"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #7: Goal Factoring

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And on we go to Training Regime Day 7: Goal Factoring. After reading through this, and the comments, I rather wish that it had come before #6; it seems to be a methodology for seeking sense in your own actions. (The phrase "goal factoring" led me to expect that goals would be factored into subgoals...this is primarily about factoring actions into goals.) I will of course modify this as I go along...in fact I'm going to add attributes to the recommended diagram, creating an over-the-top version which I will then probably do parts of.

  1. Name an action, preferably one that you do regularly or that consumes a lot of effort/time; put it in a small circle that's gonna have lines going out. For me, that's a story-spider... "Exercise", "StudyRationality", "ReadAStory", "Eat", "Sleep"... "DrawAStorySpider".

  2. Add a leg to the spider, with a label that's a goal helped or hindered right legs positive, left leg negative) by the action. Use a dashed-line leg "- - -" for a weak connection, a plain line "-----" for a normal connection, a double-line "===" for a strong connection. Use upper-case for IMPORTANT_GOALS and punctuation for !VERY_IMPORTANT! or for ?tentative?.

  3. Repeat #2 until it seems no further goals are involved. At this point, imagine that all the right-leg goals are fulfilled, and/or all the left-leg goals are unimportant; does the action still feel relevant? If so, go back to #2 anyway; there's a goal somewhere. More legs!

  4. Copy the spider all over again, onto an index card; this time put the legs in order of goal scale, with strictly personal goals at the top and global goals at the bottom, with family and then community in between. 

   The length of each leg indicates the time-scale that you're thinking about: for "Exercise" I have a very short double-line left leg that just says weHatesItWeHatesIt because I'm really not an exercise enthusiast at all, but the ?timeLost? leg is tentative because I'm not sure that the net effect really is time lost. There is one more fairly short left leg: a plain-line Willpower leg, because on many days it really is hard to get going or even to keep going. On the other leg --- well, actually there are several right legs. There's a  short single-line "?feelBetter?". There's a medium length double-line right leg "NO_HEADACHES!" which is a major discovery I made some years ago about the headaches that had plagued me since adolescence and which come back if I don't exercise enough for more than a couple of days. There's a still longer single-line "HEALTH", and a very long single-line "LONGEVITY"; I don't obsess about longevity, but I'd like to be around for as long as I can be useful and have fun. At this point I paused, thinking that was about it.  It's interesting that Mark Xu puts "look good" as a goal there; I guess even at 68 I don't like to be bloated/flabby, so I'll add a tentative right leg for that too. 

I want to try thinking about the goals in more standardized terms.... There are several ways to do that.

1. Take my somewhat distorted view of Haidt's 6 moral foundation axes: I tend to list them as "caring, pairing, sharing; ladder, limits, flight" where caring, his first axis, is a preferably temporary parental or other "caregiver" relationship; make it symmetric and you have pairing, two people who will care for each other at need. Spread it to a group and you have sharing. Add a hierarchy, whether based on dominance or respect, and that's your ladder, and if you go up above or down below the ends of the ladder you get religion; kick it away and fly, that's the liberty axis. But I add personal/private relationship with your corner of the universe as a seventh moral foundation, and call it "appreciation" or "development" depending on which end I'm looking from. In any case, I can go over my spider-legs and try to group them according to the moral foundations.

2. Take Daniel Pink's "Drive" components as being the inner incentives that people seem to share: "AMP", being Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose. (Lots of YouTube videos and web pages on this.) Again I can group my goals, thinking about how far I'm incentivized by his patterns.

3. However, then I want to take David Rock's external incentives: "SCARF", being Status, Clarity, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness. Again there are videos and web pages to discuss these.

 I'm not saying there's any magic to any of these lists, just that each of them provides a structure, a way of thinking about what pushes or pulls you. I think this is a place where a theory of values/incentives can be of value, even if it's just providing a set of placeholders for what you felt already.

Anyway, what do I do with the story spider thus created? I think it has been useful already; it helped me see how things fit together. So far, it's not actually about making choices: the "choice" to Exercise was very much overdetermined. However, having a detailed image in my head (or on an index card) for this story component does make it easier for me to imagine variations, even without writing everything out explicitly. I don't run, because trying that has in the past produced enough joint pain as to stop my exercise altogether... but I can look over that picture and think about changes in my actions, and imagine the resulting effects on goals. What I want to do next is a dual graph, where the spider-bodies are current goals and the legs are current actions which relate to them, so that the "health" goal would have an "exercise" leg. Then I can try putting these action-spiders together in different ways? Maybe so. Or maybe that would be too many spiders and altogether ooky...it is Charles Addams' birthday, after all. (Happy birthday, Charles.)