Akrasia is the tendency to act against your own long-term interests, and is a problem doubtless only too familiar to us all. In his book "Breakdown of Will", psychologist George C Ainslie sets out a theory of how akrasia arises and why we do the things we do to fight it. His extraordinary proposal takes insights given us by economics into how conflict is resolved and extends them to conflicts of different agencies within a single person, an approach he terms "picoeconomics". The foundation is a curious discovery from experiments on animals and people: the phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting.
We all instinctively assign a lower weight to a reward further in the future than one close at hand; this is "discounting the future". We don't just account for a slightly lower probability of recieving a more distant award, we value it at inherently less for being further away. It's been an active debate on overcomingbias.com whether such discounting can be rational at all. However, even if we allow that discounting can be rational, the way that we and other animals do it has a structure which is inherently irrational: the weighting we give to a future event is, roughly, inversely proportional to how far away it is. This is hyperbolic discounting, and it is an empirically very well confirmed result.
I say "inherently irrational" because it is inconsistent over time: the relative cost of a day's wait is considered differently whether that day's wait is near or far. Looking at a day a month from now, I'd sooner feel awake and alive in the morning than stay up all night reading comments on lesswrong.com. But when that evening comes, it's likely my preferences will reverse; the distance to the morning will be relatively greater, and so my happiness then will be discounted more strongly compared to my present enjoyment, and another groggy morning will await me. To my horror, my future self has different interests to my present self, as surely as if I knew the day a murder pill would be forced upon me.
If I knew that a murder pill really would be forced upon me on a certain date, after which I would want nothing more than to kill as many people as possible as gruesomly as possible, I could not sit idly by waiting for that day to come; I would want to do something now to prevent future carnage, because it is not what the me of today desires. I might attempt to frame myself for a crime, hoping that in prison my ability to go on a killing spree would be contained. And this is exactly the behavour we see in people fighting akrasia: consider the alcoholic who moves to a town in which alcohol is not sold, anticipating a change in desires and deliberately constraining their own future self. Ainslie describes this as "a relationship of limited warfare among successive selves".
And it is this warfare which Ainslie analyses with the tools of behavioural economics. His analysis accounts for the importance of making resolutions in defeating akrasia, and the reasons why a resolution is easier to keep when it represents a "bright clear line" that we cannot fool ourselves into thinking we haven't crossed when we have. It also discusses the dangers of willpower, and the ways in which our intertemporal bargaining can leave us acting against both our short-term and our long-term interests.
I can't really do more than scratch the surface on how this analysis works in this short article; you can read more about the analysis and the book on Ainslie's website, picoeconomics.org. I have the impression that defeating akrasia is the number one priority for many lesswrong.com readers, and this work is the first I've read that really sets out a mechanism that underlies the strange battles that go on between our shorter and longer term interests.
I found this article both interesting and informative. I definitely plan to spend some time studying picoeconomics.
One interesting effect that I have found in personal productivity efforts is that applying techniques to enforce resolution and overcome passive resistance can change the perceived emotional weighting between alternatives, often quite rapidly.
For example, let's say I'm reading LW instead of writing a term paper. I've made a (probably irrational) decision that the negative emotion of exerting the effort to write the term paper exceeds the negative emotion of having an incomplete assignment hanging over me. If I apply a pattern interrupt to get me started writing, my emotional weighting will shift, often within a matter of minutes - the effort of writing will not feel nearly as bad as the pressure of the unfinished assignment. Overcoming the emotional inertia of passive resistance shifts the perceived emotional weight of the alternatives.
Of course the challenge is to translate that knowledge into action. Even though I know that the emotional balance will likely shift, that doesn't alter the feeling of initial resistance. That challenge has sold and will continue to sell millions of self help books :) It's like an arms race between future/planning self and present moment self. For every pattern interrupt devised by future self, present self finds a defense to defuse the pattern interrupt and continue the present moment pleasurable activity.
The irony of reading LW as a present moment escape under the nominal guise of strengthening future self's ability to keep present self on course is not lost on me. And on that note, I'm off to get some work done.
You've actually missed a key distinction here: the negative emotion of the incomplete assignment is almost certainly what makes you procrastinate... and you're mistakenly interpreting that negative emotion as being about the writing.
What happens is this: since you feel the unfinished item pressure every time you think about doing the task, you literally condition yourself to feel bad about doing the task. It becomes a cached thought (actually a cached somatic marker) tagging the task with the same unpleasantness as the unpleasantness of it "hanging ... (read more)