I’m unsure, but I think that most of what you are talking about is time inconsistency and failure to predict your future goals and desires.
If giving up now makes sense, why did you first write so much? If something changed internally, could you have predicted it and saved yourself time, or prevented it from happening? If that would have accomplished more, saying your current preferences don’t support it is backwards!
If you have goals that are higher priority than your short term preferences, resolving the tension between different desires week make you more effective at achieving those goals. If you write as an outlet, giving up 50k words in is reasonable. If you write to improve your ability to communicate, giving up before finishing limits the feedback you will receive, but may still be a good idea. If you write because you think what you are saying is important or useful to many people, giving up is admitting defeat.
Well, as you say, a lot depends on what the point of writing was in the first place.
If the primary goal was to create a finished novel, then, yes, either I should put work into it and get a novel, or not-put work into it and get no novel, but putting work into it and getting no novel is inefficient. (Of course, that’s not to say my decision procedure was necessarily flawed, even in this case; it might be that I discovered things in the process of writing that changed my decision, that would have kept me from starting had I known them up front, but which I simply could not have known without writing. In which case the answer to “why did I write so much?” is “to improve my ability to predict the value of writing more.” But as you say, it might also be that I could have predicted that up front and saved myself time, and I need a better predictive algorithm.)
On the other hand, as you say, if my primary goal was something else, then maybe writing some of a novel makes sense.
The truth is I’m not entirely sure what my goal was, and wasn’t at the time. I wrote, because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. I stopped, because writing stopped seeming like the thing to do.
This also reminds me of the idea that if I date someone for a period of time, and we’re happy, and then we stop being happy and break up, that’s a failed relationship that it would have been optimal not to start… as opposed to the idea that it’s a successful relationship that lasted a finite amount of time.
I’m wondering what the point is of investing significant time in something if you don’t have a goal specified. Not that I don’t ever do this, but I like to think that it’s a non-endorsed behavior. When I notice myself doing this, I should assess my implicit motives, and try to find what I want, and whether what I’m doing makes sense.
If the goal of a relationship is to be happy and enjoy the time together, it can be successful and short term. If the goal is to find a life-partner, it can’t be successful and short term.
I’m wondering what the point is of investing significant time in something if you don’t have a goal specified.
It’s a fair thing to wonder.
In my case, I endorse it within limits because in my experience sometimes the best I seem able to do with respect to some goal X is establish that I do in fact seem to want to do X, that I don’t object to doing X, that doing X doesn’t seem to be causing me any problems, and that my desire to do X is reasonably persistent. When I try to dig “below” that to get at “what other goal, beyond simply doing X for its own sake, does doing X accomplish?” I sometimes get answers, but I often get nothing at all. If I push past that point I’m more likely to confabulate a plausible-sounding answer than discover a real one.
Of course, another option at that point is to give up on X on the grounds that if I can’t articulate the goal of X, then I shouldn’t value that goal (nor, therefore, X) in the first place.
But those grounds seem shaky to me; I haven’t found much evidence to support the idea that only the parts of my brain that are capable of articulating things explicitly store/process/manifest/whatever goals worth pursuing.
That makes sense to me. I think that there are things we can’t articulate that matter, but I generally prefer to work on my ability to articulate them; it probably relays to me conception of Eliezer’s idea of luminosity.
On the other hand, I feel like I might be oversubscribed on goals, making exploration difficult. I don’t know if I have time for general activity that doesn’t further a goal, since I have many that are already high priority.
I’m unsure, but I think that most of what you are talking about is time inconsistency and failure to predict your future goals and desires.
If giving up now makes sense, why did you first write so much? If something changed internally, could you have predicted it and saved yourself time, or prevented it from happening? If that would have accomplished more, saying your current preferences don’t support it is backwards!
If you have goals that are higher priority than your short term preferences, resolving the tension between different desires week make you more effective at achieving those goals. If you write as an outlet, giving up 50k words in is reasonable. If you write to improve your ability to communicate, giving up before finishing limits the feedback you will receive, but may still be a good idea. If you write because you think what you are saying is important or useful to many people, giving up is admitting defeat.
Well, as you say, a lot depends on what the point of writing was in the first place.
If the primary goal was to create a finished novel, then, yes, either I should put work into it and get a novel, or not-put work into it and get no novel, but putting work into it and getting no novel is inefficient. (Of course, that’s not to say my decision procedure was necessarily flawed, even in this case; it might be that I discovered things in the process of writing that changed my decision, that would have kept me from starting had I known them up front, but which I simply could not have known without writing. In which case the answer to “why did I write so much?” is “to improve my ability to predict the value of writing more.” But as you say, it might also be that I could have predicted that up front and saved myself time, and I need a better predictive algorithm.)
On the other hand, as you say, if my primary goal was something else, then maybe writing some of a novel makes sense.
The truth is I’m not entirely sure what my goal was, and wasn’t at the time. I wrote, because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. I stopped, because writing stopped seeming like the thing to do.
This also reminds me of the idea that if I date someone for a period of time, and we’re happy, and then we stop being happy and break up, that’s a failed relationship that it would have been optimal not to start… as opposed to the idea that it’s a successful relationship that lasted a finite amount of time.
I’m wondering what the point is of investing significant time in something if you don’t have a goal specified. Not that I don’t ever do this, but I like to think that it’s a non-endorsed behavior. When I notice myself doing this, I should assess my implicit motives, and try to find what I want, and whether what I’m doing makes sense.
If the goal of a relationship is to be happy and enjoy the time together, it can be successful and short term. If the goal is to find a life-partner, it can’t be successful and short term.
Exploration.
It’s a fair thing to wonder.
In my case, I endorse it within limits because in my experience sometimes the best I seem able to do with respect to some goal X is establish that I do in fact seem to want to do X, that I don’t object to doing X, that doing X doesn’t seem to be causing me any problems, and that my desire to do X is reasonably persistent. When I try to dig “below” that to get at “what other goal, beyond simply doing X for its own sake, does doing X accomplish?” I sometimes get answers, but I often get nothing at all. If I push past that point I’m more likely to confabulate a plausible-sounding answer than discover a real one.
Of course, another option at that point is to give up on X on the grounds that if I can’t articulate the goal of X, then I shouldn’t value that goal (nor, therefore, X) in the first place.
But those grounds seem shaky to me; I haven’t found much evidence to support the idea that only the parts of my brain that are capable of articulating things explicitly store/process/manifest/whatever goals worth pursuing.
That makes sense to me. I think that there are things we can’t articulate that matter, but I generally prefer to work on my ability to articulate them; it probably relays to me conception of Eliezer’s idea of luminosity.
On the other hand, I feel like I might be oversubscribed on goals, making exploration difficult. I don’t know if I have time for general activity that doesn’t further a goal, since I have many that are already high priority.