I attribute bed-making and similar things as reducing the cognitive cost of visual processing. If you enter a clean room, it’s easy to asses what few things are present. But if there is a mess, there are all those extra visual objects which must be sorted through in your visual attention circuits.
This fits with the studies that I have read (the abstracts of) pertaining to the effect of clutter on both productivity and indicators of stress.
Having said that, I think avoiding cognitive cost is something we acquired from evolution because thought was very costly in terms of calories. So it might not be valid to continue avoiding, especially when it comes to questions more important than bed-making. This is one reason we rely on cached thoughts and so forth. Does anyone remember if there was a sequence post on the caloric cost of thinking?
This strikes me as the opposite conclusion to the right one (and so I question the strength of the reasoning). See previously alluded to studies that can be paraphrased as “mess bad”. While I agree that thinking on net is probably desirable I rather confidently assert that we are not best off doing so by making less effort to clear up clutter—be it mental or physical. Most people would be best served by reducing the cognitive load from mess, not letting it build up more. (After all, even once the bed is all nice and neat we still have more stuff lying around to process than, well, back before we learned how to build stuff to keep lying around.)
Most people would be best served by reducing the cognitive load from mess
That’s a good point. I think I was confusing two ideas here.
1) How difficult it is to process certain information.
2) How I feel when considering whether to think about something.
Cleaning messes falls under the first category. It is unchangeably difficult to process certain kinds of information. There is probably some information theory demonstrating this.
As an example of the second, I once figured out that I don’t like doing dishes because I feel like it would take a lot of concentration and though to make sure I got them clean. But all the thought costs me is will power. I think this is an instance where evolved reluctance to spend glucose on thinking (and I’m pretty sure I read something about that here) is no longer valid, because I have more glucose than I know what to do with.
This is the kind of thing that I would like to make an explicit skill in catching. I think it is the instrumental rationality analog to the epistemic rationality skill of noticing when you flinch away from a thought.
This is the kind of thing that I would like to make an explicit skill in catching. I think it is the instrumental rationality analog to the epistemic rationality skill of noticing when you flinch away from a thought.
It’s certainly a worthwhile skill. (Probably more important for most practical purposes than all that ‘epistemic’ stuff.) It may be best to develop the skill in a somewhat original-cause agnostic fashion. It is somewhat hard to trace the exact cause of a particular instance of aversion to “aversion to spending glucose on thought” vs “aversion to spending glucose on doing stuff in general”. Yet often the reasoning we use to bypass those biases and do the smart thing anyway is the same regardless.
(If I don’t base my skills entirely upon my just-so stories it means I don’t necessarily have to abandon them if it turns out my history was wrong but practical psychology was not.)
This fits with the studies that I have read (the abstracts of) pertaining to the effect of clutter on both productivity and indicators of stress.
This strikes me as the opposite conclusion to the right one (and so I question the strength of the reasoning). See previously alluded to studies that can be paraphrased as “mess bad”. While I agree that thinking on net is probably desirable I rather confidently assert that we are not best off doing so by making less effort to clear up clutter—be it mental or physical. Most people would be best served by reducing the cognitive load from mess, not letting it build up more. (After all, even once the bed is all nice and neat we still have more stuff lying around to process than, well, back before we learned how to build stuff to keep lying around.)
That’s a good point. I think I was confusing two ideas here. 1) How difficult it is to process certain information. 2) How I feel when considering whether to think about something.
Cleaning messes falls under the first category. It is unchangeably difficult to process certain kinds of information. There is probably some information theory demonstrating this.
As an example of the second, I once figured out that I don’t like doing dishes because I feel like it would take a lot of concentration and though to make sure I got them clean. But all the thought costs me is will power. I think this is an instance where evolved reluctance to spend glucose on thinking (and I’m pretty sure I read something about that here) is no longer valid, because I have more glucose than I know what to do with.
This is the kind of thing that I would like to make an explicit skill in catching. I think it is the instrumental rationality analog to the epistemic rationality skill of noticing when you flinch away from a thought.
It’s certainly a worthwhile skill. (Probably more important for most practical purposes than all that ‘epistemic’ stuff.) It may be best to develop the skill in a somewhat original-cause agnostic fashion. It is somewhat hard to trace the exact cause of a particular instance of aversion to “aversion to spending glucose on thought” vs “aversion to spending glucose on doing stuff in general”. Yet often the reasoning we use to bypass those biases and do the smart thing anyway is the same regardless.
(If I don’t base my skills entirely upon my just-so stories it means I don’t necessarily have to abandon them if it turns out my history was wrong but practical psychology was not.)
This is relevant to my interests.