Humans are not automatically strategic

I'm disappointed at how few of these comments, particularly the highly-voted ones, are about proposed solutions, or at least proposed areas for research. My general concern about the LW community is that it seems much more interested in the fun of debating and analyzing biases, rather than the boring repetitive trial-and-error of correcting them.

Anna's post lays out a particular piece of poor performance which is of core strategic value to pretty much everyone - how to identify and achieve your goals - and which, according to me and many people and authors, can be greatly improved through study and practice. So I'm very frustrated by all the comments about the fact that we're just barely intelligent and debates about the intelligence of the general person. It's like if Eliezer posted about the potential for AI to kill us all and people debated how they would choose to kill us instead of how to stop it from happening.

Sorry, folks, but compared to the self-help/self-development community, Less Wrong is currently UTTERLY LOSING at self-improvement and life optimization. Go spend an hour reading Merlin Mann's site and you'll learn way more instrumental rationality than you do here. Or take a GTD class, or read a top-rated time-management book on Amazon.

Talking about biases is fun, working on them is hard. Do Less Wrongers want to have fun, or become super-powerful and take over (or at least save) the world? So far, as far as I can tell, LW is much worse than the Quantified Self & time/attention-management communities (Merlin Mann, Zen Habits, GTD) at practical self-improvement. Which is why I don't read it very often. When it becomes a rationality dojo instead of a club for people who like to geek out about biases, I'm in.

I can think of at least 3 ways that people fail to make strategic, effective decisions.

1. (as the above post pointed out) it's difficult to analyze options (or even to come up with some of them), for any number of reasons: too many of them (and too little time), lack of information, unforeseeable secondary consequences, etc.. One can do one's best in the most rational fashion, but still comes out with a wrong choice. That's unfortunate, but if this is the only kind of mistakes I am making, i am not too worried. it's a matter of learning better heuristics, building better models, gathering more data... or, in the limit, admitting that there's a limit to how much human intelligence and limited time/resources can go, even if correctly applied to problems.

2. A second, more worrisome, mistake is not to even realize that one can step out of one's immediate reactions, stop whatever one's doing, and think about the rationality of it, and alternatives. This mistake differs from (1). As a hypothetical example, suppose the wannabe comedian generated a list of things he could do, and decided to watch the Garfield cartoon. His choice might be wrong, but it's a conscious, deliberate choice that he made. This is mistake of type (1).

Suppose however, the Garfield idea was the first thing that came to his mind, and after 3 months he was still at it, never stopping to question his own logic. This is mistake of type (2).

Type (2) is more worrisome, because there doesn't seem to be a reliable way that, if left alone, one can break out of it. Douglas Hofstadter (of GEB fame) invented a word "sphexishness", which I think describes this vividly. It's a wonderful label, and I use it to catch myself in the act. Hofstadter coined the word from sphex's (digger wasp) inability to break out from a fixed routine of laying eggs when disturbed by human. Hofstadter gave a spectrum of sphexish behaviors, from a stuck music record to teenagers addicted to video games to mathematicians applying the same trick for new discoveries. (Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas. "On the seeming paradox of mechanizing creativity").

A lot of the 'unstrategic' decisions people make smell of sphexishness. (decision here is a misnomer, as it's a lack of conscious decision that lead them to taking ill-effective actions.)

How do you correct mistakes of such a type? It requires self-awareness. Some kind of an interrupt to break one out of a loop. The ability to spot patterns in unexpected places. Ways to help yourself: hang out with intelligent, observant people (who would do you the favor to point it out for you; return the favor when you see others trapped in such a behavior). Try to develop a mental habit of self-watching.

3.There is yet a third way that people don't do what's best for them: unlike in (1) & (2), they know what they should do, but just can't bring themselves to doing it. Taking the aspiring comedian example again. Does he really think watching Garfield is the best thing to do? I doubt it. He might know that going to an open mike event is better learning, but it's so painful (the anxiety of first time performers, fear of failure) that he procrastinates -- and in the worst way too, by doing something that seems like progress (so he doesn't feel guilty from it), but actually is very ineffective. (The irony is that, the mind is actually doing the rational thing, but on a small scale: pain avoidance. but of course on the larger scale this is detrimental to individual survival, hence irrational.)

This is a situation where the best choice is not hard to figure out, but so difficult (often the difficulty is psychological, but difficult nonetheless) that the mind avoids it. The solutions seems to trick the mind into undertaking it. E.g. some people avoid thinking of taking on a large project (because it would be overwhelming), but work on small pieces of it until they built up momentum (in the form of confidence, or having made too much investment to turn back, or having expectations places on them...).

I suspect type (3) exist because rationality is a recently evolved phenomenon. Our psychology is still by and large that of an unconscious, reactive animal. Rationality and consciousness have to fight every step of the way against some hundreds of thousands of years (much longer if you count the time when we were fish and even before that) of evolved behaviors that were once useful and hard-wired.

Yet therein lies hope too. If we can find the right tricks, push the primitive buttons, we can get such amazing, barbaric, uncontrollable motivation and energy out of ourselves. The buttons might be designed for something else, but our intelligence can use them to achieve what we know is good for us. The image is using sex to encourage people to learn and act rationally (I have no idea how that might work). But the hope is that, consciousness triumphs over the lizard brain in us.

There's an important piece missing from the articles analysis.

