He points to this recent meta-analysis that finds pretty clearly that most people find mental effort unpleasant. I suspect that this will be unsurprising to many people around here, and I also suspect that some here will be very surprised due to typical mind fallacy.
It’s no longer possible to consistently identify AI writing, despite most people thinking that they can; I’ll quote a key paragraph with some links below, but see the post for details. I’m reminded of the great ‘can you tell if audio files are compressed?’ debates, where nearly everyone thought that they could but blind testing proved they couldn’t (if they were compressed at a decent bitrate).
I guess this depends on typical circumstances of the mental effort. If your typical case of mental effort is solving puzzles and playing computer games, you will find mental effort pleasant. If instead your typical case is something like “a teacher tells me to solve a difficult problem in a stressful situation, and if I fail, I will be punished”, you will find mental effort unpleasant. Not only in given situation, but you will generally associate thinking with pleasant or unpleasant experience.
Yes, the important lesson is that some people find thinking intrinsically rewarding (solving the problem is a sufficient reward for the effort), but many don’t, and need some external motivation, or at least to have the situation strongly reframed as “hey, we are just playing, this is definitely not work” (which probably only works for sufficiently simple tasks).
If your typical case of mental effort is solving puzzles and playing computer games, you will find mental effort pleasant. If instead your typical case is something like “a teacher tells me to solve a difficult problem in a stressful situation, and if I fail, I will be punished”, you will find mental effort unpleasant.
I’m somewhat doubtful that this is the main moderator. The meta-analysis codes the included studies according to whether ‘the participants’ task behavior either affected other people or affected some real-world outcome’. Only 14 of the studies were like that; of the rest, 148 were ‘simulations or training situations’ and the remaining 188 were low-significance, ie there was nothing at stake. I would guess that many of them were game-like. That significance difference had nearly no effect (−0.03, 95% CI [−0.27, 0.21]) on how aversive participants found the task.
That doesn’t rule out your second suggestion, that people find mental effort unpleasant if they’ve associated it over time with stressful and consequential situations, but it’s evidence against that being a factor for the particular task.
It does very much depend on the person, though (‘a well-established line of research shows that people vary in their need for cognition, that is, their “tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors”’). I suspect that the large majority of LessWrong participants are people who enjoy mental effort.
Hmmm… “simulations or training situations” doesn’t necessarily sound like fun. I wish someone also did the experiment in a situation optimized to be fun. Or did the experiment with kids, who are probably easier to motivate about something (just design a puzzle involving dinosaurs or something, and show them some funny dinosaur cartoons first) and have been less mentally damaged by school and work.
Generally, comparing kids vs adults could be interesting, although it is difficult to say what would be an equivalent mental effort. Specifically I am curious about the impact of school. Oh, we should also compare homeschooled kids vs kids in school, to separate the effects of school and age.
I think an intelligence will probably also be associated; a more intelligent person is more successful at mental effort and therefore probably more often rewarded.
“simulations or training situations” doesn’t necessarily sound like fun.
Seems like some would be and some wouldn’t. Although those are the ‘medium significance’ ones; the largest category is the 188 that used ‘low significance’ tasks. Still doesn’t map exactly to ‘fun’, but I expect those ones are at least very low stress.
Generally, comparing kids vs adults could be interesting, although it is difficult to say what would be an equivalent mental effort. Specifically I am curious about the impact of school. Oh, we should also compare homeschooled kids vs kids in school, to separate the effects of school and age.
That would definitely be interesting; it wouldn’t surprise me if at least a couple of the studies in the meta-analysis did that.
Two interesting things from this recent Ethan Mollick post:
He points to this recent meta-analysis that finds pretty clearly that most people find mental effort unpleasant. I suspect that this will be unsurprising to many people around here, and I also suspect that some here will be very surprised due to typical mind fallacy.
It’s no longer possible to consistently identify AI writing, despite most people thinking that they can; I’ll quote a key paragraph with some links below, but see the post for details. I’m reminded of the great ‘can you tell if audio files are compressed?’ debates, where nearly everyone thought that they could but blind testing proved they couldn’t (if they were compressed at a decent bitrate).
I guess this depends on typical circumstances of the mental effort. If your typical case of mental effort is solving puzzles and playing computer games, you will find mental effort pleasant. If instead your typical case is something like “a teacher tells me to solve a difficult problem in a stressful situation, and if I fail, I will be punished”, you will find mental effort unpleasant. Not only in given situation, but you will generally associate thinking with pleasant or unpleasant experience.
Yes, the important lesson is that some people find thinking intrinsically rewarding (solving the problem is a sufficient reward for the effort), but many don’t, and need some external motivation, or at least to have the situation strongly reframed as “hey, we are just playing, this is definitely not work” (which probably only works for sufficiently simple tasks).
I’m somewhat doubtful that this is the main moderator. The meta-analysis codes the included studies according to whether ‘the participants’ task behavior either affected other people or affected some real-world outcome’. Only 14 of the studies were like that; of the rest, 148 were ‘simulations or training situations’ and the remaining 188 were low-significance, ie there was nothing at stake. I would guess that many of them were game-like. That significance difference had nearly no effect (−0.03, 95% CI [−0.27, 0.21]) on how aversive participants found the task.
That doesn’t rule out your second suggestion, that people find mental effort unpleasant if they’ve associated it over time with stressful and consequential situations, but it’s evidence against that being a factor for the particular task.
It does very much depend on the person, though (‘a well-established line of research shows that people vary in their need for cognition, that is, their “tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors”’). I suspect that the large majority of LessWrong participants are people who enjoy mental effort.
Hmmm… “simulations or training situations” doesn’t necessarily sound like fun. I wish someone also did the experiment in a situation optimized to be fun. Or did the experiment with kids, who are probably easier to motivate about something (just design a puzzle involving dinosaurs or something, and show them some funny dinosaur cartoons first) and have been less mentally damaged by school and work.
Generally, comparing kids vs adults could be interesting, although it is difficult to say what would be an equivalent mental effort. Specifically I am curious about the impact of school. Oh, we should also compare homeschooled kids vs kids in school, to separate the effects of school and age.
I think an intelligence will probably also be associated; a more intelligent person is more successful at mental effort and therefore probably more often rewarded.
Seems like some would be and some wouldn’t. Although those are the ‘medium significance’ ones; the largest category is the 188 that used ‘low significance’ tasks. Still doesn’t map exactly to ‘fun’, but I expect those ones are at least very low stress.
That would definitely be interesting; it wouldn’t surprise me if at least a couple of the studies in the meta-analysis did that.