A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “motivation”. Follow an idea across the archive.
This review explores how schools are primarily designed to maximize motivation rather than learning, explaining why age-graded classrooms and seemingly inefficient group learning have persisted despite numerous attempts at reform.
Scott Alexander explores the motivational system as described in 'The Hungry Brain', connecting it to dopamine, willpower, and predictive processing theory.
Scott Alexander explores the concepts of 'pulling goals' (driven by specific desires) and 'pushing goals' (driven by existing structures), expressing his preference for the former and strategies to deal with the latter.
Scott presents a framework of 'liking,' 'wanting,' and 'approving' to explain behavior, then shows how people use low-effort approving-influenced actions (like making public commitments) to influence harder behaviors through strategic self-manipulation.
Scott explains how thoughts and intentions are reinforced separately from actions, using B.F. Skinner's concept of "mental behavior" to show why people often intend to do things but never actually do them.
Scott explains why 'wanting' and 'liking' diverge by examining reinforcement learning mechanisms like context-dependence, intermittent reinforcement, and hyperbolic discounting, concluding that this undermines the concept of stable preferences.
Scott analyzes why people are more curious about pseudoscience than real science, arguing that our sense of mystery is an evolutionary algorithm that responds to solvability, worldview-altering potential, social status, and human-level problems rather than actual importance.