The madman theory angle is “If I don’t respond well to threats of negative outcomes, people (including myself) have no reason to threaten me”. The learned helplessness angle is “I’ve never been able to get good sets of tasks and threats, and trying to figure something out usually leads to more punishment, so why put in any effort?”
Combine the two and you get “Tasks with risks of negative outcomes? Ugh, no.”
With learned helplessness, the standard mechanism for (re)learning agency is being guided through a productive sequence by someone who can ensure the negative outcomes don’t happen, getting more and more control over the sequence each time until you can do it on your own, then adapting it to more and more environments.
Avoiding tasks with possible negative outcomes isn’t really feasible, so getting hands-on help with handling threat of negative consequences seems useful. Probably from a mental coach or psychologist.
The app doesn’t help people who struggle with setting reasonable tasks with reasonable rewards and punishments. Akrasia is an umbrella term for “something somewhere in the chain to actually getting to do things is stopping the process”, so it makes sense that one person’s “solution” to akrasia isn’t going to work for a lot of people.
I think it’s healthy to see these kinds of posts as procedural inspiration. As a reader it’s not about finding something that works for you, it’s about analysing the technique someone used to iterate on their first hint of a good idea until it became something that thoroughly helped them.
That sounds like something a cross between learned helplessness and madman theory.
The madman theory angle is “If I don’t respond well to threats of negative outcomes, people (including myself) have no reason to threaten me”. The learned helplessness angle is “I’ve never been able to get good sets of tasks and threats, and trying to figure something out usually leads to more punishment, so why put in any effort?”
Combine the two and you get “Tasks with risks of negative outcomes? Ugh, no.”
With learned helplessness, the standard mechanism for (re)learning agency is being guided through a productive sequence by someone who can ensure the negative outcomes don’t happen, getting more and more control over the sequence each time until you can do it on your own, then adapting it to more and more environments.
Avoiding tasks with possible negative outcomes isn’t really feasible, so getting hands-on help with handling threat of negative consequences seems useful. Probably from a mental coach or psychologist.
The app doesn’t help people who struggle with setting reasonable tasks with reasonable rewards and punishments. Akrasia is an umbrella term for “something somewhere in the chain to actually getting to do things is stopping the process”, so it makes sense that one person’s “solution” to akrasia isn’t going to work for a lot of people.
I think it’s healthy to see these kinds of posts as procedural inspiration. As a reader it’s not about finding something that works for you, it’s about analysing the technique someone used to iterate on their first hint of a good idea until it became something that thoroughly helped them.