As humans we are inherently social in nature.

We delegate a lot of our reasoning to the wider social group around us. This is more energy efficient.

The article asks 'why do many people go through long training programs "to make money" without spending a few hours doing salary comparisons ahead of time'. We do long training programs (eg, college degrees) mostly because they are socially esteemed. This social esteem serves as a proxy to their worth, and its typically information that has a lower personal cost to obtain, than going and looking at salary surveys.

The reason we do so little systematic testing for ourselves is that we have trusted our wider social grouping to do it for us. I don't find a rational argument about the bungie jump mechanism nearly as compelling evidence of safety, as I do my talking with enthusiastic friend who has done it 20 times. If I was to learn about my cars braking mechanism in sufficient detail to convince myself of why it worked, I would never go anywhere. Instead, I see others who I trust driving the car, and 'delegate' to them.

This is simply a heuristic. It doesn't always work. Just because all my friends smoke doesn't mean smoking isn't dangerous (the social influence here is well documented). But the vast majority of the time its a much more cost/information efficient way of doing things.

Any analysis of our behaviour in such circumstances must factor in our social aspects, and the fact we don't act as individuals or reach decisions in a vacuum.

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

This a point I've been thinking about a lot recently - that the time between the evolution of a species whose smartest members crossed the finish line into general intelligence, and today, is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, and therefore we should expect to find that we are roughly as stupid as it's possible to be and still have some of us smart enough to transform the world. You refer to it here in a way that suggests this is a well-understood point - is this point discussed more explicitly elsewhere?

It occurs to me that this is one reason we suffer from the "parochial intelligence scale" Eliezer complains about - that the difference in effect between being just barely at the point of having general intelligence and being slightly better than that is a lot, even if the difference in absolute capacity is slight.

I wonder how easy it would be to incorporate this point into my spiel for newcomers about why you should worry about AGI - what inferential distances am I missing?

I woke up this morning with a set of goals. After reading this post, my goals abruptly pivoted: I had a strong desire to compose a reply. I like this post and think it is an excellent and appropriate reply to Lionhearted's (also a nice post), and would have liked to proffer some different perspectives. Realizing that this was an exciting but transient passion, I didn't allow my goals to be updated and persisted in my previous plans. An hour or two into my morning's work, I finally recalled the motivation behind my original goals and was grateful. It took some time, though, before I felt emotionally that I had chosen the right set of goals for my morning. Working through those transient periods of no-emotional-reward is tough. You need to have faith in the goal decisions of previous selves, but not too much.

The fact that we so blatantly fail to optimize for using reason to solve our problems, and so effortlessly use it to rationalize our actions, is another strong piece of evidence for the thesis that reasoning evolved primarily for arguing.

Do you agree with (a)-(g) above?

• (a) Yes. I have to do that consciously, verbally.
• (b) Same – I have to mentally talk with myself about this;
• (c) Thankfully, this one comes easy to me – I usually become genuinely interested in whatever I happen to be doing because I'm a damn perfectionist. This held true for all jobs I had during my career and all my past and current hobbies.
• (d) Same as a) and b) – I have to concsiously gather such information. Thankfully, I usually become interested in the subject, provided that it aligns with my abilities and interests to at least some degree;
• (e) Speaking of "methods that aren’t habitual for us", I'm fascinated with the idea of Nakatomi space (not math), and I'd very much like to level up my own Nakatomi navigation abilities;
• (f) No opinion yet;
• (g) I sort of failed this one last time. I had a conjunction in my goal definition: "Build the best Widget on the planet AND have at least one million dollars per year in profit". The overlap between the two subgoals turned out to be small. Plus, the goal had an internal conflict: I wasn't really ready to sacrifice the perfection of the Widget in exchange for the million. As a result, I spent 10 years and actually built the Best Widget on the Planet, but it's not earning me millions (though it's pretty profitable and will have a healthy long lifecycle). Next time I'll make sure that there are no conjunctions and conflicts in my goals.
• (h) Not sure if I got your meaning right, but I never miss a chance to brag about my achievements.

Do you have some good heuristics to add? Do you have some good ideas for how to train yourself in such heuristics?

I'm not sure if these can be called heuristics, but I do have two techniques that I found to be very successful.

The first technique is "Concentrate on high-order bits". Essentially, it's a generalized 80/20 rule.

There's always a number of activities I can do, and they all contribute towards my goal, but some of them contribute 128 points, some 64 points, and some just 1 point. I consciously try to find activities that contribute the most points, and then execute using various anti-akrasia tactics including those discussed here on LW.

The second technique is complimentary for the first one. "It's macro time.".

Basically, it boils down to spending a day or more doing nothing but looking at the goal and the big picture.

Starcraft players should be familiar with the meaning of 'micro' and 'macro'. Micro and macro refer to micro- and macro-management. Micro is fine-grained real-time control of combat units (concentrating fire on dangerous enemies, using special abilities etc.) and macro refers to higher-level activities like maintaining the resource flow, building the base towards the desired tech, expanding to acquire more resources etc.

Personally, I happen to be pretty good at micro, both in games and in real life (as my co-workers will angrily confirm), so my biggest problem both in Starcraft multiplayer and in business was going too micro and not having enough mind cycles for macro.

