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Alicorn comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong
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TL;DR: Help me go less crazy and I'll give you $100 after six months.
I'm a long-time lurker and signed up to ask this. I have a whole lot of mental issues, the worst being lack of mental energy (similar to laziness, procrastination, etc., but turned up to eleven and almost not influenced by will). Because of it, I can't pick myself up and do things I need to (like calling a shrink); I'm not sure why I can do certain things and not others. If this goes on, I won't be able to go out and buy food, let alone get a job. Or sign up for cryonics or donate to SIAI.
I've tried every trick I could bootstrap; the only one that helped was "count backwards then start", for things I can do but have trouble getting started on. I offer $100 to anyone who suggests a trick that significantly improves my life for at least six months. By "significant improvement" I mean being able to do things like going to the bank (if I can't, I won't be able to give you the money anyway), and having ways to keep myself stable or better (most likely, by seeing a therapist).
One-time tricks to do one important thing are also welcome, but I'd offer less.
Also, don't offer money. External motivators are disincentives. By offering $100, you are attaching a specific worth to the request, and undermining our own intrinsic motivations to help. Since allowing a reward to disincentivize a behavior is irrational, I'm curious how much effect it has on the LessWrong crowd; regardless, I would be surprised if anyone here tried to collect, so I don't see the point.
My understanding is that the mechanism by which this works lets you sidestep it pretty neatly by also doing basically similar things for free. That way you can credibly tell yourself that you would do it for free, and being paid is unrelated.
To the contrary. If you pay volunteers, they stop enjoying their work. Other similar studies have been done that show that paying people who already enjoy something will sometimes make them stop the activity altogether, or to at least stop doing it without an external incentive.
Edit: AdeleneDawner and thomblake agree with the parent. This may be a counterargument, or just an answer to my earlier question, namely "Are LessWrongers better able to control this irrational impulse?"
So can a person ever love their day job? It seems that moneymaking/entrepreneurship should be the only reflectively stable passion.
Obviously, many people do love their day job. However, your question is apt, and I have no answer to it---even with regards to myself. I often have struggled with doing the exact same things at work and for myself, and enjoying one but not the other. I think in my case, it is more an issue of pressure and expectations. However, when trying to answer the question of what I should do with my life, it makes things difficult!
I didn't download the .pdf, but it looks like this was probably conducted by paying volunteers for all of their volunteer work. If someone got paid for half of their hours volunteering, or had two positions doing very similar work and then one of them started paying, I'd expect this effect to diminish.
The study concerns how many hours per week were spent volunteering; some was paid, some was not, though presumably a single organization would either pay or not pay volunteers, rather than both. Paid volunteers worked less per week overall.
The study I referenced was not the one I intended to reference, but I have not found the one I most specifically remember. Citing studies is one of the things I most desperately want an eidetic memory for.
On reflection, it seems to me to be the latter - my cognitive model of money is unusual in general, but this particular reaction seems to be a result of an intentional tweak that I made to reduce my chance of being bribe-able. (Not that I've had a problem with being bribed, but that broad kind of situation registers as 'having my values co-opted', which I'm not at all willing to take risks with.)
That seems to work. If I were teaching part-time simply because I needed the money, I wouldn't do it. But I decided that I'd teach this class for free, so I also have no problem doing it for very little money.
Agreed - I do basically similar things for free, and am reasonably confident that my reaction would be "*shrug* ok" if I were to work with MixedNuts and xe wanted to pay me.
(I do intend to offer help here; I'm still trying to determine what the most useful offer would be.)