Sublime

Clarity on how to think without clarity on how to act can leave people unmoved.

Stephen Jay Gould,

Framing people’s options in a

OBJECTIVISM.

Early on, he had fallen victim to what psychologists call identity foreclosure—when we settle prematurely on a sense of self without enough due diligence, and close our minds to alternative selves.

Balfour, Buchan continued, would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it until its author felt he had really made some contribution to human wisdom.

They knew from Andrew Ng and Stuart Russell’s work that one of the cardinal rules is to reward states, not actions.

“However,” they write, “there is no clear understanding of why they perform so well, or how they might be improved. . . . From a scientific standpoint, this is deeply unsatisfactory.”

volitional