Test of: Decision Fatigue, Rationality, and Akrasia.

Shortly before the Summit, Alexandros posted a short discussion post wondering whether rationality training might cause akrasia by prompting folks to make more decisions using deliberate, conscious, "system II" reasoning (instead of rapid, automatic, "system I" heuristics) and, thereby, causing decision fatigue.

This conjecture sounded interesting to me, and I'd wondered similar things myself, so I put up a poll to gather data.

Procedure

I put this poll on up LW, asking a number of questions that I hoped bore on: (1) akrasia levels; (2) how the person's akrasia levels had shifted since they came to LW; and (3) how many decisions they made via deliberate "system II" processing. 70 LW-ers completed the survey in time to get included in my data analysis; perhaps because the survey was on Discussion, these were mostly folks who'd been on LW for a while; median response to "months since you started reading LW/OB" was 19.

I also wanted a control group so as to distinguish real LW anomalies from random bugs in most humans' self-reporting architecture. I tried to ask Reddit, but got only 7 responses; then I tried Mechanical Turk and received my full 100 desired responses... but it is hard to be sure that Mechanical Turk data is from real humans.

Validity of “akrasia/procrastination” self-reports

It would be nice if self-reported akrasia levels correlated with (lack of) success with common goals, such as income, exercise, and living in a non-filthy house. To assess participants' akrasia, I asked the following questions:

2. As a kid, how much trouble did you have with procrastination?[1]
3. How much trouble do you have now with procrastination?
4. Have you had any bills go to a collection agency in the last six months?
5. When was your kitchen floor most recently cleaned?
6. How many times have you exercised in the last 7 days?
11. What was your college GPA?
12. What was your high school GPA?
18. What's your present income, in dollars per year?

I replaced all responses with z-score estimates, replaced income with "income controlled for age", and started looking at correlations. Of these items, #3 and #4 failed to correlate with the other "akrasia" questions[2], so I discarded them and noted that "akrasia" might be less of a dimension than I was hoping. The others...

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