Input goals and output goals

The Pond

Writings on AI, self-improvement, and living a good life.

The Motivation Blueprint | Learning Development Accelerator | Professional L&D Community

You can buy an ebook from us directly or wherever ebooks are sold (Apple Books, Amazon, B&N, etc..

Cherdleys on Instagram: "This is relationship goals 💖🫶🏻"

98K likes, 573 comments - cherdleys on March 29, 2026: "This is relationship goals 💖🫶🏻".

Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity

Specification gaming is a behaviour that satisfies the literal specification of an objective without achieving the intended outcome. We have all had experiences with specification gaming, even if not by this name. Readers may have heard the myth of King Midas and the golden touch, in which the king asks that anything he touches be turned to gold - but soon finds that even food and drink turn to metal in his hands. In the real world, when rewarded for doing well on a homework assignment, a student might copy another student to get the right answers, rather than learning the material - and thus exploit a loophole in the task specification.

When AI builds itself

Our progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications.

Self-Control and Optimal Goals: A Theoretical Analysis

Consumers set goals to achieve a variety of objectives such as losing weight, saving for retirement, and achieving better health. A large body of literature in psychology and consumer behavior shows that goals can help consumers achieve these objectives. However, there is almost no research that examines how we should set optimal goals. The purpose of this paper is to develop a parsimonious framework that examines how goals can help performance and how we should set optimal goals. We use the literature on hyperbolic discounting to model these issues. Our results show that goals can often increase performance but can also sometimes encourage procrastination. We show that some goals are worse than having no goals, even when the goals are achieved and the consumer exerts more effort because of the goal. We also find that the presence of goals can lead to myopic consumers behaving as if they were hyperopic. Our results also show that the most difficult goals should be assigned to consumers with moderate levels of motivation and self-control problems. We also find that it is sometimes optimal to set goals that are never achieved.

Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead

Whether its our careers, health or relationships, we often set the bar too high and end up feeling disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Try this new way of thinking … and you may just see some real results

A Systems Literacy Manifesto

In 1968, West Churchman wrote, “…there is a good deal of turmoil about the manner in which our society is run. …the citizen has begun to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.”[1] Churchman was writing at a time of growing concern about war, civil rights, and the environment. Almost fifty years later, these concerns remain, and we have more reason than ever “to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.” Examples abound.

"AI" and Productivity

[I keep bringing these up on Bluesky, so I think it’s time to gather them up and make a post out of them.] This is a collection of articles...

The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane - Read Online

Read The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane online. Explore content strategy’s roots, and quickly learn not only how it’s done, but how you can do it well.

Signals: Toward a Self-Improving Agent | Factory.ai

Traditional product analytics tell you what happened. Session duration, tool calls executed, completion rates. But they...

Eliciting Advice Instead of Feedback Improves Developmental Input

Most organizations encourage employees to provide feedback to one another to support learning, personal growth, and career advancement. However, employee feedback often fails to improve performance because it lacks concrete, specific guidance. We provide a temporal explanation for why workplace input processes routinely fail to produce valuable and concrete developmental insights: they are insufficiently focused on the future. In this paper, we theorize and demonstrate that encouraging input providers to think about the future leads them to produce more concrete developmental input. Across a large scale, preregistered field experiment (n = 27,432 comments) and two laboratory studies (n = 806), people provide more concrete and actionable developmental input when they are prompted to provide future-looking “advice” rather than “feedback,” a common method of soliciting input in organizations. The effect of soliciting advice on input concreteness was mediated by providers’ future focus. Moreover, in a follow-up study, such concrete input was assessed by independent raters as more useful. These findings highlight the role of temporal orientation in driving the content of developmental input. In doing so, our data suggest that individuals and organizations have the potential to promote higher-quality developmental input by attending to the temporal orientation that their input systems encourage. This paper was accepted by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, organizations. Funding: Funding for the laboratory experiments was provided by Harvard Business School. Supplemental Material: The supplementary appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.03207 .

Product Design Psychology by Wouter de Bres

Understand the minds you design for and the mind you design with.

Goals Garden - Goals and Habit Tracker on ATProto

Track your daily goals and habits. Build streaks, stay consistent, and achieve your goals!