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Episode 39: Procrastination
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all right good evening everybody welcome to the show today's episode episode number 39 we are going to be talking about procrastination understanding procrastination how to beat your genes regarding this problem so we're joined by dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lisle how you doing today did you hear your voice again excellent thank you and we let's just let's take it from the top dr. Lisle tell us a little bit or maybe a lot about what what is procrastination and what's just all about and how can we get around it yes what procrastination is is you know often seen as a sort of a character weakness or a bad habit or something like this nature when actually all all human behavior can simply be understood in terms of cost-benefit analysis in other words all not as such as human behavior the behavior of all organisms is emanating from nothing other than a cost-benefit process the the genes have built neural circuits to do exactly that task and that's what's happening with respect to every decision that every human makes and that includes putting something off that they could be doing now or procrastination so we call it procrastination and we give it a little bit of a pejorative slant because we suspect that it has costs associated with it and sometimes those costs will outweigh the benefits and so it seems like there are times when the the person is effectively making a mistake and often they are because and the reason why that's going to be true is that sometimes the correct solution to a problem of prioritizing what it is that you're going to do is is complex and there's a lot of variables that are being considered and therefore sometimes the a given set of variables will outweigh another set of variables and the person will wind up putting things off and it turns out that may be an evidence that comes up later or in a different kind of analysis a little bit later on they figure that they should have hustled and they should have gotten off their errand and guarding something done so it's going to turn out that that I will we'll say that there's effectively three different types of procrastination or three different sort of issues though that will give rise to procrastination the first is going to be what I'm going to call just straight rational analysis so the the second is going to be a an actually an ego defensive maneuver that is potentially quite self-destructive and the third is going to be what I'm going to call system overload where the the person is literally frozen up and they don't know which move to make first because they've got to complex and an array of things to consider and they're not sure what is the most optimal way to begin so the but the first the first one is where we're going to start mate and that's going to be with the situation where it actually is quite rational that the person puts things off because they may not have to do whatever it is so this is a this is a derivative likely of many many things that happen in human national history but one of them in particular would have been debts so there could have been many situations and obviously were we're suppose you and I made a trade and you were did you were going to give me you know 20 coconuts and then I was going to give you some bananas next month in exchange when the bananas became ripe and if I got the coconuts from you now then when the bananas came in I would likely drag my feet about paying you those bananas and the reason could be that with every day that passes where I don't give you those bananas the there's a chance that something will happen to you you may die you may forget that I owe you the bananas you may chase some hot skirt grass skirt in those days you know on the other side of the river and head down the river chasing some gal and you may not be back in the village for a long time etc and so as a result it may be the case that if I procrastinate eight that I may not ever have to give you the bananas and so this is so it's very in it's very intelligent behavior to procrastinate on debt repayment and that's going to include a lot of things that look like that so for example in in school a lot of times I found out by by by about the by the time I was a sophomore in high school I found out that if other kids weren't getting some project done it was a project that was supposed to be done by a given date that it was a very high likelihood that the teacher would extend the deadline and that's person teachers are wimps and they will not enforce things in flunked 80% of the class because 80% of the classes - you're responsible to get things done on time and so I quickly found out that if I could just keep my pulse on the wind of what my what the average colleague was doing then I didn't have to do any better than what the average colleague was doing because they probably as long as I was somewhere near the middle of the pack in terms of responsibilities they're worse it wasn't going to be any significant consequences to me and that's been proven to me you know many times over the last 40 years that being a little flaky is perfectly responsible you just have to keep your eye on what what the average dumb-dumb is up to and make sure you don't do it any worse than he's doing it then you're going to be fine and so that means that you don't have to hustle and get everything done get it all done right because it's just simply not necessary and so this this is a derivative of the concept of the Stone Age that you is it's crashing 'old to procrastinate on debt repayment and and that's that is the rational reason for procrastination and that is because it's ultimately profitable you you save the energy that is that you would otherwise have to expend and you know so this is that's how that works does that make sense yeah