What big goals do we have?

When I'm hungry I eat, but then I don't go on eating some more just to maximize a function. Eating isn't something I want a lot of. Likewise I don't want a ton of survival, just a bounded amount every day. Let's define a goal as big if you never get full: every increment of effort/achievement is valuable, like paperclips to Clippy.

Well, paperclip maximizers are satisifed by any additional paperclips they can make, but they also care about making sure people can use MS Office pre-07 ... so it's not just one thing.

Tip: you can shift in and out of superscripts in MS Word by pressing ctrl-shift-+, and subscripts by pressing ctrl-= (same thing but without the shift). Much easier than calling up the menu or clicking on the button!

Accumulate power, money or experiences. What for? I never understood that.

I'm not sure why you don't understand this. It seems like the most straightforward goal to me. My own experience is that certain experiences are self-justifying: they bring us pleasure or are intrinsically rewarding in themselves. Why they have this property is perhaps tangentially interesting but it is not necessary to know the why to experience the intrinsic rewards. Pursuing experiences that you find rewarding seems like a perfectly good goal to me, I don't know why anyone would feel they need anything beyond that.

Incidentally, accumulating money and power are mostly sub-goals of pursuing experiences. For me, money and power are largely enablers that broaden my options for accumulating rewarding experiences. The nature of the human motivational system is such that the accumulation of money and power can have a certain amount of intrinsic reward but it has often been observed that they are somewhat unfulfilling as root goals. The trappings of money and power are really the attraction, if you can attain them without first accumulating the money and power then that's generally a good strategy.

Really all the other goals you suggest are just sub-goals of the pursuit of rewarding experiences in my opinion, or are intrinsically rewarding experiences in themselves.

My main interest in improving my rationality is to better focus my efforts at accumulating rewarding experiences. The goals set themselves by being intrinsically rewarding, rationality is just a better way to pursue those goals.

Accumulate power, money or experiences. What for? I never understood that.

That reminds me of a story (not sure of its historicity, but it is illustrative) about an exchange between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic:

Diogenes asked Alexander what his plans were. "To conquer Greece," Alexander replied. "And then?" said Diogenes. "To conquer Asia Minor," said Alexander. "And then?" said Diogenes. "To conquer the whole world," said Alexander. "And then?" said Diogenes. "I suppose I shall relax and enjoy myself," said Alexander. "Why not save yourself a lot of trouble by relaxing and enjoying yourself now?" asked Diogenes.

(I love Diogenes. I disagree with him about a whole lot, but he pretty much invented keepin' it real. He had the best zingers in all of ancient Greece, too. "Behold Plato's man!")

Alexander's response is not recorded, but clearly he was not persuaded.

I suppose money and power are intrinsically motivating for some people, but for me — and I guess for you too — the possibility of acquiring them totally fails to move me unless I have something specific in mind that I need them for.

Wasn't this, er, sorta extensively addressed in the Fun Theory Sequence?

Also, neither "save the world" or "prevent suffering" are Big Goals. They both have endgames: World saved, suffering prevented. There, you're done; then what?

When I'm hungry I eat, but then I don't go on eating some more just to maximize a function. Eating isn't something I want a lot of. Likewise I don't want a ton of survival, just a bounded amount every day.

It is important to note that survival can be treated as a "big goal". For example Hopefully Anonymous treats it that way: if the probability that the pattern that is "him" will survive for the next billion years were .999999, he would strive to increase it to .9999995.

Parenthetically, although no current human being can hold such a belief with such a high level of confidence, that does not mean Hopefully Anonymous's goal is undefined or would become undefined when his survival is assured at a sufficiently high probability: it just means that a subgoal of his goal is the coming into existence of an agent that can hold such beliefs with such a high level of confidence. (The most likely way that that would happen involves a greater-than-human intelligence's having the same goal as Hopefully Anonymous or having a strongly-related goal like giving all 6 billion "founding humans" whatever they want.)

The cereal-box-top Aristotelian response:

Big goals, as you describe them, are not good. For valuable things, there can be too much or too little; having an inappropriate amount of concern for such a thing is a vice of excess or deficiency. Having the appropriate amount of concern for valuable things is virtue, and having the right balance of valuable things in your life is eudaimonia, "the good life".

Motivation has always intrigued me, ever since I was I kid, I wondered why I had none. I would read my textbooks until I got bored. I'd ace all my tests and do no homework. Every night I went to sleep swearing to myself that tomorrow would be different, tomorrow I would tell my parents the truth when they asked if I had homework and actually do it. I'd feel so guilty for lying, but I never actually did anything.

