The biggest problem here seems to be that a lot of these things would be pretty annoying even if you had well beyond the skills necessary to accomplish them.
Self-control and Social seem like the worst offenders here, especially insofar as it’s harder to dismiss them as something you already know you can do (I already know I can run a mile or what passages I have memorized, but I don’t count how many times per month I meet with friends, or how many times per month I work two hours straight).
It also threatens to conflate how skilled you are at things with how much you’re willing to do something just to tick off a box on a worksheet. Imagine someone arranging four meetups, then calling back and saying “Actually, I’m not interested in meeting up at all, I just asked you to meet up to prove I could do it, for this online worksheet thing. Anyway, I’ll talk to you next time I have some real plans, and sorry about the inconvenience.”
(if you don’t believe anyone could possibly be that pathetic, consider that it was the first thought that came into my mind when I saw that requirement.)
This is even more true of self-control. Anyone could work two hours straight to save their own life, most people could work two hours straight if there’s a big project due the next day, but I don’t know how many people could work two hours straight because a leveling worksheet told them to.
I know you’re probably joking, but I think this is an important point, so I want to say—yes!
If I ask you to go without food for seven days, without really giving you a reason, but just saying it would increase my respect for you or something—and you refused, would that be the fault of your poor self-control? No, it would be a reasonable cost-benefit decision.
On the other hand, when we take something like addiction that people commonly claim to have no self-control over—well, if you put a gun to someone’s head and threatened to kill them if they had another drink of alcohol, then as long as you can continue enforcing the threat, suddenly self-control isn’t so much of an issue.
Now all of this is complicated by hyperbolic discounting and psychodynamics and so on, but at some point, “self control” is a matter of how much of a reward or punishment you’re expecting. So if you keep that on there, I predict you’re measuring two things. First of all, how much people care about a worksheet—such that if this “leveling” thing became wildly popular and prospective employers asked you your level before hiring that would change motivation. And how annoying it is for you to concentrate at that level (eg ADHD people would have a much harder time; other people might have more or less natural concenration issues) - such that if you chose a different “self control” task like going without food for a certain amount of time, or squeezing a lever at a certain strength, you would get different results.
In either case, I don’t think measuring “self-control” as a real variable across people is on a firm philosophical footing.
Maybe “self-control” was a poorly chosen name for that worksheet item. How about we call it “the skill of working without interruptions to tick some boxes off a worksheet?” That seems relevant to many people, and skipping it doesn’t sound like a reasonable cost-benefit decision :-)
I don’t understand why you are singling out the self-control checkbox for this criticism, when it seems to apply equally well to all the other checkboxes also. The closest other item seems to be the endurance one: for me keeping running and keeping working feels subjectively very similar. Both or them would be easier to do if someone pointed a gun at you, both of them depend on how much you care about the worksheet (and also about more inherent rewards, like getting fit, experiencing “runner’s high”, getting work done, experiencing flow state), and both of them will be easier or more difficult for different people.
Your second point, than some people find it easier to concentrate than others, seems to be an argument in favour of considering it a real variable across people?
Maybe what you are objecting against is the name of the item, “self control”, since you think it is not philosophically sound? But things should add up to normality. Being about to concentrate on work seems like an obviously desirable ability. If someone (like me, currently) can’t do it, then it seems very reasonable to want to learn how. Judging by the number of akrasia-posts on Less Wrong, lots of other people think so too. If we currently have no good philosophical analysis of this, then by all means let us try to analyze it better, but let’s not deny that the phenomenon exists.
You’re right, I did a terrible job of trying to verbalize the reasons behind my intuition that the self-control requirement is too vague. Let me try again, starting by talking about the difference between requirements where you have to estimate something, versus requirements where you have to perform something.
For example, I have no problem with the “run a mile” requirement. I don’t care enough about “leveling” to go out and run a mile right now just to prove I can, but I don’t have to—I ran several miles yesterday for non-leveling related reasons, so I know I could do it if I wanted to. The same is true of most of the others: from past experience, I already have probabilities > 80% I could do memory, finance, and creativity; I have a similarly high probability that I couldn’t bake pancakes without gaining new knowledge, and I’m not sure about the strength and programming ones but it would be very easy to find out.
The self-control requirement is different. Could I do it if my life were at stake? I’m near-100% sure I could. Would I do it for the sake of this leveling game? Empirically, no. But that only puts it in the same category as running, which I also wouldn’t do for the sake of this leveling game but which I know I have the necessary skill in. And it may be that the world’s greatest expert in self-control, let’s say the Buddha, also would not do that requirement for the sake of this leveling game (the Buddha cares not for human status and awards).
So we either have to bite the bullet and say that means the Buddha has low self-control, or we have to say “Yeah, but if the Buddha had sufficient incentive, he would do it, so he qualifies”. But in that case, alcoholics also qualify, since if they had sufficient incentive, they would presumably quit drinking.
(for a metaphor, consider a Finances category in which the requirement is “Burn $1000 in bills”. This test is statistically specific for well-off people—only those with at least a spare $1000 could do it, and the more money you have the easier it is to complete—but it’s not statistically sensitive—many people who have the extra money will nevertheless choose not to do it.)
This seems to get a bit closer to why this item confuses me.