you're reminding me Trevor Baker in elementary school still owes me lunch money and he delayed it all the way until sixth grade ended and then he switched schools and I have not forgotten and you just reminded me again there you go you got sad I had a I had a I used to work in maximum security prison and the maximum security prison the the state got how we met by the way the UH I your your lectures got me out they got me back that's right that's right I very cleverly got you out of there but yeah billeted yes the it turns out that the the geniuses in downtown Sacramento would come up with various and sundry edicts about what psychologists or psychiatrists had to do what paperwork they had to fill out and and what what forms they had to file for this out of the other and whenever the Phoenix would come down you know we would have there'd be 50 psychologists groaning about this awful news set of work that they were going to have to do and I would tell them that they were not going to have to do it because I knew our brethren around the state were just as flaky and lazy as we were and so as a result they weren't going to do it either and so the whole thing was going to collapse under non-compliance and so this is and this is in fact what happened over and over again across my tenure career there that the the ingenious ideas of the of the idiots downtown with their with their new new ridiculous very often time wasting and onerous procedures would all go up in flames within three or four months and then nobody was doing it and then they just dropped it so a great example of this was they had a new law about that we had to comply with the local counties in terms of interviewing inmates and flu season that we had to get a flu shot and there was no way in hell I was going to get a flu shot and so this is just a government scheming to make a bunch of money on behalf of some pharmaceutical companies is my inference about this whole thing the there's good scientific evidence to support that so anyway I wasn't going to have get a shot of their stuff in my arm and and of course then there's paperwork that goes around saying you know are you going to do this or aren't you going to do this and so I check the box that says I wasn't going to do it at which point they then warned you that you you must then wear a mask over your face to talk to all your patients and you have to be six feet away from them ie otherwise you would be mistreating these prisoners by exposing them to the possible flu virus that you must be carrying and don't know which is of course ridiculous so in any event none of us would do this so the first year the I didn't hear anything about it I just refused to get the get the inoculation the second year my supervisor who I would rarely see working in another building because you know the professional level people are pretty much not under a lot of supervision and she one day when I was not there dropped off a mask for me to wear just dropped it on my desk that's the only feedback I ever got it in for a small paper win that was that was the only thing that took place I never wore the mask nobody ever asked me about it there was I never had to sign a thing that said I was going to wear the mask and that was the end of it so that's a classic example of a government edict and something that I was supposed to have to do and it never did and so that that is the rational reason for procrastination yeah I wish I had known more of this in college and such because I wasted a lot of time trying to do things completely right when I realized I really didn't have to right yeah you you you eventually caught on the so that that is a that is of course a very reasonable view of procrastination in general so you're simply running a coughs pen analysis and you're trying to avoid the energy output this is why people will wait till the last minute to get something done because they're waiting to the last minute because they might not have to do it so if you're if you're unwanted mother-in-law you know may or may not visit you on Thanksgiving and the house is a mess the the a good idea is to just fiddle around and fiddle around and wait and then when you actually find out that she's coming then throw it together at the last minute as best you can and call her good you know this is this is like a standard operating procedure for for human beings this is uh you will see this very consciously and calculatedly done in the law and so it's going to turn out that when it comes to for example civil law trials there will be a lot of bluffing on both sides about how oh boy you know we we think we got a big case and we're going to go to trial and everybody is bluffing and blowing smoke and huffing and puffing about how they want to go to trial and claim the others clock but meanwhile neither attorney actually wants to go to the trouble of preparing for trial because it's a tremendous amount of effort and so what there is is a lot of there's a lot of gambling that's involved here and procrastination gambling where they will settle the the cases on the courthouse steps both attorneys have every intention of settling it on the courthouse steps because neither one of them prepared very well 'fl trial and neither one of them wants to go to trial so if you are the flakier human that you only did a 30 percent prep and the other guy did a 40 percent prep you're actually in more trouble than he's in but he doesn't know that you're in more trouble than he's in he feels like he's in trouble because he could be in trouble because you could be 50 percent prepared and he's only forty percent prepared so both of these procrastinating flakes are absolutely highly motivated to settle this case which is why it which is a major reason it's not the only reason another reason is just you know mitigating risk of what you could lose a trial but a huge reason for that process to go down the way it is is that