More specifically, I suspect that art is created mainly for four reasons:

1) Urge: many artists seem to have a compulsion to create (sometimes, to create oddly specific things). They make art to satisfy this urge. In this category, I would also include art that is mainly motivated by helping the artist achieve the flow state that they are seeking, as well as art that is made to help the artist process their own experiences. For instance, “The Race Track” is a 35-inch painting that Pinkham Ryder spent literal years working on, “building up layers of paint, resin, and varnish…He used unorthodox materials such as candle wax and bitumen. In his urgency, he wouldn’t wait for each layer to dry and was often painting into wet varnish or brushing fast-drying paint into slow-drying paint” (the Washington Post reports). He painted it in response to an experience he had: a friend told him he planned to bet $500 on a horse and then died by suicide when the horse lost. This kind of work is the artist making something for themself, or because they feel like they can’t NOT make it. Sometimes, art created out of compulsion appeals to art lovers, but sometimes, it only appeals to the artist themself. 

2) Beauty: people love Monet for the stunning beauty of his paintings (often landscapes). If there is a deeper meaning beyond “I’ve captured something of great beauty and done so in a beautiful way,” I can’t figure out what that thing is. More often than not, I think that the sort of art that regular people and art lovers (as opposed to art collectors) buy for themselves is simply what they find beautiful or what they find that creates a pleasing vibe.

3) Emotion: lots of art aims less at beauty and more at stirring emotions or provoking interesting thoughts. Examples include the Fountain by Duchamp (a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt”) or the Treachery of Images by Magritte (a painting of a pipe with the French phrase, “This is not a pipe” written beneath it). This can be the deepest form of art, but it is often hard to distinguish it from bullshit: the line between deep and bullshit is a thin one. But even if you think works like The Fountain and The Treachery of Images suck, it’s hard to deny that they at least provoke thought (though this cannot necessarily be said for the endless derivatives that now exist that riff on these themes). I would also put political art, as well as art that just aims to amuse, in this category of art that is about generating emotion or producing thoughts in the viewer. Another more specific example of art that appears to be about emotion rather than beauty is Artemisia Gentilesch’s painting Judith Slaying Holofernes (which depicts the assassination of a general by the Israelite heroine Judith). Even if you find the painting heinous, it’s hard not to feel something when you look at it. Note I had originally used Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son as an example here, but as Gwern pointed out, that was actually an example of painting done out of obsession, not for stirring emotions in others. Much of this kind of art is aimed at producing visceral emotions rather than intellectual thoughts. Art that evokes emotion is sometimes beautiful, but often it is ugly, shocking, or confusing. 

4) Playing Status Games: Art is a way for people to show off that they are in the know about what’s cool, that they have sophisticated and refined taste, and that they have lots of money. For instance, a member of the Saudi royal family purchased a Da Vinci painting (Salvator Mundi) for $450 million. As another example, Bored Ape #4580 (an NFT linked to an image of an ape wearing 3D glasses) sold for $1.9 million. Obviously, these were not purchased due to the great emotion or beauty evoked by these images. People buy these things because they want you to believe something about them (or, in some cases, less cynically but more pathetically because they are trying to convince themselves that they are cool). Collecting artworks is especially well-suited to status signaling because it better enables claims of connoisseurship and sophistication compared to buying, say, a yacht or private jet. Like everyone, artists want to make money, and some will lean into the social signaling aspects of art rather than creating art that they feel the need to create or rather than trying to make something deep or beautiful.

But, considering just these four motivations for making art, how do they work against each other?

Well, since most of the money in art comes from very wealthy people who are trying to signal status (to others, but also, sometimes to themselves), this warps the art market (especially what gets attention). For instance, it appears to have a really negative influence on what is shown in some galleries and museums (showing art that is about what it signals about the owner and viewer rather than art that is about the artist, beauty, or the emotion it creates in the viewer). 

I suspect that most people who go to museums and galleries want a combination of (1) learning about the interesting minds and lives of the artists, (2) seeing things of great beauty, and (3) seeing things that move them or make them think. 

