Exercise A: For some policy that someone is carrying out today, starting as close to the object level as possible (answering an email, making a phone call, buying something at the store), ask about the consequences, and the consequences of the consequences. Identify the consequences that are desirable or that the action is being carried out for-the-sake-of. State the goal in abstract terms. Ask whether achieving the goal has further consequences—even things terminally desirable often have other, instrumentally desirable or undesirable consequences. Trace out the chain of specific events and the abstract instrumental and terminal goals they correspond to.
Exercise B: For each goal node, find some other policy—not necessarily a superior policy, but some other policy—that would be helpful for the same goal, not necessarily in the same way. (The point being to unanchor your concept of that goal from the exact, specific means of achieving it. This also obviously starts on the habit of searching for superior alternatives.)
Subskill: “What is the consequence, what is the goal?”
Exercise A: For some policy that someone is carrying out today, starting as close to the object level as possible (answering an email, making a phone call, buying something at the store), ask about the consequences, and the consequences of the consequences. Identify the consequences that are desirable or that the action is being carried out for-the-sake-of. State the goal in abstract terms. Ask whether achieving the goal has further consequences—even things terminally desirable often have other, instrumentally desirable or undesirable consequences. Trace out the chain of specific events and the abstract instrumental and terminal goals they correspond to.
Exercise B: For each goal node, find some other policy—not necessarily a superior policy, but some other policy—that would be helpful for the same goal, not necessarily in the same way. (The point being to unanchor your concept of that goal from the exact, specific means of achieving it. This also obviously starts on the habit of searching for superior alternatives.)