Interesting. Is this list of downsides representative?
"9.1.1 Rules Overshadow Goods-in-Themselves
[...]
9.1.2 Rules Magnify Lapses
[...]
9.1.3 Rules Motivate Misperception
[...]
9.1.4 Rules May Serve Compulsion Range Interests"
Also, this is great:
"modern writers wring their hands both about the average citizen’s rising body mass index and about the prevalence of dieting in the young, without noting the implication that the enemy is now approaching from two opposite directions."
Ha, please don't encourage me! I've feel like I've already used up my lifetime quota (e.g. https://dynomight.net/grandma/) and I'm trying to break the habit.
Every time you write something about procrastinating I really enjoy it and find it really insightful. And I think "In the future, I'm going to rely on this to help me with my writer's block [or some other thing I'm struggling with]." And then I find myself still procrastinating.
Yeah—the fact is, you just don't hear about a lot of examples of people who encountered some kind of "self-help" advice and then had their lives transformed, do you? I sometimes wonder why. Maybe different people need different advice? Or need the advice phrased in a different form? Or maybe advice just isn't that useful compared to the huge difficulty of following it?
Whatever the reason, I think we should set the bar for the genre pretty low. If I read something and it made me 1% more productive, I should be thrilled about that, right. But, actually increasing your productivity 1% is not easy. I worry that reading (or writing!) this kind of advice may itself be a form of procrastination. But hey, without procrastination this blog would not exist.
I think you're right about both that different people need different advice (in different forms) and that is often extremely hard to follow advice which is just, say, in book form. I read Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, recently. A self-help book from the '80s that my dad loved. I found it extremely trite and obvious and not remotely helpful. I felt like I already knew everything she was saying and the issue, for me, wasn't the self-awareness she felt like people lacked, it was something altogether different. (Execution.) But, in 1987, before the industry was as big as it is now, I guess a lot of people felt like she was saying something revelatory that they had never heard before.
I think people need to explicitly practice this sort of thing (with assignments) to internalize it. If I had a group that was dedicated to self betterment, I'd suggest we spend a couple weeks noting our procrastination and the remediations we tried.
Enjoyed it! The Jim you are talking about, I learned to recognise that as resistance. There is book called of 'Art of War', which talks about when we try to do anything creative or productive how a resistance inside us stops us from doing that, by various means.
Interesting move to give a name to resistance to doing things. I don't know if that is unusual, but I am more or less at peace with my inner Jim. I do a lot of practical work like digging holes and through the years I have found out that Jim is an excellently rational force. When Jim says no, things have not been enough thought through. Then I should actually be doing something else instead.
I think having children makes Jim a lot easier to deal with. Probably a lot of distracting things people do is based on unmet social needs. Having children merges the social and the practical. Digging a hole because one's children need a bigger house is a cause I think most Jims would approve of.
Probably different people have Jims of different sensitivity in different areas. If I get the idea to dig a hole, Jim will probably approve, few questions asked. If I get the idea to read a book, or an internet page, Jim will be very altert to the smallest sign of boredom. If the text is the least boring, Jim will pester me with questions whether this is really the most interesting thing I could read. Which forces me to spend a lot of time searching for interesting things to read.
Jim sometimes is a nuisance. But I also think he is a great force behind human development. People with stronger than usual Jims in certain areas probably made important technical inventions.
well, I personally found your chart on Cancer 5 year survival rates extremely interesting. Thank you for posting it. Although it is very depressing. I have read over and over again that we are 'winning the war on cancer', etc, but as your chart makes clear, this statement is, shall we say ... only weakly correlated with reality.
Looks like 35 years of intense effort and massive funding has only netted us about a 15 percentage point improvement. From about 50% overall 5 year survival to about 65% overall 5 year survival. Not too impressive. Granted, better results than all the time and effort invested in dementia cures, but still.
"Is there a failure mode from having too much willpower?" Apparently so, the failure modes are discussed in Ainslie's 'Breakdown of Will' (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/breakdown-of-will/BEB02F8A220A92CB34F1802783ADB267 see Part 3) and other work on temporal discounting.
