Motivation is not my problem these days. It has been all my youth, partly the reason that I completely failed at school. Now the almost primal fear of staying dumb and a nagging curiosity to gather knowledge, learn and understand, do trump any lack of motivation or boredom. To see how far above you people, here at lesswrong.com, are compared to the average person makes me strive to approximate your wit.
In other words, it’s already enough motivation to know the basics of a programming language like Haskell, when average Joe is hardly self-aware but a mere puppet. I don’t want to be one of them anymore.
If motivation is no longer a problem for you, that could be something really interesting for the akrasia discussions. What changed so that motivation is no longer a problem?
Being an eye witness of your own motives and growing-up is a tough exercise to conclude accurately.
I believe that it would be of no help in the mentioned discussions. It is rather inherent, something neurological.
I grew up in a very religious environment. Any significance, my goals, were mainly set to focus on being a good Christian. Although I assume it never reached my ‘inner self’, I consciously tried to motivate myself to reach this particular goal due to fear of dying. But on a rather unconscious level it never worked, this goal has always been ineffectual.
At the age of 13, my decision to become vegetarian changed everything. With all my heart I came to the conclusion that something is wrong about all the pain and suffering. A sense for human suffering was still effectively dimmed, due to a whole life of indoctrination telling me that our pain is our own fault. But what about the animals? Why would an all-loving God design the universe this way? To cut a long story short, still believing, it made me abandon this God. With the onset of the Internet here in Germany I then learnt that there was nothing to abandon in the first place...I guess I won’t have to go into details here.
Anyway, that was just one of the things that changed. I’m really bad when it comes to social things. Thus I suffered a lot in school, it wasn’t easy. Those problems with other kids, a lack of concentration and that I always found the given explanations counterintuitive and hard to follow, dimmed any motivation to learn more. All these problems rather caused me to associate education with torture, I wanted it to end. Though curiosity was always a part of my character. I’ve probably been the only kid who liked to watch documentations and news at an early age.
Then there is the mental side I mentioned at the beginning. These are probably the most important reasons for all that happened and happens in my life. I got quite a few ticks and psychic problems. When I was a kid I was suffering from Tourette syndrome, which didn’t help in school either. But many other urges are still prevalent. I pretty much have to consciously think about a lot that other people might just do and decide upon unconsciously. Like sleeping, I pretty much have to tell me each time why there are more reasons to sleep now than in favor of further evaluation. Or how, when and about what do I start to think, when do I stop and decide. How do I set the threshold? For me it is inherently very low, the slightest stimulus triggers a high tide of possibilities. Like when you look up some article on Wikipedia, you can click through forever. There is much more...I hope you see what I mean by mental problems.
I could refine the above or go on for long. I will just stop now. You see, my motivation is complex and pretty much based on my mental problems and curiosity. I love playing games, but I cannot push myself to play more than a few minutes. Then there’s this fear and urge to think of what else is there, what I could be missing and what could happen if I just enjoy playing this game. I have to do it...I’m not strong enough not to care. Take this reply as an example, I really had to push myself to answer but also had an urge to write it. It’s a pain. Though now the fear of how much time it takes up and what else I could do grew stronger.
Bottom line is that my motivation is a mixture of curiosity, inclination, mental problems, my youth, relieve, not staying dumb, fear of being wrong again about the nature of reality and so on. Really, the only problem I have with learning programming right now is that there are so many other problems in my head, not my ‘motivation’. I often don’t find the time to read more than one page in a book per day.
I’m sorry if this post sounds a bit confused, not having the best day today. Also just ask if you have further questions. I should probably think about it a bit more thoroughly anyway. But now you have some idea. I hope...
P.S.
Another milestone that changed everything was discovering Orion’s Arm. It was so awesome, I just had to learn more. That basicaly led me to get into science, transhumanism and later OB/LW.
Thank you very much for writing this up. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if akrasia has a neurological basis, and I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen any posts really looking at it from that angle. Dopamine?
And on the other hand, your story is also about ideas and circumstances that undercut motivation.
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
—William Blake
I haven’t read up on the akrasia discussions. I don’t believe into intelligence. I believe in efficiency regarding goals stated in advance. It’s all about what we want and how to achieve it. And what we want is merely ‘the line of least resistance’.
