Having previously been supremely convinced of this way of thinking by reading The Last Psychiatrist, and having lived by it for the last few years, I do now suspect it’s possible to take it too far.
I think the desire for status - the goal of being able to say and think “I am this type of person”, and be recognized for it - is a part of the motivation system. As you say, some (most?) take it too far. But if one truly excises this way of thinking from themselves, they’ve kind of… excised part of their motivational system!
I think you’ve anticipated this point, because you say
>”But what if I really want what’s in the mines? Sometimes you have to do unpleasant work to get what you want.” Absolutely, but when you’re honest about it, you’ll correctly recognize those situations as life-consuming work, and that’ll affect how you relate to the task. You’ll say, “I want to find three pieces of gold,” instead of saying, “I want to work in the mines.” And so you won’t expect to feel alive or rejuvenated or joyful from the work itself.
But I’m not so sure that replacement maintains the motivation that the identity-based motivation gives. For example, when I was training for and fighting in amateur boxing, I trained and ran all the time. During runs, especially sprinting, where I was tired and wanted to quit, I would say out loud (or even yell) things like “this is easy for me because I’m a fighter!” If I had instead been thinking “this sucks but I have to do it anyway because the payoff is worth it”, that would have felt a good deal less motivating.
Or, I don’t know, maybe in marital and relationship fidelity. I am not a person who cheats; it would be a stain on my soul if I cheated. “I must never be a person who cheats.” This makes it easy to not cheat. This identity-based rule works well for me, and I don’t think replacing it with non-identity thinking would be safe for me personally.
But again I think I do agree! And most normal people would probably be better off from the advice to do more things they want to do, and less things they want to have done. But to readers who have already gone down this road… don’t feel like you need to take it all the way! Preserving some identity-based motivation is good and important.
Great comment, and I will have to think more about this. Your examples do seem to support the utility of self-identity-based motivation.
I think maybe my statement "you can’t lie to yourself if you know it’s a lie" is forcing a frame where self-talk is either a genuine attempt at truth, or a lie. But with "this is easy for me because I’m a fighter" and similar statements, it seems they can be received by the mind in a different way - more like as self-fulfilling prophecy.
I guess it's an open question for me then, where to use that kind of self-talk. On one end is the danger of becoming miserable in pursuit of an identity that was actually kind of arbitrary, and on the other end you miss out on maybe the most powerful kind of motivation.
Reminds me of mimetic desire:
Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.
However, I only subscribe to this theory insofar as it is supported by Joseph Henrich's work, e.g., The Secret of Our Success, in which Henrich provides evidence that imitation (including imitation of desires) is the basis of human-level intelligence. (If you’re curious how that works, I highly recommend Scott Alexander’s book review.)
I don't go as far as Henrich, and he apparently faked some of his evidence, but I believe he is directionally correct on imitation mattering:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/11/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cultural-evolution/
he apparently faked some of his evidence
Would be happy to hear more about this. Got any links? A quick Google search doesn’t turn up anything.
This was the faked evidence here:
I’m not sure where Scott is going with this series, but I seem to have a different reaction to the excerpts from Henrich than most (but not all) of the commenters before me: rather than coming across as persuasive, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.
For simplicity let’s concentrate on the seal hunting description. I don’t know enough about Inuit techniques to critique the details, but instead of aiming for a fair description, it’s clear that Henrich’s goal is to make the process sound as difficult to achieve as possible. But this is just slight of hand: the goal of the stranded explorer isn’t to reproduce the exact technique of the Inuit, but to kill seals and eat them. The explorer isn’t going to use caribou antler probes or polar bear harpoon tips — they are going to use some modern wood or metal that they stripped from their ice bound ship.
