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Prioritize Intrinsic Goals in Your Life
re: health
I often struggle to understand the world. Slowly, very slowly, I make progress.
This essay made me realize why (in part): I have always pursued intrinsic goals. That’s at odds with most of the world and it leads to confusion vs the behavior of others.
Gurwinder: Why Everything is Becoming a Game
2024-04-20
For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests.
...Today, people increasingly live inside their phones, bossed around by notifications, diligently collecting badges and filling progress bars, even though it doesn’t make them happy. On the contrary, substantial research comprising over a hundred studies finds that prioritizing extrinsic goals over intrinsic goals — in other words doing things to win prizes and achieve high scores rather than for the inherent love of doing them — leads to lower well-being.
...Kaczynski was describing a “social trap”, a term coined by a student of Skinner, John Platt, who’d theorized that an entire population behaving like pigeons in a Skinner box, each acting only for the next immediate reward, would eventually overexploit a resource, causing ruin for everyone. What Platt called “social traps”, Kaczynski called “self-propagating systems”, because he viewed them as negative-sum games that took on a life of their own, defeating every player to become the only winner...
...
First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones...
Second: choose hard games over easy ones...
Third: choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones...
Fourth: choose atelic games over telic ones...
Fifth: choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones......Skinner’s pigeons only kept pecking the button because they were trapped in a cage — they had nothing else to do. But you are still free. Even in a world where everything is a game, you don’t have to play by other people’s rules; you have a wide open world to create your own.
WIND: is there free will? Is wokeism a "social trap" game?
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