Whatever intelligence is, it can’t be intelligent all the way down. It’s just dumb stuff at the bottom.
—Andy Clark
The universe really just exists. And it appears to us that it is unfolding because we are part of it. We appear to each other to be free and intelligent because we believe that we are not part of it.
There is a lot of talk here on LW on how to become less wrong. That works. Though it is not a proactive approach but simply trial and error allowed for by the mostly large error tolerance of our existence.
It’s all about practicability, what works. If prayer worked, we’d use it if we wanted to use it.
Narns, Humans, Centauri… we all do what we do for the same reason: because it seems like a good idea at the time.
—G’Kar, Babylon 5
Anything you learn on lesswrong.com you’ll have to apply by relying on fundamental non-intelligent processes. You can only hope to be lucky to learn enough in-time to avoid fatal failure. Since no possible system can use advanced heuristics to tackle, or even evaluate, every stimulus. For example, at what point are you going to use Bayesian statistics? You won’t even be able to evaluate the importance of all data to be able to judge when to apply more rigorous tools. You can only be a passive observer who’s waiting for new data by experience. And until new data arrives, rely on prior knowledge.
A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Thus I don’t think that a weakness of will does exist. I also don’t think that you can do anything but your best. What is the right thing to do does always rely on what you want. Never you do something that you do not want. Only in retrospect or on average might we want something else. On that basis we then do conclude that what we have done was wrong and that we knew better. But what really was different at that time was that what we wanted, which changed the truth value of what we, contemplating at present, in retrospect know to be the best to do.
So what is it that can help us dealing with akrasia? Nothing. In future we might be able to strengthen our goals, so that what we want at the time of applying the amplification of our goals is what we’re going to want forever. Or as long as something even stronger shifts our desires again.
If we could deliberately seize control of our pleasure systems, we could reproduce the pleasure of success. That be the end of everything.
—Marvin Minsky
I’m happy with how it is right now. I’m very happy that there is what we call akrasia. If there wasn’t, I’d still be religious.
Motivation is not my problem these days. It has been all my youth, partly the reason that I completely failed at school. Now the almost primal fear of staying dumb and a nagging curiosity to gather knowledge, learn and understand, do trump any lack of motivation or boredom. To see how far above you people, here at lesswrong.com, are compared to the average person makes me strive to approximate your wit.
In other words, it’s already enough motivation to know the basics of a programming language like Haskell, when average Joe is hardly self-aware but a mere puppet. I don’t want to be one of them anymore.
If motivation is no longer a problem for you, that could be something really interesting for the akrasia discussions. What changed so that motivation is no longer a problem?
Being an eye witness of your own motives and growing-up is a tough exercise to conclude accurately.
I believe that it would be of no help in the mentioned discussions. It is rather inherent, something neurological.
I grew up in a very religious environment. Any significance, my goals, were mainly set to focus on being a good Christian. Although I assume it never reached my ‘inner self’, I consciously tried to motivate myself to reach this particular goal due to fear of dying. But on a rather unconscious level it never worked, this goal has always been ineffectual.
At the age of 13, my decision to become vegetarian changed everything. With all my heart I came to the conclusion that something is wrong about all the pain and suffering. A sense for human suffering was still effectively dimmed, due to a whole life of indoctrination telling me that our pain is our own fault. But what about the animals? Why would an all-loving God design the universe this way? To cut a long story short, still believing, it made me abandon this God. With the onset of the Internet here in Germany I then learnt that there was nothing to abandon in the first place...I guess I won’t have to go into details here.
Anyway, that was just one of the things that changed. I’m really bad when it comes to social things. Thus I suffered a lot in school, it wasn’t easy. Those problems with other kids, a lack of concentration and that I always found the given explanations counterintuitive and hard to follow, dimmed any motivation to learn more. All these problems rather caused me to associate education with torture, I wanted it to end. Though curiosity was always a part of my character. I’ve probably been the only kid who liked to watch documentations and news at an early age.
