An Algorithmic Lucidity

Supposedly the method of pomodoros is a great technology for overcoming procrastination: you work in twenty- or twenty-five-minute timed blocks, each of which are atomic, indivisible: you have to work through the block, and if you let yourself wander away to something else, then it doesn't count. Katja Grace explains why this is a good idea:

While working, there are various moments when it would be easier to stop than to continue, particularly if you mostly feel the costs and benefits available in the next second or so, and if you assume that you could start again shortly [...] Counting short blocks of continuous time working pretty much solves this problem for me. [...] [A]t any given moment there might be a tiny short term benefit to stopping for a second, but there is a huge cost to it. In my case this seems to remove stopping as an option, in the same way that a hundred dollar price on a menu item removes it as an option without apparent expense of willpower.

It is a good idea (I can only imagine), and yet one can't help but guess that, like spaced repetition software or any number of other technologies for living a better life, the number of people who have heard of the method of pomodoros and judged it a good idea is far larger than the number of people who have actually given it an honest try. I could lament how terrible this is, and condemn the human spirit as being lazy and therefore evil, but it seems besides the point—we have no reason to care about moral grandstanding, we want something that actually works.

One asks oneself: is this little piece of boring but genuinely-worth-doing work really that bad, really so terrible that setting a twenty-minute timer and actually facing it would be too much to bear? One wants to say that the answer can't possibly be Yes, that if one's actions betray an implicit Yes it can only mean that one wasn't really paying attention to the question. The natural inclination is then to ask if paying attention to the question is really that terrible, but that would be too obvious.

It feels immoral to even think of using techniques to motivate oneself; one should instead just use one's free will to choose the correct action. How utterly degrading it would be, how insulting to the very notion of human dignity, to stoop to the level of contemplating one's own psychology using mere cause-and-effect reasoning, as if one were some sort of animal, or a machine!

But this moralizing is itself immoral, because it doesn't work. If I'm not smart enough to do the right thing for the right reasons, then I might at least aspire to do the right thing for the wrong reasons for the right reasons.

Dear reader, I have this ... friend, who has this problem, and I wanted to ask—

What do you mean, Who is he? You wouldn't know ... her, and—

You must realize that I'm already aware that it's a standard trope for someone to say "I Have This Friend" when they're really talking about themselves, and given that I know it's already a standard trope, I would never be so obvious as to actually do it! Therefore you must truthfully conclude that I really am talking about a—

Okay, that's a good point. No, I didn't consider the fact that that reasoning can't possibly be sound because if it were, then people would use it as an excuse to falsely claim that they were speaking about a friend rather than themselves, thereby contradicting the assumption that the reasoning is—

Well, we could try to calculate the probability that I really am talking about a friend conditional on your epistemic state and taking into account the game-theoretic considerations just mentioned, but that could take all night, so will you just listen to my transparent lies for fuck's sake?

Thank you. So I have this friend, who has this problem, which is that there's a not-infrequently-occurring scenario in which she has trouble doing stuff, which is this: she feels morally obligated to make progress on some work she owes someone else, but she also wants to make progress on her own personal projects. She thinks she ought to work on the thing she owes someone before she works on her own stuff, but doesn't feel motivated to work on the thing for someone else, and she doesn't feel like she's earned the right to work on her own stuff, so she just ends up doing nothing instead. (Or not literally "nothing"; she looks at mildly informative articles and mildly amusing captioned images on the internet. But that should be considered a ground state which might as well be called nothing.) And so the day becomes a double tragedy: not only has she failed her sacred duties to someone else, she's also failed her sacred duties to herself, and for what? Tech news emphemera? Keeping up with all the comments on her favorite community blog? An adorable animated Graphics Interchange Format file of Rainbow Dash jumping on a bed? Not worth it!

Of course the right thing to do would be to efficiently work on the project she owes someone for a reasonable amount of time, and then work on her own project, but if my friend knew how to "just" do the right thing regardless of psychological state, then this problem wouldn't exist (and I wouldn't waste your time telling you about a problem that doesn't even exist on behalf of my friend who also doesn't ex—uh, doesn't ex–pect me to annoy you with problems that—unlike my friend—don't exist). To say that she should "just use willpower" isn't necessarily wrong, but it needs to be made more specific for the use of my poor friend, or an easier-to-use (although morally or pragmatically inferior) strategy is needed.

So I recommended to my friend that when she notices herself in this situation, maybe she should just start working on her personal stuff that moment, with the quiet hope that the psychological momentum of doing something, anything, can be carried over to fulfilling her obligations to others later in the day. Again, it's not the right thing to do, but surely it's better than what she lets happen now. It is written that the perfect is the enemy of the good, with the implied moral being that we should side with the merely good. I would prefer to say that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and while we would hope for the perfect to mercilessly annihilate all its enemies, sometimes you have to temporarily ally with a stronger enemy (in this case, the good) in order to vanquish an even greater foe (in this case, evil). But for humans at least, it amounts to the same thing.

Did I say the Right Thing?

"I just got an idea that will make a great blog post ..."

"No, it won't."

"What? I didn't even tell you the idea."

"I'm not denying that you had an idea; rather, I claim that it won't make a great blog post, because you won't write it. You wrote two nontrivial posts last year and then abandoned your blog for six months. Obviously, you're just like all the other millions of bags of human refuse who think of themselves as writers and yet never write. They never change, and you've shown by your behavior that you're one of them, so why should I believe you when you say you're going to write something?"

"Uh ..."

"Aww, are you offended? Is our little soi-disant 'aspiring rationalist' incapable of handling a honest statement of the undeniable truth?"

"No, I'm not offended. I disagree—"

"As expected."

"—but I won't argue with you. Just—stay subscribed to the RSS feed, will you?"

"Oh, but of course. It's not like anything will appear in it."

"..."

"This is the part where you threaten to drown me in a veritable deluge of good writing, and then I continue to mock the pathetic cycle of failure and self-delusion at the center of your existence."

"Let's skip that part. I'll see you later."

"I know what you're trying to do! It won't work!"

"I never said it would work."