But I want to turn people into dinosaurs
My protein pudding recipe is very good. Today I put extra cacao and it turned out delicious. Also, I completely forgot to put in the protein. I realized this 3 hours after eating a big bowl.
Clearly, I am not making protein pudding. I am making dessert and justifying it as protein. It took me a week to understand my own primary motivation.
Like the villain in the meme below, I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs:
This meme explains so much. Before internalizing it, I went through life puzzled:
People stated their goals, did something, and failed in obvious and predictable ways.
I used to file it under "most people are incompetent", and, for some consequentialist definition, they are. But that is a shallow read!
It is much better to read people backwards: what do they actually accomplish? That is their primary motivation. Most people are pretty competent at their primary motivation and terrible at everything else. And they often seem and feel incompetent themselves when they haven't acknowledged their primary motivation.
Grant Slatton pointed out that this is The purpose of a system is what it does but applied to people. Yes, with the additional nuance: we often don't recognize what our purpose is but we do regardless.
And I see this in me all the time. My actual goals are much less noble than what I would like them to be. Sadly, I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs.