Seems to me that you only consider wants and shoulds as relevant parts of the story, but what about urges? People are sometimes driven by forces they did not anticipate.
As an example—I want to see what is new on LessWrong today, which would literally take 15 minutes at most. So I open the page in the browser, because those 15 minutes seem worth the pleasure I get from reading LW. This part was my conscious decision.
However there a few hyperlinks in the articles, other hyperlinks in the comment, my curiosity overpowers me to open them; some of them lead to wiki pages which are like crack for internet addicts. I also want to write some comment on LW and realize “there was one LW article really relevant to what I am trying to express, I should find it and hyperlink it”, but then I find myself reading those other articles… and suddenly I realize that I am already 4 hours online, which means my whole evening today is over.
Now here is a conflict between my conscious wish to spend 15 minutes online and the reality of spending 4 hours online. My behavior was motivated by urges triggered by things that only happened after I started reading. If I were a perfectly rational being, I would have anticipated them based on my previous experience, and told myself “really, the choice is between no LessWrong, and on average 4 hours online; you don’t realistically have a third choice here”; and there perhaps I could choose to read LessWrong only once in a week. Or if I had a software filter that would remove all hyperlinks to non-LW pages, and preferably even censor all comments containing them to avoid temptation, I would probably use it. Again, being more instrumentally rational, I would probably write such filter for myself, or pay someone else to do it; but at this moment, I don’t have it.
So if my original plan for the evening is to read LW for 15 minutes and then play a computer game for 3 hours, but then I really spend 4 hours online, then I procrastinate playing a computer game. Yes, it happens. In the same way I also procrastinate watching movies.
So I think this article is confusing a different meanings of the words want (“feel an immediate urge” and “coherent extrapolation of near-mode conscious decisions”) and should (“have a far-mode scenario about oneself”, “have a biased conclusion about oneself triggered by conflicts between far-mode scenarios and near-mode observations”).
Also, the situation does not have to “either—or”. I can procrastinate on writing my blog both because I would greatly enjoy having it written, but I enjoy actually writing it significantly less; and because my urges overcome my original conscious decisions and make me spend the whole evening online instead of writing the article, even if at the end I feel bad about wasting the evening online, and would have enjoyed somehow the writing of the article instead. Or that sometimes it is difficult to start writing a blog article, but then it is pleasant to continue writing it.
If that were at work here, we’d see the near-mode urges (I think that’s “have more readers” in the example) taking priority over the far-mode goal (write great fiction). We see the opposite. Urges may be a different category and need different treatment, but I don’t think they apply in this example, which is about a very analytic activity where everything is in far mode.
Seems to me that you only consider wants and shoulds as relevant parts of the story, but what about urges? People are sometimes driven by forces they did not anticipate.
As an example—I want to see what is new on LessWrong today, which would literally take 15 minutes at most. So I open the page in the browser, because those 15 minutes seem worth the pleasure I get from reading LW. This part was my conscious decision.
However there a few hyperlinks in the articles, other hyperlinks in the comment, my curiosity overpowers me to open them; some of them lead to wiki pages which are like crack for internet addicts. I also want to write some comment on LW and realize “there was one LW article really relevant to what I am trying to express, I should find it and hyperlink it”, but then I find myself reading those other articles… and suddenly I realize that I am already 4 hours online, which means my whole evening today is over.
Now here is a conflict between my conscious wish to spend 15 minutes online and the reality of spending 4 hours online. My behavior was motivated by urges triggered by things that only happened after I started reading. If I were a perfectly rational being, I would have anticipated them based on my previous experience, and told myself “really, the choice is between no LessWrong, and on average 4 hours online; you don’t realistically have a third choice here”; and there perhaps I could choose to read LessWrong only once in a week. Or if I had a software filter that would remove all hyperlinks to non-LW pages, and preferably even censor all comments containing them to avoid temptation, I would probably use it. Again, being more instrumentally rational, I would probably write such filter for myself, or pay someone else to do it; but at this moment, I don’t have it.
So if my original plan for the evening is to read LW for 15 minutes and then play a computer game for 3 hours, but then I really spend 4 hours online, then I procrastinate playing a computer game. Yes, it happens. In the same way I also procrastinate watching movies.
So I think this article is confusing a different meanings of the words want (“feel an immediate urge” and “coherent extrapolation of near-mode conscious decisions”) and should (“have a far-mode scenario about oneself”, “have a biased conclusion about oneself triggered by conflicts between far-mode scenarios and near-mode observations”).
Also, the situation does not have to “either—or”. I can procrastinate on writing my blog both because I would greatly enjoy having it written, but I enjoy actually writing it significantly less; and because my urges overcome my original conscious decisions and make me spend the whole evening online instead of writing the article, even if at the end I feel bad about wasting the evening online, and would have enjoyed somehow the writing of the article instead. Or that sometimes it is difficult to start writing a blog article, but then it is pleasant to continue writing it.
If that were at work here, we’d see the near-mode urges (I think that’s “have more readers” in the example) taking priority over the far-mode goal (write great fiction). We see the opposite. Urges may be a different category and need different treatment, but I don’t think they apply in this example, which is about a very analytic activity where everything is in far mode.