I don’t know if many of you guys realize, but this whole pledging-money-to-get-motivated business is a very upper-middle-class thing to do.
Dahlen, while I opposed some specific details in your exhortation I support your sentiment and intent. I can see that you are intuitively in touch with a social group that some of us may be less familiar with. You seem to have some knowledge of what motivates that group effectively. I’m sincerely interested in what you suggest is the optimal way for the archetypical person from that lower income class to increase their motivation and self control. Is there another tactic that works well for people in that reference class that is neglected in lesswrong culture? Please share.
Heh, well, it may be that people in the poorer stratum of society have a lower chance to possess herculean self-control in the first place; good motivation and self-control, after all, do propel people from poverty in places with some social mobility.
First off, the subgroup we’re considering—that fraction of poor people who want to increase their motivation and self-control—may not really be common or representative. It certainly seems to be predominantly a struggle of people from the middle and upper classes. I’m not really sure very poor people have the conditions for wanting to be more productive but failing to modify their behavior accordingly. That requires some sort of infrastructure to ensure your comfort while you fail at your goal of becoming motivated. Perhaps other people (e.g. parents) affording to support you, or a cushy job that sometimes pays you to play Solitaire and check Facebook… If you’re really poor and seek motivation, you generally only need to look around you, notice your shitty living conditions. Or you could just not seek motivation and remain complacent (which happens, a lot). But it’s hardly possible to seek it and be unable to find it. It’s only a little higher up the income scale, at the lower middle level, that it becomes easier to procrastinate comfortably.
Procrastination is still mostly an individual problem, and the solutions need to be tailored to a particular individual’s reasons for procrastinating; it’s just that, as with all things, fancier solutions become available as income raises. When all you own is your body and perhaps some tools or a plot of land, the path to productivity is a strong work ethic. (That is how virtually all my family views this issue, and my mom’s basically the living example of work ethic. The only person in my family that has heard of Pomodoros and thinks about productivity like us at LW lives in a big, fancy house in a nice residential area in the heart of the city.)
(The following is not necessarily related to motivation, but is relevant to the previous discussion about money.) It may also be worth noting that restraint in spending money is usually vital to climbing into the middle class (you’ll never get to save enough for a nice place to live if you blow all your money on stupid shit the first time it falls into your hands), and that there are class-specific ways of conceptualizing money in the first place. (I remember RibbonFarm having a nice article about this.) When you’re not rich, money is strictly something you get for working. It’s never ever something you have to spend to work more. An investment had better be damn obvious to be registered as such. That’s why I said it was a very upper-middle-class thing to do, to risk money to get motivated.
It’s also very common for people at the lower-middle income lever and lower to attend their financial needs before lofty stuff like self-improvement for its own sake. A worthy endeavour is one that gets you more money at the same time, or improves your earning capacity. (Example: after high school I wanted to take a gap year to dedicate it to learning what I want, at a self-imposed pace, but that decision got vetoed by my parents; they thought it was high time for me to prepare for entering the workforce, and worried about no longer being able to support me.)
Hopefully this answer is satisfactory; I wish I could say akrasia is a solved problem for me, but it isn’t, so my answer was more on the descriptive side, rather than the normative. I can’t speak as an authority on this, just as an observation point placed in the middle of a certain kind of crowd.
When all you own is your body and perhaps some tools or a plot of land, the path to productivity is a strong work ethic. (That is how virtually all my family views this issue, and my mom’s basically the living example of work ethic)
But your mother also seems to be the living example of a poor person.
A lot of poor people with a good work ethic work in a way that’s quite taxing but that’s not the most effective way to spend their time to get ahead.
I think the average person on lesswrong has the knowledge and intelligence to double their salary in a year if akrasia would be no issue.
It’s also very common for people at the lower-middle income lever and lower to attend their financial needs before lofty stuff like self-improvement for its own sake.
I don’t see where you get the notion that the kind of self-improvement you see on lesswrong is self-improvement for its own sake. Most people at lesswrong engage in self-improvement to build skills that help them to be more effective in life. That means being healthy, being better at social relations, making more money and changing the world.
But your mother also seems to be the living example of a poor person.
Er… Not quite. That work ethic proved to be quite useful for propelling her from dirt-poor subsistence farmer status (as her parents were) to enjoying certain middle-class comforts. That’s why I can sit here and talk to wealthy Californian programmers in good English instead of stacking hay or feeding the chickens. As a control group of sorts, her siblings (and there were a lot of them, since we’re talking about a poor family) didn’t quite have the same drive, especially in the academic sense, and so they managed to raise themselves somewhere from not quite as high to not at all.
Of course, middle-class in my country is not quite the same as middle-class in the US. The median income here is way below your poverty line.
A lot of poor people with a good work ethic work in a way that’s quite taxing but that’s not the most effective way to spend their time to get ahead.
Yeah. That’s what I warned against in the last paragraph—I’m not that capable of saying how poor people should improve their motivation, so I described how they usually do.
