Possible explanations for opportunity costs of feeling too exhausted to do anything at all:
a) The best action you should be doing now is to sleep or at least to take a nap, so your brain would process the information it has now and prepare itself for new information.
b) You are censoring the best action from your thoughts because it does not fit your idea of what you should be doing now. For example you feel that you should work on your personal projects, but your brain thinks you should drink some beer with your friends. When you say you are too exhausted to do anything, you are actually lying, because you are not too exhausted to drink beer with your friends; it is merely outside of your set of acceptable answers.
c) Your brain is wrong. For reasons that might make sense living in a jungle millenia ago, your brain is convinced that you should do X, which in reality is not an option, or is a bad option. All meaningful options are penalized because your brain insists that you should do X instead.
For example, if your job made you too exhausted, your brain may think the best action is to prevent going to the same job tomorrow. Which may be not realistic, or merely not what you want to think about.
a) The best action you should be doing now is to sleep or at least to take a nap, so your brain would process the information it has now and prepare itself for new information
I don’t think this is how Kurzban’s model would explain it. In Kurzban’s model, the “feeling of exhaustion” stems from one or more monitoring mechanisms causing aversive states (in response to trying to decide what to do). The monitoring mechanisms aren’t causing the feeling of exhaustion so that you’ll feel sleepy—they are just voting by causing aversive states, and Kaj_Sotala happens to interpret that feeling of the aversive states with the word “exhaustion” (which has certain unhelpful connotations and I think should be taboo’d in favor of “aversive state feelings”).
c) Your brain is wrong. For reasons that might make sense living in a jungle millenia ago, your brain is convinced that you should do X, which in reality is not an option, or is a bad option. All meaningful options are penalized because your brain insists that you should do X instead.
For example, if your job made you too exhausted, your brain may think the best action is to prevent going to the same job tomorrow. Which may be not realistic, or merely not what you want to think about.
I also don’t think this applies the model correctly. The feeling of exhaustion would need to stem from aversive states from monitoring mechanisms that are working at the moment you get back from work and are deciding what to do next. Returning to work the next day is a very distant action, relative to all the activities your brain would be thinking about doing at that moment.
b) You are censoring the best action from your thoughts because it does not fit your idea of what you should be doing now. For example you feel that you should work on your personal projects, but your brain thinks you should drink some beer with your friends. When you say you are too exhausted to do anything, you are actually lying, because you are not too exhausted to drink beer with your friends; it is merely outside of your set of acceptable answers.
I think this is more how Kurzban’s model would explain this situation. The bad feeling (which Kaj calls “exhaustion”) would need to come from multiple monitoring mechanisms returning aversive states for evaluating various possible next actions (in this case, maybe working on projects, watching tv, browsing the internet, practicing, or studying).
It could be that there is no strong winner (so Kaj ends up feeling just the aversive states but not a clear idea of what to do next and has to spend more time feeling that exhaustion before a clear winner emerges). In this model, I think it would be possible for no strong winner to emerge even when there are immediately gratifying activities due to some monitoring mechanisms paying attention to some sort of executive function-centered value system (like “I should feel bad for doing ”). If that were the case, I would think Kaj might feel a sort of “oscillation” between deciding to do something instantly gratifying (which is generally a quick judgement for a brain to make) but then deciding not to after the executive function/value system evaluation results are returned (which I think generally takes longer to get a result from).
It could also be that Kaj’s brain did actually reach a conclusion on what to do next, but either wasn’t introspective enough to figure out what that was and put it into words or they meant the phrase “not doing anything at all” to be a catch-all for some unproductive but instantly gratifying action.
W.r.t. this seeming to occur after “a long day at work”, I’m not really clear what is meant by “a long day”.
The monitoring mechanisms aren’t causing the feeling of exhaustion so that you’ll feel sleepy—they are just voting by causing aversive states
Thank you, this distinction between “feeling sleepy as a mechanism to get more sleep” and “feeling sleepy as a crude mechanism to just stop doing whatever you are doing now” seems very useful! So I should generally treat sleepiness as a signal which means “stop doing what you are doing”, without necessarily meaning ”...and get some sleep”.
