brazil84 comments on New year's resolutions: Things worth considering for next year - Less Wrong
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It's complicated again. Trouble is that you have the potential to miss out on opportunities. i.e. before I start a project in the electronics space, I mention it to my friends who are interested in electronics; they then have the opportunity to say, "Oh here's some information I found earlier" or "here let me help you with that"; in various ways that you don't get to take advantage of if you secretly hide all the things you do until they are done.
Sure, but that's true for anything. It's bad for your life expectancty to smoke cigarettes, but it's also possible that while you are out smoking a cigarette, the building you work in catches fire and collapses.
I will concede that there are exceptions to every general rule and situations where following the general rule works against you.
What we're really talking about is the balance of the two sides.
Given that:
sometimes goal sharing will be bad
sometimes goal sharing will be good
I am suggesting that the balance falls on a mix of:
I assume you are suggesting:
This whole issue compounds when you consider the starting state of the person; whether sharing a goal is outside or inside a comfort zone (and easy or hard to do); and again - the environment in which the goal sharing happens.
I am pretty sure we can't get much further on convincing one another of a different state of balance... Especially without more evidence either way.
On top of that - we might genuinely be living in different states of the world where your world is more how you describe it and my world is more how I describe it.
Given that the last point might be true; Which state of the world would you rather live in?
So it sounds like you are saying that, generally speaking, goal sharing is not counter-productive and is in fact beneficial. Is that right?
Well what is the evidence which supports your position?
yes.
https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself/transcript?language=en#t-141000
At the end of the video: that link takes you to the timestamp. (its pretty much what I said above)
I have to admit I only read the first few paragraphs of the transcript earlier and only now went through the entire thing. Looks like your source agrees with me.
I'd encourage a from first principles approach. where my early reasoning encompassed your initial ideas and went on to explain why that doesn't explain enough of the observation, and how to take advantage of a different state of the world..
See also: accountability partners. as a thing that happens a lot these days.
Ok.
Not sure how you get that. Pretty clearly he is saying that in general it's better not to share your goals.
Anyway, please answer my question:
What is the evidence which supports your position?
I quote from the last 40 seconds of the video:
Sounds like he says there is a way to share goals without getting the negative attributes.
Right. In other words he is stating that there may be exceptions to the general rule.
By contrast, your position is (apparently) that general rule is that sharing goals is productive and beneficial. And I am again asking you for the evidence which supports your position.
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Seifert_Michalski_When_Intentions_.pdf
Our findings are also important from an applied perspective. Given that the effect is limited to committed individuals—those who are most eager to reach their identity goals—an important question is how these individuals might try to escape this effect. Future research might address this question by exploring various routes. First, might it suffice to increase the need for consistency (Cialdini & Trost, 1998) by attending to relevant norms? Or is it also necessary to increase perceived accountability (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999) by considering relevant attributes of the audience (e.g., power) or by specifying one’s behavioral intention in a particular way (e.g., spelling out specific frequency or quality standards vs. stating only that one wants to do one’s best; Locke & Latham, 2002) so that the audience can more easily check on its enactment? Second, might it also be effective for one to furnish a behavioral intention with a plan for how to enact it —that is, to form a corresponding implementation intention (e.g., ‘‘If situation X is encountered, then I will perform the intended behavior Y’’; Gollwitzer, 1999; Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006)? As such if-then plans delegate the control of a person’s behavior to situational cues, the intended behavior should be executed when the critical cue arises, whether or not the expression of the behavioral intention had been acknowledged by other people. Third, recent research by Fishbach and her colleagues (Fishbach & Dhar, 2005; Koo & Fishbach, 2008) suggests that interpreting a behavioral performance in terms of indicating commitment to a goal enhances further goal striving, whereas conceiving of a performance in terms of progress toward a goal reduces further goal striving. This implies that a behavioral intention worded to indicate a strong commitment to the identity goal (e.g., ‘‘I want to write a paper to become a great scientist’’) should be less negatively affected by social reality than a behavioral intention that implies progress toward the identity goal (e.g., ‘‘I intend to write a paper, as is done by great scientists’’). Finally, from a goal-systems (Kruglanski et al., 2002) or goalhierarchy (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987) perspective on action control, it stands to reason that any striving for goals—and not just identity goals—that can be attained by various behavioral routes (means) is vulnerable to the negative effects of social reality on the enactment of behavioral intentions. If a person is highly committed to a superordinate goal, and if public recognition of a behavioral intention specifying the use of one route to the goal engenders a sense of goal attainment, then the enactment of this very intention should be hampered. Recent research by Fishbach, Dhar, and Zhang (2006) is in line with this reasoning, showing that success on a subgoal (e.g., eating healthy meals) in the service of a superordinate goal (i.e., keeping in shape) reduces striving for alternative subgoals (e.g., going to the gym).
that's all I got. Future research is needed. But also it matters the environment and how you share.
Umm, that article completely supports my position:
If this is the only evidence you have -- besides your own logic and common sense -- then you may want to rethink your position.