Humans are not automatically strategic | Hacker News Reader

Humans are not automatically strategic

lesswrong.com

92 pointsbillswift35 comments

[1] For example, why do many people go through long training programs “to make money” without spending a few hours doing salary comparisons ahead of time? Why do many who type for hours a day remain two-finger typists, without bothering with a typing tutor program? Why do people spend their Saturdays “enjoying themselves” without bothering to track which of their habitual leisure activities are _actually_ enjoyable? Why do even unusually numerate people fear illness, car accidents, and bogeymen, and take safety measures, but not bother to look up statistics on the relative risks? Why do most of us settle into a single, stereotyped mode of studying, writing, social interaction, or the like, without trying alternatives to see if they work better -- even when such experiments as we have tried have sometimes given great boosts?

Because thinking is hard and suffering is easy.

"Because thinking is hard and suffering is easy."

This explains so much about the world.

Incidentally, Lesswrong has had a substantial impact on my thinking, and I recommend reading through the sequences, starting with Map and Territory and Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysteri...

I'm enjoying "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", by the same.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/

Thanks, but note that OP is by Anna Salamon. Mysterious Answers and Methods is by me. Didn't know which of those you meant.

"Most basically, because humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence."

I've been pondering this issue lately independently. Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet. We're barely able to hold together our current society, and there's no particular guarantee that we're even necessarily capable of that (see the vanityfair article about Greeks currently on the homepage and remember they're the same species as every other human). A relatively morbid thought in some ways, even though it isn't a guarantee that we can't go further yet.

I like your line of thought. When we talk about what's lacking from the world that prevents us from "holding our current society together", we tend to imply qualities that are somehow isolated from "intelligence": Morality, altruism, idealism, etc.

It's... hopeful to think of these qualities as evolved forms of intelligence - and that as we progress away from the "cusp of general intelligence" towards a more veteran status of intelligence, we will exhibit more of these qualities naturally.

Morality, altruism, idealism, etc.

I do not believe in altruism as a proper virtue. One can cause damage trying to help people. Intention is not good enough.

I also believed that humans are intrinsically self-interested even if human beings couldn't exist without other human beings. No man is an island but every man is an individual worthy of respect and dignity.

One can also cause damage from being selfish. I'm not sure what your point is, no one's claiming that just wanting to help people is good enough. You have to actually help people.

> I also believed that humans are intrinsically self-interested even if human beings couldn't exist without other human beings. No man is an island but every man is an individual worthy of respect and dignity.

Agreed to an extent, and your last point is why a lot of altruists want to help the poor and downtrodden instead of just the individuals they happen to like. It's a straw-man form of "altruism" that treats individuals as scum.

Everything everyone ever does can be viewed as self-interested in the appropriate lens, but it's for precisely the same reason that that lens doesn't give you more information on how to predict people's behaviour.

A father risks his life to save his daughter. Did he do it for his daughter? Or did he do it because it made him feel better? Or to avoid feeling terrible if he didn't act? Or because genetics compels him to take care of offspring sharing, on average, 50% of his genetic distinctiveness?

There may be a causal chain in these things, genetics -> love -> joy of helping, fear of loss from not helping -> acting on behalf of another.

But we lose much of our descriptive, analytic and predictive powers if we insist on only looking at what we think are the first movers in this chain. It's not productive to try and predict the weather on the basis of quantum theory; for practicality, we look at the system at higher levels of abstraction, with their own conceptual bundles, and yes, their own names.

So I can agree with you that, in the most facile and base senses, altruism is not a "proper virtue", and that humans are "intrinsically self-interested". But I can also say that some humans are more altruistic than others, and that some humans are less self-interested than others, because saying these things expresses more information than trying to describe how one human seems to have a causal chain whose self interest leads him to seem paradoxically less self-interested and more altruistic, etc. etc.

In other words, I'm talking about personality at the conceptual level of personality, using its generally accepted meanings of words, rather than pedantically hammering away at first principles of selfishness.

Perhaps a more complete definition of altruism would be this: you are altruistic to the degree that your personal welfare is driven by your observations of the welfare of those around you, and the level of action you take as a result.

This satisfies both the commonplace meaning and the annoying but correct sophomoric objection.

It all adds up to normality.

" Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet."

I believed this about a year ago and thought myself well and properly cynical.

Then it was pointed out to me that humanity is the minimally conscious and intelligent population such that, with some random genetic shuffling, you wind up with 2-5% capable of taking over the planet, and pulling the rest up with them.

While I am a broadly cynical person, I do not mean this as a "we are certainly doomed post" to wave about my self-hating credentials; I rather dislike people who do that and consider self-hatred a pernicious and dangerous meme, not something to be rolled in. I rather see it as a cautionary tale about our need to be careful; we are not certainly doomed, but if we run about as if our success is ensured, an attitude that manifests itself in a lot of political debates in various ways, we will get ourselves into trouble.

I did mean the population, since of course we have rather significant variation in personal intelligence.

I think the goal of evolution is colonizing the planet. Once that we are capable of constructing a world-wide network (communications and transport) and colonizing the whole planet then we discover the need of not destroying the planet. We try to be self-sustainable. It begins a race against the clock, a feed-back signal marks the start (scarce resource are getting exhausted). If the feed-back is delayed because we are not enough intelligent to see what is coming then the race is over. We have no time to response and the clock signal announces the end.