To counteract this, I'm working to form a habit of allocating dedicated 'macro days', or perhaps even 'macro weeks' during which my primary task would be figuring out which activities are high-impact and which can be put on low-priority. I recently came back from the longest vacation I had in my last 10 years of work – full 45 days! – and found it to be extremely helpful in figuring out what I should do next.

Added: Did the above strategies help me achieve anything?

I've been using them for just about a year. So far the biggest achievement is a very solid, very powerful Version 2.0 of the Widget, done in a year, with no feature creep (thanks to concentrating on 'high-order bits' and cutting less-important stuff), no burnout on my part (due to macro time and non-conflicting goals) and almost no crunch time (a month prior to the release doesn't count :)

There's a reason why we don't think strategically, and it's actually a very good reason and is unfortunately why we will never have an innately strategic mentality: cost. Specifically, the cost of time. i.e. it's always cheaper in terms of time to make a correct lucky guess on the first try than to work out a solution properly over a significant length of time.

Imagine there was a such thing as a lucky charm, and by holding it, you were, say, 70% more likely to always get the right answer on your calculus test without even needing to completely understand the problem. In this situation, taking the calculus test would take you just a few minutes, and you'd still score well enough to pass the class. In fact, you could take the entire years worth of tests, perhaps, in the same amount of time that it takes the rest of the students to work their way through the first one, yet still most likely pass. Your lucky charm didn't give you the best grade, but it allowed you to quickly solve all the problems you needed to solve and now you can spend the rest of the year taking other classes.

Well, the thing is, the human mind has evolved just such a "lucky charm", specifically our highly sophisticated pattern matching ability. We can look at situations that we've seen in the past, and can generally make a "mostly right" choice much of the time with very little effort or thought. Those humans who had a particularly powerful patterning matching ability were able to "coast" through even incredibly complex situations with a small effort, leaving them more resources available to survive and propagate while those who spent more time working out far more optimal solutions would find themselves sorely behind in the evolutionary race, even though they are ending up with better answers.

Why is time so valuable? Think about it this way: Imagine you could mathematically work out the winning lottery numbers, but it would take you 50 years, or you could guess every week and never win the jackpot, but, on average, could make a few bucks consistently. Which approach will keep you in food and shelter until you reach the age that you can have children? The jackpot may be orders of magnitude more money, but you need the monetary resources up front in order to pay your way through survival.

Evolution doesn't seek out the optimal long-term solution, it seeks out the "just barely good enough for right now" solution. Unfortunately, as long as we continue to evolve in a world where time is as or more valuable than total available resources, we'll most likely never reach the point where "strategic thinking" is something we do by default.

Part of it is that achieving success through means other than the standard things you're supposed to achieve success by doing well at can feel like cheating, possibly for some sort of signaling reason. Part of it is there are serious psychological and social costs not only to doing things that other people don't do, but to doing things for different kinds of reasons. Part of it is you're suggesting the benefits of what you call being strategic are larger than they really are by focusing on available cases where it changed someone's life and ignoring a great many forgettable and hard to pinpoint cases where it was just a time/energy sink, or where considering it was a time/energy sink, or where there was good reason to believe the relevant strategy had already been taken into account by whatever caused you to be doing the default thing, or where there seemed to be such good reason absent an appreciation of the world's madness.

Perhaps 5% of the population has enough abstract reasoning skill to verbally understand that the above heuristics would be useful once these heuristics are pointed out.

I think you're underestimating the average person.

Is it really fair to say there has been "no strong evolutionary or cultural force sufficient to focus us on the very narrow behavior patterns that would actually be effective"?

Clearly we've evolved the ability (trainable hardware) to do the kind of planning, abstract reasoning, and analysis that would help us find these optimal courses of action. Furthermore, we've evolved the tendency to do a fair amount of this (compared to other life forms) automatically.

This isn't just a hardcoded ability to execute plans that bring food, shelter, and sex. If you decide you want a new pair of shoes, it's trivial for you to mentally construct and carry out the relatively complex (again, comparing to other species) plan required for you to get them. You'll even carry out some optimizations without too much effort ("wait, there's a closer shoe store east of here").

While it's trivially true that we haven't evolved to automatically seek the optimum path in all things (which there might be a good reason for, e.g. time-constraints on assessing and choosing paths), I think it's fair to say evolution has given us a running start.

And the selective pressures are pretty clear: something like the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis is almost certainly at work, selecting those genes that are best at carrying out plans, since in the ancestral environment most plans were directly concerned with survival and breeding. Granted, no shortage of optimization was hacked on towards attaining those goals specifically (which might explain why it's so hard to focus on your bigger goals when you're hungry), but the fact is humans didn't evolve to mindlessly seek out food and mates. We're capable of pursuing other interests.

So I'd say there have been strong selective forces to help us choose effective courses of action. Not absolutely optimal courses of action, but when you consider the massive size of action-space (as you pointed out, rocks fail calculus tests by default), it's apparent that evolution didn't totally leave us out in the cold.

Here's a strategic thing I figured out:

When I wake up really early, I get a lot more work done because the morning hours have no distractions and I feel like I'm ahead of the day, like I'm using 100% of the possible day.

Therefore I wake up really early now - 3-5am.

