This post has been surprisingly important to me, and has made me notice how I was confused around what motivation is, conceptually. I’ve used Steam as a concept maybe once a week, both when introspecting during meditation and when thinking about AI alignment.
I remember three different occasions where I’ve used steam:
Performing a conceptual analysis of “optimism” in this comment, in which I think I’ve clarified some of the usage of “optimism”, and why I feel frustrated by the word.
When considering whether to undertake a risky and kind of for-me-out-of-distribution big undertaking, checking whether I actually had steam around that project—whether my parts could coordinate around it. In the end it didn’t work out for other reasons, though.
When talking to a friend, trying to help them clarify whether they were motivated by the city they were moving to, and which goals were and were satisfied and which weren’t by that move.
I remain unsure what differentiates steam from motivation or flow, or whether steam is on the way towards mathematization of those concepts. As such, there is a pretty big relation between steam and interactions of multiple agents in a mind (gestured at with having steam work both in a societal and an “individual” context).
Steam is […] “recursive self trust with self common knowledge” or something.
I would be really interested in seeing Steam be formalised further, and feel like it may play an important role in a “generalized vNM”, which describes the relation between nearly-fulfilled vNM axioms, probabilities and Steam. As such, some more math (maybe even code?) would be very cool for this.
For the reasons detailed above, I’m giving this post a +9, with hope for more.
This post has been surprisingly important to me, and has made me notice how I was confused around what motivation is, conceptually. I’ve used Steam as a concept maybe once a week, both when introspecting during meditation and when thinking about AI alignment.
I remember three different occasions where I’ve used steam:
Performing a conceptual analysis of “optimism” in this comment, in which I think I’ve clarified some of the usage of “optimism”, and why I feel frustrated by the word.
When considering whether to undertake a risky and kind of for-me-out-of-distribution big undertaking, checking whether I actually had steam around that project—whether my parts could coordinate around it. In the end it didn’t work out for other reasons, though.
When talking to a friend, trying to help them clarify whether they were motivated by the city they were moving to, and which goals were and were satisfied and which weren’t by that move.
I remain unsure what differentiates steam from motivation or flow, or whether steam is on the way towards mathematization of those concepts. As such, there is a pretty big relation between steam and interactions of multiple agents in a mind (gestured at with having steam work both in a societal and an “individual” context).
I really like the short definition by lukehmiles,
I would be really interested in seeing Steam be formalised further, and feel like it may play an important role in a “generalized vNM”, which describes the relation between nearly-fulfilled vNM axioms, probabilities and Steam. As such, some more math (maybe even code?) would be very cool for this.
For the reasons detailed above, I’m giving this post a +9, with hope for more.