I think something like "accountability" is a much more accurate term for this generalization than "dominance". Parents, teachers, bosses etc. are roughly as motivated by their accountability to their children, students and employees.
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1Some supplementary armchair psychologizing + navel gazing...
A core part of the recipe for a prototypical LWer seems to be: take a kid with a fairly high IQ (like, at least +2 sd, probably more). At some point, the kid notices that the authority figures in their life - teachers, bosses, parents, what have you - are just not that smart or competent. Indeed, relative to the capabilities of our prototypical LWer, it is basically true that the authority figures in their life are largely morons. (This was certainly my experience!)
… and a natural response to this is to reject the core dominance-hierarchies of society.
That, in turn, lifts the wool from the prototypical LWer’s eyes in many ways. They become able to apply an appropriate level of skepticism to authoritative sources of information, like e.g. academic papers. On the flip side, part of the cost is often losing the standard anti-akrasia mechanism.
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1I think a smart kid's judgement of other people as incompetent is a very noisy and biased signal. To put simply, they're wrong.
A more reliable signal is that many things around us are surprisingly well made. Take the smart kid in your example, and ask them to make a simple wooden chair. Or play a simple piece on the piano and make it sound good. Or draw a simple website design that looks appealing. There are tons of "ordinary" people, not any kind of authorities or top 1%ers, who routinely do these things well. But the smart kid will find it impossible to do any of these things well, unless they make a serious effort for a quite long time.
The general point you're making might be true, but 2/3rds of your examples are working against you.
It depends on exactly how young the 'smart kid' is, of course, but I think (and have seen in practice) that a reasonably smart and tech-savvy 14-year-old can build a functional, pleasing-to-the-eye website in a week, especially if they have a lot of free time. To play any instrument well takes a certain amount of dedicated effort, but I think a lot of high-achieving kids start learning one early, especially if their parents push it on them.
Meanwhile, a lot of the world's most popular websites are noisy, buggy, and full of ads. And pop music, even when it sounds good, is not very melodically complicated; that "simple piece on the piano" might be more interesting, even if it doesn't have the juicy bass or whatever. Depending on what kinds of aesthetic judgements you're making, I think it's absolutely true that an individual smart kid can make something "better" than the public SOTA, without trying very hard, in either of those two categories. Honestly, I suspect this is true regardless of how smart the kid in question is.
That's not to say it's because everyone else is stupid. Mass-deployed websites are operating under a lot of constraints that a hobbyist Neocities page doesn't need to worry about, so their job is a lot harder. And pop musicians are actively optimizing for something kinda basic, because that's what reaches the widest audience. But these nuances might not be obvious to the kid in the scenario, and especially not if you just look at the product on its own. From the kid's perspective, just looking at the things around us might give a sense that they're surprisingly badly made, relative to what the kid could do (with a little effort).
Not sure about the chair, though. Maybe those really are surprisingly well made.
I really think it's more about having autism-typical personality traits, which do often play badly with conventional schooling but aren't particularly caused by it.
The opposite is also frequently true, perhaps even for the very same people: being in a position of authority is also a reliable fix for akrasia. Common examples: “I have a kid now, my family relies on me”, “my community is depending on me”, “my employees need me to make the best decision for the company”.
Even in the example given, almost every officer in the military has both superiors and direct reports.
I wasn't quite happy with the OPs phrasing it in terms of dom/sub dynamics, but couldn't quite put a finger on it - I think your point that it's more about social expectations and connections in general captures it pretty well!
I really, really dislike other people telling me what to do. In fact, I've sometimes done things because other people told me that I couldn't do them (motivation through pride) or shouldn't do them (motivation through spite). I think this goes for a lot of intelligent people, unless they are working for something which aligns with their values, or for people who they like. I'm often more motivated to help my friends than I am to help myself.
So, this solution works for most people, but it doesn't generalize to people like myself who have a high need of agency and feel unfairly compensated (being twice as good of a worker rarely results in twice the salary). And I think this problem is at its worst when I interpret the actions I must take in my life as originating from the outside (society saying I need to work) rather than as being my own choice (Me choosing to work because I think it's best).
