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lionhearted comments on A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy - Less Wrong
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I've noticed that some video games tend to directly reward this behavior (starting your search in the worst place). They provide a big maze, with a goal at the end that you're supposedly trying to get to, but in fact your goal is not to reach the end quickly but to search as much of the maze's area as you can. Similarly, if you're on a quest to save the world, you put it off as long as possible, because you're optimizing for fraction-of-content-seen, rather than probability-world-is-saved, which is 1.0 from the very beginning. Some of the errors taught are very subtle and insidious.
Wow Jim, that's actually a really really amazing insight.
Do you think people get a feeling of, "Well, I'll get there eventually anyways, so I might as well (have some ice cream / surf the net / watch some TV / screw around)?" Fascinating if true... hmm...
For me: yes, definitely.
I have to be careful setting my goals because if it looks something like (read this paper by the end of the day), then unless I have other more pressing concerns, it will take all of my productive time that day to read the paper. Even though the paper will in actuality take at most 2-3 hours to read and understand, probably closer to an hour and a half.
My best counter to the problem is to remove the time limit on the goal. It's counter-intuitive, but there's something in my brain that will see a concrete time limit and decide that as long as it gets done by that limit it's fine to be wasteful with the rest of my time.
I think I feel like that sometimes.