Akrasia is a socially convenient narrative: “I, the real me I identify with, wanted to do this thing, but some mysterious thing, which is not the real me and which I don’t identify with, prevented me from doing it.” One way of describing what’s happening is that you’re identifying with your System 2 and distancing yourself from your System 1 so you can lay the blame on it.
But your System 1 is where your motivation comes from, especially your deepest motivation; it’s where you love from, it’s where you defend your loved ones from, etc. It is you, not just a subsystem of you that you have to wrangle. You are the elephant too, not just the rider.
So you don’t “have akrasia,” you didn’t want to do the thing, and there’s some social / psychological weirdness around admitting that fact to yourself or others. You can further try to figure out why you didn’t want to do it and whether you could want to do it later, but that’s secondary to just admitting to yourself that you didn’t want to do the thing.
While I 100% agree with your views here, and this is by far the most sane opinion on akrasia that I’ve seen in a long time, I’m not convinced that so many people on LW really “get it”. Although to be sure, the distribution of behavior that signals this has significantly shifted since the move to LW2.0.
So overall I am very uncertain, but I still find it more plausible that the reason why the community as a whole stopped talking about akrasia is more like, people run out of impressive-seeming or fresh-seeming things to say about it? While the minority that could have contributed actual real new insights turned away for better reasons.
Edit: I rewrote this to use “Alice” and “Bob” instead of “you” and “me” as characters to clarify that it’s a thought experiment and not a question about Less Wrong user arundelo (though it is inspired by actual events). I also added a paragraph at the end.
Let’s say Alice asks Bob why he didn’t watch the most recent episode of $TVSHOW and he says, “I didn’t feel like it”, and she asks for more detail. He might tell her that he doesn’t really like $TVSHOW, or that he likes it but wasn’t in the mood and maybe will watch it tomorrow.
Now let’s say she asks him why he didn’t work today and he says, “I didn’t feel like it”, and she asks for more detail. He might tell her that he decided to take a day off because he’s been working a lot lately, or because the weather was nice and he wanted to spend the day hiking.
All these responses seem pretty similar compared to Bob telling Alice, “I don’t know why I didn’t feel like working. I guess work is hard and I’d rather goof off. Or maybe I have some sort of subconscious fear that if I do work I’ll prove that I’m stupid or incompetent. But I’ve only worked a couple hours so far this week and I get paid by the hour, and I’m afraid I’m gonna be late to pay my rent again, and my landlord told me if I’m late again she’s going to file an eviction notice.”
The most important thing is solving the problem, which may involve figuring out if Bob does have a subconscious fear of failure or whatever. But when I use words like “akrasia” or “procrastination”, I’m using them as shorthand for long descriptions like the one in the previous paragraph.
Is it really worthwhile for Bob to avoid the words “akrasia” and “procrastination”? If so, should his short answer to “Why didn’t you work today?” really be “I didn’t feel like it”? Or is there something better?
Yes, I think it is really worthwhile for Bob to avoid the words “akrasia” and “procrastination,” and that the short answer “I didn’t feel like it” is better.
It’s an important feature of this scenario that Bob must work in order to survive, which the akrasia / procrastination frame masks; poetically, he is a slave to Moloch, and it’s important that he uses language that clearly distinguishes what he wants (which is to not work) from what Moloch wants (which is to continue his enslavement).
(A mantra for Bob: is it akrasia or am I a slave?)
Thanks for the response! (I’ve seen you say similar stuff about “akrasia” once or twice before and had been meaning to ask you about it. I’ll think about this.)
Akrasia is a socially convenient narrative: “I, the real me I identify with, wanted to do this thing, but some mysterious thing, which is not the real me and which I don’t identify with, prevented me from doing it.” One way of describing what’s happening is that you’re identifying with your System 2 and distancing yourself from your System 1 so you can lay the blame on it.
But your System 1 is where your motivation comes from, especially your deepest motivation; it’s where you love from, it’s where you defend your loved ones from, etc. It is you, not just a subsystem of you that you have to wrangle. You are the elephant too, not just the rider.
So you don’t “have akrasia,” you didn’t want to do the thing, and there’s some social / psychological weirdness around admitting that fact to yourself or others. You can further try to figure out why you didn’t want to do it and whether you could want to do it later, but that’s secondary to just admitting to yourself that you didn’t want to do the thing.
While I 100% agree with your views here, and this is by far the most sane opinion on akrasia that I’ve seen in a long time, I’m not convinced that so many people on LW really “get it”. Although to be sure, the distribution of behavior that signals this has significantly shifted since the move to LW2.0.
So overall I am very uncertain, but I still find it more plausible that the reason why the community as a whole stopped talking about akrasia is more like, people run out of impressive-seeming or fresh-seeming things to say about it? While the minority that could have contributed actual real new insights turned away for better reasons.
Right, that’s why I labeled the above “the optimistic story.” The pessimistic stories were left as exercises to the reader.
Edit: I rewrote this to use “Alice” and “Bob” instead of “you” and “me” as characters to clarify that it’s a thought experiment and not a question about Less Wrong user arundelo (though it is inspired by actual events). I also added a paragraph at the end.
Let’s say Alice asks Bob why he didn’t watch the most recent episode of $TVSHOW and he says, “I didn’t feel like it”, and she asks for more detail. He might tell her that he doesn’t really like $TVSHOW, or that he likes it but wasn’t in the mood and maybe will watch it tomorrow.
Now let’s say she asks him why he didn’t work today and he says, “I didn’t feel like it”, and she asks for more detail. He might tell her that he decided to take a day off because he’s been working a lot lately, or because the weather was nice and he wanted to spend the day hiking.
All these responses seem pretty similar compared to Bob telling Alice, “I don’t know why I didn’t feel like working. I guess work is hard and I’d rather goof off. Or maybe I have some sort of subconscious fear that if I do work I’ll prove that I’m stupid or incompetent. But I’ve only worked a couple hours so far this week and I get paid by the hour, and I’m afraid I’m gonna be late to pay my rent again, and my landlord told me if I’m late again she’s going to file an eviction notice.”
The most important thing is solving the problem, which may involve figuring out if Bob does have a subconscious fear of failure or whatever. But when I use words like “akrasia” or “procrastination”, I’m using them as shorthand for long descriptions like the one in the previous paragraph.
Is it really worthwhile for Bob to avoid the words “akrasia” and “procrastination”? If so, should his short answer to “Why didn’t you work today?” really be “I didn’t feel like it”? Or is there something better?
Yes, I think it is really worthwhile for Bob to avoid the words “akrasia” and “procrastination,” and that the short answer “I didn’t feel like it” is better.
It’s an important feature of this scenario that Bob must work in order to survive, which the akrasia / procrastination frame masks; poetically, he is a slave to Moloch, and it’s important that he uses language that clearly distinguishes what he wants (which is to not work) from what Moloch wants (which is to continue his enslavement).
(A mantra for Bob: is it akrasia or am I a slave?)
Thanks for the response! (I’ve seen you say similar stuff about “akrasia” once or twice before and had been meaning to ask you about it. I’ll think about this.)
(“Meditations on Moloch” link for anyone who didn’t understand the reference.)