All of Procrastinus's Comments + Replies

Love xkcd. Spherical cows and all that. But appropriate parsimony is a desirable feature. Here's a summary of whether the equation does a good job of summarizing the science:

http://studiemetro.au.dk/fileadmin/www.studiemetro.au.dk/Procrastination_2.pdf

Also, from the book "The Procrastination Equation"

The Procrastination Equation attempts to economically describe the underlying neurobiology that creates procrastination. I will tell you right now; the biology and the math won’t match exactly. A road map of a city, for example, no matter how recent ... (read more)

Here's the background on its construction for those interested,the academic article "Integrating Theories of Motivation"

http://webapps2.ucalgary.ca/~steel/images/Integrating.pdf

Spectacularly uncontroversial really, based on the core and best established parts of the key motivational theories. Due to limiting the theory this way (i.e., focusing on the core elements), it doesn't cover directly obvious elements like satiation, though really you would incorporate it in value.

If I could redo it again, I would differentiate between goal choice and goal... (read more)

This is neat and actually might be better in some ways than the original book. People tend to respond better to stories than statistics and science, though the most useful stories are those based on the latter. Could be the best of both worlds?

Let's go back and look at the source article one more time: "PubMed references more than 25 million articles relating primarily to biomedical research published since the 1940s. A comprehensive search of the PubMed database in May 2012 identified 2,047 retracted articles, with the earliest retracted article published in 1973 and retracted in 1977."

So over 99.99% of articles aren't retracted. Lets say the retracted ones are a tip of the iceberg and the real situation is ten times worse. That makes it 99.9% accurate.

Aside from the sensationalism, these results are a stunning and unequivocal endorsement that the scientific system works.

DanArmak120

Aside from the sensationalism, these results are a stunning and unequivocal endorsement that the scientific system works.

2047 articles retracted (for any reason) out of 25 million = 0.008%. (Edit: I mistyped the figure as 5 million instead of 25 million, but the percentage was correct.) 21.3% of that was retracted due to error, i.e. 0.0017% of all published papers later admitted an error that made the paper worthless.

That looks like massive underreporting. I cannot believe that there weren't several orders of magnitude more retraction-worthy cases, whic... (read more)

Too good. Trying to think up new ones that would belong, but I can't verify my own predictions. Heh, maybe that is one right there. Some more (?):

"Well, essence does precede existence." "Total spaghetti monster." "You have to make your cognitive biases work for you." "What's the citation count on that?" "I'll wait for the meta-analysis, thank you very much."

You are probably right. It was an overly onerous requirement on my part. However, peer-reviewed is our best stamp of quality research we have and a meta-analysis is even better, comprised of hundreds of peer-reviewed research. I am passionate about science, well aware of the limitations of clincial expert opinion, and was probably too strident.

In truth, it is almost impossible for a sole practitioner to discern whether the efficaciousness of their treatment is due to the treatment itself or other apparently non-relevant aspects, such as the placebo effect... (read more)

2pjeby
Heh. Doesn't apply in my case, unless mere text on a screen qualifies as innate ability to inspire. (Most of my client work is done in text format, and I mostly try to teach people techniques which they can apply themselves.) Really, if these clinicians are successful for this reason, then why isn't there any research identifiying what this "innate ability" consists of, so that other clinicians can be taught to be inspiring, or conversely, there can be some sort of inspirational ability test made a qualification of licensing? A phrase like "innate abiliity to inspire" is bad science and bad reductionism. Ah, that's why auto mechanics have peer-reviewed journals in order to notice whether they can really fix cars, or just have an innate ability to inspire the cars. ;-) Can a mechanic be wrong about why a car started working, or how it was broken? Absolutely. Does it matter to the mechanic? To the car's owner? Not very much. I wrote a response to your post above, but the site sits and spins for several minutes every time I submit it; I guess perhaps it's too long. I referred back to various other postings on this site, so you could get an idea of how strict LessWrong's standards of reductionism and word usage actually are, and showing why individual falsifiability is a higher standard than peer-reviewed research, if you want a car that starts. The type of research-based advice you're touting, doesn't rise to the level of individual falsifiability, because you can still say "it's proven science" even when it doesn't work for that particular individual. I don't have that retreat, because I only accept as "technique" processes which can be unequivocally stated as having worked or not worked for a particular application. My longer post also detailed the likely areas where placebo effects could exist in my work, and described some of the difficulties in formulating an appropriate control placebo for same. So, I do understand the difference between chemistry and aut

Given our difference on opinions, I think we managed to conduct this dialogue with a fair amount of decorum. However, I don't we are going to have any agreement. I have to go with the science.

