This is my post for day 22 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

The basic promise of science is this; by using the scientific method, you can figure out how the world works, and thereby take better actions to get the outcomes you want. This is the primary justification for funding scientific endeavors with taxpayer dollars. There is of course also the justification that scientific inquiry has value in its own right. But this isn’t valued by everyone, and is overall a much harder sell.

In some fields, like astronomy, it’s clear that the main activity is observation and not manipulation. No one is expecting astronomers to figure out how to make the sun be less bright to reduce global warming. But I think a lot of people are still expecting that studying the deep nature of neutron stars gives us a better chance of discovering some kind of double-hyper-fusion, or something.

And people often talk about the danger of attempting to apply the knowledge gained from investigating nature. Whether it’s nuclear bombs or Jurassic park, the harms of science-fueled technological development have been vividly impressed into the public’s mind.

In contrast, I almost never hear anyone talk about the null outcome that some domains of science are substantially inactionable.

Investigating the mind is one such category with dubious applicability. Putting aside the hard problem of consciousness, I would claim that we still have basically no idea how “thinking” works. We have a lot of data about neurons and synapses, and also a lot of fMRI data, the value of which is very unclear. We have no shortage of ideas about how thinking could work. And at this point, we’ve literally built a brand new intelligence (using methods that specifically obfuscate the entire structure). But we still don’t know the basic, architectural principles behind the human mind.

Personally, I have some kind of moderately severe problem with the way my mind works, which can be expressed via attention, motivation or executive function. I spent a lot of my 20s trying to understand what was going on at the level of psychological investigation. Did I have false subconscious beliefs? Did I have underlying values that I wasn’t aware of? Did anything in my childhood cause this? And I figured out a lot of stuff! I outlined several models of my psychological content which resonated and were consistent with other facts about my life. But change was lagging.

Sometimes, when you do enough introspection to excavate an underlying belief, the realization of it causes the relevant problem to almost autonomously resolve itself. Perhaps you fantasized about getting a puppy but were conflicted about it making your house too messy. Through introspection you realize that you mostly wanted a puppy to cure your loneliness, and that you wanted a clean house to feel a sense of control. And now that you’ve realized this, it feels clear that a better solution to both of these is to put more focus on finding a romantic partner who would enthusiastically help you gain better skills to control your life. But my big problem was not resolving itself despite my “discovery” of some underlying content that seemed very related.

Another way to fix some motivation or executive function problems is to set up strong habits. Habits are an extremely real, extremely reliable neural/psychological mechanism that humanity has written about since Aristotle.

There are several self-help books that describe the phenomenon of habits in great detail. The habit will have a contextual cue or trigger. This trigger will cause you to take the habitual action. The action will then result in you experiencing a reward. This reward reinforces the trigger-action pair, making the habit more likely in the future.

These books are written in a frame of problem-solving; they have little diagrams or flow charts that help you figure out how to install or uninstall a given good or bad habit. But as I read through these books, brainstorming for hours and trying countless little modifications to my life, I found that nothing really stuck. The books are supported by a mountain of habit science, but I do not believe we have an equivalently supportive habit engineering.

Certainly some attempts to deliberately install habits work. Many of the habits you already have are from you starting to take actions that you thought would have positive effects, and being reinforced by that. But those were also likely easy enough that you didn’t need a whole habits framework to do it. Perhaps there is something like an efficient market for habits, where the habits that are worth the effort of installing are ones that you’ve already installed.

I think that failing to acknowledge this science vs. engineering or observational vs. interventional distinction is a generalized sin for self-help books, particularly the ones that claim to be based on science. It’s not an optimistic piece of advice, but keeping it in mind and tracking them separately can save you a huge amount of time.