In defense of your unconsidered approach here: I’ve sometimes found that, if conditions aren’t good, then I can do negative work, by making mistakes that take time to discover and come back and fix.
Now, it probably is possible to harness higher-mistake work time. Put in extra effort to double-check your work as you go. Some mistakes are easier to detect—for typos you just need to go through it again, for math mistakes you can see if approximations or “casting out nines” check out, but “Did I judge this nuanced tradeoff in this design decision correctly?” may require a different kind of thinking—so another approach is to select the subset of one’s tasks that are one’s comparative advantage while impaired.
It probably is possible to harness higher-mistake work time. But it is a different skill than working at one’s best, and it is a real skill; if you’ve never done it before, and you naively treat the one like the other, you’ll probably get hurt. It is, at the very least, understandable why one would avoid it until it becomes truly necessary.
Oh, I definitely agree, this is a really good point. What I was highlighting was an epistemic issue (namely the confusion between ideal and necessary conditions) but there is also a different decision theoretic issue that you highlighted quite well.
It’s completely possible that you’re not powerful enough to work outside the ideal condition. But by doing the epistemic clarification, now we can consider the explicit decision of taking step to become more powerful and being better able to manage non-ideal conditions.
In defense of your unconsidered approach here: I’ve sometimes found that, if conditions aren’t good, then I can do negative work, by making mistakes that take time to discover and come back and fix.
Now, it probably is possible to harness higher-mistake work time. Put in extra effort to double-check your work as you go. Some mistakes are easier to detect—for typos you just need to go through it again, for math mistakes you can see if approximations or “casting out nines” check out, but “Did I judge this nuanced tradeoff in this design decision correctly?” may require a different kind of thinking—so another approach is to select the subset of one’s tasks that are one’s comparative advantage while impaired.
It probably is possible to harness higher-mistake work time. But it is a different skill than working at one’s best, and it is a real skill; if you’ve never done it before, and you naively treat the one like the other, you’ll probably get hurt. It is, at the very least, understandable why one would avoid it until it becomes truly necessary.
Oh, I definitely agree, this is a really good point. What I was highlighting was an epistemic issue (namely the confusion between ideal and necessary conditions) but there is also a different decision theoretic issue that you highlighted quite well.
It’s completely possible that you’re not powerful enough to work outside the ideal condition. But by doing the epistemic clarification, now we can consider the explicit decision of taking step to become more powerful and being better able to manage non-ideal conditions.