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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Bad reasons for a rationalist to lose - Less Wrong
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This is a wrong assumption. The correctness of a decision to even try something directly depends on how certain you are it'll work. Don't play lotteries, don't hunt bigfoot, but commute to work risking death in a traffic accident.
...weighed against the expected cost. And for the kind of things we're talking about here, a vast number of things can be tried at relatively small cost compared to one's ultimate desired outcome, since the end result of a search is something you can then go on to use for the rest of your life.
Precisely. There are self-help techniques that can be tried in minutes, even in seconds. I don't see a single reason for not allocating a fraction of one's procrastination time to trying mind hacks or anything else that might help against akrasia.
Say, if my procrastination time is 3 hours per day, I could allocate 10% of that -- 18 minutes. How long does it take to speak a sentence "I will become a syndicated cartoonist"? 10 seconds at maximum -- given 18 minutes, that's 108 repetitions!
But what if it doesn't work? Oh noes, I could kill 108 orcs during that time and perhaps get some green drops!
IAWYC, but if you want to learn to do it correctly, you'd be better off using fewer repetitions and suggesting something aimed at provoking an immediate response, such as "I'm now drawing a cartoon"... and carefully paying attention to your inner imagery and physical responses, which are the real meat of this family of techniques.
PJ, I think that discussing details of particular mindhacks is off-topic for this thread -- let's discuss them here. That was just an example. (As for myself, I use an "I want" format, I don't repeat it anywhere near 108 times, and I do aim at immediate things.)
Vladimir, it doesn't matter that a lottery ticket costs only 1 cent. Doesn't matter at all. It only matters that you don't expect to win by buying it.
Or maybe you do expect to win from a deal by investing 1 cent, or $10000, in which case by all means do so.
If I were to choose between throwing one cent away and buying a lottery ticket on it, I'd buy the ticket. (I don't consider here additional expenses such as the calories I need to spend on contracting my muscles to reach the ticket stand etc. I assume that both acts -- throwing away and buying the ticket -- have zero additional costs, and the lottery has a non-zero chance of winning.)
The activity of trying the procrastination tricks must be shown to be at least as good as the procrastination activity, which would be a tremendous achievement, placing these tricks far above their current standing.
You are not doing the procrastination-time activity because it's the best thing you could do, that's the whole problem with akrasia. If you find any way of replacing procrastination activity with a better procrastination activity, you are making a step away from procrastination, towards productivity.
So, you consider trying anti-procrastination tricks instead of procrastinating an improvement. But the truth of this statement is far from obvious, and it's outright false for at least my kind of procrastination. (I often procrastinate by educating myself, instead of getting things done.)
Yep, my example with orcs vs. tricks was a degenerate case -- it breaks down if the procrastination activity has at least some usefulness, which is certainly the case with self-education as a procrastination activity.
But this whole area is a fertile ground for self-rationalization. In my own case, it seems more productive to simply deem certain procrastination activities as having zero benefit than to actually try to assess their potential benefits compared to other activities.
(BTW, my primary procrastination activity, PC games, is responsible for my knowledge of the English language, which I consider an enormous benefit. Who knew.)