You give any group of people a perfectionism or fear of failure test along with almost any procrastination scale and you get pretty much anywhere from a negative to at best a very weak positive correlation. And if you control for self-efficacy or self-confidence, that weak correlation disappears. Science does not back you up.

Similarly, characterizing impulsiveness as... (read more)

2Matti
The above made me think of a paragraph that caught my eye while I was skimming through Robert Boice's Procrastination and Blocking: A Novel, Practical Approach: (Note: This was just an association I made. I haven't read your book and I don't mean to imply that you belong to the category of researchers described by Boice.)
0[anonymous]
This seems like an unreasonable thing to ask of a non-academic. Based on what I hear of academia, pjeby doesn't have a good chance of obtaining funding for a controlled study nor of publishing his results in a respectable journal even if they are as good as he claims. Or am I wrong? It would be nice if I were incorrect on either of those things.

This is interesting. Actually, you are quite right in that TMT is an overall integrative model. It was actually designed to be a Roseatta stone, allowing us to draw findings and applications from different fields into a coherent whole. It was at one level of detail and has it uses, just as a map of the city is useful but not equivalent to a blueprint of a house (though neither are wrong). For example, it excluded nonsense solutions, which the field is rife with.

You have a naturally critical mind, which is useful, but you are taking a few short cognitive s... (read more)

7pjeby
Yes, I'm aware of that. I was pointing out that the additional complication of hyperbolic discounting isn't necessary; in helping dozens of people work through procrastination difficulties, and myself through many more dozens of specific instances, hyperbolic discounting hasn't been particularly relevant to the process. Frankly, it's never come up. In virtually all cases, any discounting effects have been dominated by more fundamental factors like negative value perceptions, and getting rid of those perceptions means the discount on the positive value is irrelevant. (Note that plain old prospect theory is enough to predict this: if losses count double relative to gains, you get bigger wins by reducing losses than you do increasing expected value gains.) I don't recall seeing anything in The Procrastination Equation that qualified in my mind as a "technique"; it looked more like "advice" to me, and I try not to deal in advice, if I can avoid it. The distinction for me is that a technique would involve cognitive steps that would repeatably bring about a change in behavior, without requiring the steps themselves to be repeated for that particular instance of procrastination. (Or if some repetition were required, it should be an extremely simple technique!) To my recollection, there was nothing in the book that claimed to be such, or provided claims of better results, repeatability, ease-of-training, or ease-of-use than techniques I already used or taught. That's the criterion I use when reading self-help materials: if a technique or method isn't claimed to be at least as good as something I've already tested and found useful, I don't bother testing it. Generally speaking, the absence of sufficiently-specific mental steps and the absence of a claim of repeatability means there's no "technique" there, in the sense of "here are the steps to break down and clean a model 36X carburetor". There's just "advice" as in, "you might want to check the carburetor if your car i

Here's the research it cites along with a few hyperlinks to other articles. Did you read it?

Mellers, B. A. (2000). Choice and the relative pleasure of consequences. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 910-924. Ghahremani, D. G., Tabibnia, G., Monterosso, J., Hellemann, G., Poldrack, R., & London, E. D. (2011). Effect of modafinil on learning and task-related brain activity in methamphetamine-dependent and healthy individuals. Neuropsychopharmacology, 36(5), 950-959. Repantis D., Schlattmann P., Laisney O., & Heuser I. (2010). Modafinil and methylphenidate for neuroenhancement in healthy individuals: A systematic review. Pharmacol Res, 62(3), 187-206.

0wedrifid
I'm familiar with the drugs cited. As he said, you had wedrifid_2011 excited thinking there was an actual research drug - NZT-48 about which a scoop was to be given.

You would think that career selection and vocational counseling would be obvious to everyone, but sadly only a sliver of humanity take it seriously that career selection is driven by three criteria: i) Demand (is there a need for this, especially in terms of salary), ii) Skills (can you do this or are you willing to get the education), iii) Job satisfaction (will you like it). There are huge differences in what the literature calls person-job fit, so getting these three things right matter. However, people often go into careers knowing little about how the... (read more)

Now we are talking. Big debate over this one in key journals like Science. Here's the scoop n NZT-48 and other "success pills." Most would take it.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-procrastination-equation/201107/better-living-through-chemistry-the-success-pill-0

7lukeprog
Nice little article.
3wedrifid
An article saying students use modafinil and ritalin that also mentions a movie. You had me excited thinking there was an actual research drug that I could experiment with!

