gwern comments on Why do some kinds of work not feel like work? - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Wei_Dai 08 January 2011 01:28AM

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Comment author: gwern 08 January 2011 01:41:32AM 3 points [-]

I think I would start with the psychology term 'flow': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29

When you're in flow, akrasia is simply irrelevant; nor does flow seem to be simply 'the absence of akrasia', since I have felt perfectly productive at times but not in what I take to be flow.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 08 January 2011 01:52:12AM *  1 point [-]

Flow seems to be another way to get around akrasia, but I think I'm talking about something a bit different. From the Wikipedia page, there are "three conditions that are necessary to achieve the flow state":

  1. One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals. This adds direction and structure to the task.[8]
  2. One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and his or her own perceived skills. One must have confidence that he or she is capable to do the task at hand.[8]
  3. The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows him or her to adjust his or her performance to maintain the flow state.[8] (end quote)

You can see there's little overlap between these and my list. And one of my examples (thinking about multiverses and anthropic reasoning) does not seem to satisfy any of the three conditions for flow.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 08 January 2011 04:42:33PM 3 points [-]

And people are quite capable of procrastinating about activities that put them into a flow state.

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