Sometimes I appear to be looking for something to ‘work distract’ me. I’ll think “I should figure out the best use of my day”, and then decide “well, I’ll just check this email that only gets productive stuff sent to it, and then maybe I’ll start doing something off the back of that”. This is not a terrible habit: it leads to a lot of the work I end up getting done. But it is interesting that it displaces actually prioritising.

When I'm being unproductive, I can usually think of a hack to fix it. But I also normally really don't want to do it. The feeling is similar to unsolicited debugging ("Yes, of course I could try that ...").

An obvious guess is some internal conflict -- it's interesting that my strategies for helping with that (e.g. focusing) are also normally rejected in the same way.

I think a lot of the time I would be well-served by using [old : burning the] willpower to institute the hack, but I wish I had a better classifier for when

People sometimes argue agains, for example, engaging with the news because its incentives run sufficiently counter to your own [LW · GW]. This seems reasonably convincing. But almost everything has incentives that run at least a little counter to my goals. And almost every organisation is made up of people that are overall pretty decent. When does the former overpower the latter such that it's better to Get Gone [LW · GW].

For now, my partial answer is that if something is existentially incentivized counter to my decision making, then I don't want any part of it, no matter how noble the individuals producing it may be. If an organisation can only exist by making me forget to choose what I want, then it has either managed to overcome the moralities of those within it, or it doesn't exist for me to interact with

I'm drawing a bright line around my decision making, because that appears to be fragile and (obviously) important enough to keep. Maybe if I regularly got tricked into spending all my money, my money would also be important enough to keep safe (unlike now)

Why have humans done so well?

Is it because of our intelligence? I think clearly it has something to do with it, but it's very vague to me exactly how. Like, is it basically just we had a bit of spare capacity to develop some technology, and then we were in a positive feedback loop? I'm also confused by my understanding that humans are not undergoing significant selection for intelligence. And it seems like a smaller group of smarter humans would have done worse than a larger group of dumber humans for a lot of our history.

So is it because of cooperation? I think not. The eusocials (among hymenoptera or the naked mole rats) have us licked in that department.

One possibility is that the smarts, language and interaction just let us be a substrate for memes. In that picture humans are just powerful and in control of many resources because the stable memes that lead humans to spread widely and reproduce a lot also led us to be powerful