the action-oriented principle


okay, for this idea you can think of every motivation in a person as a vector influencing each of their decisions, and each decision as usually being composed of several vectors; sometimes these vectors can be subconscious, but they can usually be discovered if you look for them in yourself. it's taken as axiomatic that every intentional action is motivated by something, and that a person's motivations are recurrant, maleable, and many.

what 'motivation' means here is surprisingly broad: what are normally thought of as emotions, beliefs, expectancies, attitudes, desires, habits, goals, values, or disvalues, are all "motivations" in this sense; the phrase that most fits in with what i mean is 'values and disvalues', but in a broad use of each -- i'll use motivation for simplification.

the idea is that actions are required to maintain motivations, and that the more often a motivation is acted on, the stronger it is. this also means that if you act on a valuation, you increase that valuation, and if you act on a disvaluation, you likewise increase that disvaluation. this will require examples to fully explain. i'll give many because this principle requires many to understand the full ramifications of. some of what i'm saying below may seem trivial in isolation, so read all of the examples before you decide that this idea itself is trivial; what's nontrivial is this principle's pervasiveness, not that its individual instances occur. what's also nontrivial is that once you realize how important actions are to maintaining and adjusting motivations, you can alter the motivations of yourself (and indirectly of others) by observing what your motivations for an action are and deciding on whether you want to increase those motivations by performing the action, or decrease them by not performing it.

1. it's often observed that when you give a gift to someone, or do a favor for someone, you like them more than you did previously. this is because you acted on a valuation (took an action motivated primarily by the motivation of valuing them) and that motivation thereby increased. important to note is that they have done nothing new to make you value them more, except to accept the gift; it's not a cognitive shift of 'this person is more valuable than i thought' but an emotional shift of 'i like this person more than i did before'. but the motivation is very important here: if you buy someone a gift because you feel obligated to do so, or because you are afraid they will not like you if you don't, it would instead increase that feeling of discomfortable obligation or the feeling of fear that they won't like you; so notice that actions increase motivations independently of what that action actually is, they just depend on what motivated that action. but as a rule, when you act with kindness toward someone, and it's actually primarily because of that motivation and not of because of some ulterior motive, you increase how much you like them.

2. likewise, when you act to harm someone, you tend to hate them even more than you did previously, even though they did nothing new except to get hurt by you. it's been observed that when prison guards, nazi's, etc. beat or harm someone, they gain even greater contempt for them, and see them as even more worth harming. this doesn't apply just to those extreme cases, but also to smaller things such as when you say something with the intention of hurting someone: so this would mean that people who are hate-filled are so because they often act to hurt others (even if only in minor ways).

3. likewise, when you act out of fear of something, such as to avoid it, you become even more afraid of it then you were previously, even though that thing has done nothing new to scare or harm you except allowing you to avoid it. if that suspicous drunken lout is walking your way opposite, and you cross the street to avoid a confrontation with him, you increase your fear of drunken louts. if you hide your valuables to prevent someone you're suspicious of from stealing, you become even more suspicious of that person or that type of person. if you wash your hands ten tims a day due to fear of germs, each of those actions increases your fear of germs; even buying anti-bacterial soap, if the motivation is fear of germs, increases fear of germs. all fear thus relies on action to sustain its.

4. proceeding past emotions and entering beliefs: when you act on an idea that you believe in, you have greater confidence (note: confidence, not certainty) in that idea. even something as simple as defending a particular side in an argument makes you more confident in the idea you argued for. i've found that when i argue for a particular idea, such as copyright being important to an artist's survival, i gain greater confidence in that idea, and become more emotionally supportive of it. therefore if you would like to change what ideas you believe most strongly in, change what you argue for, and avoid arguing for things which you are not sure about. as another example: if someone believes in god, acting on that belief (praying, or going to church) increases the strength (although not the certainty) of that belief; (so i would suggest that if someone wants to get rid of a belief in god, that they do profane things, such as using the bible as their mousepad or a doorstop).

5. likewise, if you argue against an idea, you disdain that idea more. by making a game with, in part, the motivation of anti-environmentalism, i dislike environmentalism more than i did (this doesn't mean that i'm any more or less sure of the idea's falseness or maliciousness, just that i dislike people who hold that ideology more than i did previously). similarly, if you *don't* argue against an idea you don't believe in, you allow it more tolerance than it perhaps should get from you; for example, my mother's boyfriend is a socialist, but when he talks about socialist things i don't bother to argue against them (both because he's a friend of the family and because a 30-year veteren socialist would probably be able to defeat any argument i could create soundly, no matter how intelligent i am, he'd have a counter-argument ready for most things i could bring up, and also because it's stupid to risk antagonizing people who are helping to support you), but as a consequence of this, i dislike socialism less than i did previously, and am beginning to see some virtues in it (see my 'socialism vs. objectivism' entry for one example of that). i'm not any more convinced of it, but i dislike its adherents less than i used to, and tolerate them more.

