What are the evolutionary purposes of laziness and procrastination? What possible survival or reproductive benefit could they have conferred? Are they simply side-effects of how our minds were built, or is there a purpose behind them?

Three possible theories:

1: Laziness didn’t exist in the ancestral evolutionary environment, it’s a byproduct of a culture that places extreme demands on our attention with various superstimuli. Without television, movies, books, music, and a thousand other distractions specifically designed to grab and hold your attention, laziness and procrastination go away. According to this theory, they’re more cultural than psychological, triggered by a specific environment.

2: Laziness/procrastination are a byproduct of being high up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The brain is designed to be motivated by hunger, thirst, pain, and fear – when civilization advances to the point of largely removing those things, Laziness is the result. According to this theory, laziness is simply the default state of a mind unencumbered by motivation.

3: Laziness/procrastination evolved specifically to counter our searing desire to predict the future. We’re built to figure out patterns, to make long term plans about achieving our goals, but long-term plans have the unfortunate habit of being negated by changing circumstances. Brains are built to make predictions, but the world is a complex place – it’s difficult to analyze. Even today we’re awful at predicting anything more than a few steps ahead. To counter this, and avoid wasting time and energy on pursuits that would likely be fruitless, we evolved an ability that stopped us from acting on our long-term predictions. According to this theory, laziness is the original labor-saving device.

The first theory I find unconvincing, though there may be a kernel of truth in it. The second theory is rather boring, but is also probably the correct one. The third theory is my favorite – it’s the most interesting – but I’m suspicious as to whether it actually fits with any data.

Any others?

Yesterday, when writing my novel (or should that be ‘writing’ my ‘novel’) I came up with a productivity trick that seemed to work rather well.Now, I usually am a follower of the Merlin Mann school of getting-things-done, and find productivity tricks to be mere distractions. But using it, by the end of the day I had written 6000 words. However, when I went to try it again today, it was not nearly as successful, and I was much more reliant on my old standby habit of simply forcing myself to buckle down and do it.

I’ve noticed this same sort of pattern off and on over the years – I’ll come up with what I’m sure is a ’sure-fire method’ of accomplishing a task, and I’ll find it doesn’t work when I go to use it a second time. My theory is that I have a sort of ‘Laziness Immune System’. Like a normal immune system, it’s vulnerable to infections from productivity tricks and hacks. However, after that first infection, it builds up a resistance to them, and they stop working whenever you try them again.

Perhaps this can explain something I’ve always found curious – that people will spend an enormous amount of time gathering productivity tips, reading lifehacking blogs, buying organizing books, and a thousand other things in order to overcome their procrastination and laziness. My standard explanation for this sort of behavior is a combination of things – liking the idea of doing something as opposed to actually doing it, a burst of excitement (and adrenaline) from an initial idea that fades over time, self-signaling that you are being productive, etc. etc. etc. Nowhere in this list was any explanation that so-called productivity tips actually work. But perhaps they DO work, they just only work once, forcing people to continually seek out more of them.

Utility maximization is essentially a mathematical formulation of how to make yourself as happy as possible. It’s a way of determining how people should behave in a somewhat rigorous manner. It’s not perfect – as can be seen in paradoxes like the utility monster and the repugnant conclusion – but it’s the best we’ve got.

In the real world, information is necessarily imperfect and accurate predictions are an impossibility. Maximizing your utility under these conditions necessitates using probability. To decide on which action will make you the happiest, you take the utility of each possible effect an action may have, multiply it times the probability that effect will occur, and sum the result. Of course, a calculation like this is much too complex to ever actually perform outside of an economics paper, but it’s a useful formulation nevertheless.

It’s trivial (to the point of obviousness, really) to adapt this sort of interpretation to my so-called ‘Option Theory‘. When maximizing your options, you’re doing it in a way that maximizes your utility. There’s no sense in giving yourself many choices if they’re all bad. You simply sum the utilities of all the options you have, and take whichever path makes that number biggest. Two really great options are better than 4 mediocre options are better than 20 lousy options.

Framed like this, option theory is merely a less complicated version of utility maximization, one that doesn’t rely on calculating probabilities. Because it’s easier to do, I suspect it’s how our brains (or any bounded-rationality system) actually decide which actions to take, versus the more intractable calculation problems of utility maximization. It’s simply another heuristic, but it’s interesting in that it appears almost universal, as opposed to our other heuristics which are more or less human-specific.