Then there is the mental side I mentioned at the beginning. These are probably the most important reasons for all that happened and happens in my life. I got quite a few ticks and psychic problems. When I was a kid I was suffering from Tourette syndrome, which didn’t help in school either. But many other urges are still prevalent. I pretty much have to consciously think about a lot that other people might just do and decide upon unconsciously. Like sleeping, I pretty much have to tell me each time why there are more reasons to sleep now than in favor of further evaluation. Or how, when and about what do I start to think, when do I stop and decide. How do I set the threshold? For me it is inherently very low, the slightest stimulus triggers a high tide of possibilities. Like when you look up some article on Wikipedia, you can click through forever. There is much more...I hope you see what I mean by mental problems.
I could refine the above or go on for long. I will just stop now. You see, my motivation is complex and pretty much based on my mental problems and curiosity. I love playing games, but I cannot push myself to play more than a few minutes. Then there’s this fear and urge to think of what else is there, what I could be missing and what could happen if I just enjoy playing this game. I have to do it...I’m not strong enough not to care. Take this reply as an example, I really had to push myself to answer but also had an urge to write it. It’s a pain. Though now the fear of how much time it takes up and what else I could do grew stronger.
Bottom line is that my motivation is a mixture of curiosity, inclination, mental problems, my youth, relieve, not staying dumb, fear of being wrong again about the nature of reality and so on. Really, the only problem I have with learning programming right now is that there are so many other problems in my head, not my ‘motivation’. I often don’t find the time to read more than one page in a book per day.
I’m sorry if this post sounds a bit confused, not having the best day today. Also just ask if you have further questions. I should probably think about it a bit more thoroughly anyway. But now you have some idea. I hope...
P.S. Another milestone that changed everything was discovering Orion’s Arm. It was so awesome, I just had to learn more. That basicaly led me to get into science, transhumanism and later OB/LW.
Thank you very much for writing this up. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if akrasia has a neurological basis, and I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen any posts really looking at it from that angle. Dopamine?
And on the other hand, your story is also about ideas and circumstances that undercut motivation.
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. —William Blake
I haven’t read up on the akrasia discussions. I don’t believe into intelligence. I believe in efficiency regarding goals stated in advance. It’s all about what we want and how to achieve it. And what we want is merely ‘the line of least resistance’.
Whatever intelligence is, it can’t be intelligent all the way down. It’s just dumb stuff at the bottom. —Andy Clark
The universe really just exists. And it appears to us that it is unfolding because we are part of it. We appear to each other to be free and intelligent because we believe that we are not part of it.
There is a lot of talk here on LW on how to become less wrong. That works. Though it is not a proactive approach but simply trial and error allowed for by the mostly large error tolerance of our existence.
It’s all about practicability, what works. If prayer worked, we’d use it if we wanted to use it.
Narns, Humans, Centauri… we all do what we do for the same reason: because it seems like a good idea at the time. —G’Kar, Babylon 5
Anything you learn on lesswrong.com you’ll have to apply by relying on fundamental non-intelligent processes. You can only hope to be lucky to learn enough in-time to avoid fatal failure. Since no possible system can use advanced heuristics to tackle, or even evaluate, every stimulus. For example, at what point are you going to use Bayesian statistics? You won’t even be able to evaluate the importance of all data to be able to judge when to apply more rigorous tools. You can only be a passive observer who’s waiting for new data by experience. And until new data arrives, rely on prior knowledge.
A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants. —Arthur Schopenhauer
Thus I don’t think that a weakness of will does exist. I also don’t think that you can do anything but your best. What is the right thing to do does always rely on what you want. Never you do something that you do not want. Only in retrospect or on average might we want something else. On that basis we then do conclude that what we have done was wrong and that we knew better. But what really was different at that time was that what we wanted, which changed the truth value of what we, contemplating at present, in retrospect know to be the best to do.
So what is it that can help us dealing with akrasia? Nothing. In future we might be able to strengthen our goals, so that what we want at the time of applying the amplification of our goals is what we’re going to want forever. Or as long as something even stronger shifts our desires again.
If we could deliberately seize control of our pleasure systems, we could reproduce the pleasure of success. That be the end of everything. —Marvin Minsky
I’m happy with how it is right now. I’m very happy that there is what we call akrasia. If there wasn’t, I’d still be religious.