Alternative sources of motivation I've seen work in other people is morality (e.g. wanting the world to be better), hopes/dreams for the future (this is vulnerable to doubt, however), the sense of duty, sheer love for the work at hand, and putting oneself in a sitaution with no way out except doing the work. Alternative causes of Akrasia I've seen are disillusionment/nihilism, perfectionism, and fear (fear of pain, risk, the unknown, and of the feeling of cognitive load). Apathy and nihilism are both harmful to motivation as motivation is rooted in meaning and emotion.
I personally recommend decreasing ones scope of consideration to the local, where one has the most agency, and surrounding oneself with people who care a lot, as this repairs disillusionment over time
This is all true, but/and dominance-as-solution-to-akrasia can be generalized to something like "not even considering [not doing the thing] as a possibility" / "excluding [not doing the thing] from the action space".
E.g., some people have an exercise habit so strong that it takes effort for them to make an exception, and it basically doesn't matter whether they have a fitness dom waving a stick over their head.
Left to their own devices, tons of people struggle to formally study topics they’d like to learn. What’s the standard solution? A classroom environment, where a teacher/professor gives assignments and there are (perceived) consequences for failing to do them.
Left to their own devices, tons of people would struggle to complete the non-fun parts of their job. What’s the go-to standard solution? A boss.
Back when I was a student, it certainly helped me study much more than I would have managed on my own, but I wouldn't say it was a solution for akrasia. I still had pretty massive amounts of it. Likely the bit about consequences also made things worse. I might notice that I was falling behind in how many courses I had completed, so I would do things like taking on an excessive course load in an attempt to catch up and then be forced to drop most of them partway through the semester, after it proved impossible to do all of them. Then I did worse than if I'd just have focused on a more realistic amount of courses from the beginning, and fell behind even more.
Many of my past jobs have been similar in that yes, I have certainly gotten more done at the job than I would have gotten done otherwise, but that's involved a very large degree of suffering and fighting akrasia and the amount of things I've accomplished has been nowhere as much as I'd have wanted to.
My levels of akrasia have been more serious than the average person's, but I don't think that I'm unusual in finding that school/work is nowhere near a solution to akrasia. In fact, I think that "procrastinating on your school assignments until it's just barely before the deadline and then doing them at the last moment with a lot of discomfort" is maybe one of the most common forms of akrasia there is.
Doing something with another person or a group is also effective. For example, gym buddies, startup cofounders, artist groups, marriages (if done right), etc. As Alex_Altair says in another comment, it's about accountability.
This seems valid as far as it goes, but there are common situations where dominance/accountability as a motivation strategy starts to fall apart. I'm thinking mainly of some types of white-collar knowledge work (at a fairly high level) where it's not easy to tell how hard or effectively someone is working from the outside. Maybe somebody with more management experience can comment on this, but my impression is: As a manager, you want to avoid micromanaging, both because you don't have the time or expertise for it and because it pisses people off. I think it's much easier, and maybe more reliable, to try to hire people with "internal motivation" than to try to motivate them via dominance. Dominance as a motivator very easily turns into fear and is fundamentally adversarial. You don't want your employees to feel like they're working against you, right? Complex intellectual work benefits from a collaborative environment. So unless you can make the work super interesting, it mostly falls to the employees to manage their own akrasia.
Or to put that another way, shouldn't the title be instead "Submission: The Standard Everyday Solution To Akrasia"? As it comes close to saying in the second-last paragraph.
1I'd argue that this is more broadly about having a forcing function, of which status dynamics are a subset. I find that when I tie myself to the mast, I have more willpower, which probably has something to do with the dopaminergic anticipation of reward changing. In the case of status, high-status people have a lot of sway over others in their tribal context, so most people are naturally averse to disobeying them in that context. You wouldn't want to get exiled from the tribe, after all.
The problem is that this doesn't work for more serious cases that might also involve e.g. depression. My best guess at a more comprehensive theory is that willpower is intricately linked with consciousness and intelligence. More intelligent minds learn and get tired out more quickly (from faster fine-tuning maybe?), which needs to be overridden with more willpower. The less conscious you are and the less willpower you exercise, the more likely you are to be doing a rote task that's already been fine-tuned, and in that case there's not much efficient cross-domain optimization going on.
