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A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation - LessWrong

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[PDF of this article updated Aug. 23, 2011] [skip to preface] Whenever I write a new article for Less Wrong, I'm pulled in two opposite directions. One force pulls me toward writing short, exciting posts with lots of brain candy and just one main point. Eliezer has done that kind of thing very well many times: see Making Beliefs Pay Rent, Hindsight Devalues Science, Probability is in the Mind,Taboo Your Words, Mind Projection Fallacy,Guessing the Teacher's Password, Hold Off on Proposing Solutions, Applause Lights, Dissolving the Question, and many more. Another force pulls me toward writing long, factually dense posts that fill in as many of the pieces of a particular argument in one fell swoop as possible. This is largely because I want to write about the cutting edge of human knowledge but I keep realizing that the inferential gap is larger than I had anticipated, and I want to fill in that inferential gap quickly so I can get to the cutting edge. For example, I had to draw on dozens of Eliezer's posts just to say I was heading towardmy metaethics sequence. I've also published 21 new posts (many of them quite long and heavily researched) written specifically because I need to refer to them in my metaethics sequence.1I tried to make these posts interesting and useful on their own, but my primary motivation for writing them was that I need them for my metaethics sequence. And now I've written onlyfour posts2in my metaethics sequence and already the inferential gap to my next post in that sequence is huge again. :( So I'd like to try an experiment. I won't do it often, but I want to try it at least once. Instead of writing 20 more short posts between now and the next post in my metaethics sequence, I'll attempt to fill in a big chunk of the inferential gap to my next metaethics post in one fell swoop by writing a long tutorial post (a laEliezer's tutorials on Bayes' Theorem and technical explanation).3 So if you're not up for a 20-page tutorial on human mo

x A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation — LessWrong Neuroscience Motivations Cognitive Science World Modeling Rationality Frontpage 210 A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation by lukeprog 19th Aug 2011 45 min read 93 210 [ PDF of this article updated Aug. 23, 2011] [ skip to preface ] Whenever I write a new article for Less Wrong, I'm pulled in two opposite directions. One force pulls me toward writing short, exciting posts with lots of brain candy and just one main point . Eliezer has done that kind of thing very well many times: see Making Beliefs Pay Rent , H

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