Seems like a rational prioritization to me if they were in an important moment of thought and didn’t want to disrupt it. (Noting of course that ‘walking on it’ was not intentional and was caused by forgetting it was there.)
This sounds like you’re saying that they made a rational prioritization and then, separately from that, forgot that it was there. But those two events are not separate: the forgetting-and-then-walking-on-it was a predictable consequence of the earlier decision to ignore it and instead focus on work. I think if you model the first decision as a decision to continue working and to also take on a significant risk of hurting your feet, it doesn’t seem so obviously rational anymore. (Of course it could be that the thought in question was just so important that it was worth the risk. But that seems unlikely to me.)
As the OP says, a “normal person might stop and remove all the glass splinters”. Most people, in thinking whether to continue working or whether to clean up the splinters, wouldn’t need to explicitly consider the possibility that they might forget about the splinters and step on them later. This would be incorporated into the decision-making process implicitly and automatically, by the presence of splinters making them feel uneasy until they were cleaned up. The fact that this didn’t happen suggests that the OP might also ignore other signals relevant to their well-being.
The fact that the OP seems to consider this event a virtue to highlight in the title of their post, is also a sign that they are systematically undervaluing their own well-being in a way that to me seems very worrying.
Also, I would feel pretty bad if someone wrote a comment like this after I posted something. (Maybe it would have been better as a PM)
Probably most people would. But I think it’s also really important for there to be clear, public signals that the community wants people to take their well-being seriously and doesn’t endorse people hurting themselves “for the sake of the cause”.
The EA and rationalist communities are infamous for having lots of people burning themselves out through extreme self-sacrifice. If someone makes a post where they present the act of working until their feet start bleeding as a personal virtue, and there’s no public pushback to that, then that sends the implicit signal that the community endorses that reasoning. That will then contribute to unhealthy social norms that cause people to burn themselves out. The only way to counteract that is by public comments that make it clear that the community wants people to take care of themselves, even if that makes them (temporarily) less effective.
To the OP: please prioritize your well-being first. Self-preservation is one of the instrumental convergent drives; you can only continue to work if you are in good shape.
Ah! I completely missed that, that changes my interpretation significantly. Thank you for the clarification, now I’m less worried for you since it no longer sounds like you have a blindspot around it.
It sounds right that these failure modes are easier to handle than the failure mode of not being able to do much work.
Though working too much can lead to the failure mode of “I can’t get myself put in work consistently”. I’d be cautious in that it’s possible to feel like you really enjoy your work… and then burn out anyway! I’ve heard several people report this happening to them. The way I model that is something like… there are some parts of the person that are obsessed with the work, and become really happy about being able to completely focus on the obsession. But meanwhile, that single-minded focus can lead to the person’s other needs not being met, and eventually those unmet needs add up and cause a collapse.
I don’t know how much you need to be worried about that, but it’s at least good to be aware of.