Interesting. Is this list of downsides representative?
"9.1.1 Rules Overshadow Goods-in-Themselves
[...]
9.1.2 Rules Magnify Lapses
[...]
9.1.3 Rules Motivate Misperception
[...]
9.1.4 Rules May Serve Compulsion Range Interests"
Also, this is great:
"modern writers wring their hands both about the average citizen’s rising body mass index and about the prevalence of dieting in the young, without noting the implication that the enemy is now approaching from two opposite directions."
Would love to read your essays on Utilitarianism.
Ha, please don't encourage me! I've feel like I've already used up my lifetime quota (e.g. https://dynomight.net/grandma/) and I'm trying to break the habit.
Every time you write something about procrastinating I really enjoy it and find it really insightful. And I think "In the future, I'm going to rely on this to help me with my writer's block [or some other thing I'm struggling with]." And then I find myself still procrastinating.
Yeah—the fact is, you just don't hear about a lot of examples of people who encountered some kind of "self-help" advice and then had their lives transformed, do you? I sometimes wonder why. Maybe different people need different advice? Or need the advice phrased in a different form? Or maybe advice just isn't that useful compared to the huge difficulty of following it?
Whatever the reason, I think we should set the bar for the genre pretty low. If I read something and it made me 1% more productive, I should be thrilled about that, right. But, actually increasing your productivity 1% is not easy. I worry that reading (or writing!) this kind of advice may itself be a form of procrastination. But hey, without procrastination this blog would not exist.
I think you're right about both that different people need different advice (in different forms) and that is often extremely hard to follow advice which is just, say, in book form. I read Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, recently. A self-help book from the '80s that my dad loved. I found it extremely trite and obvious and not remotely helpful. I felt like I already knew everything she was saying and the issue, for me, wasn't the self-awareness she felt like people lacked, it was something altogether different. (Execution.) But, in 1987, before the industry was as big as it is now, I guess a lot of people felt like she was saying something revelatory that they had never heard before.
I think people need to explicitly practice this sort of thing (with assignments) to internalize it. If I had a group that was dedicated to self betterment, I'd suggest we spend a couple weeks noting our procrastination and the remediations we tried.
Thank you. This won the internet for me tonight.
Enjoyed it! The Jim you are talking about, I learned to recognise that as resistance. There is book called of 'Art of War', which talks about when we try to do anything creative or productive how a resistance inside us stops us from doing that, by various means.
Interesting move to give a name to resistance to doing things. I don't know if that is unusual, but I am more or less at peace with my inner Jim. I do a lot of practical work like digging holes and through the years I have found out that Jim is an excellently rational force. When Jim says no, things have not been enough thought through. Then I should actually be doing something else instead.
I think having children makes Jim a lot easier to deal with. Probably a lot of distracting things people do is based on unmet social needs. Having children merges the social and the practical. Digging a hole because one's children need a bigger house is a cause I think most Jims would approve of.
Probably different people have Jims of different sensitivity in different areas. If I get the idea to dig a hole, Jim will probably approve, few questions asked. If I get the idea to read a book, or an internet page, Jim will be very altert to the smallest sign of boredom. If the text is the least boring, Jim will pester me with questions whether this is really the most interesting thing I could read. Which forces me to spend a lot of time searching for interesting things to read.
Jim sometimes is a nuisance. But I also think he is a great force behind human development. People with stronger than usual Jims in certain areas probably made important technical inventions.
Enjoyed the article!
Curious on your thoughts--what if one doesn't know what one wants? Is that Jim being resistant?
well, I personally found your chart on Cancer 5 year survival rates extremely interesting. Thank you for posting it. Although it is very depressing. I have read over and over again that we are 'winning the war on cancer', etc, but as your chart makes clear, this statement is, shall we say ... only weakly correlated with reality.
Looks like 35 years of intense effort and massive funding has only netted us about a 15 percentage point improvement. From about 50% overall 5 year survival to about 65% overall 5 year survival. Not too impressive. Granted, better results than all the time and effort invested in dementia cures, but still.