I'd like to share my specific motivation for writing Can the Chain Still Hold You?
I agree with Yvain that akrasia is probably a major reason that rationality alone doesn't create superheroes. You might be much better than average at making good decisions based on an accurate model of reality, but that doesn't mean you can follow through with them.
Many people report that their thinking is clearer and better as a result of Less Wrong. But despite our many, many attempts to hack away at the problem of akrasia (more: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), I haven't heard of many LWers conquering akrasia.
But I still have hope that this is possible. In 2006, we finally got a decent psychological theory of procrastination, much better than the old decisional-avoidant-arousal theory. On the timescale of progress in psychology, 2006 is basically yesterday. The first book on how to apply this new theory to daily life was published in late 2010. There is no community of people systematically practicing these techniques and reporting their results.
So it seems to me there is a lot of low-hanging fruit to be scooped up in the field of procrastination research. If we try and test enough things, and especially if our tests our theory-guided, we may be able to learn new things and flip a few causal factors such that the chain of akrasia no longer holds us — at least, not as tightly as before.
So who are the people who are hugely productive and what are they like? One guess I have is that they are less likely to hang around much on forums or in IRC. And we have forums and IRCs where there's this endless cycle of talking about akrasia and proposing fixes that never seem to stick. Maybe being on the forum to begin with is where things start going wrong. You get absorbed in procrastination, go read random forums and get to form a community with other folk who can't hack being productive for whatever reason and start picking up on their thought patterns and identifying with them. And then all of you wonder together on the forum why akrasia seems insurmountable.
This isn't just a "get to work instead of reading about productivity on the internet" joke. I really do want to know what seriously productive people are like. I don't get to know much about them since they are always being productive instead of wasting time writing in detail about what they are doing on blogs and forums.
Incidentally, I know a place where a lot of productive people spend their time and that is a good setting to discuss akrasia while already tackling the problem: the Lesswrong Study Hall. The password is "lw".
It is a tinychat room made in March 2013 as a 24/7 surrounding for co-working and we get pretty good coverage by now, so there should be someone around at most times of time zone. It is for people who struggle with procrastination, but obviously the regulars who are around most are productive people themselves.
How it works: We do pomodoros t... (read more)