Doing "Nothing"

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"
— Rush, "Freewill"

I think I learned this particular bad habit from video games. You can put a game off for a year, load up your save file, and continue as though nothing had happened.

This is something I have really been wrestling with lately. I know I have many things to be done, but not doing them is not an option. Why is it not an option? Because the task is eminent in my path of action anyway, and if I choose not to do it, there will be a deficit in some form or fashion in my life trajectory because the task all ready had some relationship to me that I cannot break without severing the tie; however, as much as I'd like to believe, it is not a clean break.

I'd also like to discuss injury and chronic pain. I played American Football and wrestled in my high school years (as well as a year of football in college) and I have also been in a car wreck where my body was injured in a few places that could not feasibly be medically treated; both of these contribute to chronic pain in several areas of my body. Now, the pain is nothing I cannot work through, and it has taught me to be more careful with myself, but I can't help but feel that for every instance of acknowledgement of pain, my cognitive resources are being pulled away from other subjects that I may find of greater importance. In each iteration of an idea, there is a building process, but if the building process is interrupted by something it can cause the idea to lose its inert force, right? So the occurrence of chronic pain, in my experience, can cause tiny rifts in coherent cognitive thought, because the pain is taking a cognitive-resource from what would normally be a different cognitive process. However, I am not sure how significant this really is, because the momentary lapse in concentration may not be enough to considerably derail the thought, and working with the chronic pain may allow a greater focus to be gained, though I am really not sure. The construction of coherent thought that builds on itself has always been of great interest to me, though I feel there are many complex variables involved, and I haven't even touched on biological factors such as the interplay of cortisol levels with cognitive processes or other aspects I may be overlooking.

Not quite the same as what you are talking about, but I felt the supplanting of focused thought-instances with detracting thought-instances was in some way parallel to the idea of non-action still being a choice, albeit negative when in reference to one's necessary task completion.

Edit: Changed instance to importance. Was that merely an unconscious word swap or was it due to distraction?

Other thing that some people disastrously fail at internalizing is the time limits and the necessity to make best use of available time. Many techniques of rational thought are incredibly time-expensive; especially those related to probabilities; a lot of the time in the real world you can dramatically improve your certainty easier than you can calculate appropriate degree of uncertainty, to high reliability (people tend to be sloppy at math, and the priors are all too often horribly off due to unawareness of the degree to which the proposition was privileged).

Example: professional problem for software developers - often you are stuck choosing the best way to implement something, wasting as much time as implementation of both options would have took. The opposite also happens - rushing to implement ill-conceived design that takes a lot more time than would of spent to find better way to do it (essentially, the effort is unbounded and any solution that can be done in a man-week can also be done, and routinely gets done, in man-year or a man-decade, when the effort is sufficiently misguided)

I agree with the sentiment expressed here if the alternative is simply a naive sense that "doing nothing" is always an option and is a generic semantic stop sign for consideration of possible outcomes of possible plans in a serious discussion on an important subject.

On the other hand, I think it is naive to forget that "doing nothing" is an option, and it usually does have a uniquely privileged position with respect to the alternatives. Specifically, "doing nothing" is generally a low cost and/or "low energy" strategy that allows its performer to fade into the background environment and not stick out where they could become a target for predation or blame or whatever. When people talk about the "nothing" option, they generally mean the option that goes along with things like diffusion of responsibility.

One hundred people can walk past a homeless person asking for money, and in doing so they are exercising the "do nothing" option, and it works if their goal is to get to work without a potentially dangerous interaction with a potentially confused person. If one of them stopped and tried to chat with the person to gather information as to whether or not it would be consequentially good all things considered to help this particular person that would not be "doing nothing".

I don't think neurologically normal people with experience living in cities would make this mistake based on thinking that doing "nothing" isn't particularly privileged, but I think it is possible to acquire a sort of second-order decision-theoretic naivete where you have an argument against "doing nothing" but no other arguments that explain what's going on when that strategy is executed. This second order naivete can trip you up in places common sense human instincts aren't already protecting you. If you're not careful you can end up trying to "become batman" and getting hurt or something...

Learn to "fall properly" before you work on throwing and being thrown over someone's shoulder, otherwise you'll probably become fodder for stories about the valley of bad rationality. The "nothing" option is generally a pretty safe move while you build up resources to spend some on a clever experiment :-)

I think "denying that anything changes" is one of the most common mistakes I make and notice other people making. I'm choosing between a few different jobs at the moment, and I notice I actually try to construct a vision of the world where I go off and do one for 2 years, then return and do the other. Its like I want to think current opportunities will always be open to me, so I don't have to make the painful trade-off.

Now I think about it, this "freeze the world" kind of thinking is also one of the things that makes me bad at chess. I don't think enough about what other people will do, only about my own cunning plotting.

I'm not trying to be pedantic and you probably might already be aware of this, but in one of the examples you gave ("If I don't exercise...") "doing nothing" sometimes might actually be better than doing something. For example, weightlifters who are trying to build muscles are well aware that muscles are not built during training, but during the rest periods between trainings. So in a sense, you could argue that you are ONLY getting more fit by "doing nothing". It would be counterproductive to exercise all of the time and never give your body a chance to recover.

Aside from this small critique, I agree with the spirit of the post and I think it is an excellent point to bear in mind.

When writing business analyses when multiple courses of action are available, they've trained us to always include the "status quo" option, which would be very similar to your definition of "doing nothing". Phrasing it in this way, and ensuring that it enters every discussion, allows better results from important decision points.

Interesting, I always only considered the opportunity costs of an activity, but not the consequences of not doing it. Thanks.