I've wrestled with this disparity myself, the distance between my goals and my actions. I'm quite emotional and when my goals and my emotions are aligned I'm capable of rapid and tireless productivity. At the same time my passions are fickle and frequently fail to match what I might reason out. Over the years I've tried to exert my will over them, developing emotionally powerful personal stories and habits to try and control them. But every time I have done so it tends to cause more problems that it fixes. I experience a lot of stress fighting with myself in this way and quickly lose the ability to maintain perspective or, more importantly, to prioritise. My reason becomes a tunnel visioned rationalisation, and rather than being a tool for appropriate action becomes a tool to reinforce an unwise initial judgement of my priorities.

More recently, I've come to accept that my conscious reasoning self is, to an extent, a passenger in an emotional mind. What's more, that that emotional mind often has a much more sophisticated understanding of what will lead to a satisfying future than my own reasoning can provide. If I have the patience to listen (and occasionally offer it suggestions) I seem to get much closer to solving creative and technical problems, and more importantly, much closer to contentment, than if I try to force myself to follow an existing plan.

I think there is a real risk of having ones culture and community define goals for ourselves that are not actually what we want. Causing us to feel a sense of duty towards values that deep down, we don't share. Is our reasoning flawed or do we just not understand our utility function?

I agree with all of this.

Have some of you trained yourselves to be substantially more strategic, or goal-achieving, than you started out?

At my organization, the leaders regularly (every 3-12 months) get together and say "what have we been doing? Is it the most useful thing? If not (as has always been the case when we've done this) why not? how can we do better". We always find ourselves having made substantial errors, and over our 2+ years have found that our activities are slowly getting more focused on what matters - although still much less than we'd like.

Personally, the standard goal-setting / time-management techniques don't work great for me, but they are better than nothing. At least yearly, I explicitly review my life goals and annual sub-goals, which has some effectiveness. I keep them printed out on my laptop, which has had no effect. I have been experimenting lately with tracking time spent on each project (the Pomodoro Technique), which has been going quite well - it is harder to deny that you aren't working on the right thing when the timer is staring you in the face saying "I am off because you are not working on one of your projects, you must work on one of your projects to turn me on". I am training myself to intuit that if the timer isn't on (like now), I'm not really working.

I am starting to feel the potential for good side-effects, like if the timer is not on, why do low-value work-ish type work rather than relax & have fun & re-generate energy to do high-value work?

Anyway, your question basically embraces all of time-management, GTD, and motivation, so it's a huge topic, with many techniques out there and many books written on it. Hard to answer briefly. But I agree it is a crucial skill set for rationalists (how to identify and work effectively towards your goals), and well worth putting a lot of time and study into. I would love to participate in such a training group.

Some book recommendations: "Eat That Frog!", "Getting Things Done" (flawed in many ways, but with enough useful info to be worth reading), "The Four-Hour Workweek" (large parts are irrelevant, yet a few, like those on work efficiency, are outstanding.

Thanks for the list, and to you and Lionhearted for the posts. I haven't yet figured it all out. But I'm trying to get started on this approach:

Time "working toward your goals" as you usually do is habitual. There's no harm in writing out a calendar for your pre-existing habits, and it's probably very useful for most people to do so to form new habits. My system mostly revolves around calendars.

In my calendar, the habit I've written in is a bit of planning or "meta" time. Twice a week, I plan out a full week. By re-evaluating the course of action half-way through, I'm hoping it should be easier to track where I go off-track.

Once a month, this planning time must include meta-planning. During this time, the idea is to review that my planning method is the most effective. This is the time for reviewing the past month's calendar, and also for reading any books on planning.

As for evaluating sub-goals, I've decided that the best step after some initial self-reflection is consultation. Therapy/coaching can be valuable for anyone working to solve an internal problem that defends itself, and it seems prudent to gain what I can from professional guidance. I've stated that I want my goal with that time to make evaluating my volition and turning it into action natural and habitual.

Finally, my current method (not perfectly successful, but a start) has been to keep a list of projects in a spreadsheet, each assigned a number for personal importance and for urgency, and each with a column for a link to an outline. Long-term projects are on a separate sheet, and short-term projects either belong to a long-term project or do not. On my calendar, I have a block of time simply called "Project Time" on Saturday, and open space on weekday evenings and Sunday. The idea is that during Planning Time, I take projects from the Projects List, allot them Project Time.

There is one more step I've figured out in this plan. Posting it here, mentioning it to others. Now I know people will ask me occasionally how it's going, which will provide a bit of motivation to get started on using the system.

Has anyone made good use of a planning structure similar to this, with scheduled planning and meta-planning?

Perhaps the only way to train yourself to achieve long-term goals is to use short-term motivation to improve your automatic behaviours, instead of trying to train ourselves to have motivational systems that work on long-term multi-step plans.

What if we broke down the action steps of your algorithm into:

• ask yourself what kind of person achieves goals like this by habit
• ask yourself how you could change yourself into that kind of person, perhaps by establishing new habits
• evaluate whether your new habits are effectively causing you to do things that work towards your goal.

So, forget about long-term plans. Instead select and implement short-term plans that:

• incrementally improve your position, so more opportunities that you can act on occur.
• change bad habits into more goal-directed habits
• put you into situations where you are likely to take actions that further your goals, automatically
• increase your intrinsic enjoyment of things that are directed towards your goals

So, for example, starting a startup is less Step 1 of a Grand Plan to become a millionaire, and more a way to put yourself in a situation where you will have to do things that you think help towards becoming a millionaire, and will change you into more the kind of person who does things that make you a millionaire.

