December 4th, 2022
- show notes for me & Visa today
- V lighting fires blog post
- bret victor seeing spaces: worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/
- — 2nd vid
- schoolboat
- rob hardy complice vid where I coined "intentionality app"
- everything remix thread
- not links, just notes malcolm took
- "goal-relevant opportunities"
- "outcomes"
- actualities?
- daily review ofc
- progress
- dones
- V > my thread of monthly summarizey tweets
- write your memoirs
- then write a commentary on your memoirs
- confrontation
- V > don't have to think about
- productivity genie just wants you to check the boxes
- intentionality genie - how do you feel about that?
- can't get away with just being productive
- M > building a workflow app... you're getting right up in the tangle of your users' internal conflicts
- transcending regret blog post:
- "something's better than nothing"
- ooooh an interesting piece in synthesizing or transcending mistake theory & conflict theory & game theory
- (haven't actually read the whole thing yet)
- trying to write canonical posts is confused or at least not how I want to do things - TWO my threads on twitter
- I'm thinking about that case study where they made a fine for being late to pick kids up from the daycare, and they were hoping it would function as a punishment but instead it functioned as a cost that people were just willing to pay, so they were more late rather than less late
- and it strikes me that part of what's going on is that the cost was too low, but there might not have been a realistic way to make it higher in dollars, because if people were accidentally late then it would seem draconian or absurd or whatever
- but another part of what was going on is that the fine for being late to pick kids up, rather than narrowing people's awareness to "you must be on time" functioned instead to EXPAND their awareness to include "or you could pay a fine"
- which is coming from my recent recognition of the relationships between coercion and expanding awareness
- it's not exactly "awareness", but it is sort of couldness
- Kent McClellands work on collective control - which describes how groups can control together in a win-win way
- 9th COMPLICE THREAD
twitter.com/CompliceGoals/status/1599540414239105024
- scraps
- coercive motivation is sort of the opposite of goal-directed motivation
- in the sense that the latter is in touch with whys
- in some sense coercive = extrinsic, goal-directed = intrinsic
- although self-coercion could seem "intrinsic" because it's internal
- and.... yeah
- coercive ~= awayness
- even with rewards, subtly
- damn I started writing this thread and on revisiting my towardsness/awayness post, I feel like it actually says most of what I want to say
- BUT! it doesn't say it in the form of "what's the deal with coercion?"
- coercion comes up later
- meta-commentary on my experience of writing this so far... feeling kinda stuck
- I've gone kinda deep into the cake metaphor/example
- this is okay—something about the fruits of one's labour... and having a concrete example is good
- but I also want to say the more structural things, maybe before/instead of starting/continuing with the example
- thread draft
- one main problem with coercion is that it disconnects what you're doing from why you're doing it
- whether reward or punishment, whether internal or external, coercion involves applying some force to make something happen
this is disconnected from our intrinsic motivation to experience doing the thing or to experience the natural results of doing the thing - 1. if you bake a cake, and then you enjoy the cake, that's not a reward—that's the outcome of baking the cake
2. if you try to get good grades so that your parents will buy you a cake, that's a reward - the distinction is tough, bc in some sense the 2nd cake is still a consequence
but note that however relevant/irrelevant, it's *arbitrary*: your parents are the arbiters of whether you get the cake, whether or not you get good grades
vs in 1 you NEED to bake the cake to eat it - why do your parents want you to get good grades?
maybe they want you to learn things.
maybe they want you to get into a good college.
maybe they would be embarrassed if you didn't and they haven't really thought further than that!