Then we hit “Now you have a seal, but you have to cook it.” What? The Inuit didn’t cook their seal meat using a soapstone lamp fueled with whale oil, they ate it raw! At this point, Henrich is not just being misleading, he’s making it up as he goes along. At this point I start to wonder if part about the antler probe and bone harpoon head are equally fictional. I might be wrong, but beyond this my instinct is to doubt everything that Henrich argues for, even if (especially if) it’s not an area where I have familiarity
Going back to the previous post on “Epistemic Learned Helplessness”, I’m surprised that many people seem to have the instinct to continue to trust the parts of a story that they cannot confirm even after they discover that some parts are false. I’m at the opposite extreme. As soon as I can confirm a flaw, I have trouble trusting anything else the author has to say. I don’t care about the baby, this bathwater has to go! And if the “flaw” is that the author is being intentionally misleading, I’m unlikely to ever again trust them (or anyone else who recommends them). .
Probably I accidentally misrepresented a lot in the parts that were my own summary. But this is from a direct quote, and so not my fault.
roystgnr adds:
Wikipedia seems to suggest that they ate freshly killed meat raw, but cooked some of the meat brought back to camp using a Kudlik, a soapstone lamp fueled with seal oil or whale blubber. Is that not correct? That would still flatly contradict “but you have to cook it”, but it’s close enough that the mistake doesn’t reach “making it up as he goes along” levels of falsehood. You’re correct that even the true bits seem to be used for argument in a misleading fashion, though.
This seems within the level of simplifying-to-make-a-point that I have sometimes been guilty of myself, so I’ll let it pass.
While we're at it, one example I learned afterwards was that the 'caribou randomization' story is probably bogus (excerpts):
We will show that hunters do not randomize their behavior, that caribou populations do not fluctuate according to human predation, and that scapulimancy apparently is not selected because it is ecologically advantageous. We shall also show that there is no cross-cultural evidence of divinatory random devices producing randomized subsistence behavior, but rather that people manipulate divination with the explicit or implicit intervention of personal choice.
What is particularly interesting to me is that the apparent beautiful match of this traditional hunting practice with contemporary game theory may be 'too good to be true' because it was actually the opposite: I suspect that the story was made up to launder (secret) game-theoretic work from WWII into academic writing; the original author's career & funder are exactly where that sort of submarine-warfare operations-research idea would come from... (There were many cases post-WWII of civilians carefully laundering war or classified work into publishable form, which means that any history-of-ideas has to be cautious about taking at face value anything published 1940–1960 which looks even a little bit like cryptography, chemistry, physics, statistics, computer science, game theory, or operations research.)
1
1Ah, I see now. Thank you! I remember reading this discussion before and agree with your viewpoint that he is still directionally correct.
While he is probably directionally correct, I think it should be way weaker than people think, and I now believe that something like the human body being optimized for tool use/the scaling hypothesis applied to evolution is my broad explanation of how humans have rocketed away from animals, and I now think cultural learning is way, way less powerful in humans than people thought, and this is partially updating from LLMs, which have succeeded but so far have nowhere near the capabilities that humans have (yet), and there's an argument to be made that cultural learning was the majority of AI capabilities before o1/o3.
How do LLMs and the scaling laws make you update in this way? They make me update in the opposite direction. For example, I also believe that the human body is optimized for tool use and scaling, precisely because of the gene-culture coevolution that Henrich describes. Without culture, this optimization would not have occurred. Our bodies are cultural artifacts.
Cultural learning is an integral part of the scaling laws; the scaling laws show that indefinitely scaling the number of parameters in a model doesn't quite work; the training data also has to scale, with the implication that that data is some kind of cultural artifact, where the quality of that artifact determines the capabilities of the resulting model. LLMs work because of the accumulated culture that goes into them. This is no less true for “thinking” models like o1 and o3, because the way they think is very heavily influenced by the training data. The fact that thinking models do so well is because thinking becomes possible at all, not because thinking is something inherently beyond the training data. These models can think because of the culture they absorbed, which includes a lot of examples of thinking. Moreover, the degree to which Reinforcement Learning determines the capabilities of thinking models is small compared to Supervised Learning, because, firstly, less compute is spent on RL than on SL, and, secondly, RL is much less sample-efficient than SL.
