Tom Griffiths

So instead of thinking about a whole probability distribution, you might think about a few samples, a few possible instances.

Instead of when you're making a decision, considering all of the possible outcomes,

you might think about a few possible outcomes and things like that.

And we can look at the kinds of strategies that people seem to use when they do that, when they don't consider all the possibilities, are the ones that they're considering the ones that they should be considering from the perspective of using limited resources.

And then the other kinds of things we think about are things like,

setting goals, right, or sub goals.

So I think, from the perspective of the sort of history of thinking about cognition, looks like Alan Newell and Herb Simon, sort of introduced this idea of, you know, we can think about, when we're solving challenging problems, we need to decompose those problems into parts.

And part of what it is to be smart is to

be able to decompose them in those ways.

But in many ways, that ability to kind of break down problems and set goals is really a consequence of a resource constraint, right?

So if you had infinite cognitive resources, you would never need to set goals because you can just reason all the way to the end of the trajectory of whatever is going to arise from the choices that you're going to make.

And so setting goals and sub goals and so on is a tool for being able to make progress on problems with finite cognitive resources.

And then we can ask, what are the good goals to set?

What's a good structure to sort of give to a problem from that perspective of resource rationality?

Yeah, and then you can ask, you obviously don't want to make your subgoal too close.

You don't want to make it too far away.

And so the question of where people should set their subgoals and do they do a good job of setting those subgoals is a question that we can engage with from that perspective of resource rationality.

Yeah, so this is, I think, a very deep question.

And I think there's different ways that you can ask it.

So there's one way of thinking about it.