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Executive Function Theft

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Re: Executive Function Theft

#211

Post by taneq »

escapedmoose wrote: post #157
haswell wrote: post #43

> I will admit to never having been able to read Cal Newport’s Deep Work all the way through — I got too irritated — but I would point to his dismissive naming of the idea of “shallow work”, which he defines as logistical and often repetitive tasks, such as writing short emails. Newport recommends entirely stopping or poorly performing that work; I read this as encouraging readers to commit EFT against others around…

I’ve never read the book. Can you briefly summarize how the author expects shallow tasks to be dealt with, if not offloaded to another person?

Haha, nice, a practical demonstration! ;)

Re: Executive Function Theft

#212

Post by likeclockwork »

jancsika wrote: post #71
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> neglect them until they become a larger problem, since the alternative is taking them on by oneself and growing increasingly resentful that your coworkers don’t prioritize [stuff] Tangentially, this is a common problem in relationships. "You never do the dishes", "you never do the laundry"... My headcanon for these mismatches is that people have different thresholds of activation. In a relationship, it's useful to…

Translation here may help: > "You never do the dishes" means: You ignore how much more difficult it is to get rid of those little pantry flies, roaches, and/or ants once they find a food/crumb source vs. consistently blocking the impetus for that class of problem to manifest itself. (Or, depending on your locale, perhaps just minimizing that problem as much as possible.) Moreover, your philosophy of free agency doesn…

> That's not to mention your attempts to hide your disgust when you pick up a dirty plate to reveal mold or wiggling pantry fly eggs,

Eggs don't wiggle. Those are larvae. Maggots, baby.

Re: Executive Function Theft

#213

Post by sorry_i_lisp »

flir wrote: post #142
haswell wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe so, but unrelated to the book and its message. The author referencing the book in this context is in complete bad faith.

I dunno, I can see it both ways. The front-loaded email style or eschewing social media certainly make life easier for others. But on the other hand, many of his examples of Monastic deep workers (Einstein, Darwin) absolutely relied on those around them to function. I think mentioning the book in this context is valid; the book has very little to say about the consequences of deep work behaviours on others, and that…

Cal also writes about reverse office hours. The idea is that instead of holding a 1 hour meeting where every person only has a small contribution to make (in the realm of 5 minutes or less), they don't attend that meeting but rather the person with the objective that needs input from several different players is tasked with going to the different players when it's convenient to the ones you need the small contributions from.

So I don't think Cal is only interested in optimizing his own life and dumping everything EFT style onto others.

Undoubtedly it was easier for Darwin to work 4 deep work hours a day because he didn't have to handle the kids, prepare the food, clean the house and mow the lawn and work in the garden. Based on having read Cal a lot I haven't seen him advocate this selfishness in the modern world.

Re: Executive Function Theft

#214

Post by rcxdude »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #121
IdAugmentation wrote: post #98

Two things: The main assumption in this article is that "ego depletion" is real. It may not be, see Wikipedia [1]. Psychology is in a big replication crisis, and the ego depletion stuff is all tangled up in it. There's a real possibility that this "theft" only exists by virtue of you believing in it. I'm aware there's a lot of hedging to be done here (experiences of people with ADHD, etc.). I don't like calling this…

When I hear a correlation expressed as causation, I try to turn it around to check whether it makes more sense that way. "If you believe that ego depletion is real, you experience it." -- wow, sounds spooky, fascinating if true "If you experience ego depletion, you believe that it is real." -- yes thank you, Captain Obvious To me it seems like different people have different capacity for making decisions (that's kind…

It's a hypothesis, but just because it intuitively makes more sense for you if you flip the causation in the correlation around doesn't mean that the causation actually goes in that direction. You would still need to actually back this up by experiment.

Re: Executive Function Theft

#215

Post by rcxdude »

writeslowly wrote: post #24

The author is proposing that these “Workplace EFT” examples need some sort of fix, but I think it’s actual preferable to make the same decision as your coworkers and neglect them until they become a larger problem, since the alternative is taking them on by oneself and growing increasingly resentful that your coworkers don’t prioritize meeting notes or get well cards to the same extent you do. Otherwise, you’re reall…

For people who will take on these tasks, often them not being done is worse than them getting lumped with them. While others benefit from them being done, the primary benefit is to the person doing them (because the alternative is upsetting), even if this causes resentment (which it might not do!). Apart from the potential resentment, the main issue this can cause in a team is bad allocation of resources: if there's one person who takes on most of these tasks and they are also a high-performer in other areas, then the team is unlikely to be getting the most out of them because their time is taken up by tasks that anyone could do, but isn't.

Re: Executive Function Theft

#216

Post by flir »

sorry_i_lisp wrote: post #213
flir wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I can see it both ways. The front-loaded email style or eschewing social media certainly make life easier for others. But on the other hand, many of his examples of Monastic deep workers (Einstein, Darwin) absolutely relied on those around them to function. I think mentioning the book in this context is valid; the book has very little to say about the consequences of deep work behaviours on others, and that…

Cal also writes about reverse office hours. The idea is that instead of holding a 1 hour meeting where every person only has a small contribution to make (in the realm of 5 minutes or less), they don't attend that meeting but rather the person with the objective that needs input from several different players is tasked with going to the different players when it's convenient to the ones you need the small contributio…

Was that on his blog, or in the book? Maybe I glazed over. I think it would be interesting to see him write something from the perspective of "optimising other peoples' time" to be honest. Many of the patterns do it implicitly, he's just never considered explicitly how your deep work habits can help others (afaik).

