Whereas if you’re good at your work and you think that your job is important, there’s an intervening layer or three—I’m doing X because it unblocks Y, and that will lead to Z, and Z is good for the world in ways I care about, and also it earns me $ and I can spend $ on stuff...
Yes initially there might be a few layers, but there’s also the experience of being really good at what you do, being in flow, at which point Y and Z just kind of dissolve into X, making X feel valuable in itself like jumping on a trampoline.
Seems like this friend wants to be in this state by default. If X inherits its value from Z through an intellectual link, a S2-level association, the motivation to do X just isn’t as strong as when the value is directly hardcoded into X itself on the S1 level. “Why was I filling in these forms again? Something with solving global coordination problems? Whatever it’s just my Duty as a Good Citizen.” or “Whatever I can do it faster than Greg”.
But there is a problem: the more the value is a property of X, the harder it will be to detach from it when X suddenly doesn’t become instrumental to Z anymore. Here we find ourselves in the world of dogma and essentialism and lost purposes.
So we’re looking at a fundamental dilemma: do I maintain the most accurate model by always deriving my motivation from first principles, or do I declare the daily activities of my job to be intrinsically valuable?
In practice I think we tend to go back and forth between these extremes. Why do we need breaks, anyway? Maybe it’s to zoom out a bit and rederive our utility function.
Yes initially there might be a few layers, but there’s also the experience of being really good at what you do, being in flow, at which point Y and Z just kind of dissolve into X, making X feel valuable in itself like jumping on a trampoline.
Seems like this friend wants to be in this state by default. If X inherits its value from Z through an intellectual link, a S2-level association, the motivation to do X just isn’t as strong as when the value is directly hardcoded into X itself on the S1 level. “Why was I filling in these forms again? Something with solving global coordination problems? Whatever it’s just my Duty as a Good Citizen.” or “Whatever I can do it faster than Greg”.
But there is a problem: the more the value is a property of X, the harder it will be to detach from it when X suddenly doesn’t become instrumental to Z anymore. Here we find ourselves in the world of dogma and essentialism and lost purposes.
So we’re looking at a fundamental dilemma: do I maintain the most accurate model by always deriving my motivation from first principles, or do I declare the daily activities of my job to be intrinsically valuable?
In practice I think we tend to go back and forth between these extremes. Why do we need breaks, anyway? Maybe it’s to zoom out a bit and rederive our utility function.