Every second that ticks by reduces my capabilities. Every moment I put this off makes it less likely that it will ever happen.

It would be so easy to give up, to turn in, to conjure reasons why it doesn’t fucking matter and it’s not fucking important. Will you let yourself? Are you capable of sweeping all that aside, rather than letting it wash over you, letting it drown out that one tiny voice?

The test of how much you value something isn’t how much you enjoy something – how much pleasure you get out of it. It’s how easily you’re dissuaded from doing it, how crazy it drives you. Anyone can do something when it’s fun and games. But it takes something special to do it when it’s making you miserable, when every neuron responsible for common sense and self-preservation is screaming at you to give up. If you’re doing it right, it shouldn’t be easy – every second should be a struggle.

Anyone can do something when it’s fun. Whether you can do something when it’s NOT fun is what matters.

My scale of internet trustability – 1 is completely untrustable, 4 is completely trustable:

1.1 – Yahoo answers/Wikianswers – just barely above worthless.
1.2 – Livejournal comment – can be paired with an online persona, compared to the completely random Yahoo answers/Wikianswers.
1.3 – Livejournal post – for similar reasons as the previous one.
1.4 – Blog comment (personal blog) – more visible to the internet at large, so likely more thought went in to its construction.
1.7 – Forum post – Forums tend to be host to more specialized discussion, and can give more useful information on their particular topic.
2.0 – Blog post (personal blog) – similar to a Livejournal post except available to the internet at large.
2.5 – Personal site (poorly designed) – someone cared enough to set this up, but a poorly constructed website is likely indicative of poorly constructed opinions.
2.8 – Blog comment (dilettante) – similar to a forum post, but a blog is more discussion oriented, less socially oriented.
3.0 – Blog post (dilettante) – someone who cares enough to blog at length about a particular topic.
3.1 – Blog comment (expert) – comments on blogs by experts tend to be from those who have a thorough understanding of the field in question.
3.2 – Personal site (well designed) – a well-designed personal site is likely someone who expends substantial resources on their topic of choice.
3.5 – Post from someone previously deemed trustable
3.6 – Blog post (expert) – your Seth Roberts, your Tyler Cowens, your Robin Hansons. Any expert in their field blogging about said field.
3.7 – Wikipedia page – still the de facto fount of general knowledge.
3.8 – Specialist Wikipedia page (wookiepedia, scholarpedia, etc.) – a higher concentration of particular experts than the more general-interest Wikipedia.
4.0 – Scientific paper – the Gold standard. A link to a scientific paper trumps almost anything else.

Of course, this is just the default evaluation – the prior probability assigned before evaluating any arguments. Its perfectly possible to read a complete and well thought out argument posted to 4chan, and for an expert economist to say something completely unintelligible or unsupportable. But all things being equal, this seems fairly accurate.

Am I missing anything?

Simple programs combine to form powerful, complex software.

Simple machines (lever, pully, inclined plane) combine to form powerful, complex machinery.

Simple chemicals combine to form powerful, complex replicators (life)

Simple sounds combine to form powerful, complex languages.

Simple notes combine to form powerful, complex music

Simple rules combine to form powerful, complex interactions (turing machines, chess, go).

Anything complicated can be built by properly combining a handful of basic rules and behaviors in the proper order.

Go high enough up, and these complicated interactions are washed out, and you’re left with another series of simple behaviors. The cycle then repeats. Of course, it doesn’t ACTUALLY repeat. This is just the method of analysis we apply to it because we have limited computation power, and so we’re FORCED to abstract complex things to simple behaviors. Nonetheless, it proves to be semi-reasonably accurate for the purposes of a blog post.

Previously I mentioned that predicting a possible loss in the future is one of the four basic emotions – most of the subheadings in this category can be classified as ‘fear’ . This means whenever you’re reluctant to do something, you are, for all intents and purposes, afraid. Most of these fears are probably rational – you don’t want to jump off that bridge because you’re afraid of dying, you don’t want to go to that movie because you think it will be awful. But just as often, it seems, these fears are pointless, constructed out of lingering childhood memories and rooted in a poor understanding of things, and we would be better off getting rid of them.