Of course, this whole thing is just one big long-term plan after all :) But it's a more specific one.

I think you rather overstate your case here. When you say:

But there are clearly also heuristics that would be useful to goal-achievement (or that would be part of what it means to “have goals” at all) that we do not automatically carry out. We do not automatically:

I'm not sure who you are referring to by 'we'. Most of these tactics are fairly commonly advised by everything from management and business books to self help and sports training. Some of them are things that come naturally to me and seem to come naturally to quite a few other people I know (though certainly not everybody).

(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;

This comes naturally to me but I've noticed it doesn't seem to to everybody. It is something I've seen others do (and talk about doing) fairly often however.

(b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;

Very common advice in business/management and in programming. It does seem to require a bit of practice for most people to acquire this habit and it is one of the things I notice separating more experienced programmers from less experienced. It needs pointing out however that this is often very difficult and/or time consuming in practice for many real world goals and is easy to get wrong.

(c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;

Comes naturally to me and seems to be reasonably common in others but I'd agree that there are many people for whom it doesn't seem to come naturally.

(d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);

Seems obvious and natural to me and pretty common in others. In fact I think this is how most people approach most of their goals. Many people fall down by being too undiscriminating in who they ask for advice and what evidence they require from others that said advice is effective however. Again it should be pointed out that this is much more difficult in practice for many real world problems than is implied here. There are many goals for which there is no straightforward and uncontroversial answer to how best to achieve them.

(e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;

This is one where I could stand to improve. I think it's a common failing and few people do this as much as they should. It is another case of something that is quite difficult in practice however - tracking can be time consuming and difficult for many goals and it can be difficult to gather 'clean' data on what really works best.

(f) Focus most of the energy that isn’t going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;

Seems fairly obvious and I think is reasonably common but people are easily distracted from their goals. Sometimes distraction can be a signal that goals need re-evaluating however.

(g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;

Seems fairly obvious but is something it is useful to get into a mental habit of reminding oneself of periodically. Another one that can be incredibly difficult in practice however. I'd say that figuring out what our 'real' goals are and how to achieve them is the central problem of most people's lives. I know I consciously think about this a lot, I think to a greater extent than is typical, and have yet to reach any entirely satisfactory conclusions.

(h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;

This strikes me as pretty common advice but it is useful advice and bears repeating.

Overall I don't think you are saying anything here that isn't already fairly widely known and talked about in many contexts. Some of these things come naturally, others require conscious effort to develop as habits. There is clear variation in the population when it comes to which of these come naturally however and certainly there are many people who do few of these things as a matter of course. The real trick is in the execution however - many of these things are difficult to do and failure to do them is just as often a result of this inherent difficulty as it is of a lack of awareness of these heuristics.

More examples please in the likes of [1]. I am bright enough to understand them, but not to come up with too many on my own.

Perhaps 5% of the population has enough abstract reasoning skill to verbally understand that the above heuristics would be useful once these heuristics are pointed out. That is not at all the same as the ability to automatically implement these heuristics.

Source?

I disagree - I think that people usually do know how they could be more productive. This argument is really about people who TALK versus people who DO - the talkers know that optimally they should be "do"ing. But, being a sheep (talker) is BORING, and being a fox (do-er) is LONELY.

In the author's example, the comedian knows that watching re-runs is the easy way out. He'll be bored, but he'll learn a little bit and he can tell his friends he's working.

He also knows that, ideally, he'd be working comedy all the time instead. But he's already working another job, he's tired at night, and if he REALLY plunged into comedy he'd lose his free time too. He'd be lonely and on his own.

This isn't an issue of the comedian not having "strategic" capabilities. It's an issue of him not being a risk-taker, not being sufficiently motivated, and in many ways of him just being tired out!

What do you do when the answer to (a) is "Nothing in particular"?

P(micronutrient deficiency) = 0.2
P(micronutrient deficiency|no multivitamin) = 0.8
P(micronutrient deficiency|no multivitamin & depressed) = 0.95

P(micronutrient deficiency) = 0.2

P(micronutrient deficiency|no multivitamin) = 0.8

P(micronutrient deficiency|no multivitamin & depressed) = 0.95

How has your strategy (a-h) changed since you wrote this? Are there resources you can share for learning to be more strategic? A method for finding quality resources? Methods for practicing and assessing strategic skill?

Thanks for writing this. It has enabled me to articulate the rationales behind a lot of the "crazy" thoughts I have. For example:

• People are horrible at choosing careers. They hardly explore their options at all, and thus limit themselves greatly.

• People are bad at choosing who their girl/boyfriends are. They make decisions impulsively based on romantic love when the should really be considering the expected value of true attachment. A lot of times it seems that certain relationships "work", but are clearly suboptimal. Also, it seems that if people were genuinely interested in finding someone to enter a relationship with, that they should spend more time exploring their options.

• Most philanthropists are lazy and impulsive. They don't think about how to best help society, they just make impulsive decisions based on what issues push their buttons.

• The great majority of people are stupid. They don't think at all about how to best achieve the supergoal. They just make impulsive decisions based on their high level maps.

I think the reason behind these types of decisions is that humans are not automatically strategic.