Unfortunately, more often than is ideal, they see a lot of status signaling (sometimes it’s of the form “look how one-of-a-kind this is,” “sometimes it’s “look how expensive this is,” “and sometimes it’s “look how incomprehensible this is; if you were more sophisticated, maybe you’d understand”).

Most artists who toil away at making whatever they feel the urge to create, or whatever they find beautiful, or whatever they think will make people feel and think, are typically not going to make works that are effective at status signaling. So there is a subworld of artists producing works for wealthy people to use to signal status, and this stuff gets way overrepresented in museums, galleries, and the media relative to its value as art (as opposed to its monetary value in terms of what people will pay for it).

If what you want is beauty on your walls, you can simply get an inexpensive print or replica of your favorite works of all time. But people who play the art game would rather spend a lot of money on something unattractive than spend a small amount of money on something far more beautiful. In fact, ugliness makes something BETTER status signaling because lots of people can appreciate something beautiful, but only those most in the know (with the most evolved and sophisticated taste) can appreciate something that is shit. 

Sometimes literally. Piero Manzoni filled 90 tin cans with his own excrement. Christie’s auctioned off tin number 51 for $161,000 (unfortunately, the artist had already passed away, so I don’t think he got to experience his shit being worth more than gold).

So if you suspect that a lot of art that gets famous is bad, you’re honestly probably right, but that’s mainly because a certain kind of bad is good status signaling, and this crowds out attention from work that is more beautiful and more thought-provoking.

Thanks to Hunter Muir, Barry Galef, and Gwern for their comments, which were especially valuable in helping me improve this essay.

This piece was first written on November 11, 2023, and first appeared on this site on December 16, 2023.

Think of something you value that:

A. Multiple other people you know are capable of achieving, but that…

B. You assume you would not be capable of achieving, even though…

C. You have never actually tried to do this thing well before.

Now, suppose for a moment that you have no choice but to do the thing. That is, everything you care about in the world will be destroyed if you do not achieve it in X months. Here, X could be 1 if it’s a very small thing, or X could be 100 if it’s a much larger thing.

Under those circumstances, do you STILL believe you would fail to achieve it?

I think this sort of thought experiment can help us distinguish between things that we don’t believe we are capable of merely because we aren’t motivated enough, versus things that we ACTUALLY believe are impossible for us.

And I think it’s important to distinguish between these two cases, because if something is in the first category, we may actually be able to get ourselves to succeed just by finding ways to increase our motivation!

I also suspect that for many people, a number of the things that they view as being impossible for them would seem more possible in the face of carrying out this thought experiment. In other words, it is easy to confuse “I’m not motivated enough to try really hard” with “I’m incapable.”

As an example, suppose you believe you are just inherently bad at math, and that no matter how hard you try, you couldn’t understand calculus. Well, what if the fate of the world rested on your understanding of calculus in 6 months? I think under those circumstances, you would very likely find a way to learn it, with plenty of time to spare.

This piece was first written on April 26, 2018, and first appeared on my website on September 22, 2025.

But another, important part of the story as to why resolutions are so often ineffective is that they often lack a plan. Sure you want to be more productive this year. But what strategies will you use to boost your productivity? And what will you do to increase the chance that you stick to these strategies?

To become more effective at meeting our goals, we need to go beyond just deciding what we want to achieve. We should stop making just resolutions, and instead make Planned Resolutions. A Planned Resolution is made by answering each of the following questions:

1) What do I want to achieve? This is just the standard question that is answered when making any resolution. But by itself, it’s not enough.

2) Why do I want to achieve this? Understanding why you want to achieve your goal can help prevent you from wasting time attempting to achieve something that won’t benefit you, or whose purpose can be more easily achieved in another way. People waste years in pursuit of a goal that they haven’t questioned for a mere hour. Sometimes when we understand why we are motivated to achieve something, that motivation disappears. For instance, if we’ve crafted some of our goals based on what others want us to do, rather than what we want ourselves to do, recognizing this may begin to shape what we want.

