intrinsic motivation
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December 4th, 2022
- 9th COMPLICE THREAD
twitter.com/CompliceGoals/status/1599540414239105024
- scraps
- coercive motivation is sort of the opposite of goal-directed motivation
- in the sense that the latter is in touch with whys
- in some sense coercive = extrinsic, goal-directed = intrinsic
- although self-coercion could seem "intrinsic" because it's internal
- and.... yeah
- coercive ~= awayness
- even with rewards, subtly
- damn I started writing this thread and on revisiting my towardsness/awayness post, I feel like it actually says most of what I want to say
- BUT! it doesn't say it in the form of "what's the deal with coercion?"
- coercion comes up later
- meta-commentary on my experience of writing this so far... feeling kinda stuck
- I've gone kinda deep into the cake metaphor/example
- this is okay—something about the fruits of one's labour... and having a concrete example is good
- but I also want to say the more structural things, maybe before/instead of starting/continuing with the example
- thread draft
- one main problem with coercion is that it disconnects what you're doing from why you're doing it
- whether reward or punishment, whether internal or external, coercion involves applying some force to make something happen
this is disconnected from our intrinsic motivation to experience doing the thing or to experience the natural results of doing the thing - 1. if you bake a cake, and then you enjoy the cake, that's not a reward—that's the outcome of baking the cake
2. if you try to get good grades so that your parents will buy you a cake, that's a reward - the distinction is tough, bc in some sense the 2nd cake is still a consequence
but note that however relevant/irrelevant, it's *arbitrary*: your parents are the arbiters of whether you get the cake, whether or not you get good grades
vs in 1 you NEED to bake the cake to eat it - why do your parents want you to get good grades?
maybe they want you to learn things.
maybe they want you to get into a good college.
maybe they would be embarrassed if you didn't and they haven't really thought further than that!
February 26th, 2022
- incentives are a thing, but goodharting is also a thing. if you try to create an incentive to X, you can only ever create an incentive to appear to be doing X. which will sometimes correlate with actual X, but will also correlate with deception (including self-deception) & avoidance, particularly when X is difficult or people don't know how to do it.
- but non-created incentives don't work like this, for the most part. I assume you'd agree I have an incentive to eat. pretending to eat won't satisfy my hunger. as long as I'm steering by my actual hunger, I need to actually eat in order to solve my problem. no other incentives are needed to get me to eat, unless I've gotten majorly tangled up in some way, and if so, it's probably better for my health to get me back in touch with my own appetite rather than to layer on more external incentives.
- likewise, I have an incentive to figure out how to make sense of what's going on in my mind and in the world, because it feels good to understand what's going on. this incentivizes reading, meditating, etc, and while it can goodhart somewhat it's at least directly tracking whether I'm succeeding (as far as I can tell) in making sense of things. whereas if someone tries to get me to read or meditate or whatever, it loses track with why I might want to do those things.
- it's not to say that external incentives don't matter—they absolutely do
- eg a house that has a bunch of cheetos and milk chocolate on the counter probably has worse external incentives than the same house without those snacks there
- but removing the snacks is a very gentle nudge, compared to most other attempts to create incentives
- which are designed towards controlling behavior rather than just allowing people to do whatever they feel like but in one context rather than another
- and these incentives will inevitably goodhart
- (for people unfamiliar with goodhart's law)
- "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
- (quoting that it becomes more clear that the "removing snacks" incentive-sculpting doesn't actually create targets, which is why it doesn't goodhart. although if "ensure no bad snacks" became a target, that would absolutely goodhart)
Podcast summaries
- Keywords - cooperation & defection aren't as obvious as they might seem (they depend on frame) IFS collective agency untangle self-authoring social technology is more of a bottleneck than material technology intentionality everyone is always doing whatever makes the most sense to them partswork Coherence Therapy everything makes sense Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings self-trust comes from respecting distrust Learning how to trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too safety psychological safety Alfie Kohn punishment is goodharting waiting to happen protectiveness is damage control deliberate "negative reinforcement" is punishment even if you don't call it that intrinsic motivation adulthood An Everyone Culture in general, people don't not-care. they care about many things and don't know how to care for all of them together (PCT) reward is just the temporary relief of punishment scarcity much of human collaboration scales sublinearly but it's possible to scale superlinearly what is culture? how do we make groups with the union of their individual wisdoms rather than the intersection of their individual wisdoms? list of common schemas learned in school School is fake averagerianism post-average
- 11:58 - 20:10 - Why isn't society producing enough high-agency individuals? safety psychological safety Alfie Kohn punishment is goodharting waiting to happen protectiveness is damage control deliberate "negative reinforcement" is punishment even if you don't call it that intrinsic motivation