pjeby comments on Fix it and tell us what you did - Less Wrong

41 Post author: JulianMorrison 23 April 2009 02:54PM

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Comment author: pjeby 24 April 2009 06:51:31PM 1 point [-]

I've got a hunch that I have a little Akrasia demon in my brain somewhere going "Hey! That's a Good Thing and it sounds like it would take work. Usually Good Things that take work are egalitarian in nature and best left to other people to the extent that reputation considerations allows. In fact, if I am the one who is seen expending effort changing my behavior to be more Good then I will look like someone with low status! Hell, I'll never get laid if I look like I've got to go around suppressing my instincts and being Good. Screw that! I'm going to flaunt my ability to be stubornly irrational. The girls dig it."

It's not that complicated. It's simply this: action is not an abstraction. The idea, as proposed, is abstract. To make it concrete, you would have to actually pick something, or at least figure out what process or criteria you would use to determine what to pick. You'd also need to know how you would record it, track it, etc. etc.

This stuff is all "near" thinking, and you're not doing it, which leaves this whole matter in the "far" system by default... where nothing is going to happen.

In order for it to actually count as akrasia, you'd have to first have DONE some of the near-system thinking needed to make it a concrete possibility for action. THEN, if you still resisted, it might be for reasons along the lines of what you mentioned... but in that case, it would not be by some complex string of reasoning, but because of a single, cached emotional response of shame (or a related status-lowering emotion).

That's because the "near" system doesn't reason in complex chains: it just spits out query results, and aggressively caches by reducing A-B-C chains to A-C shortcuts. That way, it never has to think things through, it just responds in a single lookup. (It's also how we get "intuitive leaps" and "gut feelings".)