And you might want to read the book that you are critiquing. I understand that this is inevitable to proceed impulsively in this day and age, but you will find that everything (yes, everything) is backed up by what most find as an annoyingly long series of endnotes. Here is the part that you should have read:

You want to tackle it when you tend to have the most zip, and that when that is depends upon your circadian rhythm. Some of us are morning larks, relentlessly chipper and active early in the morning, filling gyms during in the pre-dawn hours. Others a... (read more)

-3donjoe
While I don't have subscriptions to all those journals, so I can't check exactly what those studies proved and didn't prove, all I can say is that this example: "filling gyms during in the pre-dawn hours" tells me we're still not talking about the same thing, i.e. mental energy. I think there's a big difference between feeling physically energetic on one hand and feeling mentally focussed and creative on the other. Also, while I find it easy to accept that there are two kinds of people as mentioned above, I will still be looking for explicit proof that "most people" are "morning larks", like the original quote said. Thanks for your patience.

Actually, the placebo effect has a bad rap (note: I'm really impressed by the smart questions you get on this site; this is a treat) in that it does reduce pain, remove depresion and increase confidence. If you want it do these things, the goal is to so in the most cost effective manner (and not have people buy 20,000 dollar magic healing crystals). It becomes problematic as people extend the placebo effect beyond what it can do to doing things like curing cancer and the like. As a treatment for self-efficacy, yes it is a good idea as believing does make it so (in this case).

Pretty much the reciprocal of the equation works for punishers. You do get different weights for objectively the same phemenon, as "Losses loom larger than gains." Ten dollars lost is more aversive, relatively, than the pleasure of ten dollars gained. The groundbreaking and hugely influential book "A General Theory of Crime" pretty much emphasizes just the impulsive aspect to criminal decisions. However, to reduce the effects of crime, as the old adage goes, "Swift and sure." That is low delay and high expectancy. We live in a society that only gets the value part, that determing crime can only be done with harsher prisons sentences. As a society, we ain't that bright.

Thought you might like to see David Hume outlining the basics of construal theory about 300 years earlier. Here he is reflecting on how the nearby and concrete always seems to supersede the long-term and abstract:

“In reflecting on any action which I am to perform a twelvemonth hence, I always resolve to prefer the greater good, whether at that time it will be more contiguous or remote; nor does any difference in that particular make a difference in my present intentions and resolutions. My distance from the final determination makes all those minute differ... (read more)

I go with the CSI approach. Challenging, Specific, Immediate and make them approach goals. I think specific and concrete overlap quite a bit, though sometimes I separate them out too. SMART goals are based on a early 1980 paper on project management for teams. Only tangentially relevant for individual motivation.

0witzvo
Is there anywhere I can read about this? Are there academic papers? E.g. what keywords would make a good query to find more about how to set goals.

The best way of making this technique is focusing on the negative sides of engaging in temptation, of what would happen if you played video games instead of working for example. This is basic application of Walter Mischel's attentional control research as well as covert sensitization.

Though everything in the book is backed up with research (that was my standard for inclusion), I like where how you are focusing on it. Any of these techniques can misfire if applied inappropriately or in the wrong way. Devil is always in the details.

What a wonderful post!

I considered the benefits of meditation as a procrastination control technique and you will find it in the notes section of the book. I have practiced mindfulness meditation but no longer keep up with it. Though the mindfulness part does give you an option to reduce the power of temptations, you are quite right that it also can expand to eliminate value in general (nihilism). However, the reason I rejected it as viable solution is that it takes so long to master and this is the exact type of discipline that procrastinators will put o... (read more)

8jsalvatier
for others reference, I believe this is Piers Steel.
3[anonymous]
I'd tend to agree with you here. For me, the same applies to (strength-based) exercise. I loved it when I do it, it improves my work, but when I'm trapped in massive procrastination, I can't use it at all to get me out of it. I'd consider both more advanced techniques, or maybe maintenance. However, personally, I don't have any choice about meditation. Once you get past a certain threshold (aka stream entry), you will continue, if you like it or not. People keep on cycling through multiple stages and progress regardless of their actions, although continued practice makes this much more pleasant and efficient. Therefore, I would not recommend anyone working on their motivation that hasn't (in some form or another) crossed stream entry to pick up meditation (at least not primarily), but if you're already there, more practice helps and is kinda inevitable.

Very nice review here. Any better and I would say you needn't bother buying the book. About the equation, it is indeed a simplification of the full model -- trying to balance completeness with making sure it is understandable. As the book (and for those super keen, Temporal Motivation Theory described in my Academy of Management Review article "Integrating Theories of Motivation"), we add a constant in the denomenator to prevent the entire thing sky rocketing to infinity when delay approaches zero (in joke, one of the characters has a kid named Constance in reference to this).