everybody is procrastinating and and that that's how lawyers you know have to figure their time and how they can make a living the law is very entrepreneurial in this way they have to look at cases and try to figure out what case is a good gamble time and money wise it has nothing to do in justice that's not that's not generally involved what's involved is very very sophisticated cost-benefit analysis trying to analyze how many dollars per hour I'm going to get on my on the effort that I'm going to put in and one of the key contributing factors to optimizing your rate of return is to procrastinate and so this is you know this is just that's just an example of how this is in no way of foil this is uh this is you know conscious intelligent behavior on the part of an organism that can compute multiple different possibilities for outcomes and can assign reasonable probabilities to those multiple outcomes and then try to figure out how to place their checkers on the checkerboard in the optimal way in order to get the best payoff and so that that is a is you know the chief number one reason for procrastination behavior now I'm sorry oh yeah hold on and I would argue that for people that can sense they can smell a rat in terms of this strategy that feels like it's not always the best solution I can tell you that there's a conscious method to actually figuring out whether or not the procrastination that you're doing is actually accurately appropriate or whether or not it's actually a mistake and it's it's accurately appropriate if it turns out there's a significant chance that you may never have to do whatever it is that you don't want to do like in the case of the attorney it would be a complete preparation for trial there's an excellent chance that you're not going to have to do that so therefore it makes a tremendous amount of sense to be to be providing now people will use the same procrastination strategy on many things where it feels like they're not going to have to do it but the truth is is that they're going to have to do it so one of those things for example is paying their bills so they'll fiddle around and not pay their bills but part of that has to do I believe with the Stone Age algorithm that is saying hey those are your debts and you might not have to pay them because after all the electrical and power companies could go out of business you know some terrorists could bomb will be a whole banking system and nobody may even know what's going on so I might just get away with this in other words there's a there's a lingering possibility that for some something may come up and you may not have to do this and the truth of the matter is is that that odds of that something are effectively zero in many cases so when you identify a situation where there is something that you don't want to do but you are going to have to do it without any doubt then it is a very good strategy to do it first and do it immediately okay and the reason why you would want to do things that in that way and why very highly conscientious people get an advantages in life because they do this they behave in that way it's the following and that is that if you can essentially keep get things out of the way that will be taking time later and and you can essentially keep your calendar as clear as possible then then if opportunities come up later where your your time is limited but suddenly there's an opportunity to spend your time doing something that would be enjoyable or an otherwise profitable then you don't have to instead pass on it because there's something that you have to do that you have put off okay so this is why it is smart to be very organized and aggressive about getting things done that you are absolutely going to have to do while you may be very flaky and procrastinating and foot-dragging about doing things that you don't have to do now so that's sort of an algorithm for figuring out where it makes sense to to procrastinate and where it does not make sense what about procrastinating setting up the systems that's that's what I have set up systems I'll put the envelopes for the budgets you know next month right right this is this is the this is actually a advantage in in the modern world is that the modern world actually has extraordinary regularities that that are very you know essentially likely to you know to recur over and over again so it makes it possible to be very profitable by investing in organizational systems that are going to take care of those things and and that that is where a normal human mind not taking advantage of that can be missing about so life has a great deal to do with maintenance activities and so the more we sort of organize maintenance level activities the more time you have for you know otherwise creative profitable sort of things so things like you know dedicating some time the clean mouse wash the dishes do the laundry bob the palm all the stuff that everybody hates to do or at least I guess hired hired it out anything yes here's an example of why it is it why it makes sense to attack things that you're going to have to do let's suppose there's some project that you've been assigned to that that is going to have to be done by the end of next month and let's suppose that you know that it's going to take four days to do this project now your Stone Age brain walks around this thing and and calculates and sometimes incorrectly the possibility that you're not going to have to do it so it sort of calculates things almost on and with an estimating program that looks like how regular things would be in the Stone Age but things in the modern environment can be an awful lot more rigid and predictable than the Stone Age so let's suppose that you've got this project you've been assigned at work and you're going to have to do this thing and it's going to take you or maybe it's maybe it's a school assignment so you've got a paper that is a term paper and