Where is the focus on self-improvement, combating akrasia, productivity, and rational action? These things are important, and we know they’re important, but I don’t see much work on them recently. Practical posts seem to be doing this, but they don’t feel like enough. There isn’t common knowledge here about this like there is with rational belief.
Without categorization, it’s difficult to describe what has and what has not already been written about. So, let’s categorize them temporarily. Split the art into self-therapy[1], productivity (getting things done once you have motivation), and dealing with akrasia/getting motivation[2]. Productivity and dealing with akrasia appear to have been addressed significantly already, so I think therapy deserves the most focus.
I expect rationality to help with these things because good epistemics could allow us to filter through the massive memeplex of self-help. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get good information on therapy. Rationality doesn’t solve that problem, but it seems like it should allow for extraction of at least some useful information.
Or perhaps it’s relatively simple and large swaths of systematic self improvement come from character traits, trying very hard, getting help from other people, and compound interest on continual improvement. Increased organization of this information could be quite helpful.
Either way, this has probably been addressed about thirty times, and I’m missing at least some significant self-improvement writing here.
Where is the focus on self-improvement, combating akrasia, productivity, and rational action? These things are important, and we know they’re important, but I don’t see much work on them recently. Practical posts seem to be doing this, but they don’t feel like enough. There isn’t common knowledge here about this like there is with rational belief.
Without categorization, it’s difficult to describe what has and what has not already been written about. So, let’s categorize them temporarily. Split the art into self-therapy[1], productivity (getting things done once you have motivation), and dealing with akrasia/getting motivation[2]. Productivity and dealing with akrasia appear to have been addressed significantly already, so I think therapy deserves the most focus.
I expect rationality to help with these things because good epistemics could allow us to filter through the massive memeplex of self-help. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get good information on therapy. Rationality doesn’t solve that problem, but it seems like it should allow for extraction of at least some useful information.
Or perhaps it’s relatively simple and large swaths of systematic self improvement come from character traits, trying very hard, getting help from other people, and compound interest on continual improvement. Increased organization of this information could be quite helpful.
Either way, this has probably been addressed about thirty times, and I’m missing at least some significant self-improvement writing here.
Not to diminish the value of therapy; I suspect that there are techniques that come from therapy that are useful for self-improvement.
This is probably a bad categorization, as “self-therapy” is a catch-all; could there be a better one?
Agreed, thanks for writing this! You motivated me to write this practice advice shortform.