I like this framing, and have had thought about framing it in similar ways. I am glad to see someone else make a similar abstraction.
I also want to highlight that there are potentially significant negative consequences of using this kind of motivation in the long run, and that I am still confused about the tradeoff of what I would usually call "internal violence" and "urge propagation" (though those are both confusing terms, and I would not want them to become the default for the things I am pointing at). The thing you describe feels fairly internally violent to me.
Thanks for the response!
Can you expand what you mean by internal violence? If it means what I intuitively read it as, then it hasn't been my felt experience (though there's always the possibility that it's occurring and I'm not recognizing it, and if so I'd like to know)
Rationality/CFAR instrumental techniques such as urge propagation or TAPs or whatnot never worked for me. They felt like fighting myself and then feeling bad for failing.
To get past it I had to go through a time where I completely gave up accomplishing anything but basic Adulting, and learn to be completely okay with that. “I went to work. I paid my bills. It's totally okay if that's all I accomplish this week. Anything else is extra.” During this time I got really annoyed at anyone pushing productivity techniques because it was actively harmful to me.
It was only once I totally accepted low level functioning that I was able to add more on. Everything I do today, I do with an acceptance of being low level functioning, even though in practice I manage to generally not be.
Good Idea: RSVP to events with "Yes, AND I need a ride" or "Yes, AND I'll bring dessert" so that not showing up is causing a detriment to other people.
This is a more specific point than your overall thrust, but I like this as a concrete suggestion for the situations where it's appropriate.
For keeping my place clean and presentable, I find it helpful to invite people over to socialise at mine (rather than a pub or restaurant).
I'm a grad student in CS theory, so it is not really expected of me to go to the office everyday, no-one checks (can check?) that I have done any work this week, and people don't really expect that deadlines (for things like peer reviews) are kept, because everyone is used to academics missing deadlines. I often envy people in customer service jobs, where not much motivation / will power seems to be needed to keep going (because the customer is going to be annoyed if not). I wonder whether there is any way to salvage such theory research jobs along the lines suggested in the post; would be super-useful to me and presumably others.
I think I interpret this phenomenon as a motivation problem. The fear of letting someone down is more motivating to you than the actual task itself. We are inherently social creatures so this makes a lot of sense for why it's working for you. I'm not sure I'm really getting the connection to morality.
Maybe there's a need for more clarity on what morality means. Does moral just mean BAD or is moral a substitute for "damaged social connections"? Are you more motivated by not being BAD or are you more motivated by keeping your social connections strong?
tl;dr- "My executive functioning doesn't work, so I use morality instead."
From an outside perspective it's a little hard to tell that I don't have a lot of executive functioning. I keep my living space relatively clean, I get places relatively on time, I maintain a regular 9-to-5, and I have a lot of side projects in my free time that I generally manage to complete. But my life wasn't always that way, and most of the general rationality/CFAR methods of coping don't work at all for me. Getting diagnosed as an adult with ADD and trying a variety of medications also didn't work at all for me. Obviously, generalizing from one mind is a particularly Bad Idea in my case as I'm rather an outlier, but hopefully things that work for me might be useful for other people. (This may end up as a sequence of Things That Work for Me, but for today I'm just focusing on one.)
One way I manage to function is to have employment or other life aspects where I feel it is a Moral Imperative to Do The Thing. I call this "Offloading my executive functioning onto my morality," and it pretty much means setting up my life in a way where Doing Things comes naturally, because otherwise there are immediate negative effects on people I care about. I don't want to get into EvPsych stuff, but I feel it is a more natural motivation and How Humans Are Wired.
A bunch of examples:
Bad Idea: Have a job that lets you arrive whenever. Your arrival time has no effect on anyone else's work.
Good Idea: Have a job where a specific person is depending on you to arrive on time. Maybe your friend can't leave his shift until you arrive for yours. Maybe you are teaching a karate class and arriving late is wasting a bunch of people's time.
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Bad Idea: RSVP to events with "Maybe", so that no one's put out if you don't show.
Good Idea: RSVP to events with "Yes, AND I need a ride" or "Yes, AND I'll bring dessert" so that not showing up is causing a detriment to other people.
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Bad Idea: Have a job like academia where even if your research might be hugely useful, it is theoretic in application and far in the future.
Good Idea: Have a job like teaching or nursing, where people are relying on you, and not-working has immediate, visible, detrimental results for other people.
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In a more traditionally rational framing, these can be summarized as: Use social pre-commitment techniques, and keep things in near mode (Far mode morality does not work for this use for me). But the framing of "Use Morality Instead" tends to point more naturally at the thing that works for me.
Note: A possible downside of this is that I am much less tolerant of things like "People showing up really late for a one-on-one meeting", because my method of functioning assigns those behaviors as "Morally Bad".