I am aware that confessing to this in most places would be seen as a huge social faux pas, I’m hoping LW will be more understanding.
You’re good. You’re just confessing something that is true for most of us anyway.
Where I have a big disagreement is in the lesson to take from this. Your argument is that we should essentially try to turn off status as a motivator. I would suggest it would be wiser to try to better align status motivations with the things we actually value.
Up to a point. It is certainly true that status motivations have led to great things, and I’m personally also someone who is highly status-driven but manages to mostly align that drive with at least neutral things, but there’s more.
I struggle hugely with akrasia. If I didn’t have some external motivation then I’d probably just lie in bed all day watching tv.
The other great humanist psychologist besides Maslow was Adam Rogers. His thinking can be seen as an expansion on this “subagent motivation is perceived opportunity” idea. He proposed an ideal vs an actual self. The ideal self is what you imagine you could and should be. Your actual self is what you imagine you are. The difference between ideal self and actual self, he said, was the cause of suffering. I believe that Buddhism backs this up too.
I’d like to expand on that and say that the difference between ideal self (which seems like a broader class of things that includes perceived opportunity but also social standards, the conditions you’re used to, biological hardwiring, etc) and your actual self is the thing that activates your subagents. The bigger the difference, the more your subagents are activated by this difference.
Furthermore, the level of activation of your subagents causes cognitive dissonance (a.k.a. akrasia), i.e. one or multiple of your subagents not getting what they want even though they’re activated.
And THAT is my slightly-more-gears-level model of where suffering comes from.
So here’s what I think is actually going on with you: you’re torn between multiple motivations until the status subagent comes along and pulls you out of your deadlock because it’s stronger than everything else. So now there’s less cognitive dissonance and you’re happy that this status incentive came along. It cut your gordian knot. However, I think it’s also possible to resolve this dissonance in a more constructive way. I.e. untie the knot. In some sense the status incentive pushes you into a local optimum.
I realise that I’m probably hard to follow. There’s too much to unpack here. I should probably try and write a sequence.
I think that’s a good explanation. I agree that the solution to Akrasia I describe is kind of hacked together and is far from ideal. If you have a better solution to this I would be very interested and it would change my attitude to status significantly. I suspect that this is the largest inferential gap you would have to cross to get your point across to me, although as I mentioned I’m not sure how central I am as an example.
I’m not sure suffering is the correct frame here—I don’t really feel like Akrasia causes me to suffer. If I give in then I feel a bit disappointed with myself but the agent which wants me to be a better person isn’t very emotional (which I think is part of the problem). Again there may be an inferential gap here.
You’re good. You’re just confessing something that is true for most of us anyway.
Up to a point. It is certainly true that status motivations have led to great things, and I’m personally also someone who is highly status-driven but manages to mostly align that drive with at least neutral things, but there’s more.
The other great humanist psychologist besides Maslow was Adam Rogers. His thinking can be seen as an expansion on this “subagent motivation is perceived opportunity” idea. He proposed an ideal vs an actual self. The ideal self is what you imagine you could and should be. Your actual self is what you imagine you are. The difference between ideal self and actual self, he said, was the cause of suffering. I believe that Buddhism backs this up too.
I’d like to expand on that and say that the difference between ideal self (which seems like a broader class of things that includes perceived opportunity but also social standards, the conditions you’re used to, biological hardwiring, etc) and your actual self is the thing that activates your subagents. The bigger the difference, the more your subagents are activated by this difference.
Furthermore, the level of activation of your subagents causes cognitive dissonance (a.k.a. akrasia), i.e. one or multiple of your subagents not getting what they want even though they’re activated.
And THAT is my slightly-more-gears-level model of where suffering comes from.
So here’s what I think is actually going on with you: you’re torn between multiple motivations until the status subagent comes along and pulls you out of your deadlock because it’s stronger than everything else. So now there’s less cognitive dissonance and you’re happy that this status incentive came along. It cut your gordian knot. However, I think it’s also possible to resolve this dissonance in a more constructive way. I.e. untie the knot. In some sense the status incentive pushes you into a local optimum.
I realise that I’m probably hard to follow. There’s too much to unpack here. I should probably try and write a sequence.
I think that’s a good explanation. I agree that the solution to Akrasia I describe is kind of hacked together and is far from ideal. If you have a better solution to this I would be very interested and it would change my attitude to status significantly. I suspect that this is the largest inferential gap you would have to cross to get your point across to me, although as I mentioned I’m not sure how central I am as an example.
I’m not sure suffering is the correct frame here—I don’t really feel like Akrasia causes me to suffer. If I give in then I feel a bit disappointed with myself but the agent which wants me to be a better person isn’t very emotional (which I think is part of the problem). Again there may be an inferential gap here.