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taw comments on Anti-Akrasia Reprise - Less Wrong
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What is "genuine akrasia"?
Every time I failed to keep some GTD-ish system in proper order for any reason, my life immediately collapsed and nothing got done for weeks, even urgent things with supposedly severe consequences (from which I somehow got away in the end anyway, but that might be just luck), and with my mental state turning into some mixture of pointless stress and fuck-it-all.
Most of the time, there's plenty of things I sort of intend to do but never quite get to, but they tend to be not especially severe.
As far as I can tell, the only thing any threat of punishment would do to me would be add to the stress, reduce my mental energy, and make me more miserable overall.
Ah, I would say you're not genuinely akratic then. Consider these three questions about some hypothetical goal you have:
If your answers are "totally", "absolutely", and "given historical evidence, not entirely" then it's genuine akrasia and you should self-bind. It may add to the stress but it will force the thing that needs to happen to happen.
For example, if you regularly let your GTD-ish system fall out of order then that -- keeping it in order -- could make a ton of sense to self bind on. If there's some minimal daily effort that prevents weeks of stress and pain (and, hypothetically, you irrationally allow that to happen often) then the stress of the self-binding is probably totally worth it. It's like paying an insurance premium against screwing yourself over.
Note that the use of self-binding is technically blatantly irrational so for a non-akratic it makes sense that it seems simply crazy.
David Allen claims that most people's GTD-ish systems fall out of order every now and again, and this is to be expected, various real changes in life require changes to the system, rethinking of personal priorities etc., but we're pretty bad at spotting them pre-emptively.
I think noticing such problems earlier would be very helpful to me, and I tend to come back on track faster than in the past, but I'm still not terribly happy about it.
My most common akrasia-like problem is frequent gross misestimation of available time when I have high mental energy - most tasks compete for this, and amount I have is unpredictable, but not random, and I haven't figured out makes my mental energy more or less plentiful. Some minor correlates are higher room temperature (26-28C range seems optimal), more physical exercise during the last week or two, fewer distractions, cleaner room where I work, frequent naps, and better maintained GTD system. These are pretty solid, but that's still not enough to explain most of variance.
I cannot think of any recent akrasia related to anything that didn't require high mental energy levels, except during some GTD breakdowns.