberate goals has already happened.
On the other hand, it might be perfectly fine if Feedbackloop Rationality requires some not-yet-teachable minimal proficiency at this which only a fraction of people already have. If Feedbackloop Rationality allows these people to improve their thinking and contribute to hard x-risk problems, that is great by itself.
To some degree, I am describing an imaginary person here. But the pattern I describe definitely exists in my thinking even if less clearly than I put it above.
I do think basically none of this makes sense if you don’t have some particular flavor of ambitious goals. If you don’t have ambitious goals that (probably) depend on leveling up a bunch, then yeah, don’t do that. (unless you intrinsically value the leveling up)
If you sort-of-kind-of have ambitious goals, but you’re not totally bought into them, or have mixed feelings about them, then you probably want to somehow resolve that (which I don’t think is a “deliberate practice” shaped problem, more like a therapy/emotional processing problem, or a “just find a fun project or better work environment that makes things more naturally motivating” problem)
For me, a strong reason why I do not see myself[1] doing deliberate practice as you (very understandably) suggest is that, on some level, the part of my mind which decides on how much motivational oomph and thus effort is put into activities just in fact does not care much about all of these abstract and long-term goals.
Deliberate practice is a lot of hard work and the part of my mind which makes decisions about such levels of mental effort just does not see the benefits. There is a way in which a system that circumvents this motivational barrier is working against my short-term goals and and it is the latter who significantly controls motivation: Thus, such a system will “just sort of sputter and fail” in such a way that, consciously, I don’t even want to think about what went wrong.
If Feedbackloop Rationality wants to move me to be more rational, it has to work with my current state of irrationality. And this includes my short-sighted motivations.
And I think you do describe a bunch of the correct solutions: Building trust between one’s short-term motivations and long-term goals. Starting with lower-effort small-scale goals where both perspectives can get a feel for what cooperation actually looks like and can learn that it can be worth the compromises. In some sense, it seems to me that once one is capable of the kind of deliberate practice that you suggest, much of this boot strapping of agentic consistency between short-term motivation and deliberate goals has already happened.
On the other hand, it might be perfectly fine if Feedbackloop Rationality requires some not-yet-teachable minimal proficiency at this which only a fraction of people already have. If Feedbackloop Rationality allows these people to improve their thinking and contribute to hard x-risk problems, that is great by itself.
To some degree, I am describing an imaginary person here. But the pattern I describe definitely exists in my thinking even if less clearly than I put it above.
I do think basically none of this makes sense if you don’t have some particular flavor of ambitious goals. If you don’t have ambitious goals that (probably) depend on leveling up a bunch, then yeah, don’t do that. (unless you intrinsically value the leveling up)
If you sort-of-kind-of have ambitious goals, but you’re not totally bought into them, or have mixed feelings about them, then you probably want to somehow resolve that (which I don’t think is a “deliberate practice” shaped problem, more like a therapy/emotional processing problem, or a “just find a fun project or better work environment that makes things more naturally motivating” problem)