What's interesting is actually identifying what came out of this research, is that there are three-- when you tell kids that they're smart, or amazing, or all of this evaluative praise that we often use as parents, three things can happen. One, you can become lazy and think, well, I'm smart anyway, so I'm going to wing it.
So it's an interesting thing to think-- I mean, we're just meaning the best, and it doesn't always come across for children. So the effects of evaluative praise is children end up doing things for the praise-- the extrinsic motivation-- instead of children doing things for themselves-- the intrinsic motivation.
So obviously, this is a drawback that you have to make sure that we don't fall into. So effects of evaluative praise is that invites children to change for others and become approval junkies. But what we want is invite children to change for themselves, to have an inner direction.
So neurons firing leads to neurons rewiring. So it takes this evaluative circuit and says, what's the upside of doing that?
What metering mode do I use? I use the evaluative metering mode and here's why because I can look at a scene like this and say okay, I'm just going to set this at evaluative metering.
By and large they move together, but there are some things that can move them somewhat separately. Economists have mostly just looked at the evaluative account, because it's really easy to get ahold of. It's one question, and you can ask it today, and you can ask it next week and next month and you'll get a similar answer.
I use the evaluative metering mode and here's why because I can look at a scene like this and say okay, I'm just going to set this at evaluative metering. If I just left it on zero exposure compensation setting these birds would be a little washed out.
How satisfied are you with your life nowadays? And this relates to what we often call the evaluative account of well-being, thinking about your life as a whole. It asks what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
So neurons firing leads to neurons rewiring. We talked about the limbic area having an evaluative system that works.
receive an evaluation I probably will not talk at all the boss will tell me whether I get a gold star not so it's an evaluative process that is not the kind of thing one normally wants to go through very often you once a year would be plenty for most of us so now all of a
And so rather than thinking about these from kind of this like deficit mindset, that there is some disadvantage given the pathway you've taken, take a step back. I do not use the terms traditional or non-traditional kind of as evaluative criteria. Again, the places that you move through inform the types of opportunities, resources, the types of impact that you're, that Might be characteristic of your field, industry, geography.
And so That is not something we're seeking. Again, that is context and not an evaluative criteria. I know that the question marks about Stanford entrepreneurship founders, there's a lot of misconceptions about that, so don't worry
And by "happy," I mean, in psychology, we refer to it as subjective well-being. And it's basically how positive, as opposed to negative, we feel in the day to day, in the moment, as well as there's an evaluative cognitive component of how satisfied we feel about our lives overall.
So there's a large asymmetry here. Because even when the machine is making the system more fair, it's getting a lot of pushback, at least in this evaluative dimension.
But what we want is invite children to change for themselves, to have an inner direction. And finally, long-term, it becomes, evaluative phrase gives dependence on others and feel worthwhile when others approve, while what we want, obviously, for our children is self-confidence and self-reliance and feel worthwhile without approval of others.
If you're imagine a more efficient digital implementation, you can add another big chunk of orders of magnitude. And so what you find fairly robustly, if you just work the numbers, is that if you have this evaluative view, some broadly-aggregated consequentialist view, then even a very, very small reduction in the net level of existential risk will be worth more, in expected utility terms,
than any interventions you could do that would only have local effect here. Even something as wonderful as, like, curing cancer or eliminating world hunger would really be, from this evaluative perspective, insignificant compared to reducing the level of existential risk by, say, 1/100th of one percentage point.