Comment by jacobedawson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobedawson | Hacker News Reader

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I found Nassim Nicholas Taleb's take on procrastination in Antifragile interesting - he likens procrastination to a natural defense: "Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity."

He goes on to make the point that he use procrastination as a filter for his writing - if he feels strong resistance to writing a certain section he leaves it out as a service to his readers - why should they read something that he himself didn't particularly want to write? Instead of fighting procrastination as though it is an illness, maybe we should learn to understand it's utility:

"Psychologists and economists who study ‘irrationality’ do not realize that humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger. I do not procrastinate when I see a lion in my bedroom or fire in my neighbor’s library. I do not procrastinate after a severe injury. I do so with unnatural duties and procedures."

Yeah, I'm still alive - but the amount of late-fees, insane interest rates and chronic struggle to have a flat and something to eat each months that could be solved with a lot less money and pain if I hadn't procrastinated on solving these problems earlier is not exactly nice also. Also procrastinating going to the dentist cost me... What I want to say: It's a nice quip at society - but utterly useless for the chronic procrastinator.

I think "procrastination" means a different thing when you're able to write a large number of books, etc.

At that point you're not a procrastinator, just a productive person who doesn't like to do particular things.

If Taleb's procrastination works as a negative feedback loop, preventing him from wasting time, then good for him. This is not how procrastination looks like for those who struggle, though.

For us, procrastination runs on a positive feedback loop - the pain you seek to avoid by delaying a task is increased the longer you avoid that task, locking you into a spiral of anxiety, out of which you usually break in two ways: either you flake on the task, or the "pain buffer" overflows and you find enough energy to complete it in a half-assed way. Rinse & repeat.

If you read the section of his book that was quoted, he makes it clear that he understands the argument that you're making, but he thinks it's wrong. He goes on to say:

Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.

I think he would say that if your environment (which is requiring you to do things you don't want to do) is creating the conditions for a positive feedback loop as you describe, then it's your environment which is "irrational" (as he says), not you.

The difference between his and mine viewpoints seem to be that Taleb thinks everything is fine with him/most procrastinators. I, on the other hand, believe my brain has buggy firmware and possibly even buggy hardware.

Since we don't have the specs of a "correct" human brain, the distinction between buggy brain and a problematic environment may be in some areas a matter of perspective, but when you have problems dealing with things that are part of our environment since before civilization, and when you see most other people dealing well with those things, you have to seriously consider the option that it's a wetware fault.

A "spec" for a human brain would have to include beliefs about questions of value, like "what is the point of human life?" Such a spec couldn't in principle be written because there is no objective basis for answers to these questions.

It sounds like you and Taleb hold different values. He thinks that living a life that involves following your own impulses is both valuable and "natural" (a suspect source of objective value IMO). You think that being able to fit into the existing environment is valuable. You might think Taleb is undisciplined and his philosophy could never be widely embraced. He might think you are just mindlessly following the orders of people who don't care about you. At the end of the day, it's up to you how you live.

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