But humans are badly modeled as single agents. Our behavior is rather the result of multiple agents acting together. It seems to me that some of those agents do try to convince others.
I don’t believe humans are badly modeled as single agents. Rather, they are single agents that have communicative and performative aspects to their cognition and behavior. See: The Elephant In The Brain, Player vs Character.
If you have strong reason to think “single agent communicating and doing performances” is a bad model, that would be interesting.
In this case, “convincing yourself” is clearly motivated. It doesn’t make sense as a random interaction between two subagents (otherwise, why aren’t people just as likely to try to convince themselves they have bad qualities?); whatever interaction there is has been orchestrated by some agentic process. Look at the result, and ask who wanted it.
But humans are badly modeled as single agents. Our behavior is rather the result of multiple agents acting together. It seems to me that some of those agents do try to convince others.
I don’t believe humans are badly modeled as single agents. Rather, they are single agents that have communicative and performative aspects to their cognition and behavior. See: The Elephant In The Brain, Player vs Character.
If you have strong reason to think “single agent communicating and doing performances” is a bad model, that would be interesting.
In this case, “convincing yourself” is clearly motivated. It doesn’t make sense as a random interaction between two subagents (otherwise, why aren’t people just as likely to try to convince themselves they have bad qualities?); whatever interaction there is has been orchestrated by some agentic process. Look at the result, and ask who wanted it.