3) Is there an easier way to achieve the same underlying purpose? Since most of our goals have a deeper purpose behind them (even though we aren’t always aware of our underlying motivations), we may discover that there are more effective ways to achieve this purpose than through the original goal that we set. For instance, suppose that you’ve decided your goal is to get into a PhD program this year, and upon reflection, conclude that you want this because you’ll enjoy the job of being a professor. Well, even if you are correct that you would enjoy such a life, there may be other jobs that are far easier to get which would require much less time investment. Before setting yourself the goal of getting into a PhD program, it’s almost certainly worth spending some time to carefully investigate these other possibilities. Sometimes there is an easier way to achieve the true goal beneath the surface goal.

4) What strategy can I use to achieve my goal? Knowing where you want to go isn’t enough to get to that place, you have to know how to get there. If your goal is to lose weight, do you plan on dieting? If so, which diet will you try? It might be worth taking a look at the research on weight loss to see if some diets have proven to be more effective or easier to stick to than others. Or suppose that your goal is to improve your social life. Are you going to achieve this by seeing your existing friends more? Which friends? Or by meeting new people? If so, where will you meet them? Convert your abstract desire into a plan of action.

5) What can I do right now to get myself to apply this strategy? One of the other big reasons that resolutions fail is because people don’t actually follow through on pursuing the goal they set. Even if you plan a strategy to achieve your goal, it still raises the question as to how you’re going to get yourself to carry out this strategy. Four months from now will you remember the goal you’ve set? Will you have the willpower and motivation to carry out the plan you’ve chosen? Will you actually make the time to do it? Take a few minutes to plan out how you can get yourself to actually apply your plan. A few suggestions are:

• Put reminders (right now!) in your calendar that recur periodically to remind you of your plan.
• Tell a couple of friends that you need their help making sure you stick to your plan. Ask them to check in on you about it.
• Use stickk.com to put money on the line, betting that you’ll actually achieve your goal.
• Put a sticky note reminder in a place where you’ll see it pretty often (but not so often that you stop noticing it altogether).
• Make a list of reasons why things would be better off if you meet this goal, and mentally contrast that list to what exists now.

Once you’ve figured out what you can do to increase your chances of applying your strategy, immediately go and do these things. Tomorrow you may not remember, or may not feel the same motivation that you do today.

So stop merely making resolutions, and start making Planned Resolutions. Don’t just think about what you want to achieve, but also why you want to achieve it, and whether there is a more efficient path to achieve your underlying purpose. Then identify a plan of action, and a strategy you can use right now to get yourself to stick to this plan. Here’s a form (in Microsoft Word format) to help you do this.

So why don’t we always do what we know we should?

1. Habit. Have you ever tried to correct bad posture? At some point you’ll notice that your shoulders are hunched and you’ll make a correction, only to notice them hunched again two minutes later. Habits are behaviors that are done automatically. Frequently, we’re not aware of doing them as they occur, so our conscious mind doesn’t have the chance to stop them in action. Intellectually knowing what you should do won’t help if you aren’t consciously aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it.

To permanently correct a bad habit, it often takes a large number of repetitions of a different behavior, in the context where you would normally engage in the habit. Eventually the old habit will be replaced with a new one. Ideally, you want it to be the case that the context automatically triggers the good habit.

Suppose that you are using an ineffective tennis swing. You would ideally practice a better swing a large number of times (starting without a ball, and then eventually doing it with a ball, and finally doing it while hitting back and forth with another player). Eventually, the correct motion would feel more natural than the incorrect one.

To give another example, suppose that you’d like to correct a habit of pronounce certain words incorrectly. Ideally, you would make a list of these words and the correction pronunciations, and practice saying each correctly a few times a day (to yourself, and then eventually in conversation) until the correct pronunciations no longer required thought.