Very interesting and revealing post. (I'm new)
I recently picked up a habit that makes me more strategic and goal-achieving that might be useful to share. 
I have instated a rule to start the day by: Making a list of options of things that I could do and ranking them in importance and how much effort they cost, and then the rule is to do the most important / greatest effort or unpleasant first. Then, when I have done it, I have moved toward my goal and feel better about myself. Before doing this, I would choose what to do based on what you WANT to do first and then feel disappointed by the little progress after a few hours. Another rule that ties in with this is no phone or other distraction before having done one hour of productivity. 
 

What a thought provoking article. Thank you so much for writing this. I am especially interested in the question "why do people spend their Saturdays 'enjoying themselves' without bothering to track which of their habitual leisure activities are actually enjoyable. When I was younger I spent a large amount of my summer vacation and weekends playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare online. The bizarre thing was that I would always stop infuriated. It did not make me happy. In fact, there are few things more infuriating than what you hear while playing an online video game.

I have some hypotheses as to why people continue to do things that they do not enjoy, but I was wondering if you know of any other essays on this cite, your own ideas, or a body of literature that you are familiar with on the issue.

This was a magnificent post, Anna. I'd like to write a longer reply and more analysis later, but for the moment I wanted to say this was really fantastic and amazing, and there's wisdom and insight packed very densely here. Thank you for writing this up, it's inspiring and insightful.

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?

Disease, motor vehicles, and humans are very dangerous. Currently, everyone dies eventually(1), and almost everyone who dies is killed by one of these three things. The CDC has charts about this. See 10 Leading Causes of Death by Age Group, United States – 2007. Boxes that aren't one of the Big Three Of Doom are extremely rare. This chart breaks down the unintentional injuries. As you can see, motor vehicles dominate. I was surprised at first that "Unintentional Poisoning" came in second, especially among the 35-54 age group, then I realized that it's probably drug overdoses, not people thinking that vitamins are candy. After that, it's Unintentional Fall among older people(2).

Do people fear the wrong diseases, wrong motor vehicles, and wrong humans? Sure. But at least the categories are correct.

I suggest "plane crashes".

1. If you are cryopreserved, you are dead, but with strange aeons even death may die. (Information-theoretic death is eternal, though.)
2. And now you know why there's a Culture ship named Death and Gravity.

As for the rest of the post, which is asking very good questions, when I became a programmer I started with (c) "Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;", bootstrapped up to skill and power, and then figured out what goals I could achieve with it. (In no particular order, improving the state of the art at my employer and the field as a whole, working on my projects at home, and funding my retirement.) I consciously decided to teach myself a real programming language (the wrong one, although it worked out in the end), but I didn't have to mess with my reward gradients or motivational systems. At most, I had to throw away mini-goals that were interesting at the time, but later became trivial or pointless. For me, learning how to do neat stuff was its own reward and its own motivation. After I worked my way out of the depths of newbie confusion, I realized that I could work on problems that previously, or to anyone else, would have seemed like a terrible slog. (My work and hobbies involve staring at angle brackets all day, and not the HTML kind.)

I don't know if that can work for anyone else. It's just my data point.

In my case, I don't run into "not being able to make myself pursue my goals effectively" a whole lot. What I do run into a lot is, "not being able to figure out what goals I actually want to pursue."

I think that what's going on is this in part. When I find resistance within myself to pursuing some goal (which I read into the comedian watching reruns), I take that as evidence that this goal isn't what I'm really after. I don't spend a lot of time in a state of trying to make myself do something, because of my assumption that whatever I really want to do, I won't need to make myself do. (You seem to be working under a different assumption.)

My experience is that when I hit on something I sincerely want to do, I don't find resistance in myself to doing it. I just do it. Maybe a lot of problems getting ourselves to do what we want are actually misdiagnosed problems of understanding what we want?

(I actually wrote a post on this topic a while back. Realized halfway through this comment that I was repeating what that post said; but it's what leapt into my mind when I read this, so I thought I'd press forward anyway.)

On Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1673144

Even Pythagoras believed in the laity - laypeople.

Laypeople do not have goals and generally only engage thier reason after action has been taken in order to justify why they did what they weren't thinking about. 

I don't see this as a problem. I think it's just the way it is and getting all people to be actors (instead of being acted upon) is a fool's errand (probably).

I really enjoyed your writing :)

Thanks so much for writing this great article! I'm new so for all of you this is an old hat. I want to add my 2ct anyways.

Do you agree with (a)-(h) above?  Do you have some good heuristics to add?  Do you have some good ideas for how to train yourself in such heuristics?

The above mentioned steps are the best system for progressing in life in general which I was able to find so far. I've read and applied lots of self-help in recent years and I can definitely agree that applying the theory is incredible hard (and I fail at that like >90% of all time - only very few things stick but those really are my superpowers in everyday life). Rewiring habits is really hard.

I can recommend The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business and Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. They are both really good books.

Do you agree with (a)-(h) above?

While I've seen them before this is the best summary I found in the internet so far. I'm definitely going to bookmark this!

I don't know how other people do this but when I want to wire something in my brain I first need to research it. Then I sit down quietly together with pen and paper and I work through the concept until it feels natural to me. Most of the time this requires regular breaks and/or sleeping over weather I really like this and/or researching some more. Then, when I'm ready to make this part of my identity I append this to my Horizons of Focus Document. It's a 15ish page document which I review semi-regularely (yeah it's hard...).

