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incariol comments on Checklist of Rationality Habits - Less Wrong
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Very nice list! I feel like this one in particular is one of the most important ones:
To give my own example: I try to be vegetarian, but occasionally the temptation of meat gets the better of me. At some point I realized that whenever I walked past a certain hamburger place - which was something that I typically did on each working day - there was a high risk of me succumbing. Obvious solution: modify my daily routine to take a slightly longer route which avoided any hamburger places. Modifying your environment so that you can completely avoid the need to use willpower is ridiculously useful.
Another example: as I don't feel like getting in a relationship for the foreseeable future, I try to avoid circumstances with lots of pretty girls around, e.g. not going to certain parties, taking walks in those parts of the forest where I don't expect to meet any, and in general, trying to convince other parts of my brain that the only girl I could possibly be with exists somewhere in the distant future or not at all (if she can't do a spell or two and talk to dragons, she won't do ;-)).
It also helps being focused on math, programming and abstract philosophy - and spending time on LW, it seems. :)
I disagree with the commenters below-- I think you're fairly likely to find yourself wanting to be in a relationship if you're not careful. I'm a female, and I don't want to get married or have kids. Unfortunately, I'm 24, and some part of me/the body is really trying to marry me off and give me baybehs. So I try not to take in too much media that normalizes this vs. normalizing my goals, I don't babysit, and I am open about my intent so as not to attract invitations.
I don't think you'd be likely to find yourself in a relationship despite not wanting to by going to parties with lots of pretty girls around, let alone by walking on a street where girls also walk rather than through a forest. And not developing social skills may make things much harder should you ever decide to try and get into a relationship later in your life.
Aha, but the clever arguer could respond that you could be likely to find yourself wanting to despite not wanting to want to be in a relationship, and thus that avoidance is a twice-effective method of willpower conservation!
Of course, that the above be true and applicable to this case is unlikely. If you're to end up wanting it, and that you'll end up wanting it enough to compensate for the opportunity costs regarding other things you might want incurred by eventual willpower expenses or time spent "succumbing" and attempting to get into a relationship, then I think it trivially follows that you should already have updated towards the more reflectively coherent behavior that seems to give higher expected utility. After all, we want to win.
It's the "Lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from weevils!" tactic. Well . . . maybe not weevils, but not evil either, in this case.
Your objection to the ultimate utility of avoidance doesn't seem to take the desire to avoid distraction and wasted time even when successfully resisting the biological urges toward relationship-establishing behavior into account. Even if you (for some nonspecific definition of "you") simply find yourself waylaid for a few minutes by a pretty girl, but ultimately ready to move on, the time spent not only in those few moments but also in thinking about it later on may prove a distraction from other things, regardless of whether you allow yourself to get caught up enough to actively pursue a relationship with her.
Well, yeah, my objection does take it into account, but I was being unfair in my implicit assumptions because I didn't think it likely that anyone here would object.
Basically, this is where I lumped an implicit: "For most humans, the desire and expected benefits of successfully entering a relationship are much greater in terms of evolved values than the opportunity costs incurred, and it is reasonable to expect that the gains obtained from this would free up enough mental resources to actually make faster, rather than slower, progress on other goals of interest in the case of well-motivated individuals with above-average instrumental rationality."
However, estimating the costs you mentioned for humans-on-average is difficult for me, due to lack of data. Picture me as wearing a "typical mind fallacy warning!" badge on this particular issue.
Well, it has happened to me before - girls really can be pretty insistent. :) But this is not actually what concerns me - it's the distraction/wasted time induced by pretty-girl-contact event like apotheon explained below.