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Emily comments on Group Rationality Diary, July 1-15 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (13)
I'd like to coin some terminology: anti-lists.
Having a well-constructed list helps you get things done. Every action on the list has an immediate successor, so you don't have to think about the next actionable step required to complete your overall goal. If the goal is "clean my home" or "pack for my trip abroad", this is very useful. If the goal is "enjoyably waste time", it can cause some problems.
An annoying number of time-wasting activities are very good at giving you the next actionable step in wasting your time. In some cases this is deliberate, such as websites that provide you with lists of related articles once you've finished reading them. In some cases it's presumably accidental but still very effective. Heavily cross-referenced websites such as Wikipedia, TVTropes or Less Wrong can create a tab explosion, and once you've finished reading this tab, the obvious successor to that action is reading the next tab. Once you've watched an episode of a TV series, there is generally an obvious successor to that episode, and if you have immediate and easy access to that successor, watching it becomes a strong candidate for your next action.
I have recently started thinking in terms of "anti-listing" activities that are conducive to this sort of behaviour. To anti-list an activity is to take action to disrupt the line of succession. In the case of the series of Robot Chicken I just downloaded, this is literally a case of removing the list of files from my immediate environment. This seems like a fairly robust way of thinking about my activity management.
I don't quite understand what goal you're going for here. As you say, if the goal is "enjoyably waste time", some activities are set up to encourage the next step automatically. If you do in fact have the goal "enjoyably waste time for an hour" or something, this seems like useful behaviour? Or is it the case that your actual goal is "perform this particular enjoyable waste of time that I have selected and then stop"? It seems like this would be the reason you might want to do this anti-listing thing, but at no point do you describe something other than "enjoyably waste time" as your goal. What did I miss?
I'm talking about akrasia, not about literally possessing the explicit goal "enjoyably waste time". This is unlikely to be a goal anyone needs help achieving, and yet there exist a wide variety of lists to help people achieve it nonetheless.
What I'm getting at is that lists facilitate getting things done. If that thing is an explicit goal we have, the goal is more likely to be achieved. In these cases, where no lists (or poor lists) exist, we want to create or improve them.
Some things which aren't our explicit goals automatically produce their own lists which don't work in our best interests. In these cases, we want to disrupt those lists.
Makes sense. So the goal is something else entirely, you end up on the self-list-producing activity by mistake, and then it's hard to escape from. The anti-listing idea is a way of escaping from the mistake.