Hyperbolic Discounting Revisited

Related Reading: Picoprocrastination, Hyperbolic Discounting in Education

My, what a difference a year makes! As the months till graduation tick down, my time horizon has seemed to grow. It's not clear whether that's a product of the hard limit of my knowledge approaching, or my lived experience increasing.

Either way, my dissatisfaction with past selves has risen dramatically as 2017 progressed. At this point, I can even admit that my behavior—while not necessarily unpredictable given those initial conditions—was the primary reason I failed so dramatically during my years at Purdue. Four years doesn't seem like a particularly long time, not nearly as long as it felt five years ago, during my first semester of university.

Motivating myself with the prospect of being done with it (no, not like that) is now a viable strategy. It never worked before, and I found those kinds of pep talks somewhere between frustrating and completely incomprehensible. When I wrote about hyperbolic discounting in education, I was just barely starting to react to that line of reasoning, after a semester of struggling to make myself work through a workload that, in retrospect, was pretty good. I probably wouldn't have believed it then, but I'm actually nostalgic for Dr. D's thermodynamics class. It's unclear, however, how much of that perception stems from the broader situation.

Noticing progress can be a subtle art, but pleasurable nonetheless.

Impulse Control

During times of stress, like exam season, I can frequently be found reading about esoterica on the internet or cleaning up messes that have been awaiting attention for months. One could easily pin this behavior on procrastination, and that's certainly been a part of it, but such phenomena can also be attributed to low-impulse control.

It's harder to avoid temptations and distractions when you're tired. Think about how many times you've ended up reading or checking social media before bed when you know that you're better off going to sleep and doing that sort of thing in the morning (or not at all). Being tired makes it harder to ignore the appeal of one more click, page, or scroll.

Stress increases fatigue [citation needed]. Stress can reduce your impulse control, but stress also heightens your awareness of all the little issues in your surroundings. Evolutionarily this is great, because it's good to notice the snake when you're running from the tiger. In the modern world, not so much. Suddenly it's desperately important to look up who that actor was in a film you saw and didn't care for eight years ago, or scrub down the bathroom, or whatever. You're going to notice problems that weren't quite able to cross the threshold of perception before.

Another way in which our history comes back to bite us.

The take-away here is to plan your time wisely in times of lower stress. Keep your space clean and up to snuff. Deal with all those pressing issues like bills or groceries in a regular fashion. Don't pollute your mindspace with all sorts of nonsense. Make life easier for future selves.

Why yes, I am talking about you, Mom and Dad.

Aside

Last year for Secular Lent, I opted to give up sleeping in, to mixed success. At this point, I can't even sleep in when I tried (no alarm this morning but I was out of bed by 9:00 from sheer boredom), but I killed off my latest jar of Nutella on Monday and decided not to buy a replacement.

Objectivism doesn't promote asceticism, and neither do I, but resetting one's hedonic baseline occasionally allows you to maximize the pleasure derived from given stimuli. And I do eat slightly unhealthy amounts of Nutella, ruining my appetite for dinner. Cutting back in therefore a rational, selfish choice.

Might also end up going off other snack foods, but that will be incidental rather than committal.

An Observation

When studying Tuesday night for my aerodynamics exam yesterday, I found it extremely difficult to study precisely because my performance was extremely important. Pressure actually made the process of learning more stressful and therefore made me more likely to procrastinate. This is a disturbing behavior but not a new ones. I experienced it earlier this semester, and frequently during my time at Purdue.

Pressure depends heavily on the amount of time remaining before the deadline. I experienced significantly less pressure when reviewing on Sunday afternoon, despite the fact that I was, at that time, less prepared. The impact of this exam upon my grade has been fixed since under-performing of the first midterm and lab report.

As I see it, there are three way to attack this problem:

1. Do more of the focused work before pressure builds
2. Reduce the perceived pressure of individual assignments
3. Improve focus overall

Unfortunately, none of these are easy fixes. Doing work beforehand requires the cooperation of parents and professors--both notorious for doing everything in their power to prevent routine. Individual assignments would be less stressful if I were doing well overall, but that would require more work time. See #1. Attempts at improving focus have, so far, been met with limited success.

This feeds into the larger problem of...something I'm not sure I have a name for. The phenomena where I notice a mistake or failure mode but can't correct it until a term set by outside entities comes to an end. An example would be the housing complex I lived in last year: entirely unsuitable to my needs, but locked into the contract unless we forfeited a sum of money my parents were unable to pay. So I drove home each weekend of the spring semester and waited it out.

A similar dynamic arises with classes. For various reasons I find that the class is not working out for me, and am essentially unable to do anything about it without adding a year to my program. Dropping classes has never been a real possibility for financial reasons alone, which makes me all the more frustrated when professors a) fail to state their expectations clearly b) set their expectations way to high c) have expectations at all but no plans to teach.

My aerodynamics story has a happy ending: the exam went really well. After the first one it was clear that most questions are lifted directly from the textbook with only small changes, so finding the relevant example is half the work. (Aerodynamics exams are open book.) But on the whole this semester has been pushing against a brick wall. No amount of BRUTE STRENGTH will get around the two-sided job of conceptual communication. I'm willing to do my part. But a lot of educators don't seem willing to do theirs.

