On intent loops, intent prediction, and compartmentalized purpose

This is part of my reverse engineering humans post series. I am not a psychologist, biologist, or anyone who is even remotely qualified to talk about this in a professional manner. I just observe myself, and document my findings.

Humans have an issue with remembering what they're doing. Sometimes, you'll walk into a room with intent, and suddenly, your confidence will be shattered as your mind completely tosses that intent out the window. "Why am I here? What did I want to do?" This is the sign of a weak intent loop.

The strength of an intent loop can be determined with a question: "If your short-term memory reset while doing this, how easy would it be to understand what you are doing?" For example, let's say you're in the middle of making a croque monsieur, when suddenly, you get hit with the Neuralyzer. It probably wouldn't be hard to get back to cooking, right? You've either got the recipe open or you know it off the top of your head. One of your hands is slimy with butter, you can smell béchamel, etc. This is a strong intent loop.

Compare that to simply walking into a room with a million things in it. That's harder to figure out, right? The strength of an intent loop is important, because sometimes our brain will just drop the intent (intent drop from here on) from our short-term memory, assuming that it can easily figure it out again the next time it's needed.

This gets especially wacky if you combine it with intent prediction. A default intent is the intent your brain will fall back on if it doesn't want to spend time/energy figuring out the true intent. It's pretty sure that the default intent is the true intent, because it's what you do all the time anyways. It's basically speculative execution for humans.

Have you ever accidentally driven to work/school instead of wherever you actually needed to go? Congratulations! You got hit by an intent misprediction.

Exploiting intent prediction

Muscle memory is similar to intent prediction. We don't want to spend time figuring out how to move each one of our muscles, so we just do what we've done since we've learned to walk, constantly learning to adjust to the new changes to our bodies through the process. This can also be exploited, like in The Office.

Dwight learned subconsciously that the handset was getting heavier, but the rate of change was never high enough to cause the default intent ("pick up the handset using x amount of force") to noticeably fail. It never reached the consciousness, never became an active thought, only a passive adjustment of the default intent (x became more and more) over time. This is an intent prediction exploit.

Intent prediction exploits allow you to strengthen habits. For this purpose, let's view boredom as an intent drop. When you're bored and don't know what to do, you are directionless. There will be no strong intent loops your brain can pick up on. Therefore, if you've pocketed a pack of cigarettes, you might be inclined to go out for a smoke. On the flip side, if you've put your running shoes conveniently by the door, you might be inclined to go outside and run.

To moderate what intents will become your default intents in certain scenarios, you need to 1. do them a couple times, and 2. make them the easiest option to do. Make a list of scenarios where you frequently encounter intent drops throughout the day, and adjust your environment to lead you to better default intents. James Clear's Atomic Habits talks a lot about this (albeit with different language) and it's a great resource on exploiting intent prediction and intent drops.

Compartmentalized purpose

In order to improve your default intents, you have to make every environment of yours have a clear purpose. Clear doesn't mean you've written it down meticulously and memorized it letter for letter, instead, it should be instantly discernible by simply being in the environment.

For example, if you don't have a TV in the bedroom, you may be less inclined to watch TV instead of sleeping. If you don't bring your phone in the bathroom, you won't spend 30 minutes on the shitter watching Instagram Reels. This is why working from your bedroom sucks -- your brain isn't sure if it's supposed to be in work mode or sleep mode. When you're supposed to be working, you'll want to lie in bed, and when you're supposed to be sleeping, your brain will be too amped up to shut off.

This also applies to your smart devices. Smart devices are cursed by their ability to do anything anywhere anytime. They are the weakest points of an intent loop. A particularly nasty intent exploit is when you close an app to do something important, but you end up opening Instagram right after and scrolling for half an hour. If you want to improve your intent loops, using smartphones is untenable.

Instead, make your devices dumber and harder to use.

If you want to learn more about digital minimalism, check out my page on it (lacking content right now, coming soon), and some other people who've had a great time with it:

That's all for today. I hope you can implement something from this to make your day-to-day life a little bit better.

This post was written to R.A.P. Ferreira - purple moonlight pages.

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