I did not enjoy this read; drawing conclusions about humans from simple systems is most often as true as an exercise in astrology.

>I don't personally think humans explicitly look ahead very often. We give ourselves credit as the "thinking, planning animal", but we generally just make whichever choice corresponds to the highest expected valence in the current moment.

Really? Do you clean your teeth? work a job you hate? pay your taxes?

A fair point, but I do think theres a limit- from the few years I spent in retail I came to the realization that a majority of people have near zero critical-thinking or problem solving skills.

For instance, we had these kiosks where someone could sit down and order printouts of photos on their phone. There is a touch screen with very clear instructions: "touch here to begin", "plug in your phone with the appropriate usb cable below", "tap the button that has the photo choice you want". Without fail, I would say near 80% of customers would sit down, look at the screen, and call an employee over asking "what do I do?" for every step, even if they've come in before and been shown already. It was mostly older folk, but there was still a good portion that were younger.

Sorry you didn’t enjoy it. I think I was pretty open, both in the intro and the conclusion, that it was an exploratory attempt at experimenting with intuitions, and not actually intended to prove or conclude. That said - astrology is a large set of vague content designed to be maximally open to interpretation. What I’ve done here is implement a minimal set of axioms and explored their consequences, and, yes, their consequences are open to interpretation.

As for your last question — I don’t understand your last question, to be honest. You certainly have a preference for having clean teeth. You also probably had your mom or dad teach you to clean your teeth, meaning somebody else did all the work of making it a rote habit. So that’s not a strong example. Paying taxes — well, the highest-valence option means the highest absolute valence. Wanting to not go to prison is very motivating. Perhaps you and I aren’t quite understanding what the other means by “look-ahead”. I do not think people sit back and perform calculating predictions very often. I think what we do is respond to far-off goals within the local context in complex ways, which my toy model doesn’t claim to capture.