Writing things down won't make me apply it. Doing autosuggestive training makes me do things. I became good in math by performing autosuggestive training. And I became self-organized due to autosuggestive training. Please note that up to this point I haven't read the core sequences and/or the "How to teach yourself" article yet. Tricking my brain into believing something through constant repeating ("autosuggestive training") is the only tool which worked for me so far. I'm ready to hear your opinion on how to incorporate these steps into ones life!

Why do many who type for hours a day remain two-finger typists, without bothering with a typing tutor program?

Because science shows, that being a two-finger typists can be of comparable speed of a ten-finger typist. I'm guilty of being a two-finger typists. But I'm also guilty of having learned the 10 finger way, practicing ot for days ongoing and then just dropping it when I realized that "this learning curve is way to steep for my 5 % realistic speed improvements".

Besides I figured "why the heck do I need to write fast anyways? 90 % of my computer time is thinking about what to write, not actually writing". My job is solving problems with my brain. My fingers are just a way to communicate with the primary tool of choice: the computer.

Convince me of why I should pursue the 10 finger way of writing. I'm a QWERTZ user by the way...

...

I automatically do points (a) through (h).

I have always automatically done points (a) through (h).

I always attributed this to the fact that I had no identity with which to value particular opinions with. As impossible as I already know it is for anyone to accept, you have to let go of the idea that your opinions are even remotely correct. Not because your opinions are incorrect, but because you will not be able to effectively correct them until you accept that they could all be just outright blatantly wrong. But if I say it that way, you'll try to retain as many of them as you can, which is wrong. You literally need to let go of the idea that you or the people around you know anything about anything at all. If it helps, pretend you're in a simulation designed to help you cope with the fact that you're now in a simulation. Pretend we're all just participating in this simulation with you until you yourself accept that this could be a simulation and literally everything you know about logic and reason and physics could just be... Wrong.

Why should your first guess ever be likely to be correct or accurate?

I've found that the most helpful thing for me in achieving my goals seems to be picking the right goals to begin with. I try to find goals that I really care about with a large portion of my being, rather than goals that only a small portion of my being cares about. This requires a fair amount of introspection. What do I want? It's not an easy question; counterintuitively, we don't know what we want. But, if I know what I want, then I can get it.

I'll give a couple examples. I used to have the conscious goal, "write music." My real goals, though I did not know it, were "express myself," "experience beauty," and "be more intuitive." Now I pursue those goals directly, in more concentrated forms than I could achieve with music-writing.

I now know that I can express myself better through writing than through music, so I now pursue the goal of self-expression much more efficiently by writing.

I now know that I can experience beauty in almost anything, and so my aesthetic interests are no longer limited to the narrow domain of music.

I have integrated the goal of being more intuitive in numerous ways into my life. However, finding efficient ways of becoming more intuitive remains a challenge for me.

So I no longer make music, but I still get all of the things that I wanted out of music-making, and I get them much more efficiently and in larger quantities than I did with music-making. This was made possible by my increased knowledge of what I want.

So to recap, I think that the first step in getting what you want, is knowing what you want. If you're having trouble getting yourself to pursue your goals, maybe you're wrong about what your goals are.

In common with all animal species, our sensory perceptual interpretation and behavioural action is also recognisable in basic physiological structure of (a) the peripheral nervous system, in our case the eyes, ears etc., and (b) parts of the central nervous systems, frontal lobes, the visual cortex, hypothalamus, amygdala, etc. that are within the brain. These are significant and extensive hardwired components. Using these structures, we can detect, recognise and evaluate a huge number of sensory patterns. For each of us these patterns are given emotional value. This is perception and learning at a distributed physiological level, on fine-grained scale that works in response to all the changes in our environment as they occur. We have a large memory to store the patterns we ‘see’, with a facility to recall and match. Emotional experience attaches new or revised values to each pattern. Where it is novel, innate curiosity is aroused. If it is seen as an unexplainable or a threat we avoid, if it is seen as an opportunity we approach. If, as is the case most of the time, it is determined as neutral we are initially attentive but tend to ignore or habituate to most of it. Moreover we physiologically tend to seek situations where our environment is largely ‘known’ and not one where the unknown continually confronts us. It is very demanding having to make highly aroused conscious decisions. There are only so many we are capable of dealing with in a period of time. However some degree of non-threatening novelty can brighten a routine day. For any individual our daily waking lives are dominated by fine grained decision-making and action instigating mechanisms constructed from our perceptions and affective memory. By about 10 years of age these collective processes are extremely well developed . Dependent upon circumstances they could be the basis of an independent survivable life though in western society another 6 to 12 years social support is the norm. Nevertheless despite extensive experience there is an innate requirement to make decisions. This is dominant and continuously operational and manifest many individual discrete decisions. As the world is ever changing we remember the pattern and the experience of our interaction. Second time round the response maybe quicker, eventually our action becoming almost sub-conscious; we gradually habituate to a potential changing complex environment. This gives rise to our almost unbounded ability to 'see' and easily decide what to do in the complex world about us - most of the time. Thus given an appropriate worldly experience then – scratching an itch, avoiding cars in traffic, jumping on busses, keeping clear of alligators, buying and selling stocks and shares, eating lunch in the park on a sunny day, flying planes, performing surgery or kicking pigeons in Trafalgar Square – all seems routine. In fact it is. It is the basis of living our everyday life.
The consequences of the innate and engrained nature of ‘decision making’ means that for most of the time we are not very interested in decisions we don't have to make and by things we can’t actually see. We are 'aroused' or 'activated' by what we see and hence do; by what the environment 'tells' us we need to do, now. We do not easily see the inevitability of something that happens in two years’ time, in fact we hardly see beyond two weeks into the future. How often do we wish we could replay a situation? With hind sight surely we could do better. For hind sight read planning - strategy -working out how a situation might play before it happens. There is an unconscious acceptance of an unfolding world to be negotiated. Most of the time this may appear as rational considered thought but in reality it is action man who is king and planning beyond the weekend is for nerds.
The perception, arousal, appraisal decision, action sequence is the basis of what we do every day maybe 99% of the time. Sometimes there are nuances of difference, new things to accept as for example when we travel to new places on business or on holiday. The bed room and bath room are not the same. Which side do I get out of bed? Where have I put the tooth brush? Where can I get a hot drink? In such circumstances we have to make lots of simple every day decisions. The regular business traveller is frustrated by those starting out on our once a year holiday. He knows how airport systems work – we don’t. However we quickly learn and habituate to this and drift with the flow.
Rarely are we stimulated to consider any major discontinuity. When this rare occurrence happens we are usually required to deal with an urgent threatening or opportunistic situation. In the modern world our usual range of innate coping mechanisms are inadequate. Unless we have been trained to perform in unusual situations as are soldiers or airline pilots we tend to do something immediate rather than something appropriate. Those with psychological and physiological processes that arouse significant longer-term consideration in their perceptual decision-making actions are the exception and not the rule. They are aroused by curiosity and an even smaller number by abstraction and formalism. Nevertheless we are all susceptible to our increasing complex world that requires more of us to think before we act rather than the acting before we think. However we are not very proficient at this latter course since in past time it was the least conducive to survival. Now we need to better understand factors that moderate decisions and improve our scope for performance and learning. How we do this is critically important and what this list is about. However the list alone is not sufficient. It is necessary to take the majority and human neurophysiology is not in our favour.