I joined the military because I knew I couldn't survive in college the way I'd got through high-school. 10 years later I'm smarter, but still technically uneducated and no more motivated.

I've started to think to myself lately... That the sum of human knowledge. From the very discovery of our fundamentals to the pinnacles of theory and achievement adds up to contributions from what couldn't possibly be more than 10% of the people who have ever lived. What stops people not from just achieving their goals, but even wanting goals in the first place?

I've started to wonder if I do have the capability to become someone who could legitimately contribute something to the sum of human knowledge (rationally speaking I have to admit that I probably don't). But if I do is it an obligation? Should I push myself against my own will to achieve things I don't even really care about?

Procreate

You can cheat it by donating sperm (or eggs if you're female) - and easily having 10x as high reproductive success, with relatively little effort.

I don't think I can be content, as long as I know how ignorant I am. See http://www.sl4.org/archive/0711/17013.html for example.

Also, I'm not sure why you define "big goal" the way you do. How does knowing that eventually you will, or won't, be satiated affect what you should do now?

Mine would be "Understand consciousness well enough to experience life from the perspective of other beings, both natural and artificial." (Possibly a subset of "Advance science", though a lot of it is engineering.)

That is, I'd want to be able to experience what-it-is-like to be a bat (sorry, Nagel), have other human cognitive architectures (like having certain mental disorders or enhancements, different genders), to be a genetically engineered new entity, or a mechanical AGI.

This goal is never fully satisifed, because there are always other invented/artificial beings you can experience, plus new scenarios.

Difficulty isn't a point against saving the world and helping the suffering as goals. The utility function is not up for grabs, and if you have those goals but don't see a way of accomplishing them you should invest in discovering a way, like SIAI is trying to do.

Also, if you think you might have big goals, but don't know what they might be, it makes sense to seek convergent subgoals of big goals, like saving the world or extending your life.

I want to do all of these.

Save the world. A great goal if you see a possible angle of attack, which I don't. The SIAI folks are more optimistic, but if they see a chink in the wall, they're yet to reveal it.

Help those who suffer. Morally upright but tricky to execute: James Shikwati, Dambisa Moyo and Kevin Myers show that even something as clear-cut as aid to Africa can be viewed as immoral. Still a good goal for anyone, though.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1qf/the_craigslist_revolution_a_realworld_application/

Procreate.

Having children holds appeal to me, but only as something that seems worth experiencing eventually, not something I want to do in the next 10 years. It seems that if I am going to wait that long I might as well wait until genetic engineering or genetic selective implantation catches on. If I'm going to have children; I'd like to have superbabies. Superbabies also have a better chance of positively impacting existential risk.

Follow your muse.

I play the drums. Drum set, etc. I've been taking lessons in tabla for the last two years. I would like to be a rock star eventually, but I need to become independently wealthy first. You can't make money by making music anymore.

My startup is in the area of video game design, though I don't have any particular talent for video game design beyond the highest level (the big picture level). I guess I'll be better at the mechanics of game design once my game is actually finished.

Accumulate power, money or experiences. What for? I never understood that.

Not experiences, but accumulating power and money allow one to better achieve the other goals listed.

Advance science.

I'd also like to do this one, but it's probably last on my list of big goals. I also don't think I could make much of a difference now with my current intelligence, but I'd like to give it a shot in the future once we have some sort of drastic intelligence enhancement technology.

Having said that, I believe very strongly that people do not need a goal in life. Most people seem obsessed with the idea of doing something, but I think it's perfectly acceptable just to be without having to continuously do.

I have moved from Advance Science to Save the world, as I have aged.

Nudging the world is not hard, many people have nudged the world. Especially people who have created technology. Knowing what ripples that nudge will cause later is another matter. It is this that makes me sceptical of my efforts.

I know that I don't feel satisfied with my life without a big goal. Too many fantasy novels with a overarching plot when I was young, perhaps. But it is a self-reinforcing meme, I don't want to become someone who goes through life with no thought to the future. Especially as I see that we are incredibly lucky to live in a time, where we have such things as free time and disposable income to devote to the problem.

I recently read a history of western ethical philosophy and the argument boiled down to this: Without God or deity, human experience/life has no goals or process to work towards and therefore no need for ethics. Humans ARE in fact ethical and behave as though working towards some purpose, so therefore that purpose must exist and therefore god exists.

This view was frustrating to no end. Do humans have to prescribe purpose to the universe in order to satisfy some psychological need?