This is not quite right—pain isn’t the unit of effort, but for many things it’s correlated with whatever that unit is. If you avoid unpleasantness, you’ll likely be putting in less actual effort than is rewarded for many of your goals.
Unfortunately, all of the relevant inputs are hard to measure, so it’s VERY hard to know when it’s too much or too little.
pain isn’t the unit of effort, but for many things it’s correlated with whatever that unit is.
I think this correlation only appears if you’re choosing strategies well. If you’re tasked with earning a lot of money to give to charity, and you generate a list of 100 possible strategies, then you should toss out all the strategies that don’t lie on the pareto boundary of pain and success. (In other words, if strategy A is both less effective and more painful then strategy B, then you should never choose strategy A.) Pain will correlate with success in the remaining pool of strategies, but it doesn’t correlate in the set of all strategies. And OP is saying that people often choose strategies that are off the pareto boundary because they specifically select pain-inducing strategies under the misconception that those strategies will all be successful as well.
This is not quite right—pain isn’t the unit of effort, but for many things it’s correlated with whatever that unit is. If you avoid unpleasantness, you’ll likely be putting in less actual effort than is rewarded for many of your goals.
Unfortunately, all of the relevant inputs are hard to measure, so it’s VERY hard to know when it’s too much or too little.
I think this correlation only appears if you’re choosing strategies well. If you’re tasked with earning a lot of money to give to charity, and you generate a list of 100 possible strategies, then you should toss out all the strategies that don’t lie on the pareto boundary of pain and success. (In other words, if strategy A is both less effective and more painful then strategy B, then you should never choose strategy A.) Pain will correlate with success in the remaining pool of strategies, but it doesn’t correlate in the set of all strategies. And OP is saying that people often choose strategies that are off the pareto boundary because they specifically select pain-inducing strategies under the misconception that those strategies will all be successful as well.