you go to to UC Berkeley and this paper is going to be due on December 10th because that's the the last end of teaching for the quarter our semester and that's just how it's going to go and it's 33% of the grade they've talked about it several times like there's no way this is not going to happen and there's no way you're going to get out of this thing not unless you drop the class so so now we're in the class and we're going to tape the class and we need it for our major and we've taken the midterm and then there's a final and we've got this paper and this paper is going to be a four day project now let's let's look at the standard Stone Age behavior of the average individual the average brain says gee there's a possibility I'm not going to have to do this paper but that's that's what's going to come up so they fiddle and a fiddle and a fiddle and they fiddle and they fiddle and then it's December fifth and there's about four or five days left and suddenly they get off their rear end and now they have to really hustle and have to pull an all-nighter and now they're in trouble sort of sleep or finals and this is just absolutely standard operating procedure for Humanity now let's talk about why that's a bad idea the in principle so the the utility of doing this paper on November 1st to November 4th is the following the there is uh and here I will outline some sort of some some ways of looking at this problem mathematically so that you can sort of test your own thinking against against it so that you can use this as a way of thinking about procrastination problems the intelligent thing to do would be to look at this and say on September 10th when you when you get the assignment is that it's due on December 10th there is some possibility that this guy could throw it out okay there is a possibility that he could throw out this assignment now when is that likely to happen well it's not going to happen early in the semester it could happen late in the semester it could be that there's such a human cry over the midterm how much readings everything that there's a there's a student revolt and the guy just says forget it or he could lose his TA funding and that etc and so that he doesn't have anybody to read the papers so he says forget it I'm not going to we're not going to do the papers after all so there is some possibility that you might not have to do it but this is why we do not want to write the paper on September 10th to September 14th because there is there's a window of opportunity where this this thing that we're going to have to do may not have to be done so what we should be doing is thinking in terms of probabilities consciously about this and so that's why it makes sense to not lift a finger till November first now why would we wait so we go through half of the the time for example and we don't lift a finger until until there's the final six weeks now why would we do this though the reason we do this is that we're actually trying to optimize the following following parameters we're trying to use the following parameters as we think this thing through and that is that we want we want to give a big chance a nice big fat chance that we don't have to do it at all now as we as November first comes and now we're in the last fifty percent of the time available for this thing to go up in smoke now if we now if we wait to the very end so let's suppose we wait till November 28th now there's an exceedingly low chance that he's going to cancel this this assignment and we have a problem that we only have six days left and so we must now spend four of those days on this assignment which means if there's some other very important opportunity or important need that we have we won't have the resources to do it so let's suppose Barry Manilow comes to town and he's your favorite artists in the whole world and your friend got you tickets ok now you can't go see Barry because is you you don't have the time do it so essentially this now this now became very very costly that you that you have crammed yourself into a corner and you have no choice but to do this behavior and and you waited until it was almost certain in other words that it was a virtual certainty that you had to do it this is not the ideal situation now this is exactly the situation that human beings naturally go through because they aren't running these estimations very well they're running them on on Stone Age flaky algorithms when behavior was a lot less regimented okay so this is why they wind up in this situation and it's a problem but if instead you do this rationally and you say okay listen I'm going to give this a very good shot of going up in smoke so maybe I'm in a way tell you know November the 10th and I'm going to give it their every possibility and I'm even going to ask and request that this thing be dropped that we've got too much to do etc and we watch the professor backlash as he says no this assignment has to take place it wouldn't be fair I've already had 6 of 6 of the 200 of you have already turned in the things so there's no way it would be unfair you all have the same problems too bad you got to do it ok fine so now we have 30 days left and we've got 4 days that need to be spent on this problem and there's a very high probability that we're going to have to do this so the wise move then is to do it now because what we want to do is have maximum flexibility for for all possible opportunities in the following 26 days so once we have figured out that it is that is very likely that we're going to need to do this then the thing to do is to attack it as quickly as possible and get it out of the way because that makes your life in principle more more open to optimizing possibilities rather than closing yourself down and possibly missing terrific opportunities or important important things that need to be done and then you backed yourself into a corner mm-hmm so I got a question for you sure