About three and a half years ago, polutropon ran an akrasia tactics review, following the one orthonormal ran three and a half years prior to that: an open-ended survey asking Less Wrong posters to give numerical scores to productivity techniques that they'd tried, with the goal of getting a more objective picture of how well different techniques work (for the sort of people who post here). Since it's been years since the others and the rationality community has grown and developed significantly while retaining akrasia/motivation/etc as a major topic, I thought it'd be useful to have a new one!
(Malcolm notes: it seems particularly likely that this time there are likely to be some noteworthy individually-invented techniques this time, as people seem to be doing a lot of that sort of thing these days!)
A lightly modified version of the instructions from the previous post:
- Note what technique you've tried. Techniques can be anything from productivity systems (Getting Things Done, Complice) to social incentives (precommitting in front of friends) to websites or computer programs (Beeminder, Leechblock) to chemical aids (Modafinil, Caffeine). If it's something that you can easily link to information about, please provide a link and I'll add it when I list the technique; if you don't have a link, describe it in your comment and I'll link that. It could also be a cognitive technique you developed or copied from a friend, which might not have a clear name but you can give it one if you like!
- Give your experience with it a score from -10 to +10 (0 if it didn't change the status quo, 10 if it ended your akrasia problems forever with no unwanted side effects, negative scores if it actually made your life worse, -10 if it nearly killed you). For simplicity's sake, I'll only include reviews that give numerical scores.
- Describe your experience with it, including any significant side effects. Please also say approximately how long you've been using it, or if you don't use it anymore how long you used it before giving up.
Every so often, I'll combine all the data back into the main post, listing every technique that's been reviewed at least twice with the number of reviews, average score, standard deviation and common effects. I'll do my best to combine similar techniques appropriately, but it'd be appreciated if you could try to organize it a bit by replying to people doing similar things and/or saying if you feel your technique is (dis)similar to another.
I'm not going to provide an initial list due to the massive number of possible techniques and concern of prejudicing answers, but you can look back on the list in the last post or the previous one one if you want. If you have any suggestions for how to organize this (that wouldn't require huge amounts of extra effort on my part), I'm open to hearing them.
Thanks for your data!
(There's a meta thread here for comments that aren't answers to the main prompt.)
I guess my way of thinking of virtue is a bit weird. Virtue is classically described as something like balancing values, but because I take an existentialist view the only source of values I can have is my own preferences, I might as well admit I'm trading off against preferences. That I prefer for my preferences to reflect available knowledge of what worked for others (wisdom), my sense of virtue tends to flatten out as something pretty much like how 'virtue' is normally used.
As to doing unappealing things, I think that's a weird way to ask the question. It's not that I never do anything that, all else equal, I would prefer not to do, so in some sense I do unappealing things all the time. But there is always some action that, on balance, is most preferred, so I always do that one (though I must freely admit by ability to determine what is most preferred is by no means perfect and I make mistakes all the time). Sometimes the most preferred action is to just wait and do nothing. Questions of long-term and short-term outcomes don't really come into the picture here.
As to Maslow, I'm pretty sure I don't stop being self-actualized when I'm hungry, I'm just now in need of food. Same for many other necessities. And I still don't need to care very much about the specifics of satisfying my needs for food, shelter, etc. so long as I find a way to satisfy those needs. To me Maslow kind of gets it backwards in that self-actualization eliminates the ability of more "basic" needs to dominate your thinking, though to be fair because of where Maslow stops I basically have to lump all post-formal thinking about the self into "self-actualization".
Finally, as to alignment of preferences for short, medium, and long term objectives, my best answer is lots of experience at being honest with myself. I can either want something enough to take actions to get it or not; there's no need to have the form of regret we call akrasia if I end up not wanting to do something. I balanced the preferences, made my choice, and now I live with it. If it turns out I'm not getting the things I want and living the life I want to live, that's pressure to change my preferences.
Let me make this concrete. I like donuts. All else equal, I'd eat donuts every morning until I felt sick of eating them and had to stop (maybe after about 8 donuts I'm guessing). So let's say I do this. Donuts are a lot of calories but not very filling, so I'm going to be hungry again soon after eating them. Over a course of weeks, I'm going to gain weight as a result of the excess calories. At some point I'll notice and think "I'd like to be less fat" and think about how to achieve that goal. I'll notice that eating donuts is adding lots of unnecessary calories, so then I feel pressure not to eat donuts. Having experienced donuts making me fat and not wanting to be fat I'll less eat donuts. If I fail to cut down my donut consumption and continue to gain weight, then fine, I apparently like donuts more than being skinny. I'm the only one reasonable for how fat I am, so I'm the only one it really matters to how fat I am. I fully accept responsibility for myself, I'm the only person who I can control how they change the state of the world, and so I simply must act having accepted that responsibility for myself since no one else will.
So my alignment can't really break for any longer than I can fail to update on the evidence. This is maybe the whole point: having accepted radical self responsibility, I'm the only person doing anything about my preferences, so the only sense I can "break" is to choose otherwise. I have no form to break from; there's just being.
I understand how it works for you, but I have two associations that came up while reading your comment. One is taking the path of the least resistance -- you float to where the river carries you. The other one is treating your own decision mechanism as a black box which you refuse to peer into. The box says that it weighted the alternatives and you should do X, so you nod and do X.
I think the critical point here is the one you mentioned: "seeing yourself as a single agent". Most approaches to akrasia start with positing two yous: one which wants ... (read more)