I wonder what distinguishes sphexishness from a simple habit. They’re both unreflective, automatic, default behaviors, and “bad habits” are just habits that fail to achieve goals. But they feel different to me. The best I can come up with is something like: habits are in theory changeable, whereas an actual sphex wasp will never change its behavior based on experience. Habits are acting sphexish.
But we need habits. I’m reminded of this:
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform
without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle --
they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be
made at decisive moments.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
So I think I agree with you about noticing and agency. Agency isn’t the opposite of sphexishness. But it does seem to require choosing when to act so, and that requires noticing when you’re doing it.
(somewhere in my unposted-blog-notes folder is something about noticing that horrible mental loop where I click random links all over the web, no matter how much I’m not-enjoying-myself, because I can’t seem to context-switch. I titled it “Noticing Boredom.”)
Perhaps there is an optimal balance between habits and deliberation.
Too much on the side of habits, and you just keep doing the same behavior over and over again. Not necessarily a bad thing; sometimes you get lucky and the strategy you started with is actually a good one, and can bring you success in life. But you need the luck.
Too much on the side of deliberation, and your clever ideas get undermined by lack of “automated operations” that would keep you moving forward. The result is procrastination; well known among the readers of this website.
And the optimal balance probably depends on your current situation in life. After you achieve some success, you have more choices, and now deliberation probably becomes more useful. But again, there is such thing as too much meta-deliberation; obsessing “exactly how much time should I spend thinking and how much time should I spend working” generates neither useful work nor useful directions for work.
I guess, the more meta, the less time you should give it, unless you already have evidence that the previous level of meta was useful to you. (When you notice that spending some time thinking increases the productivity of the time when you are working, that is the right moment to think about how much time do you actually want to spend planning.) Also, meta decisions take time to bring fruit at the object level, so when you make plans, you should spend the following days executing the plans instead of adjusting them; otherwise you decide without feedback.
Also, meta decisions take time to bring fruit at the object level, so when you make plans, you should spend the following days executing the plans instead of adjusting them; otherwise you decide without feedback.
Execution is Actual Work, though! Noooooooooooooooo!
(I’m adding that to my fortune file. I could use the reminder from time to time.)
Thank you for bringing this up—it’s a comparison that doesn’t resonate with me. I suspect that “sphexishness” is a different modeling layer than “agency”, so a direct comparison is confusing. More importantly, it’s assumed without explanation that one is bad and one is good.
For some reason, nobody’s talking about the amazing success of the Sphex wasps, and looking for ways to ensure successful behavior without everyone having to model reality individually. And we don’t talk (much) about the horror of bad choices, and how all suffering is caused by agency.
I wonder what distinguishes sphexishness from a simple habit. They’re both unreflective, automatic, default behaviors, and “bad habits” are just habits that fail to achieve goals. But they feel different to me. The best I can come up with is something like: habits are in theory changeable, whereas an actual sphex wasp will never change its behavior based on experience. Habits are acting sphexish.
But we need habits. I’m reminded of this:
So I think I agree with you about noticing and agency. Agency isn’t the opposite of sphexishness. But it does seem to require choosing when to act so, and that requires noticing when you’re doing it.
(somewhere in my unposted-blog-notes folder is something about noticing that horrible mental loop where I click random links all over the web, no matter how much I’m not-enjoying-myself, because I can’t seem to context-switch. I titled it “Noticing Boredom.”)
Perhaps there is an optimal balance between habits and deliberation.
Too much on the side of habits, and you just keep doing the same behavior over and over again. Not necessarily a bad thing; sometimes you get lucky and the strategy you started with is actually a good one, and can bring you success in life. But you need the luck.
Too much on the side of deliberation, and your clever ideas get undermined by lack of “automated operations” that would keep you moving forward. The result is procrastination; well known among the readers of this website.
And the optimal balance probably depends on your current situation in life. After you achieve some success, you have more choices, and now deliberation probably becomes more useful. But again, there is such thing as too much meta-deliberation; obsessing “exactly how much time should I spend thinking and how much time should I spend working” generates neither useful work nor useful directions for work.
I guess, the more meta, the less time you should give it, unless you already have evidence that the previous level of meta was useful to you. (When you notice that spending some time thinking increases the productivity of the time when you are working, that is the right moment to think about how much time do you actually want to spend planning.) Also, meta decisions take time to bring fruit at the object level, so when you make plans, you should spend the following days executing the plans instead of adjusting them; otherwise you decide without feedback.
Execution is Actual Work, though! Noooooooooooooooo!
(I’m adding that to my fortune file. I could use the reminder from time to time.)
Thank you for bringing this up—it’s a comparison that doesn’t resonate with me. I suspect that “sphexishness” is a different modeling layer than “agency”, so a direct comparison is confusing. More importantly, it’s assumed without explanation that one is bad and one is good.
For some reason, nobody’s talking about the amazing success of the Sphex wasps, and looking for ways to ensure successful behavior without everyone having to model reality individually. And we don’t talk (much) about the horror of bad choices, and how all suffering is caused by agency.