Barry Manilow really doctor I think I couldn't resist I don't know it just popped into my tab alright yes so what you're so serious question though um so what so what you're saying is if you're procrastinating just kind of reason out that that there really is no way around it and you're gonna have to do it and then just kind of just do it you know yeah kind of like what Nike says right right and but you can you can essentially help your ability to to rationally make this computation by sort of understanding what the real issues are so you you are when you are procrastinating normally you're just following stone-age algorithms that you're sort of very unconscious cost-benefit analyses and you don't know why you're doing it it just seems like it's sort of a naughty bad habit or you're lazy or flake or whatever okay but that's actually generally not what's happening what's going on is that there's actually algorithms cost-benefit algorithms that are being run and it's it's useful to know that those cost-benefit algorithms can actually be mistaken they can be distorted because there there's preset estimates in those algorithms that are put in in in by essentially your history of Stone Age life and so it's the very same kind of distorted algorithms where where people young people young men in particular will take extraordinary chances a lot of times with their life and safety in order to show off for females because they're sort of computing they're they're computing their longevity and their mating career over a very relatively short window because they're anticipating that they're going to be dead by 40 now they don't need to know that they're doing this but that's sort of how the algorithms are being run and as a result they for example don't back down from fights that they should back down from because those fights you know the big moment in the bar or the local high school or wherever it is essentially according to the stone-age algorithm is going to be viewed and then is going to be essentially parotid around the village and it's going to have a profound impact on that individuals potential mating career if he was living in the Stone Age right but he is not living in the Stone Age and so his his modern mind doesn't do a great job of computing this and he takes chances and then he winds up with an injury that that might name him for life okay behind this sort of thing and yet it was worth it for males and the Stone Age to take those kinds of risks because the reproductive stakes were so high so this is this is an example of where the modern mind and the Stone Age mind can be at variance and it's very useful to know you know what those algorithms are running in when they are very likely to be mistaken in order so that we can optimize our behavior so you can optimize your life mm-hmm all right well doctor we have a caller here Jura that wants to speak with you so we're going to put you on right now neg color what's your name my name's Luc Luc hey Luc how you doing wonderful good all right you're on with dr. Lila Nate hey guys I first of all I just want to say I love your show Stan want some ID could do it as I had listened to every episode whenever they come out it's very fascinating and my question is is why are out of the world came to be so fascinated with white men and women when it comes to pornography and covers of magazines and in movies you mentioned earlier in one of your podcast that what we find attractive is sort of universal there's something in that ethnic group that is better with their genes and all that that you know I read your question Nate had put that question on last week on my on my email and we looked at that we didn't get to it last week that's a very interesting question and yet I'm first of all I have to say that I'm not sure you're correct okay so we're going to begin there you you have to you have to believe let's suppose for example we would start with the null hypothesis which is that that would not be true that there would be there is there's a strong bias and human beings to mate with members of their own race there's going to be a great deal of reasons why why that would be true now the bias is pretty strong it's not it's not ironclad but it's pretty significantly evident and so therefore we would expect that for example African Americans or African people would be would be interested in African pornography and that Asian people would be interested in Asian pornography etc now the thing is is that in the United States Caucasian people are are not only the dominant population wise dominant not any other way other than sheer numbers I'm talking about the and also you should understand that pornography is overwhelmingly visual pornography is overwhelmingly a male consumption things so we're really talking about white males buying pornography you know basically photography of of females so the so now the thing to ask would be of the money that is spent on pornography how much of the money is spent by white males versus black males by versus Asian males versus Hispanic males so it would be very interesting to know how much money is being spent and then by those various ethnic groups and then if we were to then determine how of the money that's spent how much of that photography is for example of women of each of those groups we would then have to see evidence that the white women were photographed more often per dollar spent than in the others so it's an interesting concept I mean your eyeball estimate is that that the Caucasians are are over represented in this relative to the financial interests and in relative to essentially population base rates I am Not sure that that's true I can remember for example visiting the Orient a few times and of course walking by a counter that had pornographic materials through no fault of my own I'm sure I was there just to buy some raw almonds and some some heavy on water but the but when I when