Just for the record, ‘akrasia’ is a stupid word. It fails to carve reality at its joints. It’s dangerous to reify the lack of something, mostly because it’s hard to catch subtle lack of reflectivity about that lack of something in the midst of more complex lines of reasoning. I’m reflective enough at the moment to know that my previous sentence was not an ironic example, but I can’t trust myself to always be reflective enough when e.g. my thoughts are bent by affective bias, so in general I avoid ‘stupid’ words like ‘akrasia’ unless I am making conscious effort to be careful about reflectivity over concept clarification. Also, rationalists who are less experienced than me would probably still do it wrong even if they were being consciously reflective about it, so they should never use words like ‘akrasia’.
I’d rather get a really solid framework for reasoning about ‘dispositional skill’ before I talk about ‘akrasia’ in particular; this will take a few months of hard work by me and others. We’re currently doing a large-scale literature review before we start playing around with our own unifying theories, and the review/learning process should take a month or more. A lot of it will involve talking to domain experts, et cetera.
Just for the record, ‘akrasia’ is a stupid word. It fails to carve reality at its joints. It’s dangerous to reify the lack of something, mostly because it’s hard to catch subtle lack of reflectivity about that lack of something in the midst of more complex lines of reasoning. I’m reflective enough at the moment to know that my previous sentence was not an ironic example, but I can’t trust myself to always be reflective enough when e.g. my thoughts are bent by affective bias, so in general I avoid ‘stupid’ words like ‘akrasia’ unless I am making conscious effort to be careful about reflectivity over concept clarification. Also, rationalists who are less experienced than me would probably still do it wrong even if they were being consciously reflective about it, so they should never use words like ‘akrasia’.
Could you expand on your ideas for better ways to talk about difficulties with taking action?
I’d rather get a really solid framework for reasoning about ‘dispositional skill’ before I talk about ‘akrasia’ in particular; this will take a few months of hard work by me and others. We’re currently doing a large-scale literature review before we start playing around with our own unifying theories, and the review/learning process should take a month or more. A lot of it will involve talking to domain experts, et cetera.