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Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

Moral of the story is that you were intrinsically motivated to learn… in which case it doesn’t matter how you learn it as long as you follow that motivation.

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I had a similar story. I barely got through linear algebra in university. The professor never suggested that linear algebra was useful for anything (except passing the course). Apparently the goal was to manipulate symbols. Applications were something for technicians, not academics. Everything was so abstract and seemed arbitrary. Theorems were developed and proofs were presented without ever providing any sense of why you would want to do whatever it was the theorem did. I had absolutely no intuition about anything related to linear algebra, I only had memorization to go on.

Then a decade or so later I encountered matrices in computer graphics and suddenly I found that a lot of that stuff was actually useful and piece by piece it started to make sense to me.

The way that course was taught didn't work at all for me. I wasn't looking for motivation in the sense that I want to use it, but more about what was the motivation for developing any of it in the first place.

Is there any other sort of motivation?

Extrinsic, from the outside. For example being paid for stuff.

Right, seems to me that's still intrinsic. The motivation somehow entering me from the outside, I still want to do the thing. (If I don't want to do it, then I'm by definition not motivated to do it)

There has been plenty of research that shows a distinction. Stuff like paying kids to read books leads to them reading less over time.

https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/jep_...

Behavioral economics is debunked pseudoscience.

Incentives are more in the vein of psychology than behavioral economics but the two fields are clearly adjacent. And this "debunked pseudoscience" led to a Nobel prize a few years ago. And many of the observations that led to this--relating to people not always being economically "rational"--are very clearly true.

I don't think anyone other than an economist would assume that people were economically rational. Is it really worth a prize to demonstrate a fundamental hypothesis underpinning your field of science is wrong?

It was apparently worth a prize to explain more rigorously why behaviors often deviate from an underlying assumption of maximizing expected value. And, yes, some of the economics community was quite resistant to the idea that the answer was anything more than people are stupid. (That may be a bit of an exaggeration but there was quite a bit of resistance in economics to behavioral economics being a field of serious inquiry.)

You can argue with the (somewhat squishy) motivational theory but money is pretty much the classic extrinsic motivator in the literature. There's also an idea of internalized extrinsic motivation however like peer recognition. (Basically external motivations without an explicit carrot/stick.)

The line is somewhat blurry but there's probably a difference between playing a game and doing a job you don't really like because you're paid to do it.

Nothing squishy about it. The more indirection the more extrinsic it is.

Squishy in the sense that many things are neither purely external or purely internal.

If someone was threatening to kill you you would be motivated to defend yourself, even going as far as hurting them… wouldn’t mean that you would want or desire to hurt them.

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