I did see a whole bunch of magazines I saw a hundred different magazines all with very youthful looking asian girls on the front of them in various amounts of little attire and so it was not the case that where this was Asia or Thailand or wherever I was Japan that this was a bunch of Caucasian women so the now so we don't know so you got an interesting hypothesis and I don't know what the answer is and if it were true that Caucasians were literally over-represented in terms of a universal human attractiveness to this then the only thing that I could suspect would be the case there's actually I have a couple of different concepts that would be possible but one of the things that could be possible would be simply the socioeconomic status of America and and Western Europe could be simply could be lording over the world that these are sort of the economic winners of the world and therefore this is sort of more attractive maybe that's a possibility it's also a possibility that there's a deeper possibility that this is interesting and it's going to be the case that that there are the shapes of secondary sexual characteristics in different races is quite significant and that is that Africans have greater degrees of secondary sexual characteristics than Caucasians and Caucasians have more than Asians so the the big muscles that make men attractive or more prominent in Africans the the the hips and busts are more prominent in African women that it's more prominent those characteristics are more prominent in Caucasian men and women than are than they are in Asian men and women so these these are sort of natural variances that have occurred and whether or not that has an impact on pornographic tastes of men around the world that are buying pornography I don't know so good interesting question very you know useful keeping your ear to the ground trying to sniff out anomalies or interesting questions in in modern societies of evolution but the answer to your question is I don't know not sure and it's uh and there's actually additional ideas that have been considered but not not with enough merit for me to talk about them thank you so much for answering my question and I hope you guys keep doing what you're doing for a long time okay very good they have busted thanks very much Luke really appreciate it all right okay so um okay so you were talking about procrastination and how the first the big issue for procrastination is just doing it for tasks where you're gonna have to do it things like playing your electric bill or doing a paper for a term or finally Ford afford not just kidding yeah uh lingly lull in the yard there we go that's a lot fare that which we to the other so so what are the other possibilities now so what are the things that are stopping somebody from from doing that four things those they are not let's see I mean the the things that are stopping them is this I mean what I'm getting at is that the way the algorithms are built the motivational mechanisms inside people they're they're built to run these cost-benefit analysis and they will come up with some wrong answers if they're not seeing the question clearly and so you can improve your life by being smarter about about these issues and you know that can actually be a little turning point in somebody's life where they realize that they have been they've been essentially procrastinating for a what I call seductive but incorrect reasoning and they can get their act together and sort of turn their life around and make better use of the time they have on earth by not fiddling there's another benefit incidentally to attacking problems that you're going to have to do and that is when you when you're not doing something and it's looming that you're very likely that you're going to have to do it it's actually taking up work space in the brain it's your brain keeps revisiting it and it keeps thinking about how it's going to have to do it and it keeps having to rerun the analysis that it may have to do it and it keeps trying to rerun the analysis about when it is that they're going to finally have to get off your rear end and do it or else it's going to be very costly so it's actually pretty significant prices to procrastinate so there better be good reasons to procrastinate so that's why it's useful to run the conscious analysis about the statistical likelihood that you are going to have to do this and if the statistical likelihood is high and the actual time and effort involved is moderate then one should attack these things fairly aggressively and if you do that you'll have a better life hmm yeah and you know when I when I think of what you're saying part of me thinks that it seems like it's you tell somebody who's saying an addictive pattern say they're they're addicted to alcohol or something you say well now you've got to realize it's bad for you and then just do it just stop right do it um so there's because there seems like there's a little bit more to this well yeah I mean the truth of the matter is is that they're actually very similar problems the the reason why you have addiction and the only reason you have addiction is because you have an unnatural payoff matrix in the cost-benefit analysis because the addictive substance or process for exam gambling pornography etc the the addictive stimulus is a super normal stimulus acting on the mind and particularly the pleasure centers of the brain which essentially are sending a false signal of biological success which makes it essentially motivated to repeat those acts because the system is essentially sensing biological victory okay that's that's what happens that's what I have termed the pleasure trap and the book that I wrote with Alan Goldhamer about that process is explains that that this is a just this is a way of distorting the cost/benefit analytic engine that is the human mind and biasing behavior in a way you know that is difficult to get out