What’s more, it’s impossible to improve unless we can plumb the reasons for our behavior. We can’t figure out a way to do something better unless we know the reason we’re doing something in the first place. So the heuristic to employ here is simple – whenever you find yourself reluctant to do something, or find yourself subconsciously avoiding a person, action, or place, dig down and root out the fear that spawned that behavior. It may be rational, it may not be. But simply KNOWING about it will open up options that you didn’t know you had. Fear restricts our behavior to try to protect us, but it casts a wide net, ruling out huge realms of possibilities that we might prefer to keep around. When we know the reasons behind something, we can get much more precise in our handling of it.

Understand yourself, and your own motivations. Confront the subconscious fears that are driving a large preponderance of your actions.

[Warning! Extremely ham-fisted treatment of philosophical issues approaching. Continue at your own risk]

As far as I’m aware, there are two basic sets of axioms used in mathematics – the Peano axioms (for arithmetic) and the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms combined with the axiom of choice (for set theory). Using these sets of axioms lets you construct enormously complex mathematical formulations, piece by piece. They are extremely useful, utterly basic, and completely necessary. The problem with axioms (a problem logicians have railed against futilely) is that you have to, in essence, assume them. To create maths and logic you need some basic building blocks, some unsimplifiable parts, that seem so self evident and fit together so completely that they can be assumed. Of course, the entire point of maths and logic is to prove things rigorously, without the need for any assumptions to creep in and gum up the works.

Likewise, in probability theory, a possible event in the world can never be assigned a probability of either zero or one. No matter how likely something seems, no matter how many times a theory is verified or falsified, you always need to leave room for a tiny sliver of uncertainty. There’s never a point where you are, without a doubt, absolutely positive.

Our quest for absolute knowledge is doomed to uncertainty by the very tools we use to pursue it. But it occurs to me that there is at least one thing, one shining point of absolute certainty that glows bright in the surrounding shadows of doubt. It’s the famous (infamous) “I think therefore I am” – we know we exist, simply by virtue of having thoughts and perceptions. Whether we’re brains in a vat, simulations on a computer, solipsistic masters of our own universe, fluctuations of Planck-scale fundamental fields, or something else we can’t even conceive, we have some sort of existence. We know there is something, rather than nothing.

My question is simple – can we not build a bridge from this point of certainty to the rest of the world? Can we not use this as a building block to eventually get to the basic mathematical/logical axioms? Why not? (I’m assuming this question has been asked and answered some time ago, or becomes obvious with a less-than-superficial understanding of logic).

[Tentative answer making the rounds in my head: 'existence' is defined tautologically as 'whatever all this is' - it doesn't LEAD anywhere or IMPLY anything, it's just a cul-de-sac with no way out.]

Expanding on a previous post about optimum travel group size, I suspect the limiting factor behind group cohesion is working memory.

For any group interaction, you have to track what each person is saying, but also how everyone else is responding to what each person is saying. Failing to do this will cause the group to fracture as conversations drift apart. So for effective interaction, you need to monitor all the connections between people.

For a group of size n, the number of connections between people is (n-1) + (n-2) + … + (n-n). A group of 3 has three connections to monitor. A group of 4 has 6. A group of 5 has 10. The famous limit of working memory is “seven plus or minus two”. So as anyone who has gone to a dinner party knows, a group of more than five will split into smaller groups that don’t exceed our mental capacity – provided a leader doesn’t exist to direct the groups attention.

Values aren’t rational.

Our values were instilled in us by millions of years of evolution. They’re core beliefs that, for one reason or another, produced behavior gave us a survival advantage. Blah blah blah, standard evolution explanation. Moving on.

The essential point is that values are arrational. Like mathematical axioms, you have to start with them, have to assume something, to get anywhere. In a technical sense, there’s no reason to prefer our values over any other set, except for the fact that we already have them, and the fact that they correspond strongly with survival. We can only get new values, like new axioms, by deriving them from the ones we have. They’re not explainable in terms of themselves – it’s all very godelian.

Because our values are instantiated in biology, any change in them will be mirrored in a biological change. And changes in our biology that are outside our control (aging, disease, etc) can produce changes in values. And once that happens, you’re more or less stuck with them. That values are unexplainable is probably why so much blood gets shed over them.