Created: July 08, 2020
Modified: July 08, 2020
Modified: July 08, 2020
high-level actions
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- The plans I make now include components that would have been impossible for me to conceive of as a kid. At the moment (July 2020), I'm planning (among other things) to:
- possibly hike the John Muir trail in six weeks,
- maybe go live in Asia in the next year or two,
- read some research papers and discuss them with friends,
- write an implementation of SMC**2
- These are conceptual chunks for me---ideas I can grasp in a single 'slot' in my mind.
- A lot of growth involves increasing the set of things you think of as high-level actions. This enables you to make bigger plans.
- If something doesn't appear to you as a high-level action, you might not be able to even conceive of it, because doing so would take too many 'slots'. For example, I don't think I really have high-level actions for 'start a new company', 'learn a new language', 'start a research collaboration'. So it doesn't easily occur to me to do those things.
- Your high-level actions are affordances. They are concepts with which you can actuate the world, which affects how you see the world. They are part of your reality tunnel.
- However, I can force them into being with a lot of system-2 effort, or at a suggestion from someone else. I can start to learn patterns for executing them through being around people who know how to do that.
- What high-level actions should I have developed, or be developing
- What's the difference between a high-level action and a skill? I might think of a skill as being a combination of one or more high-level actions with policies to execute them by building out trees of lower-level actions.