I doubt we have more of it. But it seems fairly clear that we worry about it more. Two related hypotheses concerning why:
(1) Think about the kinds of things LW commenters do for a living: lots of programmers, a fair number of engineers and the like, plenty of students or people otherwise in academia. Those jobs share the characteristic of requiring a lot of solitary, focused work, which is easy to procrastinate from. Furthermore, in those jobs, we often have the choice of working a little less hard with no obvious, immediate drawback: a perfect breeding grounds for akrasia.
(2) Think about the kinds of things we procrastinate from. There’s work, sure, but to a large degree also, there’s stuff that we want to be spending our non-work time doing: reading improving books, teaching ourselves more math, etc. Those things (which have a pretty delayed payoff and are difficult and not always fun) share a lot of characteristics with our jobs in being easy to procrastinate from. And the desire to spend non-work time doing stuff like that is clearly massively correlated with LW readership.
If you imagine the ideal non-LW person—who has a heavily supervised, impossible-to-procrastinate-from job, and who has no ambition to spend evenings and weekends other than in totally hedonistic leisure activities—that person might be as prone as we are to akrasia, in some biological sense, but essentially never gets a chance to act on it.
Frankly, since I think most of us have more interesting jobs and more interesting hobbies than most people, I think we’re correct in general to be worried that akrasia is costing us a lot at the margins.
I doubt we have more of it. But it seems fairly clear that we worry about it more. Two related hypotheses concerning why:
(1) Think about the kinds of things LW commenters do for a living: lots of programmers, a fair number of engineers and the like, plenty of students or people otherwise in academia. Those jobs share the characteristic of requiring a lot of solitary, focused work, which is easy to procrastinate from. Furthermore, in those jobs, we often have the choice of working a little less hard with no obvious, immediate drawback: a perfect breeding grounds for akrasia.
(2) Think about the kinds of things we procrastinate from. There’s work, sure, but to a large degree also, there’s stuff that we want to be spending our non-work time doing: reading improving books, teaching ourselves more math, etc. Those things (which have a pretty delayed payoff and are difficult and not always fun) share a lot of characteristics with our jobs in being easy to procrastinate from. And the desire to spend non-work time doing stuff like that is clearly massively correlated with LW readership.
If you imagine the ideal non-LW person—who has a heavily supervised, impossible-to-procrastinate-from job, and who has no ambition to spend evenings and weekends other than in totally hedonistic leisure activities—that person might be as prone as we are to akrasia, in some biological sense, but essentially never gets a chance to act on it.
Frankly, since I think most of us have more interesting jobs and more interesting hobbies than most people, I think we’re correct in general to be worried that akrasia is costing us a lot at the margins.
Couldn’t have put it better. My compliments for a lucid and concise assessment.