6. proceeding now past ideas to expectancies; if a motivation for an action is an expectancy, the strength of that expectancy increases through that action. if you are sure the world is doomed and times of trouble are on their way, every time you act on that motivation (such as stocking up on canned goods or building a bomb shelter or buying guns or whatever) you increase your expectancy that you'll soon after to defend your home from raving gangs of criminals in an anarchic environment. this is seen most strongly in paranoid people; the more they act on their paranoia, the more paranoid they become. the more people stalin executed for being possible conspirators, the more he became sure that everyone was out to get him. the more a hypochondriac takes measures to determine whether they have some strange illness that will later debilitate them, the more they expect that they have somesuch illness. if the paranoid person or the hypochondriac had instead resisted acting on their paranoid or hypochondric motivations, they wouldn't get any worse, and their expectancies would eventually die through lack of action to feed them.

7. likewise what are called attitudes maintain their strength through actions as well: if a person acts upon the attitude that the rich are corrupt and that anyone in a higher position than them got that way through deception and connections and other immoral behaviors, for example if they refuse to buy things that the rich buy, or insult (subtley or directly) anyone who is rich when they come up in conversation (such as bill gates or whomever) then they increase the strength of their attitude that goodness is not rewarded and reward goes to the corrupt. notice how subtle this is, though: they don't really notice that this almost metaphysical attitude is motivating these actions, but nonetheless they would not do these actions if they were not motivated by that attitude. so, if someone wishes to see the world as a just place again, they would best refrain from acting on the idea that it isn't, by taking any action which assumes that anyone with a reward doesn't really deserve it, that he obviously had to take it from someone else who really deserves it who was cheated.

(there are a huge variety of pervasive but malignant attitudes that are maintained through action but which are assumed to be stable rather than volitile (things which are normally thought of as very basic to a person's personality, such as how social they are, or how self-defeating, or how rational), and my suspicion is that they only seem so pervasive and stable because they are constantly maintained by action; a pervasive attitude is one that motivates a good portion of a person's actions, sometimes even the majority. so it would be possible to change them, but only systematically, as they'd have to change every single action that that motivation motivates, in order to starve it. it may be that this is impossible in many cases, that a motivation has profligated itself so strongly that the actions it motivates are impossible to remove. they would literally eat, breathe, and sleep some motivation, and so removing that motivation would remove their ability to eat, breathe, or sleep. strongly ingrained motivations are of course no always bad; i'm addicted to actions motivated by the feeling of accomplishment for example.)

8. desires too become stronger when acted upon and weaker when not acted upon. no matter what the desire is, or how important or unimportant the desired thing is, desire for it increased when action is taken motivated by that desire. if you like coffee and drink it, you like it even more; if it's been some time since you last had coffee you might desire it less, regardless of its actual taste effect on you. likewise the more you act out of a desire to do some activity, such as drawing or exercising, the more you like it (and the reverse happens: if you act to do an activity not because of the desire to do it but because of some other reason, you will actually lose desire to do that activity). remember that simply acting to get something or do something does not mean that desire that thing itself. if you do a book report it's not because you desire to do that book report, but because you desire to graduate, or to not be yelled at by your parents, so doing it is not acting out of the motivation of desire to do it. but if instead you read a book and report on it in your livejournal out of a desire to read organize your thoughts on it and give a report about that book to others who might be interested in it, it increases your desire to read more novels and to report about them.

i could go on, but eight types of examples should be enough.

what does 'increase/strengthen a motivation' or 'decrease/weaken a motivation' actually mean? it means only that you are more likely or less likely to act on that motivation again; that's what a motivation is, an inclination or push to act.

i suggest observing yourself over the next few days and, whenever you take or consider taking an action, observe the motivations for that action, and try to determine whether this principle is true for you -- whether your motivations get stronger when acted on, and weaken when you decide not to act on them.

(((this theory of course comes from something i was thinking about videogames -- how would i model motivation in a game? not zfrt, but some later game where i'd need a more accurate representation of motivation. the answer i came up with was to try a geometrical model where decision-making was done by deciding on a direction (the number of dimensions to use (2, or 3 or possibly more) remains undetermined), and where motivations were vectors of force, having both magnitude and direction; i then thought that if an action is performed it could increase the magnitude of the vectors that pointed in that direction and decrease the magnitude of the vectors that pointed in the opposite direction in proportion to how directly they pointed at the decision point.)))

now for applications. the applications to self-change are obvious but not too mundane; simply stop performing actions motivated by motivations you want to get rid of, and only perform actions motivated by motivations you want to keep, and never act unless you're sure about what the motivation for an action is (very difficult to do, even for highly introspective and intelligent people, but also very worth it when it can be maintained).

the applications to other-change, however, are amazing, but also dangerous because they're so powerful. the general idea of it would be: if you want someone to change in some way, encourage them to act on motivations you want them to have, and discourage them to act on motivations you don't want them to have. so, for example, if you want someone to like you more, you would encourage them to act out of what liking currently exists in them for you and discourage them from acting out of what disliking exists for you. likewise if you want someone to become more productive, you'd get them to act out of their desire for productivity; if you mishandle that and they act out of a feeling of obligation and harbor any dislike of creation, then they will be less likely to repeat it. this type of influence is tricky because you have to determine what a person's motivations are for their actions, and that's hard even if you are the person yourself, but if you're very good at determining motivations, then you can use this to change other people's motivations in various ways. this may sound immoral, but i don't think so; you can even openly tell them what you are doing and it'd work the same.