When deciding what to do, follow what genuinely interests you rather than chasing expected outcomes. Instrumental reasoning fails because the world is too uncertain to predict whether doing X will actually lead to Y. Decisions rooted in what you find inherently valuable hold up better.
When you think about what to do or when you advise other people what to do, or when you synthesize those 2 things and you advise yourself what to do, we end up learning some other things. Number one, fundamental beats instrumental. What do I mean by that? When we make decisions, we can sometimes do things for fundamental reasons. I want to do this because it's interesting. I want to take this job because I get to work with cool people and do something important. We can also make decisions for instrumental reasons. I'm going to do this because it's going to lead to that and it's going to lead to that and going to lead to that. What I have discovered and what I advise others and advise myself, and that you should advise yourself, is that fundamental reasons are better. Instrumental reasons don't work very well because the world is too uncertain. We don't know what's going to happen next. So you're better off making a decision for fundamental reasons rather than instrumental reasons, because we have no idea whether those instrumental reasons are actually going to actually bear fruit.
