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thomblake comments on Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting - Less Wrong
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Comments (138)
I'm really surprised this article has such a high rating - it strikes me as one of Eliezer's worst.
Why should anyone believe anything written here?
Why do you believe it?
My guess at the reason for the high rating would be:
* Some people like postings on instrumental rationality, and upvote because they would like to see more of them.
* Some people like Eliezer to be active here, and they upvote to signal that they want him to be more active.
* There is little overlap.
* The people who would rather that Eliezer spend his time on the TDT paper, the rationality book, a clarification of CEV, and HPMoR ..., well, those people don't downvote to signal their preferences.
My theory is that people who like this article are procrastinating wrong.
Then you should write a post on how to procrastinate more effectively!
...Would anyone sincerely welcome that into their lives? Because I could actually do that, but if I were any good at it, people would find Eliezer's advice above neutralized. (I, for instance, procrastinate very comfortably and therefore derive no value from his suggestion.)
I'm fairly certain that your advice would not work for all the situations in which I procrastinate.
Edit: How do you procrastinate properly with regards to swimming? Can you?
I'm having some trouble parsing your comment. Can you rephrase with more context?
I'm thinking about two specific situations in which there do not appear to be effective procrastination options.
1: You are too tired to enjoy anything but sleep. You are procrastinating on going to bed.
2: You are at a beach or a pool and would like to swim, but the water is cold. You are procrastinating on swimming.
More serious thoughts I'm having are based on the observation that many fun things I could do require exercising willpower or a period of undistracted conscious thought, both of which would pretty much prevent me from procrastinating. Do you achieve effective procrastination reflexively, or do you engage in planning and similar behavior to achieve effective procrastination?
I don't think I'd really call either of those things "procrastinating". That's probably because I don't identify sleep or swimming as "work", though.
I still don't know what kind of information you're looking for.
In the first half of the comment, it's fine if you don't have any information. My motives for bringing it up were rather dumb, and it's not really a coherent point. The second seems like a reasonable question. Everything but the final sentence is relatively unimportant.
However your first sentence brings up something interesting. Walking to my bedroom and doing some basic hygiene unpleasant and necessary, therefore work. However it is short in duration, and carries significant rewards (sometime, lying comfortably in bed in a few minutes, always, being well-rested tomorrow) Many of the same failures that cause me to procrastinate more than I want to, cause me to stay up later than I want to. Therefore I see strong connections between not working and not sleeping. Are some of these connections not part of your experience, or do you see these connections, but still deny that staying up late is procrastination?
I have trained myself not to put off sleep simply because I don't want to brush my teeth or change into my pajamas. Neither of those things is important relative to getting to bed at a sane hour; so when I notice that what I am avoiding is not physically moving to my bed, lying down, and closing my eyes, but rather walking into the bathroom and performing my evening ablutions, I skip the latter. (Interestingly, granting myself permission to skip it often leads to me doing it, when I make it clear to myself that my choices are "go to bed without brushing my teeth, right now" or "go to bed after brushing my teeth, right now".)
Well, I would, but I suspect I'm pretty atypical for LW in terms of my relationship with procrastination, productivity, akrasia, and so forth.
I don't dislike it, and it does match my own experiences, but its score is way too high. I think it makes fairly standard observations; very little that you wouldn't hear in zillions of books on productivity or self-help. (I mean, there's more interesting technical discussion of it than you'd find in those books, but not any novel advice, as far as I can tell.)
I didn't vote the article up-- I didn't think it was that extraordinary.
On the other hand, it's not wildly different from some of my experience, and I can believe that there are people for whom it's very accurate.
Eliezer gets a good bit done, and he might well find threshold effects be an obstacle to work, but find actually doing work to be very engaging.
Do you find the article implausible, and if so, why?
Personal experience that it worked for them? Even if it's a placebo, a placebo is better than nothing.