[lgas]

I think perhaps you're just misunderstanding some of the terms you're attempting to use. Those things that everyone else told you were wrong and that no one else saw the value in... your reward function rewards pursuing those. And in that context your decisions were rational and functional.

[pmarreck]

I am not misunderstanding anything. I'm 51 and have been programming since I was 10 in 1982- Rest assured that I know what a "function" is, and I know what "optimizing for a local minima/maxima" is from my machine learning coursework. You can't just say there's a "reward function" without defining it. It's otherwise a completely hypothetical assumption, and assumptions are beliefs, and beliefs are useless from the perspective of rationality. There is otherwise nothing rational about some of the things I felt I needed to do, and yet a very disproportionate percentage of them seemed correct in hindsight.

What YOU have to realize is that you (like many others in the past) can only seem to understand the explanation for something in terms of only what is already understood. And that there is nothing "magical" or "special" about our current understanding (unless you believe there's nothing new to discover, which is preposterous hubris).