Genetic Relations Among Procrastination, Impulsivity, and Goal-Management Ability
pdf.yt
pdf.yt
Hopefully one day "blame culture" can be ended altogether.
Suppose that genetically, someone is predisposed to have very high motivation and discipline. Born into whatever environment, they have the aptitude to improving their life. Now imagine someone who, genetically, is predisposed to very low motivation and discipline. Born into a poor, or low-class environment, they are going to have a hard time moving up. However, someone with little natural discipline born into a high-class environment may still do okay in life (not great), by sheer virtue of the fact that they were born into fortunate circumstances.
Similarly, what if we find that most criminal behaviors have a genetic component? What distinguishes mental illness from "evil"? A serial killer is clearly not right in the head; do we lock them up or treat it as an illness? Is the distinction simply based on the whims of the majority at a particular point in history? (Note the history of homosexuality.)
A lot of times, people will complain about "lazy, uneducated people" and that if they'd just work harder, there wouldn't be any problems, but that's easy to say when you have an innate ability to work hard. (Ignoring, of course, all variables other than "hard work".)
In another vein, it's easy to be a good, moral person if being a good, moral person is easy. That's a tautology, but I think it really highlights my point. Similarly, losing weight is easy for some people but much harder for others. Everyone projects their natural aptitudes and weaknesses on everyone else, and then makes political decisions on the basis of that projection.
Anyway, I don't know what the correct answer is. But these thoughts bother me.
One of the oldest questions in philosophy to which I don't think there has every really been a good answer. Or at least I haven't read one.
I see you where looking for confirmation for some kind of ideology, but I don't think I would blame short people for being short, but try to identify in which areas height is a issue and route around in various ways (climbing on stuff, abandoning some activities, or finding taller surrogates to do them).
As long as you work on the right things and make constant progress, you should be ok.
My wife decided she wanted to be a professor when she was in high school. She's three years into a tenure track job. She's been working towards this for nearly 15 years.
Building non-trivial skills or things of value takes time and usually requires a plan. All my startups had multi-year plans, even if things didn't work out as we'd envisioned.
At one point I decided I wanted to learn to speak other languages. I studied Japanese for a year, got a chance to move to China, and studied Chinese regularly until I got conversational. I wanted (and still want) to study others, but things went in another direction.
Another time, I decided I wanted to get better at math. It took me about a year to formulate a clear plan: I decided to get a PhD. There were some barriers (I had dropped out of my undergrad, for example) and it took a while to get on track. That was 8 years ago. I graduated in July.
I'm still working on my next plan.
Of course, just having those traits is not sufficient to establish any specific diagnosis. Digesting the article more thoroughly will take me some time. However, it does seem to show these traits appear to have common genetic roots, but the traits also cut across nominal diagnostic categories.
That last point has merit. Behavior has to be considered along with its complex context in order to determine the significance of the behavior. It's difficult to figure out connections among the many contextual variables, far too many to glean quickly. "Explanations" whether applied to self or others bear risk of being wrong.
OTOH, procrastination or impulsive action may have non-trivial consequences. If these really are causing problems finding solutions is imperative. If self-help doesn't solve it, seek professional help. Most places, it's not hard to find, and it can make a big difference. If you need it, go get it.
Doing your job may mean procrastinating asking for a raise, looking for a better position at another company, starting your own business and many other things.
The questions tend to cluster around things with firm deadlines, or otherwise of more or less known time components to it, and which furthermore have more or less the same costs to you. In your examples, things being put off have unknown time components and a relatively large degree of risk. Putting off those actions is in many ways the result of a pretty rational calculation.
In contrast, typical things that we 'procrastinate' about (like returning a library book, or washing the dishes, or doing some assignment) are things with little or know risk, as well as relatively well known time and effort (or we believe to be well known) costs.
My main objection is that what appears as procrastination to an outsider may not necessarily be procrastination per individual’s plan.
Moreover, I think the common attitude to this is unfortunate, because avoiding externally perceived procrastination may actually go against individual’s own interests. Such conflict could be enough to induce actual procrastination in those sensitive to public pressure but not willing to fully cave in[1].
Meanwhile, the majority of questions in the document judge the procrastination by this “external” standard.
[0] “Procrastination is the practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, or doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time…”
[1] “I want to go freelancing (fire my client, etc.) but when I lurk and read up on this topic (polish my resume, etc.) I feel like I’m procrastinating, so I’m writing Hacker News comments instead” is roughly how I imagine this.
Do people tend to know if they are identical or non-identical twins?
Just kidding. But in my experience, parents of identical twins go in for the "isn't it cute lets dress them the same and treat them the same and tell them they are just the same". That has to be a strong influence. I'm not sure the twins-identical-or-not goes near far enough to untangle the nurture question.
The authors interpret the low correlation in non-identical twins as evidence that the traits being studied are weakly (if at all) influenced by environmental factors that non-identical twins are subjected to. They then infer (assert, w/e) that this level of weak environmental influence also extends to the set of environmental factors that identical twins are subjected to. Now, obviously as you point out, there are environmental factors that are more or less unique to identical twins, but I feel that its unlikely (and so did the authors) that these identical twin specific factors contribute significantly the vast difference in correlation between the two classes.
I don’t think there’s a strong relationship. If anything, mathematical problem solving requires a lot of drifting around in the problem space and doodling that can be difficult for someone who approaches work/problem solving in a start-working-now-and-work-until-it’s-done kind of way.