of so we can recognize it and understand it but actually getting a person out of the trap is is truly art and very slippery and not easy to do as you'd expect you would expect that it would be very difficult because the system is simply following the cost-benefit analytics that it was genetically programmed to to follow and if it follows that in an environment when it's been exposed to distortions stimuli distortions then it's in trouble which is why it is incidentally that the number one behavioral goal of people in the United States of America is to lose weight every year and yet they're not doing it okay they have tremendous stakes involved in losing weight you have marriages in deep trouble you have lonely people that are unable to secure mates it isn't they would be unable to secure mates they are unable to secure mates for whom their nervous systems would consider them to be a reasonable genetic trade and the reason is is because they're overweight unattractive relatively unattractive relative to their genetic potential they know that this is true and their nervous system our girl who is a genetic eight who is masquerading as a five because of our extra thirty pounds knows quite well that this is in fact the obvious between herself and maybe getting married and having kids and having a happy life okay can't do it why because she's got the weight on why does she have the weight on because she's eating a distorted diet even most people who do not understand the process of weight loss needs to be moved towards food that is closer to human nature's natural history that is the solution the solution is not portion control a ketogenic you know high-protein diet a ferocious workout regimen or anything else into the Sun so even once people get advice from people like myself John McDougall Alan Goldhamer Caldwell l-cysteine T Colin Campbell Neal Barnard Rip Esselstyn etc even once people have actually found the correct direction it is exceedingly difficult for them to go that direction and the reason is is that the cost-benefit analytic engine was designed by genes that have been around for for hundreds of millions of years and they're not going to change very easily so when we talk about the problems of procrastination we are talking about an absolutely analogous problem and that is that the Stone Age algorithms cost-benefit algorithms are also estimating the probabilities of us having to do things and they are estimating them on a stone-age basis and the Stone Age there was a lot of flaky crap okay yeah I'll pay you after the next you know full moon maybe if the band has come in this is the these are the flaky contracts and highly fluid agreements that had to be had to be made in cases where you have an environment that has a lot of variants to it and a much more variance than the regulated sort of trades and institutions and processes that we have in the modern environment so this is why people are again walking around with a sonjia's algorithm using procrastination is a highly rational tool but not actually consciously digging into those probabilities and estimating those parameters very well because they weren't designed to do that they're just they're just following their and prayer mystic sense of how how these probabilities are likely to pan out and they they're half flaky so people do a lot of half flaky behavior they do sort sort of an okay job this is actually one of the reasons why you're unusually conscientious people the people in the upper quarter of the distribution of the conscientiousness curve these people actually thrive a lot in the modern environment sometimes independent of their intelligence in other words it's it's the fact that they are on top of things have excellent credit reports get things done on time etc they get raises they get they get promotions they they are essentially more responsible and in a modern world we keep track of those things a little bit more carefully and so there's significant benefits associated with that behavior in addition to the fact that they are living in such a way with an in with an inner peacefulness that's possible or more flexibility in their behavior because they have kept their calendar more clear because they're a little bit ahead of the game okay so you're you are correct in saying that you know once you identify this and even understand the underlying mechanisms this doesn't necessarily solve the problem that is true in the same way that identifying the pleasure trap does not solve the problem but the more insight that you have into it the closer that you get a look at it the as people turn their intelligence and get greater insight into the way their own neural circuits work they can start to essentially learn their way out of these traps and and I'm not going to say everybody's going to do it or that anybody that's going to do it a little bit will end up doing it a lot but the point is the possibility is there and that's why we call this podcast Beecher gins because that is exactly what we're talking about mm-hmm yeah so how do we do it Jesus the believe it or not there are there are it's it's worth sometimes writing up a taxonomy of all the things that you do very in this life and when you look at that taxonomy sometimes it's a good thing to imagine yourself if you're an efficiency expert if you were to look at that taxonomy and then figure out you know if it was your job to figure out how to make these processes get done as efficiently as effectively as possible how would we go about doing it if somebody was going to pay us a lot of money as a consultant to how to do this how would we do it and the truth is is with three minutes thought in your head a lot of times you will come up with a whole host of things that you know would be worth doing and and then if you execute those things you wind up with a better life and so this is a I have a a way that I sometimes tack problems clinically