ata comments on Improving The Akrasia Hypothesis - Less Wrong
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Article request: how to find, identify, and remove those conflicts.
Are you saying that self-help books are but advertisement for workshops and that it's impossible to be any other way? That is, that an akrasia technique cannot be encoded as a string of symbols?
It doesn't deserve a top-level post, but I do have a method for locating conflicts that works for me -- a written self-interview. I open an empty Word document, and imagine that I'm being interviewed by someone (or something?) smarter, more confident or higher-status than me.
I won't quote my existing interview documents -- they're too context-dependent, and sometimes too personal -- but here's an example of how it usually looks like:
The interview continues until I find the source of the conflict and decide how to resolve it. If I can't locate it on the first session, I get back to the saved document later to continue the interview. I included the names 'Alpha' and 'Me' for readability -- I don't type any names when recording the interview.
I have at least three occasions when this technique helped me pinpoint conflicts that paralyzed me (one of them was a cause of a 6-month procrastination streak.)
Some programmers do something like this when they're stuck on a problem - they call it Rubber Ducking. Googling it I just found 4 separate stories about students having to explain their programming problems out loud to teddy bears before they get to ask a teacher.
Interesting technique, I'll need to remember that.
Reminds me of the several times I've thought I've disagreed with Eliezer on various issues here, spent a while understanding my objections so I could detail it in a reply, and ended up convincing myself of his orignal position by the time I finished writing.
Would be better if you didn't say whom you ended up agreeing with. Most people here have either a halo or horns on Eliezer, and discounting that is distracting.
+1 mind change