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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Bad reasons for a rationalist to lose - Less Wrong
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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.)