Decision Fatigue, Rationality, and Akrasia.

there seems to be a high prevalence of akrasia in the lesswrong community.

There were plans to check this but people never got around to it.

I had virtually the same thought while showering this morning. I was running late for an extremely important exam and found that I was sphexishly staring at nothing.

I said to my brain, "We're late. Finish showering."

My brain replied, "Hold on, I'm optimizing something unrelated to this."

"This is kind of urgent," I suggested.

"It's not very rational of you to ask me to stop thinking about this and thus risk allowing a potential cognitive error to pass unchecked," my brain said haughtily.

"I think it is instrumentally rational for us to not be late to the exam."

"Perhaps, let us consider the value of sacrificing global correctness for local instrumental rationality - "

"Shut up," I said out loud, and finished showering. But of course I continued thinking and realized how often I allow meta-optimization to take priority over actually doing things, and how it only really becomes apparent when I am frantic about a deadline. This also explains why deadlines actually do motivate me despite the fact that I hate them.

Many LW-ers seem also to have had unusual amounts of akrasia before finding LW, suggesting that it isn't the sequences that are the cause of the trouble. (For me, the sequences helped with productivity.)

But even so, it could be that folks here tend to use system 2 processing more than folks elsewhere (and tended to do so also as kids), and that this leads to decision fatigue. It sounds worth testing, if we can find a way to do that.

What sounds more likely to me is that people start identifying as someone that wants to get more stuff done, but their motivation level doesn't increase (fast enough?) so what used to be "I just don't want to do X" becomes "I want to do X, but I'm not doing it so it must be akrasia or something"

I'm familiar with the feeling of decision fatigue, but casually using and building a more detailed model of the world doesn't seem to have that effect - only if I'm really struggling on a hard problem.

Academics may be relevant as a similar "thinking community". I've heard many academics say they are severe procrastinators. Possible reasons for this are: 1) Procrastinators are attracted to the job, its independence and long-term deadlines 2) The nature of the work makes people procrastinate; research is hard, plus no boss and long-term deadlines mean immediate punishment for procrastination is rare 3) The job makes people feel they have akrasia even when they don't, perhaps because colleagues and competitors seem smarter and harder-working than in other fields

If nothing else, reading LW makes me feel 3)

Poll: How has your level of akrasia changed since you found lesswrong?

I don't necessarily see a larger amount of people on Less Wrong who suffer from akrasia. It seem to me like more people identify their procrastinating as akrasia and see it as problem that can fix if they try harder or find the right tools.. As a student, I hear others/myself complaining about how they didn't have the willpower to complete their homework, or wishing for better time management skills, or that they didn't give in to playing video games/the internet. No-one uses the word 'akrasia' though, and many do search for solutions.

I disagree with the conjecture. I don't think to be rational one needs to perform an unusual amount of conscious calculation per unit of time. To be rational, one must simply change one's default settings in a specific way. This could be done bit by bit over the course of many years.

It certainly takes an unusual sum total of introspection and conscious awareness and whatever to discover just how broken and unreliable our default settings are for the modern environment, but once changed it takes no further conscious intervention to keep those settings in their new position.

For example, it might have taken a long time and a lot of conscious intervention for me to identify and stop eating junk food (or what I consider such), but it certainly no longer takes any conscious thought to reject a piece of candy. I don't think through everything bad it could do to me or anything and weigh that against how good it would taste; I simply feel a few painful bodily sensations and think, "Ew! Can't have that!"

So I think this comment by Jonathan_Graehl is spot on. It seems that your conjecture would only apply to people currently making an unusually large amount of changes to their thinking and behavior. Perhaps that's the case with a lot of people on LW though.

I don't try to perform a lot of cognitive calculation except about things that I expect will make a difference. I suppose if I felt like I were working on my rationality-chops Rocky-training-montage style, what you suggest would hold.

Poll: Have you found anti-akrasia tips that have helped you since you found lesswrong?