I think the argument's slightly more subtle than that - you don't have to advocate for it, it just naturally happens. Maybe it's viewing executive function as a zero sum game, where if I get some you lose some. I think we've all come up with examples that show that's not universally true, although we haven't proved it doesn't just kinda implicitly happen.

I'm currently in the position of being a carer, and large uninterrupted blocks of time are basically impossible for me right now. It's frustrating for everyone involved. Would the author of the linked piece say that I'm being robbed of my executive function because I'm looking after a sick partner? I think her model might be deepity in the Daniel Dennett sense - sounds good on the surface, but has too many exceptions to be useful. As someone else said, we're all interdependent (today's post about us all being temporarily abled fits in here somewhere). I'm not going anywhere with this, I've just been musing a lot about executive function lately.

Re: Executive Function Theft

#217

Post by brindlejim »

The author of this piece is a great example of the sort of professional victim that liberal America applauds, seeking yet another revolution of society and bureaucracy. She may labor against a *system*, but the hellscape of re-education and the constant surveillance of micro-aggressions based on another fun acronym seems infinitely worse than that system.

The underlying reality she seems to ignore is that the people who master and decide the details actually run the shop in very real ways. There is power there, if she is not too offended to see it.

Re: Executive Function Theft

#218

Post by banannaise »

IdAugmentation wrote: post #98

Two things: The main assumption in this article is that "ego depletion" is real. It may not be, see Wikipedia [1]. Psychology is in a big replication crisis, and the ego depletion stuff is all tangled up in it. There's a real possibility that this "theft" only exists by virtue of you believing in it. I'm aware there's a lot of hedging to be done here (experiences of people with ADHD, etc.). I don't like calling this…

> The main assumption in this article is that "ego depletion" is real. It may not be, see Wikipedia [1].

I think your focus is slightly off the mark here. The problem is that people are being given mentally intensive tasks that are treated as mentally trivial, so their cognitive capacity gets drained invisibly. Your brain can absolutely get tired, and when it does, it's very hard to perform cognitive tasks.

It's not ego depletion, it's exhaustion from mental work.

Re: Executive Function Theft

#219

Post by jimmaswell »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #121
IdAugmentation wrote: post #98

Two things: The main assumption in this article is that "ego depletion" is real. It may not be, see Wikipedia [1]. Psychology is in a big replication crisis, and the ego depletion stuff is all tangled up in it. There's a real possibility that this "theft" only exists by virtue of you believing in it. I'm aware there's a lot of hedging to be done here (experiences of people with ADHD, etc.). I don't like calling this…

When I hear a correlation expressed as causation, I try to turn it around to check whether it makes more sense that way. "If you believe that ego depletion is real, you experience it." -- wow, sounds spooky, fascinating if true "If you experience ego depletion, you believe that it is real." -- yes thank you, Captain Obvious To me it seems like different people have different capacity for making decisions (that's kind…

It never made sense to me how this theory treats all decisions as fungible.

Go for a short walk through the woods and you've made hundreds of decisions including where to step, what scenery to look at, how to respond to a noise you heard, etc. but that experience is generally considered refreshing.

Meanwhile, your whole day might be dampered if you have just one really important decision looming over you, or which you just made and are unsure about.

If I'm writing a fun personal code project then none of the decisions faze me, but if I'm fixing a bug in some awful code I might need a break.

Diagnosed with ADHD myself. The prescribed stimulants definitely make it easier to deal with annoying decisions.

I noticed mental fatigue around a task is just an illusion I might have picked up from observing others? If I just don't think about it, I can start on a big daunting thing and just keep going, like I always tended to do in the past. If I let others' descriptions of task paralysis or whatever seep into my head then it gets harder.

Re: Executive Function Theft

#220

Post by rexpop »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #206
rexpop wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, appreciate your deliberate and expository introspection but if you need this explained to you, there's a chance you will never—and I mean never—get it, but here goes: Some people believe that we owe it to one another to be considerate to one another, ie to take responsibility for one another's emotional well-being. Yes, that "underlying idea" is actually quite common in polite society if not outright ubiq…

Right, and I'm not arguing it's OK to be a prick at work. But constructing a New Yorker length article to decry behavior that would more reasonably be ignored or shrugged off seems pretty overwrought to me.

So now we're just in disagreement about where these thresholds lie, and I think that's an OK place to disagree, because it will evolve over time with cultural evolution. I don't need to advise you that it's often tactically advantageous exhibit sensitivity to cultural norms.

That being said, I would be happy to see us hold one another to higher empathic standards than have been expected in corporate culture for the last century. At least one 2008 research study suggests that Narcissistic Personality Inventory scores were on the rise since 1989[0]--among undoubtedly WEIRD[1] college students.

0. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5342670_Egos_Inflat...

1. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/05/weird

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