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I wouldn’t say the subsconscious calibrating on more substantial measures of success, such has “how happy something made me” or “how much status that seems to have brought” is irrational. What you’re proposing, it seems to me, is calibrating only on how good of an idea it was from the predictor part / System 2. Which gets calibrated, I would guess, when the person analyses the situation? But if the system 2 is sufficiently bad, calibrating on pure results is a good idea to shield against pursuing some goal, the pursuit of which yields nothing but evaluations of System 2, that the person did well. Which is bad, if one of the end goals of the subconscious is “objective success”.
For example, a situation I could easily imagine myself to have been in: Every day I struggle to go to bed, because I can’t put away my phone. But when I do, at 23:30, I congratulate myself - it took a lot of effort, and I did actually succeed in giving myself enough time to sleep almost long enough. If I didn’t recalibrate rationally, and “me-who-uses-internal-metrics-of-success” were happy with good effort every day, I’d keep doing it. All while real me would get fed up soon, and get a screen blocker app to turn on at 23:00 every day to sleep well every day at no willpower cost. (+- the other factors and supposing phone after 23 isn’t very important for some parts of me)
“My experience may not be applicable to you.”
Thanks for the note - my experience has been exactly the opposite. A classic case of the law of equal and opposite advice :)
Another option after acknowledging the spiral is giving yourself 30 minutes to do nothing, and doing a Gendlin’s Focusing / IFS parts work with your emotional fatigue during that time. Perhaps laziness is guilt from not doing things in the last day or two. Perhaps it’s a symptom of long-term mental exhaustion. Either way, if you manage to find the time and are skilled enough in it, that’s one of the best ways to at the very least better understand what’s happening. In some cases, if it’s a very recent emotion, you can even become motivated and productive again in half an hour.
On your definition of 'poverty', Disneyland makes the world poorer.
I think the comparison with Disneyland misses the point. The essay measures poverty by the level of desperation people experience. People don’t typically work extra hours out of desperation to take their kids to Disneyland; they do it out of a desire for additional enjoyment. The 60-hour work week should be understood as working far more hours than one would if they weren't desperate for essential resources.
Poverty is about lacking crucial resources necessary for living, not just lacking luxury items. Therefore, adding more Disneylands wouldn’t make people poorer, but people who are not poor might still strive for better things—from a position of security, not desperation. Interestingly, this aligns with your argument right above that "work produces nice enough stuff that people are willing to do the work to produce it."
A really neat directly applicable article on LessWrong, thanks for sharing this! Since the trigger is obvious, it shouldn’t be hard to implement. Seems worth it, as those moments happen often to me.
Right, I completely missed the network effects, 5 minutes of thinking through wasn’t enough. May be there even are good apps there, which didn’t make it through the development and marketing part. Thanks, Vanessa!
I’m confused: if the dating apps keep getting worse, how come nobody has come up with a good one, or at least a clone of OkCupid? Like, as far as I can understand not even “a good matching system is somehow less profitable than making people swipe all the time (surely it’d still be profitable on the absolute scale)” or “it requires a decently big initial investment” can explain a complete lack of good products in a very demanded area. Has anyone digged into it / tried to start a good dating app as a summer project?
The Stoics put this idea in a much kinder way: control the controllable (specifically our actions and attitudes), accept the uncontrollable.
The problem is, people's could's are broken. I have managed to make myself much unhappier by thinking I can control my actions until I read Nate Soares' post I linked above. You can't, even in the everyday definition of control, forgetting about paradoxes of "free will".
Mentioned in another comment, but not explicitly: this falls under the general optimisation mindset. Not just blindly repeating the set of actions that once led to a positive outcome, but experimenting further to find the sweet spot/area - be it the optimal amount of More Dakka or Less Dakka. For example, in "The How of Happiness", the author explicitly advises doing the gratitude journal once a week rather than every day, to make it a ritual of actually feeling and expressing gratitude, rather than quickly writing down 3 relatively positive things as quickly as possible; not that the latter isn't effective, but it's less effective than savouring the gratitude. (I think thit pitfall is easy to avoid, but it's a good example) Another example could be sleep: suppose you've tried cutting back on sleep and found that 30 minutes a day for a week didn't affect your cognition. You could try both cutting back another 30 minutes or going the other way and trying to get an extra hour's sleep - what if increasing your sleep time actually gave you benefits that outweighed the extra hour in the evening?