I’ve said it elsewhere, but wringing your hands and crying “it’s because of my akrasia!” is definitely not rational behavior; if anything, rationalists should be better at dealing with akrasia. What good is a plan if you can’t execute it? It is like a program without a compiler.
Your brain is part of the world. Failing to navigate around akrasia is epistemic failure.
While you’re technically correct, I’d say it’s still a little unfair (in the sense of connoting “haha you call yourself a rationalist how come you’re failing at akrasia”).
Two assumptions that can, I think you’ll agree, take away from the force of “akrasia is epistemic failure”:
if modeling and solving akrasia is, like diet, a hard problem that even “experts” barely have an edge on, and importantly, things that do work seem to be very individual-specific making it quite hard to stand on the shoulders of giants
if a large percentage of people who’ve found and read through the sequences etc have done so only because they had very important deadlines to procrastinate
...then on average you’d see akrasia over-represented in rationalists. Add to this the fact that akrasia itself makes manually aiming your rationality skills at what you want harder. That can leave it stable even under very persistent efforts.
I’ve said it elsewhere, but wringing your hands and crying “it’s because of my akrasia!” is definitely not rational behavior; if anything, rationalists should be better at dealing with akrasia. What good is a plan if you can’t execute it? It is like a program without a compiler.
Your brain is part of the world. Failing to navigate around akrasia is epistemic failure.
While you’re technically correct, I’d say it’s still a little unfair (in the sense of connoting “haha you call yourself a rationalist how come you’re failing at akrasia”).
Two assumptions that can, I think you’ll agree, take away from the force of “akrasia is epistemic failure”:
if modeling and solving akrasia is, like diet, a hard problem that even “experts” barely have an edge on, and importantly, things that do work seem to be very individual-specific making it quite hard to stand on the shoulders of giants
if a large percentage of people who’ve found and read through the sequences etc have done so only because they had very important deadlines to procrastinate
...then on average you’d see akrasia over-represented in rationalists. Add to this the fact that akrasia itself makes manually aiming your rationality skills at what you want harder. That can leave it stable even under very persistent efforts.
That’s irrelevant to the question of whether interventions such as reading the sequences or going to a CFAR workshop improve peoples outcomes.
It’s useful for this discussion to see “rationalist self improvement” as being about the current techniques instead of playing motte-and-bailey.