What I want to know is just what such important tasks and projects everyone here believes they should be working on, which causes them to probe so deeply into the concept of Akrasia.
…
I’d like to think I’m wrong, and everyone weighing in about how they’re spending their free time curing AIDs, running charity events to buy books for orphans, and building robots to help old ladies cross the street would clarify this. If it’s just “boo hoo, I’m so useless, I can’t find the willpower to finish writing that SuDoku solver I started in C++ and I still haven’t got all the stars on Mario Galaxy” then who really gives the square root of a toss?
You’ve just committed the Mind Projection Fallacy with respect to the notion of “important”. What is important to you and important to other people may be different, as reality does not contain any XML tags marking one goal “important”, and another one “trivial”.
My post didn’t come out quite how I intended. It reads like an angry rhetorical question, when it’s supposed to be a sincere request for context. I’m baffled by the depth that people go into probing self-help ideas, talking in abstract vaguenesses of “getting things done” without revealing and explaining the personal goals that the techniques are supposed to help them achieve.
Given your profession and obsessive interest in the field PJ, perhaps you can give some examples of the sorts of objectives people need Akrasia-fighting techniques to accomplish? The examples I gave were humorous and the tone provocative, designed to draw out real goals from real practitioners. It was misjudged and looks like MPF, but that wasn’t the intention.
I realise my request for examples of people’s goals isn’t exactly on-topic, but I find it almost impossible to understand the “tricks” and “secrets” people talk about on this topic when it’s so divorced from the context of their specific goals. Let’s have some examples to help those like me get what you’re talking about. You first.
I failed out of a prestigious university (rather, I threw myself out before they could) because I just couldn’t get work done. (Underachieving, chronically disorganized, call me whatever.) In the process I also ran myself into a huge amount of debt (did I mention I’d been in and out of there for six years before I quit?)
I run into repeated difficulty doing things most people find easy: sitting down and getting work done, waking up in the morning, estimating the amount of time it will take to get somewhere. I want to change the present course of my life. I know how a reasonable person in general conducts himself. Why can’t I be like that? I understand what I am supposed to do, but on certain critical, common tasks, I fail. It’s getting harder for me to achieve positive net outcomes, as the bad consequences of previous mistakes stack.
Blah blah blah.
I’m concerned with akrasia for much more than just procrastination. And, of course I’m concerned with plain old rationality: in the conventional sense and the Eliezer “win” sense. (I obviously don’t have much of a grip on either.) I have trouble remembering when the last time I really did “win” was.
In summary: my reasons for wanting to learn about and discuss ways to be more rational in thought and action? I’m very bad at both. And it matters to me a great deal to get much, much better.
P. J. Eby nailed it: anything worth doing, is worth doing better. All the activities you mention in your first post qualify as examples, as does any other activity. If you’ve pledged your life towards curing AIDS, then you should strive to do ever better at that until the menace of the syndrome is utterly rid from this world. Or you mention having the curiosity to read books. But it is not enough simply that one reads books. We want to read more books, and the right books in the right order! A human life is so ridiculously short compared to the possibilities existence has to offer. I say it is a horrible tragedy that a person should die without finishing that sudoku solver, or getting all the stars in Super Mario Galaxy—if that’s what she would have truly cared about on reflection. And if it isn’t, then it’s a horrible tragedy that she had spent time on the sudoku solver or the video game instead of working on what she would have cared most desperately about on reflection.
Let’s have some examples to help those like me get what you’re talking about.
I’ll bite.
“Get (back) in shape” is one of my big specific goals. If I can significantly improve (and then maintain!) my physical condition this year there is a good chance I will have the opportunity to perform in an off-Broadway show. Which would be a significant-to-me artistic achievement—and there’s a looming deadline. One difficulty there is forcing myself to exercise as much as is appropriate to the situation.
“Create and publish my first iPhone application” is another goal. That one really tends to gets off track since it involves using a computer, which means it’s easy to get sidetracked by email or reddit or stackoverflow or lesswrong. I know once I get “in the zone” on that sort of task it’s hard to stop, but I’m not there yet—I’m at the early, frustrating stage of the project.
Also: keeping up and/or improving various artistic skills that might or might not culminate in future public performance… reading technical texts to keep up in my field...that’s probably enough for a start.
