What Is Your Internal Motivation? / and the tether to reality

I recently have felt a lot less motivation to do things that I "should" enjoy doing, which even includes gaming and yes, article writing. Occasionally I get people telling me that I should not be doing anything for external motivation.

Now while I appreciate the sentiment only in the sense that yes, it turns out that people tend to be more motivated to do things for their 'own' reasons instead of others', I'm pretty sure the line between internal and external motivation is thin and likely nonexistent. All motivation happens in brain.

So let's get into many reasons why this is the case:

1. The tether to reality

Bank account 'money' not money. It picture of money.will someone poop on me for wanting this to be caveman-speak just because it's more fun Only extracting all at once maybe you get proof of money, but you won't, so you have picture in mind of this stability, never able to be fully confirmed.

Similarly, where is the value of digital items, sometimes negatively framed as "just pixels", get 'more value' than real life items (like Counter Strike knives vs. actual knives that look just like the ones ingame)? Sometimes there are digital items for dead games and there's also some line where 'expensive because rarity but people care about it' is very different from a rare item that's rare because no one cares about the game anymore or the game shuts down and it is valueless.

Money itself is a hyperstitional concept. Superstitions are faraway beliefs that are difficult or impossible to confirm their existence. Hyperstitions are beliefs that directly depend on other people also buying into that belief. And because you're only one person there's no way to 'objectively' find out what everyone else is thinking.

The reason cryptocurrencysuch as "Tether", actually the specific one doesn't matter it's just for the pun is sometimes thought of as monopoly-money-esque is a bit cursed in this way. Yes it's worth nothing if no one cares about it. But also because the "value" aspect is not distinct from how regular money works.

Of course, there are scammers who have fully faked sites that pretend to be your bank account, or black out your screen and show an edited screen by editing the number in your bank account page to trick you into 'refunding' them. This example makes the 'fake picture of numbers' more direct but it's not likely you'll experience this in your lifetime.

Well, with those examples where 'value' and 'money' actually have their meanings tied to what other people think (even though they don't seem like that on the surface), "external motivation" is also like that.

2. Other People

The original creation of this article is when I first noticed that multiplayer is equivalent to implementing a game that's actually a bunch of singleplayer sessions, where the 'multiplayer' characters are painted into their singleplayer sessions.

This honestly seems like such a contrast to how I thought of itSimilarly, you could say that a movie is just a 'clip compilation' or that a visual novel is just 'text and sprites', which while a ridiculous thing to say, can help you potentially get past overwhelm if you're making one. 12 years ago before ever doing development of everything, as multiplayer is sort of a 'bulky' thing to imagine modding into a game, especially if you have never tried to figure out servers or peer-to-peer connections and were frustrated not knowing.

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But when we're on the topic of "other people's experiences", this is much more interesting one meta-level up:

You have no idea whether other people are conscious. They certainly seem to be "similar to you, more or less" - they are also more competent than you at other things, point out your mistakesThere was one person I knew who was so unbelievably talented that I'm not sure they ever had this experience with other people. That being your full life experience, must be so strange and part of the 'people's very different experiences' thing I mention later in the article., occasionally you find music or an article that really resonates with you, that you didn't write.

• So despite no proof, you believe others are conscious, due to a sort of 'weak' tether to reality that you can't confirm.

You have no idea whether other people even 'see the same world' as you or not, given colorblindness and the ability to not notice big important things. Articles to read about this: What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?An essay that explores perceptual and cognitive gaps in individual human experience like aphantasia, or lack of an internal monologue.slatestarcodex.com and Different WorldsDifferent WorldsAn essay discussing how people can live in vastly different subjective realities based on their individual backgrounds and everyday environmentsslatestarcodex.com. These articles are something I still think about occasionally to this day. One of them is about missing smell for years and years but this can seemingly happen with so many things.The idea of people having strange fantasies about me - or telling me about them, making public fanfic characters etc. - is to me, funny and fascinating. This seems like a topic others might think is creepy and cringe for others to do to them, etc. I mean it can get to that don't get me wrong, but in general I would actually like to hear more fantasies people have about me, and while this seems abnormal to admit, it could very well be the case that actually more than 50% of people think this way but it's just social dark matter to talk about. (hover: potentially cursed tooltip)

I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.

Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.

Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.

But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.

All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.

Other aspects of these articles mention, the way you talk (in real life or even online), it projects some emotion to people that cause people to react a slightly different subtle way that requires many sentences to describe.

3. The Gap

This 'tether to reality' is the most interesting gap, both in how people perceive consciousness and life, but the cursed bit is that it applies to the things people would least 'pay attention' to. Literally, every person who ever gave advice, every word spoken out of them is based on imagining others, because what else are you supposed to do? And it mostly appears to work out okay, people make games with a generally narrow playing style in mind (narrow in the context of executing goals properly, etc.).

The word 'consensus' is a monoculture that hides that some people have deep disagreements. When 'consensus' disagrees with the past consensus, there were probably people who were treated as outsiders for having what would later become the 'future' consensus.

With online bandwagons and media bubbles it's actually really hard to find 'true' consensus. You've potentially already been in a situation where a community had some 'consensus' in which it was only possible because the people who managed to claim power banned everyone who disagrees (censorship basically never comes with good qualities) and later this happens automatically as people who perceive themselves as the minority just leave in disgust.