How do LLMs and the scaling laws make you update in this way? They make me update in the opposite direction. For example, I also believe that the human body is optimized for tool use and scaling, precisely because of the gene-culture coevolution that Henrich describes. Without culture, this optimization would not have occurred. Our bodies are cultural artifacts.
I think the crux is that the genetic changes come first, then the cultural changes come after, and the reason is the modern human body plan happened around 200,000 BC, and arguably could be drawn even earlier, whereas the important optimizations that culture introduced came over 100,000 years at the latest.
That said, fair enough on calling me out on the scaling laws point, I was indeed not able to justify my update.
As far as why I'm generally skeptical of cultural learning mattering nearly as much as Heinrich, it's because I believe a lot of the evidence for this fundamentally doesn't exist for human cultures, and a lot of work in the 1940s-1960s around lots of subjects that were relevant to cultural learning were classified and laundered to produce simulated results:
What do you make of feral children like Genie? While there are not many counterfactuals to cultural learning—probably mostly because depriving children of cultural learning is considered highly immoral—feral children do provide strong evidence that humans that are deprived of cultural learning do not come close to being functional adults. Additionally, it seems obvious that people who do not receive certain training, e.g., those who do not learn math or who do not learn carpentry, generally have low capability in that domain.
the genetic changes come first, then the cultural changes come after
You mean to say that the human body was virtually “finished evolving” 200,000 years ago, thereby laying the groundwork for cultural optimization which took over form that point? Henrich’s thesis of gene-culture coevolution contrasts with this view and I find it to be much more likely to be true. For example, the former thesis posits that humans lost a massive amount of muscle strength (relative to, say, chimpanzees) over many generations and only once that process had been virtually “completed”, started to compensate by throwing rocks or making spears when hunting other animals, requiring much less muscle strength than direct engagement. This begs the question, how did our ancestors survive in the time when muscle strength had already significantly decreased, but tool usage did not exist yet? Henrich’s thesis answers this by saying that such a time did not exist; throwing rocks came first, which provided the evolutionary incentive for our ancestors to expend less energy on growing muscles (since throwing rocks suffices for survival and requires less muscle strength). The subsequent invention of spears provided further incentive for muscles to grow even weaker.
There are many more examples to make that are like the one above. Perhaps the most important one is that as the amount of culture grows (also including things like rudimentary language and music), a larger brain has an advantage because it can learn more and more quickly (as also evidenced by the LLM scaling laws). Without culture, this evolutionary incentive for larger brains is much weaker. The incentive for larger brains leads to a number of other peculiarities specific to humans, such as premature birth, painful birth and fontanelles.
You mean to say that the human body was virtually “finished evolving” 200,000 years ago, thereby laying the groundwork for cultural optimization which took over form that point? Henrich’s thesis of gene-culture coevolution contrasts with this view and I find it to be much more likely to be true. For example, the former thesis posits that humans lost a massive amount of muscle strength (relative to, say, chimpanzees) over many generations and only once that process had been virtually “completed”, started to compensate by throwing rocks or making spears when hunting other animals, requiring much less muscle strength than direct engagement. This begs the question, how did our ancestors survive in the time when muscle strength had already significantly decreased, but tool usage did not exist yet? Henrich’s thesis answers this by saying that such a time did not exist; throwing rocks came first, which provided the evolutionary incentive for our ancestors to expend less energy on growing muscles (since throwing rocks suffices for survival and requires less muscle strength). The subsequent invention of spears provided further incentive for muscles to grow even weaker.
There are many more examples to make that are like the one above. Perhaps the most important one is that as the amount of culture grows (also including things like rudimentary language and music), a larger brain has an advantage because it can learn more and more quickly (as also evidenced by the LLM scaling laws). Without culture, this evolutionary incentive for larger brains is much weaker.
