I’m confused now, because the way you discuss it here it sounds like you read Ainslie’s book some time ago, but in the post you say you only very recently learned the word akrasia. If you haven’t read the book, I again urge you to—there’s a lot more to it than just presenting the discount curve, there’s a whole theory that sets out how our wacky discounting curve leads to all sorts of behavours like making rules for ourselves. Certainly if you’re actively trying to make a theory of akrasia, doing so without making sure you’re thorougly familiar with this work would seem like a great mistake to me.
If you haven’t read the book, I again urge you to—there’s a lot more to it than just presenting the discount curve, there’s a whole theory that sets out how our wacky discounting curve leads to all sorts of behavours like making rules for ourselves.
No, I haven’t read the book—I’ve just encountered discussions of the discount curve before. And I read the precis and a couple articles available on the site you linked, and find his rules and bargaining model to be massively overcomplicated, compared to what you need to know to achieve actual results. From my POV, it’s like he’s trying to explain a word processor by discussing pixels, instead of fonts and character buffers.
IOW, his model actively distracts one from knowing anything useful about how the human platform generates the results it gets, or how to make the platform DO anything.
It’s like trying to build a model of health by discussing how to work around symptoms, instead of actually curing any diseases. And it perpetuates the notion that you need to (and can) work around your “interests” at the conscious level, instead of simply adjusting the interests directly—i.e., it’s a perpetuation of “far” (extrapolative) thinking in a place where “near” (directly-associative) thinking is desperately needed.
That having been said, there are some things he gets right: we do have conflicting interests, and they do more or less interact in the manner described. It’s just that knowing that as an isolated fact, doesn’t tell you anything: it’s like knowing a thing’s emergent properties, but not the rules that generate those properties.
(Also, his ideas about appetite moderation and satiation are interesting, so I do intend to study that further, to see if it leads to anything useful. Likewise some of his thoughts on dissociation.)
if you’re actively trying to make a theory of akrasia
I’m not making a theory of akrasia; I’ve been reverse-engineering fixes for it. That means I’ve been developing a practical model that supports predictions I can test in myself and my clients, to produce quick results.
That’s not quite the same thing as developing an accurate theoretical model. You might say I’m making a street map rather than a terrain map of the same territory: it might not be “accurate” in a literal sense, but it gets people where they want to go.
I’m still a rationalist and interested in truth, but I’m seeking navigational truth rather than topographical truth, and the experimental results that count are whether my clients are accomplishing the things they want to.
The reason I linked to that thoughts-into-action video is that it’s a concrete and highly repeatable demonstration of the practical results that my model produces… and it doesn’t need anything in Ainslie’s model (AFAICT from the precis) to explain how to do it. (You can certainly fit Ainslie’s model to it, but I think you’d have a hard time getting Ainslie’s model to predict it in advance, or to generate the actual steps of the method.)
And that technique is only the tip of the iceberg—it’s something that I deliberately chose to be a quick-and-easy demonstration that could be done inside of YouTube’s 10 minute limit, and which would work on most people if they follow the directions precisely.
It’s a little bit of a cheat, in that inducing positive motivation (which is what the technique does) is considerably less useful than reducing negative motivation in practical treatment of chronic procrastination. But my techniques for reducing negative motivation are more complex to teach.
Btw, another critique of the temporal bargaining concept is that, at least in the precis, there’s little discussion of negative motivation, which is in my experience is almost always the dominant factor in undesired behaviors.
Certainly, he dabbles in the idea of “credibility injury”, but he appears to miss the fact that it’s precisely our desire to avoid painful self-image adjustment that generates our worst failures!
The desire to avoiding self-image injury doesn’t help us, it actually hurts us… and it’s due to a design flaw in the human architecture that I call the “perform-to-prevent bug”. (It’s not a flaw from evolution’s perspective, of course, just from ours!)
To be fair, he does point out that rules and willpower make things worse, but he’s missing the self-image injury avoidance as the generator of both the rules and the negative behaviors. (In my work, it’s clear that removing the negative motivation and stopping all attempts at using rules and willpower result in eliminating the compulsive behaviors that motivated the desire to use willpower in the first place.)