that doesn't involve this but it involves the same kind of use of imagination and that is that sometimes if I have somebody facing quite a difficult problem let's suppose that they really wanted to get into nursing school or they really want to I have a relationship there there's things that are very important to them and they're struggling with this and they're having problems with it the and they'll come to me and we're discussing things and they're depressed or frustrated or you know feel defeated or not sure what to do my way of looking at problems like this is to put a hat on that says okay if our life depended upon it if literally our life depended upon it how would we do it would we cheat you know who could we pay off what what would it what would be required for us to get this done does somebody need to be killed okay in other words went you know what what government clerk is getting in our way or what do we do all right the point here is Ricki Lake is going to start investigating us so my sign here is that if we put on a little different hat in our imagination and we say okay if I had to this if I had to what would I do about this what could possibly be done so for example instead of moping about the fact that I'm thirty pounds overweight and can't get a relationship and none of the guys that I would be interested would ever want to date me right now but they should because I'm actually pretty and perfectly acceptable underneath okay so not tugging on women we could go the other side on men but that's just the example that's floating around my head in the last 15 minutes now the point is is that I look at this problem and this is an example of what I call a bullshit problem so I divide the world up into two things bullshit problems and real problems bullshit problems are problems as real as they are and it's problematic in this upsetting as they are they could absolutely be accomplished with enough effort a real problem is a problem that you may not be able to solve so you've got terminal cancer your beloved mother has terminal cancer you can't solve the problem okay you are going to experience a major loss and there's nothing that can be done about it that's that's a real problem and you know what life is hard and difficult and you could just mitigate some of the real problems as best you can but then there are other problems most of the problems that cause most of the human suffering in the world that people are upset about or what I call bullshit problems and bullshit problems are problems that are solvable they are just going to cause a considerable amount of inconvenience okay and so the beautiful thing is to put on your imaginary hat and assume that okay if it was Hitler on the other side of this that he was going to take over the world and we have to beat them the question is can we and once you realize that if we had to do this to save our lives we could absolutely do this then it gives the problem a new perspective okay and the perspective is you know we don't need to whine about it we don't need to complain about it we don't need to feel defeat about it we don't even need to be depressed about it we recognize the problem is with under our control nobody can stop us from solving the problem and the only thing that's involved here is how much energy are we willing to expend to solve it that is the truth about procrastination okay getting off your rear end getting organized using the concept of a taxonomy about things you're going to have to do versus things that you know and using the concept if I'm going to have to do it and it's going to happen repeatedly how can I act as an efficiency expert to make this thing run like a well-oiled machine so that it takes up the what least possible mental effort in my life and takes up the least amount of time and no time where it's crowding out other things you know at the end of a deadline that could be more lucrative or important for me to use that time on so essentially you know can we can we deal with this problem absolutely yes we can we can utilize our time and energy in an optimal fashion by using discipline behind this and it's useful to sort of look at the problem globally in this way the to try to get motivated behind this so that we can see the costs and benefits more clearly so can we snap our fingers and get rid of this sort of procrastination tendency no but we can attack it rationally and hopefully with a deeper insight into its nature people can see that it's a kissing kin to addiction and it has its expenses just as addiction has its expenses fantastic and so this is if you're procrastinating due to laziness yes to assume the worst case scenario and work work backwards as to how you would get out of it yes yes and so and then beginning the show you mentioned though that there's a third option which is a you set the set your sights a little bit too high yeah there's there's a couple more options that we could talk about other time one of them is going to be what we're going to call the ego trap which is a very very sticky and again a stone-age algorithm because it's often misapplied in the modern environment and it's very costly for people this is where people do not reach a high for the goals that would be possible for them to attain because they are afraid of the status loss or embarrassment that's going to come if they if they fall short so that that's it we can talk about that another time and also the final reason for cross nation is just situation overwhelmed where the person's life has become sufficiently complex and it's difficult for them to actually run the analytics on what they should be attacking first because they've got too many urgencies and and there's they're essentially frozen over so those are two different problems and we could talk about those another day fantastic thank you dr. Lyle would really appreciate it
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