In a sense, evolution never stops, but yes the capacity to make tools was way later than the physical optimizations that used the tools.
More generally, an even earlier force for bigger brains probably comes from both cooking food and social modeling in groups, but yes language and culture do help at the margin.
What do you make of feral children like Genie? While there are not many counterfactuals to cultural learning—probably mostly because depriving children of cultural learning is considered highly immoral—feral children do provide strong evidence that humans that are deprived of cultural learning do not come close to being functional adults. Additionally, it seems obvious that people who do not receive certain training, e.g., those who do not learn math or who do not learn carpentry, generally have low capability in that domain.
I actually think this is reasonably strong evidence for some form of cultural learning, thanks.
If you'll forgive diving into the linguistics here, English is atypical in that we have a distinctive present perfect.
In French, the present perfect - type construction (passé composé) has subsumed the past simple, which is now reserved for literate or archaic uses, so you use that for any past experience. But you can use something close to our future perfect with a similar sense: (I will have finished my degree by March/ "J'aurai terminé mon diplôme d'ici mars"). In Chinese (and other Sino languages), there's a present-perfect type construction, albeit used less consistently (e.g. have been to... quguo 去过）, but it's very awkward to use future perfect-style constructions: “I just want to have read this”. I'm sure many obscure languages will have even less of a distinction.
So, if the theory in your title is correct, people from languages without a present perfect will have unruined lives, or at least lives ruined by different grammatical structures (we're looking at you, subjonctif...)! This sounds like a testable theory to me!
There's a bunch of theories around language influencing thought patterns, e.g. the idea that people who speak future-less languages save more etc. https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf , so you could test something similar for perfect tenses. I hear that some Italian and Spanish dialects differ in whether the present-perfect and past simple are distinct. So you might have a great natural experiment there.
My personal hobby horse here is counterfactual conditionals, usually used to express regret (mainly: "If I had done x..." or "I should have done x ...", "I wish I'd done x ..."). I used to have harmful, regretful thought patterns like this until I learned Chinese very immersively. I realised that, in Chinese-thinking mode, I had stopped using these conditionals in my train of thought, and noticed them returning when I reintegrated into an English-speaking context. It wasn't a clean experiment by any means - it could have been partly due to thinking in a non-native language, which made (over-) thinking slower, and of course, I was living in China, with obviously massive lifestyle effects. But still, I did identify these conditional thought patterns as almost definitely negative, so I'm convinced there's at least some effect.
I haven't noticed "wanting to have done something" being less common in Chinese- or French-mode because of a more limited present perfect tense, but it would be interesting if bilinguals on LW have noticed something there.
Yes I’m talking about grammar. The present perfect tense describes actions that happened in the past but are relevant in the present. You say, “I have seen that movie,” meaning you saw it in the past, but what’s important is that presently you are a person who saw it.
How is a verb tense ruining my life?
There’s a world of difference between wanting to do something and wanting to have done something.
I’m not the first to find this distinction interesting:
What’s dangerous is when we conflate the two tenses. We say, “I want to do X,” when really we want to have done X. I’ve often caught myself doing this, and I see others doing it too. It’s a form of deception (usually self-deception), and it sets us up for failure and frustration in our efforts.
Let’s talk about the nature of this mistake, why we make it, and how it comes back to bite us.
so fun
What does it mean to want in the present perfect tense?
Let’s look closely at the difference between wanting to read Paradise Lost and wanting to have read Paradise Lost.
Wanting in the present tense is simple: when you want to do something, your desire is for the act itself.
Wanting in the present perfect tense is tricky: when you want to have done something, your desire is for a future state where you already did the thing and acquired the memories/experience of it.
