Are there any scientific comparative studies on the effectiveness
of various existing methods?
For me, a to-do lists/GTD-inspired approach works well, and has
improved my productivity quite a bit. I have no idea how this
works out in the brain, but maybe it’s about adding one more
force to some weighted average which determines one’s
actions. But I suspect this is all at the psychological level,
far away from neurons and synapses.
Likely, there’s also some evolutionary angle to this—but can we
distinguish something that merely sounds plausible from something
that is true? Do we have some testable prediction?
My pet hypothesis is that akrasia was adaptive for ancestors who did not want to waste too many resources on an idea that may or may not work. Overall, it seems better to continually “refresh” your list of goals, and sometimes the future refresh is not as rationally calibrated or clashes with the former or future refresh states.
How do we test it? Gee. You’ve got me. I’m posting this because I hope a person more creative than me might have an idea.
Indeed… that is a bit of a weak point of evolutionary psychology; it’s likely that quite some behaviours have an evolutionary background, but it’s very hard to proof—and in quite some cases, you could ‘proof’ opposite conclusions; as Chomsky said:
“You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ’Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.”
This is not to say that EP is wrong, just that things are hard to proof. E.g., compared to biological evolution, there are no fossils of ancient behaviours or intermediate forms and so on.
“Fossils of ancient behaviors” is brilliant. I can’t believe I never thought about that, great example.
I’m going to drift a little offtrack for a moment, but I don’t expect it to go too off topic. I’ve read in Wired that they’re working on altering the genome of chickens by looking at specific DNA markers and trying to revert them to be more like their reptilian ancestor. I can see technology progressing so that we can use computers to look at possible previous genomes of humans and what kind of psychologies the genome could create.… The only problem here is the complex interactions between humans and the environment, but it would be a great leap forward for evo-psych I think.
Are there any scientific comparative studies on the effectiveness of various existing methods?
For me, a to-do lists/GTD-inspired approach works well, and has improved my productivity quite a bit. I have no idea how this works out in the brain, but maybe it’s about adding one more force to some weighted average which determines one’s actions. But I suspect this is all at the psychological level, far away from neurons and synapses.
Likely, there’s also some evolutionary angle to this—but can we distinguish something that merely sounds plausible from something that is true? Do we have some testable prediction?
My pet hypothesis is that akrasia was adaptive for ancestors who did not want to waste too many resources on an idea that may or may not work. Overall, it seems better to continually “refresh” your list of goals, and sometimes the future refresh is not as rationally calibrated or clashes with the former or future refresh states.
How do we test it? Gee. You’ve got me. I’m posting this because I hope a person more creative than me might have an idea.
Indeed… that is a bit of a weak point of evolutionary psychology; it’s likely that quite some behaviours have an evolutionary background, but it’s very hard to proof—and in quite some cases, you could ‘proof’ opposite conclusions; as Chomsky said:
This is not to say that EP is wrong, just that things are hard to proof. E.g., compared to biological evolution, there are no fossils of ancient behaviours or intermediate forms and so on.
“Fossils of ancient behaviors” is brilliant. I can’t believe I never thought about that, great example.
I’m going to drift a little offtrack for a moment, but I don’t expect it to go too off topic. I’ve read in Wired that they’re working on altering the genome of chickens by looking at specific DNA markers and trying to revert them to be more like their reptilian ancestor. I can see technology progressing so that we can use computers to look at possible previous genomes of humans and what kind of psychologies the genome could create.… The only problem here is the complex interactions between humans and the environment, but it would be a great leap forward for evo-psych I think.