Removal of pressure → removal of counterpressure → collapse of irrationality.
This is precisely what I mean when I say that getting rid of people’s negative motivation to accomplish a goal (i.e., the “I have to do this or else I’m a bad person” motivation) is critical to ending chronic procrastination… and even to remove the sense of “struggling” in a non-procrastinator.
It’s counterintuitive, but true. The hypothesis in my model is that there’s a bug in our cognitive architecture… what I call the “perform-to-prevent” bug.
Our avoidance-motivation system—the “freeze or flight” system, if you will—is not designed to support sustained action, or really take any positive actions at all. It’s designed to make us avoid things, after all! So sustained activation leads to avoidance behaviors (rationalizing, procrastinating) rather than the desired positive action, even though to our logical conscious minds it seems like it should do the opposite. So we push ourselves MORE… which makes things worse!
The only point at which negative motivation works well, is when the threat is imminent enough to feel like the action you’re taking is actually “running away” from the threat. Otherwise, the system seems to want to just “hide and wait for the predator to give up”.
(Of course, what differs from person to person is their internal model of the “threat”, and some people’s threats are other people’s minor annoyances not even worth thinking about. Seligman’s 3 P’s and the Dweck Fixed/Growth mindsets play a big part here as well.)
(EDIT: It occurred to me after posting this that it might not be clear that I’m not comparing Kaj Sotala’s situation to procrastination per se. I’m only using it a s springboard to illustrate how negative motivation—specifically, the kind that draws on lowered personal status/esteem connected with an action—produces counterintuitive and irrational behaviors. Kaj’s situation isn’t the same as procrastination per se, but the diagram Eliezer drew does precisely match the pattern I see in chronic procrastination and its treatment.)
This is precisely what I mean when I say that getting rid of people’s negative motivation to accomplish a goal (i.e., the “I have to do this or else I’m a bad person” motivation) is critical to ending chronic procrastination… and even to remove the sense of “struggling” in a non-procrastinator.
It’s counterintuitive, but true. The hypothesis in my model is that there’s a bug in our cognitive architecture… what I call the “perform-to-prevent” bug.
Our avoidance-motivation system—the “freeze or flight” system, if you will—is not designed to support sustained action, or really take any positive actions at all. It’s designed to make us avoid things, after all! So sustained activation leads to avoidance behaviors (rationalizing, procrastinating) rather than the desired positive action, even though to our logical conscious minds it seems like it should do the opposite. So we push ourselves MORE… which makes things worse!
The only point at which negative motivation works well, is when the threat is imminent enough to feel like the action you’re taking is actually “running away” from the threat. Otherwise, the system seems to want to just “hide and wait for the predator to give up”.
(Of course, what differs from person to person is their internal model of the “threat”, and some people’s threats are other people’s minor annoyances not even worth thinking about. Seligman’s 3 P’s and the Dweck Fixed/Growth mindsets play a big part here as well.)
(EDIT: It occurred to me after posting this that it might not be clear that I’m not comparing Kaj Sotala’s situation to procrastination per se. I’m only using it a s springboard to illustrate how negative motivation—specifically, the kind that draws on lowered personal status/esteem connected with an action—produces counterintuitive and irrational behaviors. Kaj’s situation isn’t the same as procrastination per se, but the diagram Eliezer drew does precisely match the pattern I see in chronic procrastination and its treatment.)