http://www.autistics.org/library/inertia.html
"Wanting and Doing: A common-sense model and its limitations.
In high school, I passed many hours thinking about how I wanted to be doing my homework, being frustrated with myself for not doing my homework, making elaborate plans to try to get myself to homework... and still not starting my homework. When I've tried to describe how this worked to others, I've generally been met with disbelief. "If you didn't do it," they say, "You must not really have wanted to." This idea seems to function partly as a belief about how people work, but also partly as a definition -- what a person wants to do is almost defined as what they end up doing. The belief-structure underlying this -- our society's common-sense explanation for what a person does and does not end up doing -- seems to go something like this:
A person is a chooser. They have an array of options laid out in front of them, and they take whichever one they most want -- whichever option they care most about doing. What a person does is exactly the same as what that person cares most about doing.
I don't know how well this model works for most people, but I know this model does not work for me, or for a number of other ACs. For the purpose of this paper, I'll call anyone for whom this model is far from working "inertial", and I'll call the phenomena which make it difficult or impossible for them to connect intention and action "inertia". I'm going to try to explore what factors effect inertia in various people, and how one might structure one's life to make inertia less of a problem. Assumed Skill Sets
To begin with, it might be useful to look at the skillsets a person would need to have, in order for what they did to be whatever they cared most about doing. A person would need, among other things, to:
Since a lot of ACs are missing various neuro-typical cognitive modules, and since if any of these steps fails to work in a given situation the person will be inertial in that situation, it is perhaps not surprising that a lot of ACs are inertial. Also, since removing various skills from that list will all result in a disconnect between intention and action, but will have rather different internal dynamics, it is perhaps not surprising that the details of how the person is inertial, and of what changes make sense to address that, vary widely from person to person. "
I was recently having a conversation with some friends on the topic of hour-by-hour productivity and willpower maintenance—something I've struggled with my whole life.
I can avoid running away from a hard problem the first time I see it (perseverance on a timescale of seconds), and I can stick to the same problem for years; but to keep working on a timescale of hours is a constant battle for me. It goes without saying that I've already read reams and reams of advice; and the most help I got from it was realizing that a sizable fraction other creative professionals had the same problem, and couldn't beat it either, no matter how reasonable all the advice sounds.
"What do you do when you can't work?" my friends asked me. (Conversation probably not accurate, this is a very loose gist.)
And I replied that I usually browse random websites, or watch a short video.
"Well," they said, "if you know you can't work for a while, you should watch a movie or something."
"Unfortunately," I replied, "I have to do something whose time comes in short units, like browsing the Web or watching short videos, because I might become able to work again at any time, and I can't predict when—"
And then I stopped, because I'd just had a revelation.
I'd always thought of my workcycle as something chaotic, something unpredictable. I never used those words, but that was the way I treated it.
But here my friends seemed to be implying—what a strange thought—that other people could predict when they would become able to work again, and structure their time accordingly.
And it occurred to me for the first time that I might have been committing that damned old chestnut the Mind Projection Fallacy, right out there in my ordinary everyday life instead of high abstraction.
Maybe it wasn't that my productivity was unusually chaotic; maybe I was just unusually stupid with respect to predicting it.
That's what inverted stupidity looks like—chaos. Something hard to handle, hard to grasp, hard to guess, something you can't do anything with. It's not just an idiom for high abstract things like Artificial Intelligence. It can apply in ordinary life too.
And the reason we don't think of the alternative explanation "I'm stupid", is not—I suspect—that we think so highly of ourselves. It's just that we don't think of ourselves at all. We just see a chaotic feature of the environment.
So now it's occurred to me that my productivity problem may not be chaos, but my own stupidity.
And that may or may not help anything. It certainly doesn't fix the problem right away. Saying "I'm ignorant" doesn't make you knowledgeable.
But it is, at least, a different path than saying "it's too chaotic".