CronoDAS comments on Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality - Less Wrong

105 Post author: patrissimo 14 September 2010 04:17PM

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Comment author: CronoDAS 15 September 2010 03:07:05AM 20 points [-]

Paul Graham on "How to do what you love":

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.

I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You'll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 15 September 2010 03:41:00AM *  13 points [-]

Another quote from Paul Graham:

The way to work for long periods on something is to be interested in it. Few to no people have the discipline to make themselves work on something that bores them for many hours straight without paging it out. Probably none of the people whose work I admire do. Their trick is to work on stuff they like.

The emphasis is mine, and note that Graham knows a lot of extremely successful people.

Patri links to Paul Graham, but IIRC those links advise one to remove distractions and temptations from one's office and from one's life so that one does not have to exert willpower to resist the distractions and temptations. ADDED. The thinking behind that, which is supported by psychology experiments, is that simply successfully resisting a temptation (such as refraining from eating from a plate of fresh cookies left in a waiting room by a psychology researcher) depletes a person's daily reserve of willpower so that the reserve is unavailable for other things (such as keeping oneself at a tedious task).

In his essays, Graham probably never advised building willpower by forcing yourself to do things you do not like. (I've read most of his essays.)

Some people will not be able significantly to increase their ability to exert willpower that way. If you can keep on building up your willpower that way, then congratulations! you are probably headed for great things. Just make sure that you are not just fooling yourself. The rest of us are best advised to learn some tricks, like removing reminders of temptations from our awareness so that we deplete less of our precious reserves of willpower resisting the temptations.

Comment author: patrissimo 15 September 2010 05:46:42AM 12 points [-]

Sure, there are two ways to work on the problem. One is to increase willpower. The other is to learn tricks not to use it. I agree the second one is better. But let's take this back to the context of Less Wrong and its effects.

Paul Graham's tricks include turning off the internet. The "distractions and temptations" he wants you to remove from your office are things like Less Wrong. The existence of Less Wrong is the existence of a temptation tuned to those who wish to become more rational and more effective at achieving their goals. This makes it just as bad a thing in Graham's analysis as in mine!

"Working on stuff you like", and "rationalizing that stuff you like is work" are very different. The former is great when you can do it. The latter is the type of rationalization that Paul talked about in his recent essay Self-Indulgence, where the wost time-wasters are those that don't feel like time-wasters:

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I'd start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.

And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work.

That is what I am claiming Less Wrong is - something that seems, superficially, like real personal growth work.

Comment author: patrissimo 15 September 2010 05:38:14AM 2 points [-]

Yes, exactly. And getting yourself to do this work for long-term reasons, when at the moment you would rather read Less Wrong or check Digg or Reddit, is the skill of "consciously directing attention", which is a core skill of instrumental rationality.

And Less Wrong not only makes it hard to do this, it promotes a value of this not being important through the shared idea that reading Less Wrong is growth work, or will make you more rational and better at your job, rather than admitting that it's a shiny distracting, much more like being teleported to Rome than like doing your work.

Comment author: mattnewport 15 September 2010 04:26:26AM *  1 point [-]

I'd read this article before but it was useful to read it again in the context of this discussion. According to Paul Graham, my suspicion that most people who say they like their jobs are lying is correct. However he also claims that a few people genuinely do find something they love to do. He also makes a point of saying in this essay that it is very difficult to find something you love to do and can get paid for. I find myself still wondering whether anyone (i.e. me) can find something they love to do and get paid for it or whether it takes the combination of a certain personality type with the right kind of work to achieve that.

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken.

I find it difficult to imagine crossing this lower bound for anything I'd have to spend 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year on until retirement or death. I find it more plausible for something (or a series of somethings) with a more flexible schedule. I've been trying to figure out possible candidates that would also bring in sufficient income and haven't had much success so far. As Paul Graham points out in the essay, if it was that easy it would be a lot more common than it is.

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