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RichardKennaway comments on Experiential Pica - Less Wrong
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Comments (109)
I find this suggestion hard to follow. There are far more experiences I don't have than ones I do have, and I think this is true for almost everyone. How would I know where to start? Should I take up dancing? Baking? Painting? Horse riding? Ant farming? Blogging? :-)
If our brains can have a deficiency of some kind of activity, there must be a relatively small number of such activity types. Unless we can figure out what they are we won't make much progress.
Also, unlike pica (where you say at least some sufferers have a craving for iron-rich food, which helps them), we don't know if "positive" akrasia ever drives people to do the thing they lack (because we don't know what it is they lack). Why should we suppose akrasia ever serves to fix a problem except by coincidence?
If you cannot work out an answer, and you want an answer, then you must look for one. This is also called "research".
Alicorn said "some large class of experiences", and by definition, there aren't all that many of those. Physical exertion, craftsmanship, artistic creation, social interaction, intellectual endeavour (although people reading LW are unlikely to be doing too little of that), making money...
Pick something, anything, pursue it seriously, see if it does anything for you, take it as far as seems useful. Repeat.
Unless they are spending all their time reading community sites such as LW as a substitute for, say, acquiring the kind of detailed, in-depth understanding that you typically need textbooks for.
There's no such thing as too much intellectual endeavor! There's too much to know!
There is if doing other stuff will make your time spent on intellectual endeavor significantly more productive.