Argument by lexical overloading, or, Don't cut your wants with shoulds

I think you're making (among others) the following two quite different points. (1) If you keep putting something off, it probably means that what you want is more to have done it than to do it, and you should face that honestly. (2) There's something wrong with the thinking of a writer who cares more about writing Great Fiction than about writing what readers actually want to read (and the something-wrong is to do with turning pragmatic goals into moral imperatives).

I think there's a lot of truth to #1 but am very unconvinced by #2. After all, you yourself propose that these authors are more fundamentally concerned with Writing Great Fiction than with writing stuff that lots of people want to read; what do you think is wrong with that? (Other than that it doesn't pay the bills very well for most people, but I don't think "prioritize money above all else" is a fundamental principle of rationality.)

More precisely, I propose the following model for at least some of those authors. What they primarily want (for whatever reason) is to write well, which they might if pressed instrumentalize by saying that this means writing that, in the long run, most of the most discerning readers would find admirable. (There is some circularity here, but it's defensible.) They also want to have people read their good writing, because they think that would be to the benefit of the readers; and they also want to have people read whatever the actually end up writing, because that would bring them money and visibility and so forth. They prioritize those goals in that order; what drives them to write is the desire to write well, and they would be dissatisfied with providing lots of popular but (in their view) low-quality stuff not only because they aren't interested in writing it but also because they think it wouldn't be good for their readers. They complain that no one reads what they write because they think that reading what they write would benefit their readers, and saying "so write what they want to read" doesn't address this because they think that then reading their stuff would benefit their readers less. The only moral value involved here is that of wanting people to have things that are good for them, which is a widely shared goal and one I wouldn't have thought you'd want to condemn.

I think that (1) this model gives a plausible account of what these writers do and say, (2) it doesn't have to involve "cacheing desires as shoulds", and (3) it doesn't have to involve making a hard distinction between moral obligations and satisfaction of other goals.

It might well be that authors well-described by this model would be happier, or do more good, or even write better fiction in something like the sense they have in mind, if they paid more attention to writing what their readers want to read; so even if I'm right about its plausibility it doesn't necessarily contradict what you suggest that these writers do. But if it's right, then I think your diagnosis is wrong.

Seems to me that you only consider wants and shoulds as relevant parts of the story, but what about urges? People are sometimes driven by forces they did not anticipate.

As an example -- I want to see what is new on LessWrong today, which would literally take 15 minutes at most. So I open the page in the browser, because those 15 minutes seem worth the pleasure I get from reading LW. This part was my conscious decision.

However there a few hyperlinks in the articles, other hyperlinks in the comment, my curiosity overpowers me to open them; some of them lead to wiki pages which are like crack for internet addicts. I also want to write some comment on LW and realize "there was one LW article really relevant to what I am trying to express, I should find it and hyperlink it", but then I find myself reading those other articles... and suddenly I realize that I am already 4 hours online, which means my whole evening today is over.

Now here is a conflict between my conscious wish to spend 15 minutes online and the reality of spending 4 hours online. My behavior was motivated by urges triggered by things that only happened after I started reading. If I were a perfectly rational being, I would have anticipated them based on my previous experience, and told myself "really, the choice is between no LessWrong, and on average 4 hours online; you don't realistically have a third choice here"; and there perhaps I could choose to read LessWrong only once in a week. Or if I had a software filter that would remove all hyperlinks to non-LW pages, and preferably even censor all comments containing them to avoid temptation, I would probably use it. Again, being more instrumentally rational, I would probably write such filter for myself, or pay someone else to do it; but at this moment, I don't have it.

So if my original plan for the evening is to read LW for 15 minutes and then play a computer game for 3 hours, but then I really spend 4 hours online, then I procrastinate playing a computer game. Yes, it happens. In the same way I also procrastinate watching movies.

So I think this article is confusing a different meanings of the words want ("feel an immediate urge" and "coherent extrapolation of near-mode conscious decisions") and should ("have a far-mode scenario about oneself", "have a biased conclusion about oneself triggered by conflicts between far-mode scenarios and near-mode observations").

Also, the situation does not have to "either -- or". I can procrastinate on writing my blog both because I would greatly enjoy having it written, but I enjoy actually writing it significantly less; and because my urges overcome my original conscious decisions and make me spend the whole evening online instead of writing the article, even if at the end I feel bad about wasting the evening online, and would have enjoyed somehow the writing of the article instead. Or that sometimes it is difficult to start writing a blog article, but then it is pleasant to continue writing it.

I've never heard anyone say, "I keep putting off playing baseball," or, "I keep putting off eating ice cream."

Sometimes I find myself putting off playing video games. Which is kind of confusing to me, because procrastination is usually done to avoid doing things one doesn't really want to experience the doing of, but apparently it's not that unusual for people to fail to get around to finishing games...

People who keep putting off writing don't want to write, they want to have written. Some people might actually enjoy writing if they started, but don't want to start.

When I have something that I want to do, then categorize it as something I "should" do, I generally want to do it less. Attaching the sense of moral obligation makes me forget that the original reason I put it in that bucket was because it was something I would actually enjoy doing. This seems to line up with your hypothesis that people conflate these two and cause problems for themselves. But this also seems to imply that there is, in fact, a relevant difference between "want" and "should," at least in one's own head.

"I keep putting off eating ice cream."

This is actually a pretty successful dieting technique :P

Shoulds sound like the far-mode version of wants.