I suppose, all in all, though, I should say that he’s actually doing pretty good for someone who doesn’t need to have their model actually fix anyone. ;-)
I’m confused now, because the way you discuss it here it sounds like you read Ainslie’s book some time ago, but in the post you say you only very recently learned the word akrasia. If you haven’t read the book, I again urge you to—there’s a lot more to it than just presenting the discount curve, there’s a whole theory that sets out how our wacky discounting curve leads to all sorts of behavours like making rules for ourselves. Certainly if you’re actively trying to make a theory of akrasia, doing so without making sure you’re thorougly familiar with this work would seem like a great mistake to me.
No, I haven’t read the book—I’ve just encountered discussions of the discount curve before. And I read the precis and a couple articles available on the site you linked, and find his rules and bargaining model to be massively overcomplicated, compared to what you need to know to achieve actual results. From my POV, it’s like he’s trying to explain a word processor by discussing pixels, instead of fonts and character buffers.
IOW, his model actively distracts one from knowing anything useful about how the human platform generates the results it gets, or how to make the platform DO anything.
It’s like trying to build a model of health by discussing how to work around symptoms, instead of actually curing any diseases. And it perpetuates the notion that you need to (and can) work around your “interests” at the conscious level, instead of simply adjusting the interests directly—i.e., it’s a perpetuation of “far” (extrapolative) thinking in a place where “near” (directly-associative) thinking is desperately needed.
That having been said, there are some things he gets right: we do have conflicting interests, and they do more or less interact in the manner described. It’s just that knowing that as an isolated fact, doesn’t tell you anything: it’s like knowing a thing’s emergent properties, but not the rules that generate those properties.
(Also, his ideas about appetite moderation and satiation are interesting, so I do intend to study that further, to see if it leads to anything useful. Likewise some of his thoughts on dissociation.)
I’m not making a theory of akrasia; I’ve been reverse-engineering fixes for it. That means I’ve been developing a practical model that supports predictions I can test in myself and my clients, to produce quick results.
That’s not quite the same thing as developing an accurate theoretical model. You might say I’m making a street map rather than a terrain map of the same territory: it might not be “accurate” in a literal sense, but it gets people where they want to go.
I’m still a rationalist and interested in truth, but I’m seeking navigational truth rather than topographical truth, and the experimental results that count are whether my clients are accomplishing the things they want to.
The reason I linked to that thoughts-into-action video is that it’s a concrete and highly repeatable demonstration of the practical results that my model produces… and it doesn’t need anything in Ainslie’s model (AFAICT from the precis) to explain how to do it. (You can certainly fit Ainslie’s model to it, but I think you’d have a hard time getting Ainslie’s model to predict it in advance, or to generate the actual steps of the method.)
And that technique is only the tip of the iceberg—it’s something that I deliberately chose to be a quick-and-easy demonstration that could be done inside of YouTube’s 10 minute limit, and which would work on most people if they follow the directions precisely.
It’s a little bit of a cheat, in that inducing positive motivation (which is what the technique does) is considerably less useful than reducing negative motivation in practical treatment of chronic procrastination. But my techniques for reducing negative motivation are more complex to teach.
Btw, another critique of the temporal bargaining concept is that, at least in the precis, there’s little discussion of negative motivation, which is in my experience is almost always the dominant factor in undesired behaviors.
Certainly, he dabbles in the idea of “credibility injury”, but he appears to miss the fact that it’s precisely our desire to avoid painful self-image adjustment that generates our worst failures!
The desire to avoiding self-image injury doesn’t help us, it actually hurts us… and it’s due to a design flaw in the human architecture that I call the “perform-to-prevent bug”. (It’s not a flaw from evolution’s perspective, of course, just from ours!)
To be fair, he does point out that rules and willpower make things worse, but he’s missing the self-image injury avoidance as the generator of both the rules and the negative behaviors. (In my work, it’s clear that removing the negative motivation and stopping all attempts at using rules and willpower result in eliminating the compulsive behaviors that motivated the desire to use willpower in the first place.)
I suppose, all in all, though, I should say that he’s actually doing pretty good for someone who doesn’t need to have their model actually fix anyone. ;-)