Not sure to what extent I endorse the following, but a thought I’ve had on this topic:
Conservation of expected evidence means that unless you’re reasoning in a predictably incorrect manner or outright deceiving yourself, you can’t deliberately change a belief in a particular direction—any test that could disprove it must also be able to reinforce it, depending on the result.
Insofar as morale is “the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve”, there’s no principled way to, on expectation increase it. You can try working hard and see if your conditions improve, and if they do, you’ll gain morale, but if they don’t, you’ll presumably lose morale.
And this is fine, actually! We tend to presuppose that high morale is good, but sometimes, your conditions are not responsive to being improved by hard work, and when that is the case, isn’t it worth noticing?
So perhaps the lesson is not to try to raise morale, but to keep at least a little bit of an open mind on the question of whether hard work will prove worthwhile, and to be willing to update on that as your situation changes.
I don’t think the OP was using “belief” to mean Bayesian credence; more like “what your System 1 expects”. Also, you can definitely make it the case that your conditions improving is correlated with effort, and the OP gives several examples of how to do this. Changing the territory is a pretty good way to change your (approximate cached proxies for) beliefs in a predictable direction.
Well, what you can do is put yourself into situations in which you expect better feedback. E.g. maybe you get a feeling that your effort goes to waste because your workplace is shit and it does go to waste, but changing jobs might help that, and maybe see you better rewarded for what you accomplish.
Of course if after enough attempts you seem to always notice that things don’t work out either you have a systematic bias or maybe the world around you is, indeed, pretty fucked.
I think one thing you can do is get involved in spaces and activities in which it is known that effort and diligence give results.
The classic example is exercise. Other examples could be tidying your home, the author gives the example of cooking for yourself.
Personally, during Covid I was one of those people who got really into chess. I did a LOT of practice puzzles and developed a sharp tactical instinct, as well as a sense of gritty perseverance and attention to detail. More importantly, I do feel it improved my sense that “I can get better at things, look, that’s the graph of my chess rating”.
I think it makes sense to find areas of life where feedback is faster, improve morale, and port that over to careers and relationships, where feedback is slower and often full of setbacks. You might get an amazing job, only to find that your company does layoffs, and you struggle to find a similar job and have to take a step back into less interesting work for a time (I am personally in the middle of this, lol)
Tiding one’s home is a bad example. Cleaning it doesn’t really stop it from getting messy again, especially if you live with other people that make messes.
I think you’re getting at something here, but I’d frame it a little differetly, notably that the learning from the experience of low morale could be that continuing hard work for hard work sake is not the answer to improving your conditions.
I think many of us are conditioned to want to “do our part,” especially if you find yourself to be a particularly value-driven person. Unfortunately one only need a cursory understanding of game theory to know if your strategy (“work harder when times are tough to improve material conditions”) is predictable, it will be exploited or, to put it more generously, “priced in” to labor models.
There’s a halfway decent book on this called “Exit, Voice, or Loyalty,” and I think at its root, low morale is a signal that Loyalty and/or Voice are not being respected, and an Exit might be the necessary reframe to preserve correlation between effort and outcome.
Not sure to what extent I endorse the following, but a thought I’ve had on this topic:
Conservation of expected evidence means that unless you’re reasoning in a predictably incorrect manner or outright deceiving yourself, you can’t deliberately change a belief in a particular direction—any test that could disprove it must also be able to reinforce it, depending on the result.
Insofar as morale is “the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve”, there’s no principled way to, on expectation increase it. You can try working hard and see if your conditions improve, and if they do, you’ll gain morale, but if they don’t, you’ll presumably lose morale.
And this is fine, actually! We tend to presuppose that high morale is good, but sometimes, your conditions are not responsive to being improved by hard work, and when that is the case, isn’t it worth noticing?
So perhaps the lesson is not to try to raise morale, but to keep at least a little bit of an open mind on the question of whether hard work will prove worthwhile, and to be willing to update on that as your situation changes.
I don’t think the OP was using “belief” to mean Bayesian credence; more like “what your System 1 expects”. Also, you can definitely make it the case that your conditions improving is correlated with effort, and the OP gives several examples of how to do this. Changing the territory is a pretty good way to change your (approximate cached proxies for) beliefs in a predictable direction.
Well, what you can do is put yourself into situations in which you expect better feedback. E.g. maybe you get a feeling that your effort goes to waste because your workplace is shit and it does go to waste, but changing jobs might help that, and maybe see you better rewarded for what you accomplish.
Of course if after enough attempts you seem to always notice that things don’t work out either you have a systematic bias or maybe the world around you is, indeed, pretty fucked.
I think one thing you can do is get involved in spaces and activities in which it is known that effort and diligence give results.
The classic example is exercise. Other examples could be tidying your home, the author gives the example of cooking for yourself.
Personally, during Covid I was one of those people who got really into chess. I did a LOT of practice puzzles and developed a sharp tactical instinct, as well as a sense of gritty perseverance and attention to detail. More importantly, I do feel it improved my sense that “I can get better at things, look, that’s the graph of my chess rating”.
I think it makes sense to find areas of life where feedback is faster, improve morale, and port that over to careers and relationships, where feedback is slower and often full of setbacks. You might get an amazing job, only to find that your company does layoffs, and you struggle to find a similar job and have to take a step back into less interesting work for a time (I am personally in the middle of this, lol)
Tiding one’s home is a bad example. Cleaning it doesn’t really stop it from getting messy again, especially if you live with other people that make messes.
I read this essay not as a guide to improve your own morale but as an explanation of yet another one of the ways society is currently fucked up.
That sounds like something someone with low morale would do.
I think you’re getting at something here, but I’d frame it a little differetly, notably that the learning from the experience of low morale could be that continuing hard work for hard work sake is not the answer to improving your conditions.
I think many of us are conditioned to want to “do our part,” especially if you find yourself to be a particularly value-driven person. Unfortunately one only need a cursory understanding of game theory to know if your strategy (“work harder when times are tough to improve material conditions”) is predictable, it will be exploited or, to put it more generously, “priced in” to labor models.
There’s a halfway decent book on this called “Exit, Voice, or Loyalty,” and I think at its root, low morale is a signal that Loyalty and/or Voice are not being respected, and an Exit might be the necessary reframe to preserve correlation between effort and outcome.