The piece is a bit too long to keep the attention of most, but it's one of the most important things someone can and should understand about themselves: how they get things done, how they make decisions to get things done.
I wish this is how the brains behind Asana, Wunderlist, Calendars, etc really thought about the end-user-human.
If only I could motivate myself to read the lengthy article about motivation maybe I could understand how to better motivate myself in other aspects of my life. But it really is a long article and I have other things to do, so... chicken, meet egg. Egg, meet chicken.
Undivided attention is a skill, and it can be developed.
Make it a habit to read literature, something you actually enjoy, for an hour at a time, each day. In six weeks you will have trained yourself to stay focused for extended periods of time.
A lot of "neuropsychology" and related approaches are questionable. The combination of some current machine-learning methods and some neuroscience results doesn't add up to anything like a global theory of how the brain works - such a global theory is just not yet in [1].
It's simpler to stick with established psychological theory if you want a theory of what makes people do thing on average.[2]
But oppositely, if you're interested in how naive utility functions and the neoclassical economic view of human behavior, "homo economicus", fails to account for much of human behavior, take a lot at evolutionary game theory. [3]
agreed. interesting read, yet far from complete, and certainly questionable.
a couple that jumped out to me as questionable:
the "discounting" section reminds me of the stanford marshmallow experiment (itself questionable iirc). i'm not convinced a marshmallow is worth an additional 5 minutes of delayed gratification, and i'm even less convinced an additional 0.07ml of juice (or a whole 0.002oz) is worth waiting at all.
the "Relative and Absolute Utility" section, and particularly the quoted section of Glimcher's example, fail to acknowledge a fundamental component of human motivation: context.
for example, strand someone on a remote, uninhabited, desert island (with no way to escape, etc.), and offer her a choice of $1,000,000 worth of goods or $1,000 worth of goods. her choice at this point is uninteresting because currency is arguably worthless in the absence of trade; she assigns value based on what these goods can do for her rather than what they would fetch at auction back home.
for example, let's say the $1,000,000 worth of goods is a lifetime supply of jello, and the $1,000 is a safe ride home on a fishing vessel. the safe ride home is arguably the better choice despite its lower monetary value. this is why i believe it's silly to blindly apply the transitive property of inequality (in terms of monetary value) as a predictor of human motivation while ignoring context.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 31.9 ms ] threadThe piece is a bit too long to keep the attention of most, but it's one of the most important things someone can and should understand about themselves: how they get things done, how they make decisions to get things done.
I wish this is how the brains behind Asana, Wunderlist, Calendars, etc really thought about the end-user-human.
http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/procrastination/
Make it a habit to read literature, something you actually enjoy, for an hour at a time, each day. In six weeks you will have trained yourself to stay focused for extended periods of time.
[0] www.useDopamine.com
[1] Learning How Little We Know About the Brain http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/science/learning-how-littl...
[2] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition Revised Edition by Robert B. Cialdini, Harper Business
[3] Game theory Evolving, Herbert Gintis, Princeton
a couple that jumped out to me as questionable:
the "discounting" section reminds me of the stanford marshmallow experiment (itself questionable iirc). i'm not convinced a marshmallow is worth an additional 5 minutes of delayed gratification, and i'm even less convinced an additional 0.07ml of juice (or a whole 0.002oz) is worth waiting at all.
the "Relative and Absolute Utility" section, and particularly the quoted section of Glimcher's example, fail to acknowledge a fundamental component of human motivation: context.
for example, strand someone on a remote, uninhabited, desert island (with no way to escape, etc.), and offer her a choice of $1,000,000 worth of goods or $1,000 worth of goods. her choice at this point is uninteresting because currency is arguably worthless in the absence of trade; she assigns value based on what these goods can do for her rather than what they would fetch at auction back home.
for example, let's say the $1,000,000 worth of goods is a lifetime supply of jello, and the $1,000 is a safe ride home on a fishing vessel. the safe ride home is arguably the better choice despite its lower monetary value. this is why i believe it's silly to blindly apply the transitive property of inequality (in terms of monetary value) as a predictor of human motivation while ignoring context.