lost about what you want
November, update: This used to be a longer post but something (something about the boundaries?) seemed off so I’ve removed the parts that I thought were bad (most of it).
Feedback from others, like all gradients of extrinsic motivation and direction, cannot cause us to know what we want. They cannot cause us to become aligned with ourselves. They can't even cause us to become fundamentally good friends, parents, or lovers. ("One cannot 'gradient descent' from finite play to infinite play".)
Even if you're rightfully defending your boundaries, others will call you an asshole.
Even if you do parenting 'right', your kids will tell you off.
And if you do everything your partner says they want you to do, you will lose both your path and your partner!
(We also aren't going to create aligned AI through reinforcement learning.)
So we cannot decide how to grow by merely taking feedback from others.
Someone else's ideal you is not your ideal you. And others will invariably shape the incentive landscape to cause you to get closer to who they want you to be. And it will be extrinsically rewarding for you to follow that incentive gradient. Besides, when you don't know who you want to be, what else is there for you to do? So you follow the gradient of prestige, or money, or whatever.