The biggest problem here seems to be that a lot of these things would be pretty annoying even if you had well beyond the skills necessary to accomplish them.
Self-control and Social seem like the worst offenders here, especially insofar as it’s harder to dismiss them as something you already know you can do (I already know I can run a mile or what passages I have memorized, but I don’t count how many times per month I meet with friends, or how many times per month I work two hours straight).
It also threatens to conflate how skilled you are at things with how much you’re willing to do something just to tick off a box on a worksheet. Imagine someone arranging four meetups, then calling back and saying “Actually, I’m not interested in meeting up at all, I just asked you to meet up to prove I could do it, for this online worksheet thing. Anyway, I’ll talk to you next time I have some real plans, and sorry about the inconvenience.”
(if you don’t believe anyone could possibly be that pathetic, consider that it was the first thought that came into my mind when I saw that requirement.)
This is even more true of self-control. Anyone could work two hours straight to save their own life, most people could work two hours straight if there’s a big project due the next day, but I don’t know how many people could work two hours straight because a leveling worksheet told them to.
For the skill of self control, is there a difference between these two things? :-)
I know you’re probably joking, but I think this is an important point, so I want to say—yes!
If I ask you to go without food for seven days, without really giving you a reason, but just saying it would increase my respect for you or something—and you refused, would that be the fault of your poor self-control? No, it would be a reasonable cost-benefit decision.
On the other hand, when we take something like addiction that people commonly claim to have no self-control over—well, if you put a gun to someone’s head and threatened to kill them if they had another drink of alcohol, then as long as you can continue enforcing the threat, suddenly self-control isn’t so much of an issue.
Now all of this is complicated by hyperbolic discounting and psychodynamics and so on, but at some point, “self control” is a matter of how much of a reward or punishment you’re expecting. So if you keep that on there, I predict you’re measuring two things. First of all, how much people care about a worksheet—such that if this “leveling” thing became wildly popular and prospective employers asked you your level before hiring that would change motivation. And how annoying it is for you to concentrate at that level (eg ADHD people would have a much harder time; other people might have more or less natural concenration issues) - such that if you chose a different “self control” task like going without food for a certain amount of time, or squeezing a lever at a certain strength, you would get different results.
In either case, I don’t think measuring “self-control” as a real variable across people is on a firm philosophical footing.
Hm, I wasn’t joking actually.
Maybe “self-control” was a poorly chosen name for that worksheet item. How about we call it “the skill of working without interruptions to tick some boxes off a worksheet?” That seems relevant to many people, and skipping it doesn’t sound like a reasonable cost-benefit decision :-)
See my reply here
I don’t understand why you are singling out the self-control checkbox for this criticism, when it seems to apply equally well to all the other checkboxes also. The closest other item seems to be the endurance one: for me keeping running and keeping working feels subjectively very similar. Both or them would be easier to do if someone pointed a gun at you, both of them depend on how much you care about the worksheet (and also about more inherent rewards, like getting fit, experiencing “runner’s high”, getting work done, experiencing flow state), and both of them will be easier or more difficult for different people.
Your second point, than some people find it easier to concentrate than others, seems to be an argument in favour of considering it a real variable across people?
Maybe what you are objecting against is the name of the item, “self control”, since you think it is not philosophically sound? But things should add up to normality. Being about to concentrate on work seems like an obviously desirable ability. If someone (like me, currently) can’t do it, then it seems very reasonable to want to learn how. Judging by the number of akrasia-posts on Less Wrong, lots of other people think so too. If we currently have no good philosophical analysis of this, then by all means let us try to analyze it better, but let’s not deny that the phenomenon exists.
You’re right, I did a terrible job of trying to verbalize the reasons behind my intuition that the self-control requirement is too vague. Let me try again, starting by talking about the difference between requirements where you have to estimate something, versus requirements where you have to perform something.
For example, I have no problem with the “run a mile” requirement. I don’t care enough about “leveling” to go out and run a mile right now just to prove I can, but I don’t have to—I ran several miles yesterday for non-leveling related reasons, so I know I could do it if I wanted to. The same is true of most of the others: from past experience, I already have probabilities > 80% I could do memory, finance, and creativity; I have a similarly high probability that I couldn’t bake pancakes without gaining new knowledge, and I’m not sure about the strength and programming ones but it would be very easy to find out.
The self-control requirement is different. Could I do it if my life were at stake? I’m near-100% sure I could. Would I do it for the sake of this leveling game? Empirically, no. But that only puts it in the same category as running, which I also wouldn’t do for the sake of this leveling game but which I know I have the necessary skill in. And it may be that the world’s greatest expert in self-control, let’s say the Buddha, also would not do that requirement for the sake of this leveling game (the Buddha cares not for human status and awards).
So we either have to bite the bullet and say that means the Buddha has low self-control, or we have to say “Yeah, but if the Buddha had sufficient incentive, he would do it, so he qualifies”. But in that case, alcoholics also qualify, since if they had sufficient incentive, they would presumably quit drinking.
(for a metaphor, consider a Finances category in which the requirement is “Burn $1000 in bills”. This test is statistically specific for well-off people—only those with at least a spare $1000 could do it, and the more money you have the easier it is to complete—but it’s not statistically sensitive—many people who have the extra money will nevertheless choose not to do it.)
This seems to get a bit closer to why this item confuses me.