An approach like this requires a lot of effort, and the willingness to put time into repetitive practice, but it can really pay off. Think about what habit you’d like to instill instead of the one you currently have. Now think about what you could practice to instill this new habit. For complex actions, the practice should be simple to start, and then grown in complexity as you master the basic components (e.g. practice your tennis swing without a ball before doing it with a ball). Finally, schedule time on your calendar to actually perform the practice. Note that one practice session very likely won’t be enough (you may need quite a lot of practice to overcome strongly ingrained habits).

Note that even if you don’t currently have a bad habit, it may be well worth it making an effort to install a good habit. Practice doing what you’d like yourself to do, in the context you’d like yourself to do it. Try to do this good behavior as consistently as possible, to make the new habit form faster.

2. Conflicting desires. You may want to lose weight, but you also want to eat that cupcake. To say you know you shouldn’t eat that cupcake, is to imply that overall, the weight loss is more valuable to you than the pleasure you’ll get from the cupcake. The problem is that when these two desires come into conflict at the moment while that cupcake is sitting in front of you, your desire for the pleasurable taste may win out. Since our desires shift due to context, it may well be the case that 5 minutes prior, when the cupcake hadn’t yet been placed in front of you yet, your desire to lose weight was in fact stronger than your desire to eat a tasty treat. But when you start to salivate at the sight of cupcake, your desires change in magnitude.

If conflicting desires cause you to do things that are not in your own long term interest, there are a few strategies you can try. First, you can try making your desire stronger for the good behavior. For instance, try vividly imagining yourself after having lost the weight and mentally basking in how good that will feel, and the benefits you will get from it. Immediately follow this visualization by a second one where you mentally contrast that desired state with how things currently stand. This second part is critical to help build motivation (rather than just basking in wishful thinking).

A second approach is to try to make your desire for the bad behavior weaker, for instance by imagining yourself gaining weight as you eat unhealthy food. The idea is to build a stronger association between your desire and the negative consequences associated with it, so that when the desire is triggered, the negative thought is triggered simultaneously, reducing your overall desire. One way to carry this out is to make a list of the negative consequences of the bad behavior, and then imagine each of these negative consequences occurring.

A third approach to dealing with conflicting desires is to try to arrange your environment so that your desires are unlikely to shift in a way that will yield behaviors that aren’t what you want. For instance, if you’re trying to lose weight, don’t keep unhealthy foods around your house, and don’t go to cupcake shops.

It’s worth noting, that sometimes we have conflicting desires that we aren’t consciously aware of. For instance, you might know that you should start searching for a job, but without having acknowledged it explicitly, be terribly afraid of rejection. Hence, you may find that you mysteriously become anxious every time you start looking at job postings, which leads you to procrastinate.

To better understand whether conflicting desires are involved in causing you to avoid what you know you should do, try the following exercise: Ask yourself “what are the benefits that I get out of NOT doing this good behavior?” Make a list of whatever you can think of. Doing this may make you realize that you have reasons for not acting that you weren’t even aware of. Now, make a list of the costs of not doing the desired behavior. Reflect on this list of costs and benefits, and reflect whether those benefits are really worth the costs.

3. Lack of motivation. Sometimes you’ll know intellectually that something would be a good idea to do, but for some reason feel an utter lack of motivation to actually do it. For instance, you may be aware that it is much more efficient from a learning perspective to take notes on articles and non-fiction books you read, and review those notes later (or better yet, make flashcards from them), than to merely read passively. But there’s a good chance that you don’t feel any significant motivation to actually take notes while you’re reading.

When lack of motivation strikes, it may help to perform a cost benefit analysis. Make a list of the benefits and costs of doing that action (compared to the baseline state of not doing it). Read this list over again. If the action really is worth doing, this list of reasons why you should do it may give you greater motivation.

You also might find it helpful to try to boost your desire through visualization (as in the conflicting desires case above). Visualize your future after you have done the desired behavior, and imagine the benefits that you are likely to get out of it. Now, remind yourself of how things currently stand, and mentally contrast this with the desired future.

