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xamdam comments on Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality - Less Wrong
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I had difficulty engaging with most of your article from this point on, because your premise seems to be that Work is hard and problematic and we must be forced to do it.
This premise is not just epistemically false: believing it has bad instrumental effects as well.
Ask anybody who's actually productive -- especially those who make a lot of money by being productive, and nearly all of them will tell you that they love their work. (The rest will probably say they love money, or prestige, or whatever other result their work gets for them.)
IOW, instrumental observation shows that the driving factor of high productivity is loving something more, not forcing yourself to do something you love less.
Upvoted, but I think you're both right. I'm surprised you only see one side, I am used to you having deeper psychological insights.
I don't disagree that LW can be a massively addictive waste of time, it's only the "work != fun" part of the article that I object to. (Of the bits I read, anyway.)
I agree that "work" should highly correlate to fun, under normal circumstances. Still, there is a lot of drudgery on the way to accomplishing goals that needs to be overcome, and there are circumstances where fun might just not be appropriate.
OP gives one example:
Others that come to mind:
Running your own business is fun, having to fire people is not.
Exercise is fun once you get into the rhythm, but I had to trick myself into the gym for the first couple of month.
Having kids can be fun, changing diapers is not
Some possibly rational actions cannot ever be fun
If all you mean is that the post overemphasized the necessity of occasional pain, I agree, and upvoted thusly
The claim was "work != letting your attention drift to wherever it wants to go".
Once you have disciplined yourself to direct your attention, it can be fun to execute a task, sure. But I am very skeptical that very many jobs consist of letting your attention drift to whatever is most shiny, with no effort to direct it. Even in those jobs, I suspect the workers would be more effective were they occasionally to direct their attention to what is most useful rather than most shiny.
<comment indicating significant approval to emphasise the upvote/>