1) There was this famous marshmallow experiment, where the kids had an option to eat one marshmallow (physically present on the table) right now, or two of them later, if they waited for 15 minutes. The scientists found out that the kids who waited for the two marshmallows were later more successful in life. The standard conclusion was that if you want to live well, you should learn some strategy to delay gratification.
(A less known result is that the optimal strategy to get two marshmallows was to stop thinking about marshmallows at all. Kids who focused on how awesome it would be to get two marshmallows after resisting the temptation, were less successful at actually resisting the temptation compared to the kids who distracted themselves in order to forget about the marshmallows—the one that was there and the hypothetical two in the future—completely, e.g. they just closed their eyes and took a nap. Ironically, when someone gives you a lecture about the marshmallow experiment, closing your eyes and taking a nap is almost certainly not what they want you to do.)
After the original experiment, some people challenged the naive interpretation. They pointed out that whether delaying gratification actually improves your life, depends on your environment. Specifically, if someone tells you that giving up a marshmallow now will let you have two in the future… how much should you trust their word? Maybe your experience is that after trusting someone and giving up the marshmallow in front of you, you later get… a reputation of being an easy mark. In such case, grabbing the marshmallow and ignoring the talk is the right move. -- And the correlation the scientists found? Yeah, sure, people who can delay gratification and happen to live in an environment that rewards such behavior, will suceed in life more than people who live in an environment that punishes trust and long-term thinking, duh.
Later experiments showed that when the experimenter establishes themselves as an untrustworthy person before the experiment, fewer kids resist taking the marshmallow. (Duh. But the point is that their previous lives outside the experiment have also shaped their expectations about trust.) The lesson is that our adaptation is more complex than was originally thought: the ability to delay gratification depends on the nature of the environment we find ourselves in. For reasons that make sense, from the evolutionary perspective.
2) Readers of Less Wrong often report having problems with procrastination. Also, many provide an example when they realized at young age, on a deep level, that adults are unreliable and institutions are incompetent.
I wonder if there might be a connection here. Something like: realizing the profound abyss between how our civilization is, and how it could be, is a superstimulus that switches your brain permanently into “we are doomed, eat all your marshmallows now” mode.
This seems likely to me, although I’m not sure “superstimulus” is the right word for this observation.
It certainly does make sense that people who are inclined to notice the general level of incompetence in our society, will be less inclined to trust it and rely on it for the future
1) There was this famous marshmallow experiment, where the kids had an option to eat one marshmallow (physically present on the table) right now, or two of them later, if they waited for 15 minutes. The scientists found out that the kids who waited for the two marshmallows were later more successful in life. The standard conclusion was that if you want to live well, you should learn some strategy to delay gratification.
(A less known result is that the optimal strategy to get two marshmallows was to stop thinking about marshmallows at all. Kids who focused on how awesome it would be to get two marshmallows after resisting the temptation, were less successful at actually resisting the temptation compared to the kids who distracted themselves in order to forget about the marshmallows—the one that was there and the hypothetical two in the future—completely, e.g. they just closed their eyes and took a nap. Ironically, when someone gives you a lecture about the marshmallow experiment, closing your eyes and taking a nap is almost certainly not what they want you to do.)
After the original experiment, some people challenged the naive interpretation. They pointed out that whether delaying gratification actually improves your life, depends on your environment. Specifically, if someone tells you that giving up a marshmallow now will let you have two in the future… how much should you trust their word? Maybe your experience is that after trusting someone and giving up the marshmallow in front of you, you later get… a reputation of being an easy mark. In such case, grabbing the marshmallow and ignoring the talk is the right move. -- And the correlation the scientists found? Yeah, sure, people who can delay gratification and happen to live in an environment that rewards such behavior, will suceed in life more than people who live in an environment that punishes trust and long-term thinking, duh.
Later experiments showed that when the experimenter establishes themselves as an untrustworthy person before the experiment, fewer kids resist taking the marshmallow. (Duh. But the point is that their previous lives outside the experiment have also shaped their expectations about trust.) The lesson is that our adaptation is more complex than was originally thought: the ability to delay gratification depends on the nature of the environment we find ourselves in. For reasons that make sense, from the evolutionary perspective.
2) Readers of Less Wrong often report having problems with procrastination. Also, many provide an example when they realized at young age, on a deep level, that adults are unreliable and institutions are incompetent.
I wonder if there might be a connection here. Something like: realizing the profound abyss between how our civilization is, and how it could be, is a superstimulus that switches your brain permanently into “we are doomed, eat all your marshmallows now” mode.
This seems likely to me, although I’m not sure “superstimulus” is the right word for this observation.
It certainly does make sense that people who are inclined to notice the general level of incompetence in our society, will be less inclined to trust it and rely on it for the future