

Humans are not automatically strategic - billswift
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/

======
Qz
_[1] For example, why do many people go through long training programs “to
make money” without spending a few hours doing salary comparisons ahead of
time? Why do many who type for hours a day remain two-finger typists, without
bothering with a typing tutor program? Why do people spend their Saturdays
“enjoying themselves” without bothering to track which of their habitual
leisure activities are _actually_ enjoyable? 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? Why do most of us
settle into a single, stereotyped mode of studying, writing, social
interaction, or the like, without trying alternatives to see if they work
better -- even when such experiments as we have tried have sometimes given
great boosts?_

Because thinking is hard and suffering is easy.

~~~
srgseg
_"Because thinking is hard and suffering is easy."_

This explains so much about the world.

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msluyter
Incidentally, Lesswrong has had a substantial impact on my thinking, and I
recommend reading through the sequences, starting with Map and Territory and
Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions:

[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysteri...](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysterious_Questions)

~~~
godDLL
I'm enjoying "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", by the same.

<http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/>

~~~
Eliezer
Thanks, but note that OP is by Anna Salamon. _Mysterious Answers_ and
_Methods_ is by me. Didn't know which of those you meant.

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

I've been pondering this issue lately independently. Humans are basically the
minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet.
We're barely able to hold together our current society, and there's no
particular guarantee that we're even necessarily capable of that (see the
vanityfair article about Greeks currently on the homepage and remember they're
the same species as every other human). A relatively morbid thought in some
ways, even though it isn't a guarantee that we can't go further yet.

~~~
MBlume
" Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that
could take over a planet."

I believed this about a year ago and thought myself well and properly cynical.

Then it was pointed out to me that _humanity_ is the minimally conscious and
intelligent _population_ such that, with some random genetic shuffling, you
wind up with 2-5% capable of taking over the planet, and pulling the rest up
with them.

~~~
jerf
While I am a broadly cynical person, I do not mean this as a "we are certainly
doomed post" to wave about my self-hating credentials; I rather dislike people
who do that and consider self-hatred a pernicious and dangerous meme, not
something to be rolled in. I rather see it as a cautionary tale about our need
to be careful; we are not certainly doomed, but if we run about as if our
success is ensured, an attitude that manifests itself in a lot of political
debates in various ways, we will get ourselves into trouble.

I did mean the population, since of course we have rather significant
variation in personal intelligence.

------
sosuke
There are so many ways to reach our general goals that just going through the
motions of reaching a goal feels like we are actually moving toward the goal
we want to reach.

Say I want to make $10 million dollars a year for the rest of my life. There
are so many ways to achieve that goal from so many different paths that if I
were to try and plan a path that isn't guaranteed to succeed I would spend all
my time planning and never any time actually doing things.

That's exactly why we do things, because thinking and planning are good and
nice but if that's all you do you'll never end up doing any of the things that
might help you reach your goals.

For his [1], some folks don't do all that data analysis and tracking because
for them it isn't fun and actually is distracting from whatever their goal may
be.

~~~
MBlume
"For his [1]"

Her [1], in fact.

------
zb
This article irritates me. It seems like trying to apply the equivalent of the
Waterfall Method to life. I'm perpetually disappointed that ideas like this
have such a big following here, because I like to think that most HNers would
agree with me when I say that I think the Waterfall Method was stupid _even at
the time_.

That's without even getting into the smug "only 5% of the population is smart
enough to understand me" drivel.

~~~
greenlblue
Ya the 5% figure annoyed me as well.

------
zazi
Thought provoking article but I'm not too sure that it is this simple. The
heuristics outlined are inherently helpful and going through the process would
be enlightening, but getting the answers to any of the questions in (a) - (h)
are hard (some harder than most).

For example "(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve" I find that this
is a problem with most people (including myself), they do not know what they
want to achieve, nor how to even start on the process of discovering what they
want to achieve. Given this, then the first order question then becomes - How
do I find out what I want to achieve?. Answering this question probably
involves gaining more perspective and this is probably why "many people go
through long training programs to make money" (college). So it seems that if
you dig a little more, seemingly unoptimal actions make more sense.

Regardless, this article is a great start and I would love to see more in
depth discussions on this.

~~~
billswift
You don't need detailed answers, after all many of them are unanswerable in
any absolute sense, just thinking about them enough to get a partial answer
will help.

------
da5e
I think the basic reason we pursue our goals ineffectively is that we are
afraid to go at them straight on and, instead, look for activities that appear
to be goal-oriented, but are not emotionally difficult.

The comments on the site to this article are quite good too. And the post to
which it replied is worth reading. lesswrong.com is definitely going into my
reader.

------
lvecsey
I don't think you can necessarily verbally articulate some goals. Someone like
Dave Letterman may have had a vision as he watched baseball on a black and
white TV, and then Johnny Carson. But presumably it's taken him a lifetime to
get close to what he had in mind.

You don't just take a kid and say "these are the heuristics you need. It's
clear this is what you want to achieve, so these are the ingredients. Diverge
from this at your own peril."

It might work if you want to recycle the existing societal structures and keep
them in perpetuity as is. I suppose that's perfectly reasonable. You'll be
excluding a hell of a lot of innovation though.

~~~
jerf
I still think that falls under "(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to
achieve". The author may not go deeply into it but I am relatively confident
the author would agree with the statement that that step itself could turn out
to be a challenge; some of the other lettered steps strongly suggest the
author believes that, (g) in particular.

------
wikyd
Where does the 5% figure come from of people being able to understand the
author's bullet points?

~~~
khafra
In the comments, the author mentions an informal survey she conducted with the
conclusion that 2 of 5 randomly chosen people do not know what a "sphere" is.

------
kilian
If you're interested in stuff like this, check out 'How we decide' by Jonah
Lehrer : [http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-
Lehrer/dp/06186201...](http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-
Lehrer/dp/0618620117)

I'm reading it now, and it's an amazingly insightful book, in that it manages
to at once explain the workings of the brain on a psychological and
physiological level, for a whole different slew of "decisions" we humans make.

------
Swizec
I think the reason we behave like this is very simple:

"It's better to make A decision than wait forever to make THE decision"

~~~
sumeetjain
Those aren't the options most people weigh. Obviously it's better to make a
decision than spend an eternity contemplating.

But "making a decision" implies some amount of thought - some calculus for the
_choice_. The article suggests that people don't _automatically_ / _naturally_
perform this calculus when acting. We just act. Do you think this isn't true?
In my experience, it's very often true.

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patana
I admit that I am not going to read the original post, but from a comment:
Most basically, because humans are only just on the cusp of general
intelligence. I can explain why this is so.

Every time there is a leap from one state to another one, and this latter
state is better in the sense that it open new possibilities from transition,
then when you get into the new space (the one that this leap open) you realize
that the leap was a small one and that there are a lot of leaps to get to the
next state (heaven is not one leap away)

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mattmanser
This is the most incoherent, vapid, meaningless tripe I have ever seen get on
the front page of HN.

~~~
panacea
...and yet it spoke to me as if the composition of our atmosphere could
conspire to produce prismatic arcs of blended color in the sky.

(You're probably strategic in your approach to life, but if this is the most
"vapid, meaningless tripe" you've encountered on HN, that speaks volumes about
the site, because this article attempts to codify exactly what makes "vapid,
meaningless tripe" the currency of our collective culture... if you are
strategic in your day job tomorrow and aren't merely swaying in the breeze of
office dynamics, I'd love to hear a brief outline of your day if you have the
time)

