This is a wonderful point made well. I know who have fallen into the trap of taking the path of most resistance for reasons like those you lay out.
My own (less clear) version of a similar concept was a strong dislike of the saying “work ethic”. What is ethical about working?
Some comments:
(1) I have noticed some cultural correlations in this area. In my limited experience Danes approach this issue in a more healthy way that the English. A colleague who used to work in Japan complained bitterly about his Japanese colleagues making themselves (and him) miserable with mountains of needless and unproductive busywork—which sounds like a strong manifestation of this effect.
(2) Early PhD students seem to be very susceptible to this thought-trap. 18 months into a typical physics PhD you will have nothing tangible to show for your efforts. Your code/maths/experiment will either not work or you will have discovered that the result it gives is trivial. At this point many PhD students start trying to latch on to anything that is a demonstrable time-sink. I suspect that the less tangible the output the stronger the effect you describe is likely to be.
This is a wonderful point made well. I know who have fallen into the trap of taking the path of most resistance for reasons like those you lay out.
My own (less clear) version of a similar concept was a strong dislike of the saying “work ethic”. What is ethical about working?
Some comments:
(1) I have noticed some cultural correlations in this area. In my limited experience Danes approach this issue in a more healthy way that the English. A colleague who used to work in Japan complained bitterly about his Japanese colleagues making themselves (and him) miserable with mountains of needless and unproductive busywork—which sounds like a strong manifestation of this effect.
(2) Early PhD students seem to be very susceptible to this thought-trap. 18 months into a typical physics PhD you will have nothing tangible to show for your efforts. Your code/maths/experiment will either not work or you will have discovered that the result it gives is trivial. At this point many PhD students start trying to latch on to anything that is a demonstrable time-sink. I suspect that the less tangible the output the stronger the effect you describe is likely to be.