Personally I’m not talking about anything important that I “believe I should be working on” except work for my university course. Obviously this is important to me and I do believe I should be working on it, but it doesn’t seem like this is the type of thing you’re looking for—more like personal, aside-from-the-day-job tasks like the writing-a-novel example? Many people do have that sort of goal, I guess (I certainly do during breaks from uni), but there’s nothing to stop the goals being more everyday ones. My guess is that most people are talking about any work that has to be mostly self-motivated—that is, there’s no one standing over you threatening to fire you if you don’t get it done right now, or something similar.
You’ve just committed the Mind Projection Fallacy with respect to the notion of “important”. What is important to you and important to other people may be different, as reality does not contain any XML tags marking one goal “important”, and another one “trivial”.
My post didn’t come out quite how I intended. It reads like an angry rhetorical question, when it’s supposed to be a sincere request for context. I’m baffled by the depth that people go into probing self-help ideas, talking in abstract vaguenesses of “getting things done” without revealing and explaining the personal goals that the techniques are supposed to help them achieve.
Given your profession and obsessive interest in the field PJ, perhaps you can give some examples of the sorts of objectives people need Akrasia-fighting techniques to accomplish? The examples I gave were humorous and the tone provocative, designed to draw out real goals from real practitioners. It was misjudged and looks like MPF, but that wasn’t the intention.
I realise my request for examples of people’s goals isn’t exactly on-topic, but I find it almost impossible to understand the “tricks” and “secrets” people talk about on this topic when it’s so divorced from the context of their specific goals. Let’s have some examples to help those like me get what you’re talking about. You first.
Here’s my context:
I failed out of a prestigious university (rather, I threw myself out before they could) because I just couldn’t get work done. (Underachieving, chronically disorganized, call me whatever.) In the process I also ran myself into a huge amount of debt (did I mention I’d been in and out of there for six years before I quit?)
I run into repeated difficulty doing things most people find easy: sitting down and getting work done, waking up in the morning, estimating the amount of time it will take to get somewhere. I want to change the present course of my life. I know how a reasonable person in general conducts himself. Why can’t I be like that? I understand what I am supposed to do, but on certain critical, common tasks, I fail. It’s getting harder for me to achieve positive net outcomes, as the bad consequences of previous mistakes stack.
Blah blah blah.
I’m concerned with akrasia for much more than just procrastination. And, of course I’m concerned with plain old rationality: in the conventional sense and the Eliezer “win” sense. (I obviously don’t have much of a grip on either.) I have trouble remembering when the last time I really did “win” was.
In summary: my reasons for wanting to learn about and discuss ways to be more rational in thought and action? I’m very bad at both. And it matters to me a great deal to get much, much better.
P. J. Eby nailed it: anything worth doing, is worth doing better. All the activities you mention in your first post qualify as examples, as does any other activity. If you’ve pledged your life towards curing AIDS, then you should strive to do ever better at that until the menace of the syndrome is utterly rid from this world. Or you mention having the curiosity to read books. But it is not enough simply that one reads books. We want to read more books, and the right books in the right order! A human life is so ridiculously short compared to the possibilities existence has to offer. I say it is a horrible tragedy that a person should die without finishing that sudoku solver, or getting all the stars in Super Mario Galaxy—if that’s what she would have truly cared about on reflection. And if it isn’t, then it’s a horrible tragedy that she had spent time on the sudoku solver or the video game instead of working on what she would have cared most desperately about on reflection.
I’ll bite.
“Get (back) in shape” is one of my big specific goals. If I can significantly improve (and then maintain!) my physical condition this year there is a good chance I will have the opportunity to perform in an off-Broadway show. Which would be a significant-to-me artistic achievement—and there’s a looming deadline. One difficulty there is forcing myself to exercise as much as is appropriate to the situation.
“Create and publish my first iPhone application” is another goal. That one really tends to gets off track since it involves using a computer, which means it’s easy to get sidetracked by email or reddit or stackoverflow or lesswrong. I know once I get “in the zone” on that sort of task it’s hard to stop, but I’m not there yet—I’m at the early, frustrating stage of the project.
Also: keeping up and/or improving various artistic skills that might or might not culminate in future public performance… reading technical texts to keep up in my field...that’s probably enough for a start.
Personally I’m not talking about anything important that I “believe I should be working on” except work for my university course. Obviously this is important to me and I do believe I should be working on it, but it doesn’t seem like this is the type of thing you’re looking for—more like personal, aside-from-the-day-job tasks like the writing-a-novel example? Many people do have that sort of goal, I guess (I certainly do during breaks from uni), but there’s nothing to stop the goals being more everyday ones. My guess is that most people are talking about any work that has to be mostly self-motivated—that is, there’s no one standing over you threatening to fire you if you don’t get it done right now, or something similar.