4. Forgetting. You might know what is good for you, but simply forget to do it. For instance, for the last two months you may have been in desperate need of a haircut, but what with your busy life, you never think to make an appointment. Or maybe you made an appointment, but forgot to show up for it.

There are at least four strategies you can use to combat forgetfulness. First, write down whatever you want to remember, and put that note somewhere that you’ll be forced to notice it (e.g. stick it on your sock drawer).

Second, put the thing you need to remember in your calendar. So if you think to yourself that you need a haircut, but right now its after business hours, put a reminder in your calendar to book one tomorrow at 10am.

Third, for important things that you keep forgetting to do (especially major things that you really aren’t looking forward to doing), you can ask a friend to act as an enforcer. Tell them how important it is for you to do this thing, and when you want to have it done by. Ask for their help with making sure you get it done, giving them free reign to nag you as much as is necessary. This social pressure can be very effective for some people.

The fourth, and best strategy, is to (whenever possible) act immediately at the moment when you do remember what you should do. So when you happen to recall that you need a haircut, don’t assume that you’ll remember to make an appointment tomorrow, just pick up the phone immediately and book it. You’ll likely be better at getting yourself to act immediately if you start viewing your brain as a buggy machine, which occasionally forgets important things for long periods (I know mine does, at least). Taking this perspective means that when you remember something important that you should do, you can’t just assume that your brain will eventually take care of it. If you don’t act now, who knows when you’ll remember to do it again, if you ever even remember to act at all. So act now, to save yourself from your buggy brain later!

5. Lack of knowledge. Even if you know what you should do to improve your life, you may not know how to do it. For instance, you might want people to view you as being more confident, but have little idea how to get yourself to act in a more confident manner. If you keep telling yourself what you “should” do, but you don’t know the steps to carry it out, you’re unlikely to change your behavior for the better.

When you lack sufficient knowledge as to how to achieve a behavior, take steps to correct your lack of knowledge. Ask someone who knows more, or do some research online, or try breaking down the action by taking twenty minutes to write down the small, simple components that make up whatever you’re trying to do. Even very complex actions can usually be broken into simple steps, each of which is fairly straightforward. For instance, suppose you want to learn to write computer programs, but you don’t know the first thing about programming. You might break this task up as follows: Step 1. Talk to friends who are knowledgable about computer programming, and ask them what programming language you should learn based on your goals. Step 2. Install the required software on your computer in order to be able to write programs in the language that your friends suggested. Step 3. Google to find a few tutorials on the language. Run them by your knowledgable friends to see which tutorial they think looks best. Step 4. Complete one of these tutorials on the language. etc.

To get yourself to do what you know is good for you, the first step is to diagnose what is holding you back form acting. Are you trying to break a bad, sticky habit? In that case, you may need to devote time to practicing a better habit to replace it. Are you dealing with a case of conflicting desires? If so, use visualization to increase your desire for the good action and reduce your desire for the bad action, while you try to avoid contexts that cause your desires to flip in a way that is counterproductive. Are you feeling a lack of motivation to behave how you know you should? Write down a list of pros and cons for the good action, and try visualization to increase motivation. Do you keep forgetting to do the desired behavior? Put notes in places where you’ll be forced to see them, use your calendar to schedule when you’re going to do your helpful behaviors, and try to build a habit of acting immediately when you remember something important to do. Know what you want to do, but lack the knowledge how to do it? Ask those who know more than you do how to start, do some research, and try to break the task down into simple, easy steps.

Unfortunately, all of this advice is problematic: what if you don’t feel like taking the advice, or you do want to take it but will likely forget to do so? What if you have existing habits that will make taking this advice difficult? In other words, how do you get yourself to do what this article says you should? The solution is to set the stage right now for following this advice in the future. Namely, apply the advice of this article, right now, to get yourself to take this article’s advice in the future.
Perform the following steps (right now!) so that you can benefit later:

Step 1. Consider the following reasons for not acting. Which of these do you think is most likely to prevent you from acting on the advice from this article?

