Hm. I never saw this as a bad attribute nor can I accept it as the reason for procrastination. Yes, sure. People work more for goals that are closer in time then for goals that are further away. But that is not irrational, nor is it the reason for procastination. First let me explain how I see the procastination thing and then let me say a word or two about why I think that temporal discounting is something rational…
Why do humans procrastinate?
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Re: Why do humans procrastinate?
#22It is worth noting that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are the fathers of modern-day behavioral economics. Their biggest contribution is called Prospect Theory. It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong. Kahneman won a noble prize in Economics for his work. Sadly, Tversky passed away in 1996 before he could be awarded. Prospect Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…
I was rather under the impression that prospect theory was descriptive and not normative. Prospect theory ain't gonna save you and your hyperbolic discounting from being money-pumped, and one of the interesting bits of Ainslie's book, IIRC, was discussing how economic incentives and penalties did shift people closer to normatively-correct discounting and away from preference reversals.
Re: Why do humans procrastinate?
#23What that comment doesn't get is the anguish that sometimes accompanies procrastination. I don't want to start real work, often for a reason I can't quite fathom, so I go play Skyrim, and while I'm playing it I feel really really bad for not working even though I can't quite force myself to quit playing either. There's no joy in this particular kind of procrastination, and so it can't be explained by the lure of imme…
Of course the issue is success isn't a linear thing, it has peaks and valleys, but its sometimes hard to rationalize this as you're actually going thru it - you really just have to push going through those feeling like a loser phases.
Re: Why do humans procrastinate?
#24Re: Why do humans procrastinate?
#25Hm. I never saw this as a bad attribute nor can I accept it as the reason for procrastination. Yes, sure. People work more for goals that are closer in time then for goals that are further away. But that is not irrational, nor is it the reason for procastination. First let me explain how I see the procastination thing and then let me say a word or two about why I think that temporal discounting is something rational…
Exactly. Distance in time means greater uncertainty of reward, and greater uncertainty means lower motivation to go after it in the first place.
In fact, it is often wildly different from the known rational answer. In other words, we have some hardcoded responses to scenarios that are probably built on evolutionarily rational behavior, but which don't apply well to specific scenarios in which the "correct" rational behavior is easily determined.
Re: Why do humans procrastinate?
#26I think this simplistic explanation does not do justice to the complex subject which is procrastination. If it were that simple, we wouldn't be having those problems, would we? For a more rounded perspective on the subject of procrastination I suggest reading someone who observed a few hundreds of cases and helped in fixing most of them: http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-G...
How do you figure? Our behavior is driven by powerful forces, and rational analysis is a relatively new factor. The book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely explores how our cognitive biases (such as anchoring and many others) often remain in place even after we are told that they exist and how to identify them.
Re: Why do humans procrastinate?
#27Taleb's "The Black Swan" has a nice discussion of scorn of the abstract, though not in the context of procrastination.
Re: Why do humans procrastinate?
#28Hm. I never saw this as a bad attribute nor can I accept it as the reason for procrastination. Yes, sure. People work more for goals that are closer in time then for goals that are further away. But that is not irrational, nor is it the reason for procastination. First let me explain how I see the procastination thing and then let me say a word or two about why I think that temporal discounting is something rational…
Temporal discounting is just something we do. It's a heuristic[1] sometimes gives good results, sometimes doesn't. When it doesn't, the redditor suggests, that's what we call procrastination. When it works well, we generally don't even notice, because it seems so natural.
Procrastination often has no reward at all. If it has a reward, why call it procrastionation? You actually do something useful, if it has a reward.
That's setting a higher bar for "reward" than what is meant. Pleasurable activities like watching television or playing video games are "rewarding". That's why people do them. That's why people continue doing them even when they "have more important things to do". Yes, in the end, you might not get anything material out of them, but if it truly had "no reward at all", nobody would do them.
losing $100 might feel as bad, as winning $200 might feel good
That's known as "loss aversion", another cut from Kahneman & Tversky's Greatest Hits.
But if you think about that risk again for this point in time + one year it is not that unlikely anymore.
Notice that you say if you think about.... When people procrastinate, are they really thinking of those sorts of things. Suppose you're a student that has a paper due soon and opt to play video games instead. You'd probably be thinking something like "I'll play games now and do the paper later." rather than something like "I might die before the end of term, so why bother with the paper?"
That's not to say you're wrong: only to bring it back to the original context.
[1]: A heuristic, in other words, being a way of "avoiding cost" of doing the rational (maximizing) computation. So it's not really different from what you're saying.
Re: Why do humans procrastinate?
#29Hm. I never saw this as a bad attribute nor can I accept it as the reason for procrastination. Yes, sure. People work more for goals that are closer in time then for goals that are further away. But that is not irrational, nor is it the reason for procastination. First let me explain how I see the procastination thing and then let me say a word or two about why I think that temporal discounting is something rational…
It's over-discounting that's irrational.
If I have a school paper due in a month, the probability that I won't have to do the paper is certainly non-zero (I could die, my professor could get sick, etc)... but it's likely something less than a .01% chance that an event like that will happen. It's not rational to put off a paper until the last couple days if there's still a 99.99% chance you will have to turn it in. I over value my current reward of being able to watch more TV now, while under discounting the future cost of having to do the paper in the future. I treat it more like there's a 10%+ chance that I won't actually have to do the paper.
Re: Why do humans procrastinate?
#30http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Bra...
And there was a very interesting Metafilter thread from a few years ago that found that a small amount of alcohol overcame procrastination:
http://ask.metafilter.com/22924/Why-does-alcohol-overcome-my...
It's probably time to start studying these kinds of things as genuinely biological phenomena.