Notice the language there—you acquired something, like you’re doing work and getting a paycheck at the end. In fact even the original wording implies this: in English, we use the word “have” both to mean possession and to construct the present perfect tense (“I have a car” / “I have been to Florida”). That’s not a coincidence! You can see how statements in the present perfect tense could also be interpreted as statements about possession: saying I have been to Florida is basically the same as saying I have (i.e. possess) the experience/memory of being in Florida. This double usage of the verb “to have” goes all the way back to Latin.
So the present perfect tense is fundamentally about owning/possessing something. It’s not about doing.
Sometimes people really just want to have read Paradise Lost, and they definitely don’t want to read it. They find it dry and dense and long from beginning to end, but they would enjoy having it “under their belt” at the end.
The lie
But you’ll notice nobody says “I want to have read Paradise Lost” or “I want to have done X.” It’s so unconventional, it sounds awkward even though it’s 100% grammatically valid. We connect other verbs to present-perfect statements all the time (“I seem to have forgotten”; “I expect to have finished it by then”), but with wanting, we force the subsequent statement into the present tense. Why is that?
I notice that saying “I want to have done X” sounds kind of insincere. If you tell me you’re gonna read Paradise Lost just because you “want to have it under [your] belt,” socially that’s kind of weird. It leaves your real motive ambiguous—what exactly are you going to get out of it? Do you need to read it for a class or something? Do you just want to show off on Goodreads?
If you’re reading it without wanting to read it, that implies your heart’s not in it. It implies you’re not really paying attention during the act, you’re just checking a box. It “doesn’t count.” By contrast, when a person acts directly on their desires, it counts: it tells you something about their identity.
And now we’ve answered an important question: Why are you announcing your desires in the first place? Often it’s for the sake of cultivating an identity.
This move of switching the tenses is very similar to liking the idea of something without liking the thing itself.
It’s all about the thing “looking good on paper,” where the paper is an imaginary ledger of all the good and worthy traits you possess.
Some examples
It’s especially funny that the Mark Twain quote is about Paradise Lost, because for a long time I thought I wanted to read the entire The Divine Comedy, which happens to also be an epic poem that was written hundreds of years ago that has themes of Christian theology and that’s now canonized as a great work of Western literature. Mark Twain saw right through me.
The Divine Comedy was on my reading list for years, but I never started reading it; I never felt a desire to start. My real desire was to be familiar with all the compelling imagery in that book, and to feel more legitimate as a lover of the Italian Renaissance, and maybe to hold it as a point of pride that I’m the interesting kind of person who enjoys a 700-year-old giant poem. One day I saw it there on my reading list and realized, “I just want to have read this,” and I deleted it.
I recall having a lot of these false desires during and immediately after college, and I feel like I see college-age people doing it more than others. During college years you’re figuring out your own adult identity while being exposed to all these interesting paths of human endeavor, many of which are considered prestigious and respectable by people you consider prestigious and respectable (namely professors). “How cool would it be if I was a Bach guy?” “How neat would it be if I could speak Mandarin?”
The typical college student’s experience is perhaps the perfect mix of being old enough to charter a course for your life, young enough to not know what you really want in life, wise enough to want to better yourself, and impressionable enough to uncritically adopt someone else’s definition of “better.” You start ardently pursuing the things you “want,” but you don’t realize that those wants are captive to the hidden project of adding shiny badges to your identity.
This also applies to completing things that were fun at first but eventually stopped being worthwhile, where “completion” is a kind of arbitrary label that some people care about for social reasons. For example, you’ve read 10 out of 12 chapters of a nonfiction book, and the other two chapters don’t seem relevant to you. Do you grind through them just so you can say you’ve read the book “cover to cover?” And many modern video games are notoriously annoying to complete to 100%, where the last few goals involve running around a virtual world for hours picking up meaningless collectibles. But are you a “real fan” if you haven’t 100%ed it?