(1) Habit (you have existing habits that may stand in the way).
(2) Conflicting desires (you have desires that conflict with your desire to take this advice).
(3) Lack of motivation (you don’t feel motivation to do what this article says).
(4) Forgetting (you are likely to forget to follow the advice of this article).
(5) Lack of knowledge (you don’t know how to follow this article’s advice).

Step 2. Go and reread the section of this article corresponding to whatever you selected in Step 1.

Step 3. Schedule at least two different times on your calendar for when you are going to do what that section you reread suggests.

Step 4. Schedule a time on your calendar when you are going to reread this entire article.

Step 5. When the scheduled events come up on your calendar, actually do them!

The actions of governments generally come about due to the behavior of many people, each with their own motivations, and the invasion of Iraq is probably not an exception. The house of representatives and senate both authorized the use of military action against Iraq by very wide margins, with 58% of democrats in the senate voting in favor, and 98% of republicans. (Incidentally, the Iraq War Resolution cites more than ten different justifications for using force against Iraq, though it is unclear how many of these were taken seriously by senators.) What’s more, it is likely that George Bush’s decisions regarding Iraq were determined partly by the opinions of and information from his military and civilian advisors, each of whom had their own motivations for giving the advice that they did. Even in cases when a governmental decision seems to have been made by a single person, it can still be problematic to assume that the action was taken just for a single reason. Individual people often act based on multiple motivations which occur simultaneously. So, given that governments typically cannot reasonably be said to have a single reason for acting, why do we often ask questions that seem to assume that such a reason exists?

As philosopher Daniel Dennett has noted, the human brain can model entities at different levels of abstraction. Consider, for example, the game Pac-Man. We can consider the ghosts that chase our hero from at least three different perspectives. Taking a physical stance, the images of these ghosts are produced as result of snippets of computer code being executed by a computer’s processor. Viewing the ghosts from a design stance, we can think of them as having been created for the purpose of presenting a challenge to the gamer by providing something that the gamer will need to avoid to beat each level. Finally, we can consider these ghosts from an intentional stance, imagining that they desire to catch our hero, and that they act in accordance with those desires by chasing him.

One might argue that the intentional stance is inaccurate for Pac-Man, because the ghosts don’t truly have desires. But that does not stop the stance from being a useful model of the situation. If you want to explain how the game works to someone, saying “the ghosts want to catch you, and you don’t want to be caught” is an efficient way of transmitting a lot of information about the game. It is probably an even more intuitive way for us to think about this situation than “the ghosts are programmed to follow you, and you lose the game if they come into contact with you.” So the intentional stance (where we model an entity as if it had agency) can be quite useful even when we are not dealing with a conscious agent.

People often assume this intentional stance without even thinking about, especially when they discuss governments, corporations and movements. And in many cases it makes sense from a practical point of view to adopt this stance. For instance, it is useful to model the company General Electric as an entity with certain goals (profit maximization, for example) and then consider what this entity would do in various situations. But this method of modeling becomes less informative when we ask questions about why General Electric took a particular action. The answer “to maximize profits” merely gives us back the assumptions used in our model for General Electric (i.e. that it is a profit maximizer). General Electric may behave like a profit maximizer, but knowing that does not mean we now know WHY General Electric performs a particular action (nor does it explain how we are supposed to interpret the idea of “General Electric performing an action”). Profit maximizer is a description of the company, not the explanation of why the company (or more realistically, the collective of its employees) behaves in a particular manner. If we dig deeper, we see that the effects that the employees of General Electric have on the world come about due to the actions of individual agents with a variety of motivations. It is through analyzing the motivations of the individual agents that we can begin to arrive at an explanation.

When considering the motivations of an agency, it is useful to remind ourselves that agencies are not in fact agents. Though modeling them as agents can be very useful for prediction purposes, if we want to answer questions about why they acted we have to dig deeper and consider the motivations of their constituent agents.