I don’t see where you get the notion that the kind of self-improvement you see on lesswrong is self-improvement for its own sake.
Well, nowhere. Because that’s not what I believe. When I mentioned self-improvement for its own sake, I meant “self-improvement for its own sake like I wanted to do in my gap year”, not “self-improvement for its own sake like all self-improvement discussed on LW is”.
Dahlen, while I opposed some specific details in your exhortation I support your sentiment and intent. I can see that you are intuitively in touch with a social group that some of us may be less familiar with. You seem to have some knowledge of what motivates that group effectively. I’m sincerely interested in what you suggest is the optimal way for the archetypical person from that lower income class to increase their motivation and self control. Is there another tactic that works well for people in that reference class that is neglected in lesswrong culture? Please share.
Heh, well, it may be that people in the poorer stratum of society have a lower chance to possess herculean self-control in the first place; good motivation and self-control, after all, do propel people from poverty in places with some social mobility.
First off, the subgroup we’re considering—that fraction of poor people who want to increase their motivation and self-control—may not really be common or representative. It certainly seems to be predominantly a struggle of people from the middle and upper classes. I’m not really sure very poor people have the conditions for wanting to be more productive but failing to modify their behavior accordingly. That requires some sort of infrastructure to ensure your comfort while you fail at your goal of becoming motivated. Perhaps other people (e.g. parents) affording to support you, or a cushy job that sometimes pays you to play Solitaire and check Facebook… If you’re really poor and seek motivation, you generally only need to look around you, notice your shitty living conditions. Or you could just not seek motivation and remain complacent (which happens, a lot). But it’s hardly possible to seek it and be unable to find it. It’s only a little higher up the income scale, at the lower middle level, that it becomes easier to procrastinate comfortably.
Procrastination is still mostly an individual problem, and the solutions need to be tailored to a particular individual’s reasons for procrastinating; it’s just that, as with all things, fancier solutions become available as income raises. When all you own is your body and perhaps some tools or a plot of land, the path to productivity is a strong work ethic. (That is how virtually all my family views this issue, and my mom’s basically the living example of work ethic. The only person in my family that has heard of Pomodoros and thinks about productivity like us at LW lives in a big, fancy house in a nice residential area in the heart of the city.)
(The following is not necessarily related to motivation, but is relevant to the previous discussion about money.) It may also be worth noting that restraint in spending money is usually vital to climbing into the middle class (you’ll never get to save enough for a nice place to live if you blow all your money on stupid shit the first time it falls into your hands), and that there are class-specific ways of conceptualizing money in the first place. (I remember RibbonFarm having a nice article about this.) When you’re not rich, money is strictly something you get for working. It’s never ever something you have to spend to work more. An investment had better be damn obvious to be registered as such. That’s why I said it was a very upper-middle-class thing to do, to risk money to get motivated.
It’s also very common for people at the lower-middle income lever and lower to attend their financial needs before lofty stuff like self-improvement for its own sake. A worthy endeavour is one that gets you more money at the same time, or improves your earning capacity. (Example: after high school I wanted to take a gap year to dedicate it to learning what I want, at a self-imposed pace, but that decision got vetoed by my parents; they thought it was high time for me to prepare for entering the workforce, and worried about no longer being able to support me.)
Hopefully this answer is satisfactory; I wish I could say akrasia is a solved problem for me, but it isn’t, so my answer was more on the descriptive side, rather than the normative. I can’t speak as an authority on this, just as an observation point placed in the middle of a certain kind of crowd.
But your mother also seems to be the living example of a poor person.
A lot of poor people with a good work ethic work in a way that’s quite taxing but that’s not the most effective way to spend their time to get ahead.
I think the average person on lesswrong has the knowledge and intelligence to double their salary in a year if akrasia would be no issue.
I don’t see where you get the notion that the kind of self-improvement you see on lesswrong is self-improvement for its own sake. Most people at lesswrong engage in self-improvement to build skills that help them to be more effective in life. That means being healthy, being better at social relations, making more money and changing the world.
Er… Not quite. That work ethic proved to be quite useful for propelling her from dirt-poor subsistence farmer status (as her parents were) to enjoying certain middle-class comforts. That’s why I can sit here and talk to wealthy Californian programmers in good English instead of stacking hay or feeding the chickens. As a control group of sorts, her siblings (and there were a lot of them, since we’re talking about a poor family) didn’t quite have the same drive, especially in the academic sense, and so they managed to raise themselves somewhere from not quite as high to not at all.
Of course, middle-class in my country is not quite the same as middle-class in the US. The median income here is way below your poverty line.
Yeah. That’s what I warned against in the last paragraph—I’m not that capable of saying how poor people should improve their motivation, so I described how they usually do.
Well, nowhere. Because that’s not what I believe. When I mentioned self-improvement for its own sake, I meant “self-improvement for its own sake like I wanted to do in my gap year”, not “self-improvement for its own sake like all self-improvement discussed on LW is”.