Complex Behavior from Simple SubAgents

A fair point, but I do think theres a limit- from the few years I spent in retail I came to the realization that a majority of people have near zero critical-thinking or problem solving skills.

For instance, we had these kiosks where someone could sit down and order printouts of photos on their phone. There is a touch screen with very clear instructions: "touch here to begin", "plug in your phone with the appropriate usb cable below", "tap the button that has the photo choice you want". Without fail, I would say near 80% of customers would sit down, look at the screen, and call an employee over asking "what do I do?" for every step, even if they've come in before and been shown already. It was mostly older folk, but there was still a good portion that were younger.

Sorry you didn’t enjoy it. I think I was pretty open, both in the intro and the conclusion, that it was an exploratory attempt at experimenting with intuitions, and not actually intended to prove or conclude. That said - astrology is a large set of vague content designed to be maximally open to interpretation. What I’ve done here is implement a minimal set of axioms and explored their consequences, and, yes, their consequences are open to interpretation.

As for your last question — I don’t understand your last question, to be honest. You certainly have a preference for having clean teeth. You also probably had your mom or dad teach you to clean your teeth, meaning somebody else did all the work of making it a rote habit. So that’s not a strong example. Paying taxes — well, the highest-valence option means the highest absolute valence. Wanting to not go to prison is very motivating. Perhaps you and I aren’t quite understanding what the other means by “look-ahead”. I do not think people sit back and perform calculating predictions very often. I think what we do is respond to far-off goals within the local context in complex ways, which my toy model doesn’t claim to capture.