Although a short rest or nap would probably not be harmful, because it does stop doing what I was doing, and provides me a time to reflect on my next actions. Short meditation would help too.
Still, not quite. Basically, what Kurzban is saying is that that bad feeling that people attribute to “mental fatigue” is really just a residual feeling left over from the aversive-state votes of the monitoring mechanisms. It’s not actually a way for your brain to try to communicate to you, at a conscious level, that you should do something different. You feeling that bad feeling is just a side-effect of that decision making process taking place (or, a decision that has already taken place). And, if I understand correctly, you’ll feel that bad feeling more strongly when the votes from the monitoring mechanisms are more negative (which is why it generally feels harder to do things that are less immediately rewarding). If you are actually feeling like you need to sleep, though, I think that is a feeling that is actually not a part of this model.
I agree with your comment but it would be a lot better if you could say “Part of you thinks X and part of you thinks Y”, instead of “You think X and your brain thinks Y”.
a) The best action you should be doing now is to sleep or at least to take a nap, so your brain would process the information it has now and prepare itself for new information.
This is actually a resource model type argument. Required sleep (or rather amount of wakeful time) is a limited resource which is depleeted by staging awake. It is not depleted or refilled linearly but a resource it is still.
Here is an experiment with different predictions for the models:
Imagine a person doing some work for 8 hours. Based on experience from previous days, you know that if they get home, they will be “too exhausted to do anything”. However, you ask them to stay and continue doing the same work for next 2 hours. As a reward, they will be allowed to leave the work 3 hours sooner tomorrow. (Let’s suppose their time is fungible; i.e. they have nothing scheduled specifically for today evening).
Resource model: The person will not be able to work anymore, because their mental resources are depleted.
Opportunity cost model: The person will be able to continue to work, because this is the best option they have now.
(Keeping doing what they did would be the best choice; taking a nap and doing something else would be the next best choice; trying to switch to something completely different without taking the nap would be the worst choice.)
I can tell you that I have worked definitely at my ‘resource’ limit a lot of times the last months and it definitely wasn’t due to insufficient motivation but to plain exhaustion.
Actually when the motivation for the main task subsided I’d temporarily switch to a more rewarding intermediate task like lesswrong, thus the opportunity model itsn’t wrong either.
But there comes a time when Isshoukenmei takes its toll. When you have to realize that your concentration is slipping after 14 hours and all further effort nearly ruins previous work.
But I have to agree that this amount of exhaustion is seldom nowadays and in your example of the ‘exhausting’ 8 hour work-day the ‘exhaustion’ most likely is from dissatisfaction, lack of reward or misapplication of pressure.
Possible explanations for opportunity costs of feeling too exhausted to do anything at all:
a) The best action you should be doing now is to sleep or at least to take a nap, so your brain would process the information it has now and prepare itself for new information.
b) You are censoring the best action from your thoughts because it does not fit your idea of what you should be doing now. For example you feel that you should work on your personal projects, but your brain thinks you should drink some beer with your friends. When you say you are too exhausted to do anything, you are actually lying, because you are not too exhausted to drink beer with your friends; it is merely outside of your set of acceptable answers.
c) Your brain is wrong. For reasons that might make sense living in a jungle millenia ago, your brain is convinced that you should do X, which in reality is not an option, or is a bad option. All meaningful options are penalized because your brain insists that you should do X instead.
For example, if your job made you too exhausted, your brain may think the best action is to prevent going to the same job tomorrow. Which may be not realistic, or merely not what you want to think about.
I don’t think this is how Kurzban’s model would explain it. In Kurzban’s model, the “feeling of exhaustion” stems from one or more monitoring mechanisms causing aversive states (in response to trying to decide what to do). The monitoring mechanisms aren’t causing the feeling of exhaustion so that you’ll feel sleepy—they are just voting by causing aversive states, and Kaj_Sotala happens to interpret that feeling of the aversive states with the word “exhaustion” (which has certain unhelpful connotations and I think should be taboo’d in favor of “aversive state feelings”).
I also don’t think this applies the model correctly. The feeling of exhaustion would need to stem from aversive states from monitoring mechanisms that are working at the moment you get back from work and are deciding what to do next. Returning to work the next day is a very distant action, relative to all the activities your brain would be thinking about doing at that moment.