I think the term "abstract reasoning" is being conflated with acting on good or bad information (among other things). E.g., in most cases, one basically has to take it on faith ice cream is good or bad. And since most people aren't in a position to rationally make a confident choice re: the examples the author provides or comparable ones that could be imagined, agnosticism would seem the only rational alternative.*

More generally, I think a lot of these problems stem from radically defective education (if people aren't merely mostly morons as the author implies at one point: "Perhaps 5% of the population has enough abstract reasoning skill to verbally understand that the above heuristics would be useful once these heuristics are pointed out.")**. We don't get experience from a young age in figuring things out for ourselves. Instead we are merely told what to believe and not to believe (based on "respect for authority")--a recipe for making terrible decisions in later life if ever there was one.

Finally, I think the author is lumping a lot of different problems together that seemingly shouldn't be. In one case the problem may be "strategy", another ideology...ignorance, laziness etc. Apart from the fact ones stated goal is often not the real goal at all. One really needs, I think, to do a lot more work examining actual cases before attempting to pontificate on the matter. As far as I can see almost no actual work has been done...much like "postulating what one wants..."

*Of course the implication is we don't eat ice cream to be healthy on the basis of expert claims. But this raises all kinds of further questions, invoking the application of more "abstract reasoning" before we can decide wether to trust these experts (if we are really trying to be rational, that is).

**You're telling me the 5% figure wasn't pulled out of someone's ass--please!

We: (1) tell ourselves and others stories of how we’re aiming for various “goals”; (2) search out modes of activity that are consistent with the role, and goal-seeking, that we see ourselves as doing (“learning math”; “becoming a comedian”; “being a good parent”); and sometimes even (3) feel glad or disappointed when we do/don’t achieve our “goals”.

Well put. I've realized that really planning (and acting) in order to reach hard goals, is something I almost never do. Most of the time I'm just working on what feels most rewarding locally.

humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence. Perhaps 5% of the population has enough abstract reasoning skill to verbally understand that the above heuristics would be useful once these heuristics are pointed out

Yes - but perhaps some of the unfortunate remainder could grow to understand (by acquiring some missing prerequisites first).

Our verbal, conversational systems are much better at abstract reasoning than are the motivational systems that pull our behavior

Yes. And I wonder how much non-task-specific training or tricking of the motivational systems is possible. There may be general tricks like (h), but I have no evidence for a sort of general "able to try harder" faculty that can be improved (even though it seems extremely plausible).

The calculus example is a good one for examining goal-achievement.

I am currently taking Calculus 2, Integration by Trigonometric Substitution is one of the methods.

The textbook I am using is very Implicit in examples explaining this method, and I have thought many times about how much easier it would be if it were to use more Explicit examples.

Implicit examples by nature take more time and effort than explicit examples, making the implicit less likely to be chosen than the explicit.

It would have to be one very highly motivated 8-year-old to pass the calculus test, or one that has an extremely high ability to understand implicit examples.

As far as the goals of a comedian, he/she would have to be very highly motivated and very good at implicit learning to gain anything from 'Garfield and Friends'.

Myself, I would choose George Carlin as an explicit example…

Doing things the wrong way is a good way of discovering new ways and ideas. If we were programmed to go always in the right direction we couldn't explore the landscape and we should be trapped in a local minima. Random behaviour is part of an intelligent design to evolve and mature. Humour is a way of jumping across island of rationality.