Those are all people who don’t really consider cleaning their room important (Alice, if she considered it important, could easily hire a cleaning service with her programmer salary).
I’m not talking about people who don’t clean up because they’re “pouring energy into something else” or because “putting away dishes is boring” or because they have a physical disability. I’m talking about the people from Katja’s post:
‘how can make a big difference to the world, when I can’t make a big difference to that pile of dishes in my sock drawer?’
This sounds to me like someone who wants to load the dishwasher, but finds themselves unable to. Like someone who’s frustrated with themselves; not someone who’s happy with the state of the affairs because they have better things to do.
In this case, I would expect this to be a pretty good predictor of not being able to do things that are more difficult (for an able-bodied person) than loading the dishwasher. And while there will not be much of a correlation between difficulty and importance, I would still say that virtually all non-trivial accomplishments in the world will be over the “loading the dishwasher” threshold of difficulty.
You’re overloading “want” here. If all of your sub-agents want to load a dishwasher, then surely you will load the dishwasher. If some of your sub-agents want to load a dishwasher, but need to get other sub-agents on board in order to do so, then you might not. It depends on how good your dishwasher agent is at recruiting the other agents. But this recruitment problem is not a subproblem of every other task you might care about.
Those are all people who don’t really consider cleaning their room important (Alice, if she considered it important, could easily hire a cleaning service with her programmer salary).
I’m not talking about people who don’t clean up because they’re “pouring energy into something else” or because “putting away dishes is boring” or because they have a physical disability. I’m talking about the people from Katja’s post:
This sounds to me like someone who wants to load the dishwasher, but finds themselves unable to. Like someone who’s frustrated with themselves; not someone who’s happy with the state of the affairs because they have better things to do.
In this case, I would expect this to be a pretty good predictor of not being able to do things that are more difficult (for an able-bodied person) than loading the dishwasher. And while there will not be much of a correlation between difficulty and importance, I would still say that virtually all non-trivial accomplishments in the world will be over the “loading the dishwasher” threshold of difficulty.
Does that make sense?
You’re overloading “want” here. If all of your sub-agents want to load a dishwasher, then surely you will load the dishwasher. If some of your sub-agents want to load a dishwasher, but need to get other sub-agents on board in order to do so, then you might not. It depends on how good your dishwasher agent is at recruiting the other agents. But this recruitment problem is not a subproblem of every other task you might care about.