I think this is more how Kurzban’s model would explain this situation. The bad feeling (which Kaj calls “exhaustion”) would need to come from multiple monitoring mechanisms returning aversive states for evaluating various possible next actions (in this case, maybe working on projects, watching tv, browsing the internet, practicing, or studying).
It could be that there is no strong winner (so Kaj ends up feeling just the aversive states but not a clear idea of what to do next and has to spend more time feeling that exhaustion before a clear winner emerges). In this model, I think it would be possible for no strong winner to emerge even when there are immediately gratifying activities due to some monitoring mechanisms paying attention to some sort of executive function-centered value system (like “I should feel bad for doing ”). If that were the case, I would think Kaj might feel a sort of “oscillation” between deciding to do something instantly gratifying (which is generally a quick judgement for a brain to make) but then deciding not to after the executive function/value system evaluation results are returned (which I think generally takes longer to get a result from).
It could also be that Kaj’s brain did actually reach a conclusion on what to do next, but either wasn’t introspective enough to figure out what that was and put it into words or they meant the phrase “not doing anything at all” to be a catch-all for some unproductive but instantly gratifying action.
W.r.t. this seeming to occur after “a long day at work”, I’m not really clear what is meant by “a long day”.
Great comment!
Thank you, this distinction between “feeling sleepy as a mechanism to get more sleep” and “feeling sleepy as a crude mechanism to just stop doing whatever you are doing now” seems very useful! So I should generally treat sleepiness as a signal which means “stop doing what you are doing”, without necessarily meaning ”...and get some sleep”.
Although a short rest or nap would probably not be harmful, because it does stop doing what I was doing, and provides me a time to reflect on my next actions. Short meditation would help too.
Still, not quite. Basically, what Kurzban is saying is that that bad feeling that people attribute to “mental fatigue” is really just a residual feeling left over from the aversive-state votes of the monitoring mechanisms. It’s not actually a way for your brain to try to communicate to you, at a conscious level, that you should do something different. You feeling that bad feeling is just a side-effect of that decision making process taking place (or, a decision that has already taken place). And, if I understand correctly, you’ll feel that bad feeling more strongly when the votes from the monitoring mechanisms are more negative (which is why it generally feels harder to do things that are less immediately rewarding). If you are actually feeling like you need to sleep, though, I think that is a feeling that is actually not a part of this model.
I agree with your comment but it would be a lot better if you could say “Part of you thinks X and part of you thinks Y”, instead of “You think X and your brain thinks Y”.
This is actually a resource model type argument. Required sleep (or rather amount of wakeful time) is a limited resource which is depleeted by staging awake. It is not depleted or refilled linearly but a resource it is still.
Here is an experiment with different predictions for the models:
Imagine a person doing some work for 8 hours. Based on experience from previous days, you know that if they get home, they will be “too exhausted to do anything”. However, you ask them to stay and continue doing the same work for next 2 hours. As a reward, they will be allowed to leave the work 3 hours sooner tomorrow. (Let’s suppose their time is fungible; i.e. they have nothing scheduled specifically for today evening).
Resource model: The person will not be able to work anymore, because their mental resources are depleted.
Opportunity cost model: The person will be able to continue to work, because this is the best option they have now.
(Keeping doing what they did would be the best choice; taking a nap and doing something else would be the next best choice; trying to switch to something completely different without taking the nap would be the worst choice.)
I can tell you that I have worked definitely at my ‘resource’ limit a lot of times the last months and it definitely wasn’t due to insufficient motivation but to plain exhaustion.
Actually when the motivation for the main task subsided I’d temporarily switch to a more rewarding intermediate task like lesswrong, thus the opportunity model itsn’t wrong either.
But there comes a time when Isshoukenmei takes its toll. When you have to realize that your concentration is slipping after 14 hours and all further effort nearly ruins previous work.
But I have to agree that this amount of exhaustion is seldom nowadays and in your example of the ‘exhausting’ 8 hour work-day the ‘exhaustion’ most likely is from dissatisfaction, lack of reward or misapplication of pressure.