Condition-directedness

I generally think in terms of a planning horizon that doesn't extend out much past 18 months. Typically things change fast enough that planning out past that far towards anything specific is not worthwhile, besides a few exceptions, and even those exceptions I can think of involves short-term actions that can't be well planned out far in advance.

Generally I'm just thinking about how to get through the next minute. There's some day-level and week-level planning along the lines of oh the weather will be nice this day and bad that day and I have more meetings this day than that day, and it's often necessary to make plans a few months in advance for things like vacations and conferences and to think about vaguely what I might like to be working on next, but often there's just not enough information to do more than try to point myself in vaguely the right directly.

I think the biggest driver of this for me is just being able to adjust to things that are uncertain now, including unknown uncertainty. Because I don't actually know what things will be like in a minute, a day, a week, a month, or a year from now, and my ability to predict what it will be like decreases in accuracy as time extends, I find it's mostly a bad strategy to try too hard to plan or set specific goals.

So instead I mostly have to make decisions based on what I might call virtue, i.e. does this seem like the kind of thing I would like to do and have done? Will I still feel that way about it later? Will it push me vaguely in the direction of things I would like, or will it work against that?

I'm not sure the world is certain enough to do much more.

In life, it is often taken for granted that one should pursue goals, not just very locally, but over scales of decades. The alternative is taken to be being unambitious and directionless.

I think this is pretty specific to intellectual circles (which include EA + rationality). The people I know who aren't in these circles don't pursue goals over the scale of decades, and aren't hung up about that.

When people are asked for their five year plans, they become uncomfortable if they don’t have one, rather than proudly stating that they don’t currently subscribe to goal-oriented strategy at that scale.

I expect the people I'm thinking about to shrug and say "who knows" or something like that, or give a few possibilities made up on the spot (without feeling guilty that they were made up on the spot).

Nitpick about that first paragraph: that sort of backward chaining is pretty common in chess, actually. Near the end of a game you're very often envisaging aparticular state of affairs and planning how to get there. Not necessarily the exact final state, but something like "I need his king in this corner or that corner, and I need it to arrive there when my knight is here or here so that my bishop can do that and deliver checkmate". Even in the middle of the game you may have intermediate goals like "move my pawn safely from e7 to e5" or "drive the knight away from e4 without weakening my king position".

It feels as if actually there's a continuum from "do things that make the situation better in some generalized sense" to "do things that make the situation better in particular ways that seem like they're likely to be useful" to "do things that make the situation better in particular ways I can see likely uses for" to "do things that make the situation better in particular ways that I definitely have concrete uses for" to "do things that bring about a broad class of later states that I like" to "do things that bring about a very specific range of later states that I like" to "do things that bring about a single specific outcome that I need".

Isn't this what Scott Adams talks about in 'How to fail....'? ie the importance of developing stacks of skills with flexible application to respond to circumstances, rather than fixating on a single specific end-point?

I have a friend who's kept working on environmental issues for two decades now (creating and protecting nature reserves, organizing databases of rare species finds etc.) Looking at him, it's hard to say if he is condition- or ambition-directed. He created a niche where other people come to take root and can now sketch out their own five-year plans. It's definitely different than being a teacher.