'Culture shock' when these different worlds collide, can cause some really negative situations. That includes like if you are a foreigner and there's some cultural consensus you're 'supposed to know' when something is a taboo. Currently this culture has no way to deal with people who are weaponizing creation of new taboos.There is an article about "hyperstitional slur cascades" by the same author as previous links that I won't be linking, because I'm not in agreement with how it doesn't have an answer to that problem.)) It's again cursed because these gaps in tethers of reality do cause very negative and strange outcomes for people, but only a tiny amount of the time so it's not talked about very often.

I also strongly believe the sentiment of reversing any advice you hearShould You Reverse Any Advice You Hear?An essay on how advice is usually targeted at people on one extreme, meaning the opposite advice often applies to you.slatestarcodex.com although maybe not to the full extent, due to the reason that "Every piece of social commentary is most likely to go to the people who need it least", another cursed aspect of experience. My example would be like 'respecting other people' (well, 'other people' replaced with some specific type of person) being blatantly ignored by people who abuse others, while it goes to people who are receptive to the advice and become more anxious because of it. Other 'nice sounding' statements like "stranger danger" or "stop approaching the opposite sex" was ignored by predators, and only taken by people who already were nervous and self-conscious.

4. Dead Internet Theory

The "Dead Internet Theory" is the idea that most people online are bots, including (and arguably, especially) ones pushing political viewpoints, to try to explain why it feels so dead, why there feels like a trend of being illogical and tribalistic nowadays as well.

How this relates to the 'tether of reaity' concept is that there's so many people online that people have to give a lot more tether-to-reality identity markers for immediate context: "I am grieving/50 years old/worked at X", etc. But now you can't tell if it's an LLM, and in fact YouTube comments are full of people with 'real' seeming messages until you see they are promoting a book or doing a chain of bot accounts that eventually promote some stock market faith healer or something.

Now I'm very sad to say that I have had enough real important relationships become bizarre, to make the world feel more like a torture simulation where you have to give up that idea that people are a very consistent and well-rounded being and that it's just unrelated bots doing all this. Thus I cannot think that every type of illogical comment you see online is the product of "Sino-Russian-Iranian intelligence services"that quote copypasted from a comment online who believes that.

Why did the internet 'feel better' 10-20 years ago? It's because your mental model of the "other person" was more rose-tinted, more friendly, more similar to you, even though you didn't talk to literally every person there. Now, it's made it even more obvious that when you're online you could be talking to an 4 year old or a 96 year old, or a 0-year-old LLM, or of course marketers, PR agencies, political state actorsAI #182: Pause for Reflection (highlighted passage)Zvi's roundup quoting Robert Minto on AI marketer bots baiting small bloggers into long fake comment threads before dropping scam links, as an example of antisocial bot uses (but also effectively a 'heavenban')thezvi.substack.com, etc. Ease of access to AI has made bad actors worse, but they already existed even before.

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5. Where do bad actors come from anyway?

How come it's the case that you probably couldn't convince an 'antisocial' person to be a 'normal' member of society? (antisocial as in like, homeless smokers on drugs, psychopaths, sociopaths, not just people-avoiding)

Well clearly these people aren't fully working with logic, but if you have too much empathy you might try to understand and convert it into a viewpoint that makes sense to you.

To do that, I think an 'easier' place to start is why political polarization gets so heated, which I believe to come from entangled balls of definitions and foundations, where the same terms have different emotional connotations to different people, so much so that they can watch one event and come with two different takeaways, this is called 'two movies one screen'This has gotten meta because a Baba levelpack with a plot had someone rate a levelpack 10/10 due to the idea of 'wow I never saw that concept before' in that piece of fiction, while to me I've experienced it for years in my life and it is not at all a sufficient explanation of the topic to me.

This is an easier place to start, because you could imagine two completely 'normal', kind, 'rational', people who have different lifetimes and experiences, and of course political beliefs due to it. Generally speaking just because the numbers are so large, if there's any 'large political group' that you don't understand why people would hold those beliefs, you can construct a version of the smartest person of that group in which they've had some firsthand experience that would justify and be consistent with what they saw. Untangling this is difficult because 'obviously true terms' for one group will be 'cringe words' for the other, and you need to convince your opponent your own ideology is not relying on new circular definitions, which will not be convincing to them. And of course the time and effort to try to talk this out with any online strangers, that's a lot, and sometimes you feel there's no agreement there and give up, sadly.

However, even with that being said...

There's a famous cat designer you likely know who has this to say:

I find it very easy to understand people with different motivations than me. Someone who is like me but... waves hands evil... makes sense to me. I get that. I know why I'm not that, but I also see why someone might be that. Someone who is just oblivious to the consequences of their actions doesn't make sense to me. I can't predict them. They terrify me

Yeah that doesn't make sense to me. I have no idea what it's like to be a horrible human being, which isn't just like a intelligent+'rationally' selfish+greedy CEO businessman, but the ones that seem completely stupid and damaging for all parties involved, constantly dragging people into their own drama or enjoy smearing others with sensitive-topics, while still being intelligent in a few narrow areas. That shouldn't be possible in my worldview but it happens! There is no version of me with this capability to do good but intentionally choosing to be awful in such huge ways instead. That is so utterly alien and blank to me. But because other people experience consciousness so differently, I have no idea if the way they are acting is what is 'sensible' to them. The times I remember acting cringe as a child (I have like extremely old 10+ year old comments in which I have no idea why I ever made them) I'm not even sure I was conscious back then. Some of the ways I've tried to fit this behavior into an understandable way is that the other person is actually more asleep, unconscious, or succumbing to animalistic instincts that everyone has.