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Manfred comments on Handling Emotional Appeals - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'd like to note that the evidence that "Our Kind Can't Get Much Done" (relative to everyone else) is very weak. So my step one for testing anything about this thing would be actually measuring it. And to avoid obvious subjectivity problems (different groups having different standards for procrastination), and demographic problems (different groups having different opportunities to procrastinate), I'd suggest finding some task that's pretty much independent of demographic and asking objective questions about procrastination on that.
Ideas: Paying bills, or renewing a driver's license, or doing your laundry, getting a broken alarm clock / toaster / headphones replaced, turning off lights when you leave the room, taking out the trash.
Upvoted for empiricism.
Bills seems like the best choice, because there are significant negative consequences if it's not done in a timely manner. I don't know much about renewing drivers licenses, but the same thing may apply there as well.
The last four things seem demographic-dependent to an extant, so a larger sample would probably be necessary to extract useful results. For example, I might not bother getting my toaster replaced for a while if I ate toast rarely and was otherwise busy -- if the toaster's broken for a length of time, it's not going to blow up or something.
Negative utility from not taking out the trash doesn't seem to blow up quickly enough. I don't turn off the lights when I leave the room, and don't really think it causes enough negative utility to be worth thinking about (but am not well informed, so may be wrong.)
That's fair. This isn't really the point I was trying to get at, though I can see that the post makes it look so.
I'm not too concerned about how effective we are relative to everyone else. I'm concerned with how to become more effective than we are now.
That said, the measurements you describe, as well as most of the measurements here, could be useful to gauge a motivation technique against a control group.
Retracted.