Glad to learn my post was helpful! I don’t have time to engage more at the moment, but this post seems relevant to the topic: Dark Arts of Rationality.
Consider, for example, a young woman who wants to be a rockstar. She wants the fame, the money, and the lifestyle: these are her “terminal goals”. She lives in some strange world where rockstardom is wholly dependent upon merit (rather than social luck and network effects), and decides that in order to become a rockstar she has to produce really good music.
But here’s the problem: She’s a human. Her conscious decisions don’t directly affect her motivation.
In her case, it turns out that she can make better music when “Make Good Music” is a terminal goal as opposed to an instrumental goal.
When “Make Good Music” is an instrumental goal, she schedules practice time on a sitar and grinds out the hours. But she doesn’t really like it, so she cuts corners whenever akrasia comes knocking. She lacks inspiration and spends her spare hours dreaming of stardom. Her songs are shallow and trite.
When “Make Good Music” is a terminal goal, music pours forth, and she spends every spare hour playing her sitar: not because she knows that she “should” practice, but because you couldn’t pry her sitar from her cold dead fingers. She’s not “practicing”, she’s pouring out her soul, and no power in the ’verse can stop her. Her songs are emotional, deep, and moving.
It’s obvious that she should adopt a new terminal goal.
Glad to learn my post was helpful! I don’t have time to engage more at the moment, but this post seems relevant to the topic: Dark Arts of Rationality.