Live data from Hacker News

The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

jamesclear.com

121–130 of 157 posts

Re: The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An eternal hell fire is Greek/Roman mythology, it was only merged with Christianity because of the Roman Catholic Church. No, it's actually (a version of) the Jewish myth of Gehenna [0], and it's incorporated into Christianity because it is referenced directly in the Bible, both the general named myth as a place people are cast for punishment (many times, in all three synoptic Gospels plus James) and the specific e…

Judaism has no hell, ask any religious Jew. (I know a few and have had this very discussion with them.) Ghenna was a burning trash heap, not a place of torment. Death is a silencing end, not a torturous punishment in the bible, including the teachings used by the Jews. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell Also, christian Churches don't teach Jewish theology, they teach a version of Catholisim, and eternal burning hell…

> Judaism has no hell, ask any religious Jew.

Not all historical variations of Jewish religious beliefs that existed near the time of the birth of Christianity still exist as Jewish beliefs, but, AFAICT, the Jewish belief of at a minimum something like a Purgatory is still active; the concept of hell/Gehenna explicit in the Gospels as a place of punishment reflected (possibly an evolution from) a then-current (but not at all universal) Jewish religious belief related to the one that remains current in some branches of Judaism.

> Ghenna was a burning trash heap, not a place of torment.

This idea appears to be a medieval Jewish invention. It was, again, specifically in the Hebrew scriptures, a place where children were sacrificed by fire by non-Jews.

> Also, christian Churches don't teach Jewish theology

No, they teach Christian theology, but Christian theology didn't, as whole, arise ex nihilo with the formation of Christianity as a distinct religious community, it evolved, in many specifics, from Jewish theology that existed where and when Christianity emerged.

> they teach a version of Catholisim,

Well, no. It's true that most (but not all) now-existing branches of Christianity diverged at some point from the Church that was institutionalized in Rome in the same way that Christianity itself diverged from Judaism; to claim, then, that they teach “a version of Catholicism” is true only in the exact same way as saying that they teach a version of Judaism is.

> and eternal burning hell fire of punishment is found in the Vatican's own Catechism of the Catholic Church.

It's found in the Gospel of Mark (9:43); from the KJV:

“And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched”

And also in Revelation (20:10):

“And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”

I'm pretty sure the authors of the Gospel and the Revelation weren't inspired by theological developments that would occur after the institutionalization of Roman Catholicism.

> The bible is clear that when you die, you are either asleep, like King David was (Jesus referenced his bones) or burned up and gone forever, the lake of fire from Revelations

This is phenomenally wrong: the Bible uses lots of different and superficially conflicting images of afterlife states, and the lake of fire of Revelation is explicitly one of eternal torment at least for some.

Re: The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

#122
post #71

I have a pet theory than the reason people procrastinate, is because they don't concretely identify their future selves, as being the "same person" as their present self. Rather, they view their future self as an abstract person, more akin to a friend, than self. This level of relatedness varies with time as well. People identify very strongly with their future self from tomorrow, perhaps akin to their best friend. B…

There is an episode of Roderick on the Line where John Roderick goes on at length describing his relationship with past-John and future-John, and all the woes that past-John has visited upon him, and all the reasons he can't be bothered about future-John's wellbeing.

That reminds me of this Seinfeld bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Cz-LK16g4

Re: The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

#123

I like that Victor Hugo's 19th century version of "deleting apps from your phone" is "deleting your clothes". I have found that an easy, milder nudge, for either computer or mobile device, is to remain logged off of things by default and explicitly log out whenever you're done.

This is how i kicked facebook out of my life 3 years ago.

I made it a habit to only log in to facebook in incognito mode, i would have to log back in every time i close the session, and that was enough to remove it completely from my life.

Re: The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

#124

Akrasia and Enkrateia remind me of the dual nature of humans that St. Paul describes in Romans: We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know th…

It's easy (or at least easier) to be open and honest about our faults and failures when no one is telling us we'll burn in eternal damnation for them.

I despise religions as the next man, but they are as popular as they are for a reason: they usually include collections of practical strategies to achieve your goals in life, which actually work very well for a lot of people. The most skilful ones have accumulated millennia of empirical testing and refinements.

There is a lot of top-notch “self-help” advice buried in religious teachings, if you can ignore the superstitious and moralistic aspects. It took me decades to understand it, because I grew up hating secular bureaucracies spawned by religion (which are, more often than not, primarily interested in their own survival and as useful as the next bureaucracy - i.e. not at all).