I still have a strong dislike of mathematics which I acquired by doing the first semester of a German mathematics degree. I think doing that was actively harmful in certain ways. Not sure if it was net negative though. A similar thing happened when studying GOFAI and Chemistry at university.
Each time that I tried to do some accountability buddy thing it completely failed.
The things that actually worked for me is taking methylphenidate, and seriously trying to answer the question of what I think the best thing to do is (in the moment). Once I figure out the thing that I think is actually the best thing to do, it becomes easy to do.
For doing sport I dance to this. That's so fun that it makes me have the problem that I sometimes dance too long.
Also for working I noticed that writing computer programs to understand things better is both really useful and really fun, which makes it easier to work.
The general pattern is to try to make the things that are good for you to do so fun that ideally you just do them by default for their own sake.
This is standard today, but how recent is it? It looks like the industrial age to me.
How much of institutions is about solving akrasia and how much is about breaking the ability to act autonomously?
We get the word akrasia from Plato, but was he really talking about the same thing?
Funny perspective,, but why not model the phenomenon as distributed computing instead of using loaded labels? Mundane things like what to eat for dinner is a collective family-unit decision, modelling is as bi-directional dominance game sounds counter-useful to me, even though the description could be made equally accurate in both frames.
Say, when I cook pasta an hour sooner than I would have otherwise when my husband is hungry already, I even delegate 99% of the decision about various health hazards to the institutions of the civilization I live in - the tap water is fine, the bag of pasta is fine, the tomatoes are meh but fine, I just check the non-moldy cheese is indeed not moldy yet. I don't have a chemical and bio lab to check for all the poisons and microbes myself, yet I don't see it as being submissive to the society, I just trust the external computation that made the decisions for me is aligned enough with my interests..
Here’s the LessWrong tag page on Akrasia:
It’s a topic which has been talked about a fair bit on LessWrong (though admittedly more so in years past). Yet looking at both the above description and the list of posts on the topic, I am surprised that nobody has emphasized the standard way in which most of the world solves akrasia most of the time: having a boss tell you what to do.
Left to their own devices, tons of people struggle to get into physical shape; akrasia makes it hard to keep up exercise. You know what works pretty reliably? Joining the military.
Left to their own devices, tons of people struggle to formally study topics they’d like to learn. What’s the standard solution? A classroom environment, where a teacher/professor gives assignments and there are (perceived) consequences for failing to do them.
Left to their own devices, tons of people would struggle to complete the non-fun parts of their job. What’s the go-to standard solution? A boss. If you look at the actual selection pressures on bosses in mid-size-or-larger companies, it sure looks like the main thing they’re selected for is maintaining dominance. Perhaps that is the main value the boss offers: dominance is how they get most employees, even well-meaning employees, to actually do the things which need doing.
It seems like most human brains are pretty hardwired for orders from a person in a position of dominance/authority to circumvent akrasia[1], in a way that e.g. just setting monetary incentives for oneself usually doesn’t. And this seems to be the main way that most of the economy solves the akrasia problem, on a day-to-day basis.
I think of “dominance is the standard solution to akrasia” as one of the foundational building blocks of a hypothetical Rationalism For Submissives. It’s one of the main reasons why one would want a Rationalism For Submissives, why one would expect such an Art to potentially work at all. In principle, a skilled dom is a way to get the sub to actually do things, even things the sub knows they should do but which are kinda ugh-y.
Importantly, if two people make the overhead-investment to maintain the dom/sub relationship, then it’s potentially relatively cheap for the dom to marginally help the sub actually do stuff. Not every dom needs to be e.g. a full time teacher or manager, although they probably need some visible real skills of some sort to maintain the sub’s respect. Real punishments of some sort are probably necessary, though.
Of course one does need to psychologically recognize the dominance/authority in order for this to work; cultural packages seem load-bearing for making people recognize specific figures as having dominance/authority.