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Viliam_Bur comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong
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I don't see how you could possibly be observing that trend. The earliest active comment threads on Less Wrong were voting / karma debates. Going meta is not only what we love best, it's what we're best at, and that's always been so.
Whut?
Links or it didn't happen.
Do we love going meta? Yes, we do.
Are we good at it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no; it also depends on the individual. But going meta is good for signalling intelligence, so we do it even when it's just a waste of time.
Has it always been so? Yes, unpracticality and procrastination of many intelligent people is widely known.
The Akrasia you refer to is actually a feature, not a bug. Just picture the opposite: Intelligent people rushing to conclusions and caring more about getting stuff done instead of forsaking the urge to go with first answers and actually think.
My point is, we decry procrastination so much but the fact is it is good that we procrastinate, if we didn't have this tendency we would be doers not thinkers. Not that I'm disparaging either, but you can't rush math, or more generally deep, insightful thought, that way lies politics and insanity.
In an nutshell, perhaps we care more for thinking about things -or alternatively get a rush from the intellectual crack- so much that we don't really want to act, or at least don't want to act on incomplete knowledge, and hence the widespread procrastination, which given the alternative, is a very Good thing.
It seems to follow from this model that if we measure the tendency towards procrastination in two groups, one of which is selected for their demonstrable capability for math, or more generally for deep, insightful thought, and the other of which is not, we should find that the former group procrastinates more than the latter group.
Yes?
Yes & I'd modify that slightly to "the former group needs to more actively combat procrastination".
Upvoted for not backing away from a concrete prediction.
I would be very surprised by that result.
Upvoted for good reasons for upvoting :)
For data, we could run a LW poll as a start and see. And out of curiosity, why would you be surprised?
Hm. You seem to have edited the comment after I responded to it, in such a way that makes me want to take back my response. How would we tell whether the former group needs to more actively combat procrastination?
I would be surprised because it's significantly at odds with my experience of the relationship between procrastination and insight.
I have a habit of editing a comment for a bit after replying, actually I didn't see your response until after editing, I don't see how this changes your response in this instance though?
I added that caveat since the former group might have members who originally suffered more from procrastination as per the model, but eventually learned to deal with it, this might skew results if not taken into account.
It changes my response because while I kind of understand how to operationalize "group A procrastinates more than group B" I don't quite understand how to operationalize "group A needs to more actively combat procrastination than group B." Since what i was approving of was precisely the concreteness of the prediction, swapping it out for something I understand less concretely left me less approving.