Interesting. I'm familiar with the "This taks is too nebulous-what am I even doing?" but it isn't a source of procrastination for me exactly. Usually it's a cause of spending well over 25 minutes stuck in thought loops trying to figure out what to do, and what I actually need to do is talk it through with somebody or at least think out loud.
"A few minutes of browsing won't matter" matches procrastination for me, but even your short comment suggests a different context for the quoted phrase than I experience. For me "A few minutes of browsing won't matter," isn't part of the problem, it's a symptom of it, or even an instinctive attempt to solve it. You are implying that thinking such things causes you to browse instead of starting the task. For me I say that in order to guilt myself into not starting a longer-more immersive fun activity, thus giving up on the task.
For me procrastination consists of cycles of (look at website-try to start task-attempt fails-stare at nothing until boredom requires me to seek a stimulus-seek stimulus in something like browsing where the attention chunks are smaller so I'll be able to try again sooner-look at website...)
Is this not the usual phenomenon? To clarify "attempt fails", what failing looks like is this, my mind seeks to give the command to do the first step of the task, but afterward I notice my muscles have not moved.
I feel like this comes close to the definite proof that I should stop paying attention to articles about procrastination on less wrong, because you are all talking about a completely different problem than I have. (Plausible because I'm definitely neurologically weird.)
But just in case: can somebody explain to me how this isn't completely circular? If I knew how to implement the instruction "Work on one thing for that 25 minutes, nothing else." as an atomic action, I wouldn't have a procrastination problem. I notice that I'm confused and I'm not sure that I know what the word "procrastination" commonly refers to anymore.
I'm aware of the opposite problem and I try to avoid being desensitized too. But it seems to me that city people frequently actively lie to themselves and each other in order to be willing to eat meat. I'm willing to give examples if you don't know what I'm talking about.
I avoid meat (not vegetarian, just eat as little as I conveniently can) because of what I and my friends call the Stuffed-Animal-Principle. The idea is that it's bad utility function maintenance to allow stuffed animals to be abused. (Stanford burned teddy bears in the pre big game rally.) The idea is that stuffed animals are basically a technological superstimulus for empathy and you risk damage to your actual utility function by desensitizing yourself to that. (I don't have actual studies on the specific fact, but it makes sense with things that are known.)
Actual animal suffering is far more upsetting to actually witness. Mostly our society avoids this problem by putting it out of mind and just enjoying the results. We also do this for many problems that affect humans allowing them to continue and I really don't want to train my own ability and willingness to ignore suffering I'm complicit in just because it happens to not actually matter as much as it looks.
I have various friends who do meat limitation for this reason; one is even a full vegetarian. I have no idea how common it is though.
Related worry that I've been meaning to ask about for a while:
Given that is there is still plenty of controversy over which types of unusual human minds to consider "pathological" instead of just rare variants, how is MIRI planning to decide which ones are included in CEV? My skin in the game: I'm one of the Autistic Spectrum people who feel like "curing my autism" would make me into a different person who I don't care about. I'm still transhumanist; I still want intelligence enhancements, external boosts to my executive function and sensory processing on demand, and the ability to override the nastiest of my brain chemistry. But even with all of that I would still know myself as very different from neurotypicals. I naturally see the world in different categories that most, and I don't think in anything like words or a normal human language. Maybe more relevantly, I have a far higher tolerance---even a need---for sphexishness, than most people of comparable intelligence to me.
Fun theory for me would be a little different, and I think that there really are a lot of people who would consider what I did with eternity to be somewhat sad and pathetic, maybe even horrifying. I think it could be an empathic uncanny valley effect or just an actual basic drive people have, to make everybody be the same. I'm worried that this could be an actual terminal value for some people that would hold up under reflective equilibrium.
I'm not too freaked out because I think the consensus is that since Autistic people already exist and some are happy, we should have a right to continue to exist and even make more of ourselves. But I actually believe that if we didn't exist it would be right to create us, and I worry that most neurotypicals extrapolated volition would not create all the other variations on human minds that should exist but don't yet.
If it matters, up to $1000 for MIRI this year could be at stake in answering this concern. I say this in a blatant and open effort to incentivize Eliezer etc. to answering me. I hope that I'm not out of line for waving money around like this, because this really is a big part of my choice about whether FAI is good enough. I really want to give what I can to prevent existential threats, but I consider a singularity overly dominated by neurotypicals to be a shriek.
I put sometimes.
I believe all kinds of crazy stuff and question everything when I'm lying in bed trying to fall asleep, most commonly that death will be an active and specific nothing that I will exist to experience and be bored frightened and upset by forever. Something deep in my brain believes a very specific horrible cosmology as wacky and specific as any religion but not nearly as cheerful. When my faculties are weakened it feels as if I directly know it to be true and any attempt to rehearse my reasons for materialism feels like rationalizing.
I'm neither very mentally healthy nor very neurotypical, which may be part of why this happens.
In my case the usual reason they're demotivating is that I usually know that they think I can do it; they're just spelling out their model of me. Usually the model of me is so bad that I'm led to further discount their opinion, but they're signaling that they care which makes them more likely to be painfully disappointed in me. Basically those motivation talks are more than one kind of legitimate bad news. I don't need a script to be upset by them, but sometimes scripts make me care more. Childhood is one big lesson that your purpose in life is to impress and entertain adults. It can be very hard to shake.
I took the survey and all the optional questions. I love answering multiple choice questions.
Mechanism is beside the point. Mechanism is just causal nodes in between. Having no mechanism just means there is a direct connection.
Upvoted without reading for the trigger warning. Maybe I'll read it later: I suppose if it hate the article I might change my vote, but probably not. Sometimes it's in one's best interests to be a single issue voter.