You also see a lot of false desires in influencer/socialite culture. She needs to be at that beach club tonight. Does she want to go? “Of course!” No, she doesn’t. She’s tired and wine-drunk from a day on the boat and she hasn’t eaten enough solid calories today and she’d really feel so much better if she went home. But she wants to have gone to the beach club because that would make it the “perfect day in the Hamptons” and her Instagram stories will be stellar.
I’m not blameless of this either! I’m no influencer but I certainly deal with my own version of “It’ll sound cool to say I’ve done this, so can I just rally and convince myself I want to do it??”
Why is it bad?
We’ve established that this little verb tense switcheroo is a lie, which does suggest it’s bad, but let’s look at the actual harm done.
You have some free time and you think you’re spending it on what you really want, but for some reason it all feels so laborious. Or, for some reason you just aren’t doing it at all.
But you don’t know the reason. So from your view, this is “the thing I want to do.” So you think, “Huh, I really should get around to it.”
Should. Now you’re trying to coerce yourself into doing what you “want.” Aren’t you working enough already? Like for a paycheck? Imagine the mental toll it takes when your “free time” experience is psychologically identical to your day job or schoolwork.
Under these conditions, you never unwind; you never get into a flow state; you never unleash your full creative ability. You’re slaving away in the mines when you could be collecting seashells on the beach.
“But what if I really want what’s in the mines? Sometimes you have to do unpleasant work to get what you want.” Absolutely, but when you’re honest about it, you’ll correctly recognize those situations as life-consuming work, and that’ll affect how you relate to the task. You’ll say, “I want to find three pieces of gold,” instead of saying, “I want to work in the mines.” And so you won’t expect to feel alive or rejuvenated or joyful from the work itself. You’ll recognize it as something you might have to mentally prepare for; something you need to take breaks from, etc. This is related to being a benevolent Manager: assigning your Employee (your future self) only work that is worthwhile. They might be the best Employee, willing to grind for hours and hours on whatever work you put in front of them, but a good Manager won’t take this for granted.
Handling your present perfect tense desires
What do you do once you recognize that your desire to do something is actually a desire to have done it?
Now we’ve landed on a dynamic that I’ve written about before in the much more general case: Symbols and substance.
You look at a person who taught himself Mandarin, just for fun. For good measure, let’s say he focused like crazy and made significant progress in just one year. You’re impressed. What he did is a testament to his curiosity, intelligence, agency, and other good traits. You want to think of yourself as having those traits. You think about the end-state of being able to speak Mandarin thanks to your own initiative, and you feel good about yourself. So you confuse the symbol for the substance and think, “I want to teach myself Mandarin!” That is Surrogation.
Two months later you realize you’re miserable forcing yourself to learn Mandarin, or you’re just not doing it at all. You only wanted to have learned Mandarin, you didn’t want to learn it. What do you do next? Your different choices parallel the different Responses to surrogation:
Return to the substance
If you really examine your admiration for the Mandarin-learning guy, you’d probably see that it’s not the specific task you admire, but something that it represents. Maybe you feel he has a quality that you’re missing; maybe you want to challenge yourself more. As you get away from the specifics, you find something more general that you truly want.
And then you can find specifics that actually work for you.
Use the symbols as symbols
Sometimes you just wield the symbols on purpose. You do a thing for indirect reasons—like to own the state of having done it. People will see that you did it and make the expected judgments about your identity. But this is deceptive, because you weren’t genuine.
And also, you can’t lie to yourself if you know it’s a lie. So you’re not going to get the self-image boost you were hoping for. You’ll only get the social status. That sets up a tricky situation where other people’s view of you is systematically more positive than your own view of yourself. And that’s a perfect recipe for insecurity. Authenticity is better in the long run.
Abandon both
Or, you can just drop the whole intention, like I did with The Divine Comedy. Life is short, and you’re allowed to be strict about what you spend time on. Admit you’re not the kind of person who enjoys Paradise Lost, and you can live with that.
If you liked this post, consider subscribing to my personal blog at https://patrickdfarley.com.