I wish I could find a book doing with the practices of organised religion what Joseph Campbell did with myth and storytelling.

Re: The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

#125
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't adequately criticized Nietzsche for the record. So we can't know if this Simone person is up to something.

For the record, I'm not criticizing Nietzsche. I'm saying Simone de Beauvoir criticized Nietzsche in a manner I found interesting enough to remark upon. "This Simone person" pretty much invented second wave feminism with her book "The Second Sex", and is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Her work changed the course of history. So yes, she's definitely up to something.

You started off by misrepresenting Nietzsche's views and now you say that she effectively criticized him but dare not mention what that criticism was. I was trying to extract some substance from you, but now I see that will not be possible.

Re: The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

#126

Akrasia and Enkrateia remind me of the dual nature of humans that St. Paul describes in Romans: We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know th…

The only problem is that I am procrastinating by being on HN, and if I read about combating procrastination here then I can even fool myself into thinking I'm doing something useful.

Re: The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

#127
post #37
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deep Work is maybe the first book I wanted to through out of the window in a long time. The complete book can be resumed in a sentence: "Secure big chunks of time to reach and be in the flow state". But of course you cannot write a full book out of one sentence, so it repeats itself until it achieves to contradict itself by telling you that if you are a writer/journalist you can achieve the state of flow in chunks of…

Contrariwise, I just read and loved Deep Work: it's made me more purposeful about directing my attention, and aware of how my environment and lower desires work against this focus. The journalistic model of doing deep work does seems different than the others, but he's not recommending it, just pointing out that there are outliers who can train themselves to reach intense focus states quickly and do deep work in shor…

Glad it helped you! In my case, as I was already exposed to the concept of being in the flow[0] while coding and the basic rule of reserving the biggest chunk of time to my most long term or important work in my day, it was a waste of time.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Re: The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

#128
post #24
post #10

Useful things for those in the struggle... Deep Work , by Cal Newport. An excellent book on how to work on really big ideas/projects effectively, without losing your humanity in the process. This is a must-read for anyone serious about work. Pomodoro Technique. This is well-documented with lots of apps and tools online, but it's pretty simple. Set a 25 minute timer. Work, without interruption, for 25 minutes. When th…

Deep Work is maybe the first book I wanted to through out of the window in a long time. The complete book can be resumed in a sentence: "Secure big chunks of time to reach and be in the flow state". But of course you cannot write a full book out of one sentence, so it repeats itself until it achieves to contradict itself by telling you that if you are a writer/journalist you can achieve the state of flow in chunks of…

I had the opposite experience. In general most self-help books do what you describe, but I thought Deep Work went into quite some detail on how to actually achieve it.

For instance the idea of how you deal with short moments of boredom in general (also outside of work) has a lot of influence on how good you are at ignoring distractions during work was an eye opener for me, and goes deeper than "secure big chunks of time to reach and be in the flow state".

Re: The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

#129
post #14
post #10

Useful things for those in the struggle... Deep Work , by Cal Newport. An excellent book on how to work on really big ideas/projects effectively, without losing your humanity in the process. This is a must-read for anyone serious about work. Pomodoro Technique. This is well-documented with lots of apps and tools online, but it's pretty simple. Set a 25 minute timer. Work, without interruption, for 25 minutes. When th…

Any programmers here use pomodoro? I expect 25 minute interruptions would do more harm than good for my focus when writing code, especially the continuous expectation that I will be interrupted. I don’t have a pressing interest in finding productivity tips, just curious to hear about programmers who have tried this technique

I have used it and it works quite well, for certain types of work.

The 25 is just a suggestion, a starting point. There's no reason it can't be any other number.

But in the end I lost most of the ideas of the actual Pomodoro method (e.g. if you finish your work in the first five minutes of a Pomodoro, you still have to spend the twenty minutes left on improving what you did, no switching tasks within a Pomodoro -- I don't do that), what's left is just setting a timer and staying concentrated for that long. That works well for me.

What's hard is keeping the breaks short. I often start procrastinating during them and then only start the next Pomodoro much later.

There's a phone app / browser extension called "Forest" that's nice, you can set a timer and add a tree to a forest if you manage to stay off the phone / away from bad websites for that long, and add a dead tree to your forest if you failed.

Post reply on HN