The question is: we are more intelligent that a monkey but perhaps not enough intelligent to not destroy our planet.

Haven't rats taken over the planet? Ants too. Birds also. We just live in different ecosystems.

You might say but they do not have consciousness. I do not think we actually know that. As for intelligent, they manage to survive and live in groups and communicate and have structures.

We exhibit a degree of control over our environment not exhibited by rats, ants, or birds.

There are so many ways to reach our general goals that just going through the motions of reaching a goal feels like we are actually moving toward the goal we want to reach.

Say I want to make $10 million dollars a year for the rest of my life. There are so many ways to achieve that goal from so many different paths that if I were to try and plan a path that isn't guaranteed to succeed I would spend all my time planning and never any time actually doing things.

That's exactly why we do things, because thinking and planning are good and nice but if that's all you do you'll never end up doing any of the things that might help you reach your goals.

For his [1], some folks don't do all that data analysis and tracking because for them it isn't fun and actually is distracting from whatever their goal may be.

"For his [1]"

Her [1], in fact.

This article irritates me. It seems like trying to apply the equivalent of the Waterfall Method to life. I'm perpetually disappointed that ideas like this have such a big following here, because I like to think that most HNers would agree with me when I say that I think the Waterfall Method was stupid even at the time.

That's without even getting into the smug "only 5% of the population is smart enough to understand me" drivel.

Ya the 5% figure annoyed me as well.

Thought provoking article but I'm not too sure that it is this simple. The heuristics outlined are inherently helpful and going through the process would be enlightening, but getting the answers to any of the questions in (a) - (h) are hard (some harder than most).

For example "(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve" I find that this is a problem with most people (including myself), they do not know what they want to achieve, nor how to even start on the process of discovering what they want to achieve. Given this, then the first order question then becomes - How do I find out what I want to achieve?. Answering this question probably involves gaining more perspective and this is probably why "many people go through long training programs to make money" (college). So it seems that if you dig a little more, seemingly unoptimal actions make more sense.

Regardless, this article is a great start and I would love to see more in depth discussions on this.

You don't need detailed answers, after all many of them are unanswerable in any absolute sense, just thinking about them enough to get a partial answer will help.

I think the basic reason we pursue our goals ineffectively is that we are afraid to go at them straight on and, instead, look for activities that appear to be goal-oriented, but are not emotionally difficult.

The comments on the site to this article are quite good too. And the post to which it replied is worth reading. lesswrong.com is definitely going into my reader.

I don't think you can necessarily verbally articulate some goals. Someone like Dave Letterman may have had a vision as he watched baseball on a black and white TV, and then Johnny Carson. But presumably it's taken him a lifetime to get close to what he had in mind.

You don't just take a kid and say "these are the heuristics you need. It's clear this is what you want to achieve, so these are the ingredients. Diverge from this at your own peril."

It might work if you want to recycle the existing societal structures and keep them in perpetuity as is. I suppose that's perfectly reasonable. You'll be excluding a hell of a lot of innovation though.

I still think that falls under "(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve". The author may not go deeply into it but I am relatively confident the author would agree with the statement that that step itself could turn out to be a challenge; some of the other lettered steps strongly suggest the author believes that, (g) in particular.

One could also develop heuristics that maximize inspiration. "Following your bliss" may indeed be the ultimate heuristic for creating beyond one's self.

Where does the 5% figure come from of people being able to understand the author's bullet points?

In the comments, the author mentions an informal survey she conducted with the conclusion that 2 of 5 randomly chosen people do not know what a "sphere" is.

If you're interested in stuff like this, check out 'How we decide' by Jonah Lehrer : http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/06186201...

I'm reading it now, and it's an amazingly insightful book, in that it manages to at once explain the workings of the brain on a psychological and physiological level, for a whole different slew of "decisions" we humans make.

I think the reason we behave like this is very simple:

"It's better to make A decision than wait forever to make THE decision"

Those aren't the options most people weigh. Obviously it's better to make a decision than spend an eternity contemplating.

But "making a decision" implies some amount of thought - some calculus for the choice. The article suggests that people don't automatically/naturally perform this calculus when acting. We just act. Do you think this isn't true? In my experience, it's very often true.

I admit that I am not going to read the original post, but from a comment: Most basically, because humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence. I can explain why this is so.

Every time there is a leap from one state to another one, and this latter state is better in the sense that it open new possibilities from transition, then when you get into the new space (the one that this leap open) you realize that the leap was a small one and that there are a lot of leaps to get to the next state (heaven is not one leap away)

This is the most incoherent, vapid, meaningless tripe I have ever seen get on the front page of HN.

...and yet it spoke to me as if the composition of our atmosphere could conspire to produce prismatic arcs of blended color in the sky.

(You're probably strategic in your approach to life, but if this is the most "vapid, meaningless tripe" you've encountered on HN, that speaks volumes about the site, because this article attempts to codify exactly what makes "vapid, meaningless tripe" the currency of our collective culture... if you are strategic in your day job tomorrow and aren't merely swaying in the breeze of office dynamics, I'd love to hear a brief outline of your day if you have the time)

Obviously you don't read very much Hacker News.

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