Wait. You’re claiming that the goals chosen by your executive function just happen to correspond to a succession of enjoyable activities for the rest of your brain? I know there’s a lot of diversity in brain-space, but there’s not so much that you couldn’t find 100,000+ people with a nearly identical motivational system. What if I’m one of them? If so, I’ll gladly pay you $500/mo for the privilege of doing all your fun work… and will successfully complete all your goals as a by-product! Boom! Win-Win! Then you can free yourself up to do something more high-value. And if your next goal turns out to be as fun and exciting, Boom!! -- you can do it again and get another customer like me to pay you for the pleasure of taking on all that work too.
If your work is always fun, you have either
a) Aimed so low in life that referring to what you do as “having goals” is laughable
or
b) Deluded yourself that your work = enjoyable for signaling and/or motivational reasons
FACT: The #1 trait of effective people is being able to consistently do things they don’t want to do.
Not all of your work should be awful, but if a non-trivial part of what you do isn’t boring or stressful, then your goals would already be fulfilled by others. And if other people fulfilling your goals doesn’t work for your particular goals, consider the possibility that what you have are not goals, but simply desires.
Wait. You’re claiming that the goals chosen by your executive function just happen to correspond to a succession of enjoyable activities for the rest of your brain?
Nope. See my second comment, here for a better explanation of “love” in this context.
if a non-trivial part of what you do isn’t boring or stressful,
If it were impossible to love something boring or stressful, a lot of relationships would be in jeopardy. ;-)
Not all of your work should be awful, but if a non-trivial part of what you do isn’t boring or stressful, then your goals would already be fulfilled by others.
Well, unless you’re unusually capable for some reason or other. Lots of people write novels, perform music, act in plays or movies, or compete in sports. Very few people become Stephen King, Madonna, Russel Crowe, or Roger Clemens.
In general, though, if any given job wasn’t either difficult (such that few people can do it as well as you can), extremely time-consuming (so that you can’t both do it and have a “day job”) or less than optimally entertaining, it seems as though you’d have people doing it for free.
I know there’s a lot of diversity in brain-space, but there’s not so much that you couldn’t find 100,000+ people with a nearly identical motivational system. [Rest of argument omitted]
Unless I misunderstand, your argument works only for those goals held by pjeby that do not refer to pjeby. For example, would you really pay pjeby $500 / mo to make pjeby’s wife happier (as opposed to making your own wife happier)?
Or is making one’s wife happier “simply a desire” in your terminology?
Exactly. It’s not really a goal when you don’t care about the results. If the dominating term in your decision to do something is that the result be YOURS (i.e., profit being created in YOUR bank account, YOU making your wife happy, credit for YOU achieving something, etc), you might as well just call it “shit you want to be yours”.
Most people are referenced in all their “goals”. But that’s because most people don’t actually have goals in any meaningful sense beyond wanting a ton of shit to be theirs. If you notice that most all your goals wouldn’t be desirable if they didn’t include you, maybe you should look into actually finding something you care about besides yourself. I know you can do it—heck, even most PUAs end up caring about things outside of themselves (after they try everything else first and it doesn’t work).
Just remember, if it’s actually a goal, you wouldn’t care who achieved it and you would gladly welcome more effective or efficient ways to achieve it… including other people doing it in place of you.
Just remember, if it’s actually a goal, you wouldn’t care who achieved it and you would gladly welcome more effective or efficient ways to achieve it… including other people doing it in place of you.
This has even more weight if you accept that the algorithm embodied by ‘you’ is probabilistically extremely similar to other algorithms out there in the multiverse, with no easy way to distinguish between them in any meaningful sense. So even when you have preferences over ‘your’ brain states corresponding to ‘you’ being satisfied outside of any external accomplishments getting achieved, there’s still a philosophical arbitrarity in fulfilling ‘your’ preferences instead of anyone else’s that I’d bet leads to decision theoretic spaciotemporal inconsistency in a way it’d be difficult for me cache out right now.
(In practice humans can’t even come close to avoiding such conundrums but it seems best to be aware that such a higher standard of decision theoretic and philosophical optimality exists.)
Wait. You’re claiming that the goals chosen by your executive function just happen to correspond to a succession of enjoyable activities for the rest of your brain? I know there’s a lot of diversity in brain-space, but there’s not so much that you couldn’t find 100,000+ people with a nearly identical motivational system. What if I’m one of them? If so, I’ll gladly pay you $500/mo for the privilege of doing all your fun work… and will successfully complete all your goals as a by-product! Boom! Win-Win! Then you can free yourself up to do something more high-value. And if your next goal turns out to be as fun and exciting, Boom!! -- you can do it again and get another customer like me to pay you for the pleasure of taking on all that work too.
If your work is always fun, you have either
a) Aimed so low in life that referring to what you do as “having goals” is laughable
or
b) Deluded yourself that your work = enjoyable for signaling and/or motivational reasons
FACT: The #1 trait of effective people is being able to consistently do things they don’t want to do.
Not all of your work should be awful, but if a non-trivial part of what you do isn’t boring or stressful, then your goals would already be fulfilled by others. And if other people fulfilling your goals doesn’t work for your particular goals, consider the possibility that what you have are not goals, but simply desires.
Nope. See my second comment, here for a better explanation of “love” in this context.
If it were impossible to love something boring or stressful, a lot of relationships would be in jeopardy. ;-)
Well, unless you’re unusually capable for some reason or other. Lots of people write novels, perform music, act in plays or movies, or compete in sports. Very few people become Stephen King, Madonna, Russel Crowe, or Roger Clemens.
In general, though, if any given job wasn’t either difficult (such that few people can do it as well as you can), extremely time-consuming (so that you can’t both do it and have a “day job”) or less than optimally entertaining, it seems as though you’d have people doing it for free.
Unless I misunderstand, your argument works only for those goals held by pjeby that do not refer to pjeby. For example, would you really pay pjeby $500 / mo to make pjeby’s wife happier (as opposed to making your own wife happier)?
Or is making one’s wife happier “simply a desire” in your terminology?
Exactly. It’s not really a goal when you don’t care about the results. If the dominating term in your decision to do something is that the result be YOURS (i.e., profit being created in YOUR bank account, YOU making your wife happy, credit for YOU achieving something, etc), you might as well just call it “shit you want to be yours”.
Most people are referenced in all their “goals”. But that’s because most people don’t actually have goals in any meaningful sense beyond wanting a ton of shit to be theirs. If you notice that most all your goals wouldn’t be desirable if they didn’t include you, maybe you should look into actually finding something you care about besides yourself. I know you can do it—heck, even most PUAs end up caring about things outside of themselves (after they try everything else first and it doesn’t work).
Just remember, if it’s actually a goal, you wouldn’t care who achieved it and you would gladly welcome more effective or efficient ways to achieve it… including other people doing it in place of you.
This has even more weight if you accept that the algorithm embodied by ‘you’ is probabilistically extremely similar to other algorithms out there in the multiverse, with no easy way to distinguish between them in any meaningful sense. So even when you have preferences over ‘your’ brain states corresponding to ‘you’ being satisfied outside of any external accomplishments getting achieved, there’s still a philosophical arbitrarity in fulfilling ‘your’ preferences instead of anyone else’s that I’d bet leads to decision theoretic spaciotemporal inconsistency in a way it’d be difficult for me cache out right now.
(In practice humans can’t even come close to avoiding such conundrums but it seems best to be aware that such a higher standard of decision theoretic and philosophical optimality exists.)