I’ve been sitting with this post for a couple days and I’m starting to feel like it is only the tip of the iceberg. Here are three more pieces of the phenomenon to add some color:
1. My brain may be artificially injecting unpleasantness into effort. When engaged in activities that fall into the category of “work” I think my brain adds additional, unnecessary doses of drowsiness, anxiety, and feelings of low status and low agency. While doing the same activity, I can make these feelings disappear by remapping the activity in my head as “play.” I hypothesize that this is an attempt to prove to myself that I am the kind of person who tries hard.
2. In attempts to reintegrate old memories of working hard in school, I feel a mental flinch every time I suggest the hypothesis that “In this instance, I put myself through a ton of pain for no reason.” I predict that the primary immune reaction people will have to reading this post is the feeling of “This can’t be true, or else all my suffering would have been pointless!” People like very much to ascribe meaning to suffering. This also maps onto behaviors like “Back in my day...” complaining and slapping people down for looking for easy weight loss solutions “because losing weight is supposed to be hard.”
3. Part of the “pain is the unit of effort” heuristic is that pain is supposed to be the signal that you’ve exhausted your mana bar. Part of why it’s so attractive is the idea that if you don’t spend your mana, you’re wasting it. So you work up to your pain tolerance to spend it all. My rebuttal to this model is that human energy is really frigging weird and a fixed mana bar is not a good model for it. I can have an entire afternoon of small group meetings and come out of them feeling more energized than I went in. Others have claimed that human energy is even weirder; for example in the discussions around Kensho I recall Valentine making a claim (can’t find the exact place) indistinguishable from “There is a way to input ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA into the brain through meditation practices that unlocks infinite energy mode.”
I think the replies to this and the previous post have surprised me in how much even LessWrong readers are capable of rounding off a specific technical claim to the nearest idea they’ve heard before. Let me attempt just once to state what the thesis is again.
I am not saying that effort should never painful. I am also not saying that many useful interventions are painful. I am specifically saying that when you measure effort in units of pain this systematically leads to really bad places (and also that a lot of people are doing this). For example, you will discount forms of effort that are pleasant even if they are more effective.
Most amateur and intermediate athletes are doing something wrong if it hurts. “Most amateur and intermediate athletes” is a much larger piece of probability space than “elite athletes.”
I’m not quite sure I see how this is evidence for your point? Most entrepreneurs fail. It’s possible that they fail because they can’t handle enough pain. It’s also possible that they fail because they Goodharted on a terrible heuristic and lost all the free energy human brains need to innovate. As someone in mathematics research, which I thought would be filled with staring at a wall banging your head until I actually tried it, my gut leans towards the latter.