I attribute bed-making and similar things as reducing the cognitive cost of visual processing. If you enter a clean room, it's easy to asses what few things are present. But if there is a mess, there are all those extra visual objects which must be sorted through in your visual attention circuits.
This fits with the studies that I have read (the abstracts of) pertaining to the effect of clutter on both productivity and indicators of stress.
Having said that, I think avoiding cognitive cost is something we acquired from evolution because thought was very costly in terms of calories. So it might not be valid to continue avoiding, especially when it comes to questions more important than bed-making. This is one reason we rely on cached thoughts and so forth. Does anyone remember if there was a sequence post on the caloric cost of thinking?
This strikes me as the opposite conclusion to the right one (and so I question the strength of the reasoning). See previously alluded to studies that can be paraphrased as "mess bad". While I agree that thinking on net is probably desirable I rather confidently assert that we are not best off doing so by making less effort to clear up clutter - be it mental or physical. Most people would be best served by reducing the cognitive load from mess, not letting it build up more. (After all, even once the bed is all nice and neat we still have more stuff lying around to process than, well, back before we learned how to build stuff to keep lying around.)
Most people would be best served by reducing the cognitive load from mess
That's a good point. I think I was confusing two ideas here. 1) How difficult it is to process certain information. 2) How I feel when considering whether to think about something.
Cleaning messes falls under the first category. It is unchangeably difficult to process certain kinds of information. There is probably some information theory demonstrating this.
As an example of the second, I once figured out that I don't like doing dishes because I feel like it would take a lot of conce...
As I've recently been understanding signalling/status behaviors common among humans and how they can cloud reality, I've had a tendency to automatically think of these behaviors as necessarily bad. But it seems to me that signalling behaviors are pretty much a lot of what we do during our waking life. If you or I have abstract goals: become better at physics, learn to play the guitar, become fit and so forth, these goals may fundamentally be derived from evolutionary drives and therefore their implementation in real life would probably make heavy use of signalling/status urges as primary motivators. But that does not necessarily reduce the usefulness of these behaviors in achieving these abstract goals1,2.
I suppose what we need to be cautious about are inefficiencies. Signalling/status behaviors may not be the optimal way to achieve these goals. We would have to weigh the costs of actively ignoring your previous motivators and cultivating new motivators against the benefit we would gain by having motivations more aligned to our abstract goals.
Any common examples of behaviors that assist and/or thwart goal-achievement? I've got one: health. Abstract goal: We want to be healthy and fit. Status/Signalling urge: desire to look good. The urge sometimes assists, as people try to exercise to look good, which makes you healthier. Sometimes it thwarts, like in the extreme example of anorexia. Has anybody made personal trade-offs?
Note:
1) I realize that this theme is underlying in many LW posts.
2) I'm not trying to talk about whether abstract goals are more important than signalling/status goals.