Post Thanksgiving Review

I'm back at school after a rather unproductive Thanksgiving break. I studied a little bit this afternoon, but that's pretty much it. Five whole days down the sink of history.

This was far from unpredictable--as usually my optimism about a visit home was unwarranted. If left to our own devices, I'll just be getting into gear for academics when Mom or Dad will interrupt with some task or distraction. On a good day, they'll leave me be at eight or nine pm, but by then my motivation is mostly exhausted.

I'm thinking the optimal solution would be moving back my sleep schedule so that I wake up earlier, go to bed when I'm released in the evening, and study before either of them can concoct tasks to use up my time. I'll try this out fully over winter break in preparation for my eight am electrical engineering lecture. For various, interrelated reasons this shift seems less drastic than it would have a few months ago. Slowly becoming a boring, lonely adult has a few advantages.

This coming week will mostly focus on the upcoming aerodynamics exam and structures group project. Wednesday will also be the first Jayhawk Rocket Design meeting in about a month, since we finally have funding and thus can resume work on our hybrid engine. Or so I assume. There's not much time before the semester ends, but I assume we're sticking with the plan I was told.

Personally, I'm open to contributing a bit over winter break. My travel plans are no more and finding an excuse to spend less time with my parents is probably a good thing. And I do worry about losing my edge during such a long break. Hell, I'm worried about my ability to focus tomorrow. A month is probably too long, but when you haven't had a term off since 2013, you'll take it.

Weekly Review

Time for another weekly review post.

First of all, election. I'll write up my thoughts properly at some point, possibly this weekend, but for now let it suffice to say that I'm surprised with the result and very much disappointed with my fellow Americans' reactions to it. That's what you get for having expectations.

The most immediate consequence is that I messed up my sleep schedule by staying up too late waiting for a final call. I'm still paying for that. Academically the situation is mixed. I did much better on the last flight dynamics exam than I'd expected, but structures is still challenging me. Over the weekend I spent a lot of time in the library working on that and aerodynamics, but clearly more time is needed. My laptop's battery life was a serious limiting factor in how long I stayed each day, so next time the charger goes with.

For similar reasons, I didn't write as much as desired, but that will probably change in the coming days. Of course, there's two exams next week, so my schedule isn't exactly wide open.

On a bright note, the rocket design club secured funding yesterday, so we'll be getting back to work on the hybrid engine after Thanksgiving break.

Weekly Review

It's Thursday, so let's try this weekly review thing again.

My major observation is that I don't tend to be very productive on Tuesday nights, after I get back from the SEDS meeting. There's usually assignments due the next morning, but nevertheless I'm very unmotivated to complete them at that late date. My proposed solution is designating that as mid-week relaxation time (barring any exams on Wednesday) and finish that homework over the weekend.

Next Tuesday is election night, so I don't expect to get anything done that night, anyway.

Speaking of the election, I've given up on my plan to write an extended post about the case for third-party votes. My outline keeps spiraling out of control, and there's no way I'm writing a 15,000 word treatise on the failings of the American political system before Tuesday. It's also been really boring. Perhaps once the dust settles I'll rework it as a post-mortem.

I've finished House of Leaves and will be posting my review of it....eventually.

Picoprocrastination

In my post on hyperbolic discounting in May, I wrote about the akratic habits of university students and the consequences these bring. Specifically:

Compare [the quoted Less Wrong post] to a college student's tendency to procrastinate, rush assignments, not study, and consequently get lower grades than they would otherwise. I'm looking at you, 2013!Nathaniel. 

Actually, I still have this problem (though to a much lesser extent), which is why I'm writing this post when I have two final exams in the next 48 hours. While I dislike the university alarmism, the grades (and more importantly, habits) one obtains during their tertiary education has a tremendous impact on the trajectory of their life. Yet extremely little attention is given to the innate psychology of human beings which makes us act against our own long-term interests.

This doesn't actually do a good job communicating the problem I'm having. Discussing procrastination in terms of the consequences is usually a mistake. Looking at the causes is better. But I want to talk about the methods.

A problem that I've had trouble expressing to family and friends educated before the social media age is the dramatic change in how students my age procrastinate. It's not a conscious decision to not study. It's idly clicking "new tab", typing a few characters, and there you are. It's not putting on your coat and going to the bar, it's not deciding to read a book, it's not even sharpening a pencil and throwing it at the dart board. It's a near-reflexive reaction to the slightest bit of boredom or adversity.

More importantly, it's almost never something which will trigger a serious future-value calculation unless you're so conditioned. Even if it does, there's a lot of ways that can go wrong.

Social media taps right into our dopamine centers, giving us inconstant rewards for checking if there's fresh juicy posts in our newsfeeds. This can be useful, if practiced intelligently. The Pomodoro Technique is one such strategy. It can also be damaging, but that's not really the point of this post.

No, my point is that these things largely are not conscious decision on the part of interested actors, and trying to deal with them as such will be under-effective at best. If you or someone you know is struggling with picoprocrastination, you have to kick yourselves up into far mode and thing about it dispassionately. Be prepared to accept conclusions ranging from delete-twitter-right-this-instant to everything-is-okay-carry-on. This last bit is probably the most difficult, because we've usually made up our minds long before the debate begins.


This post didn't quite go as expected. At least that means more thoughts to get out later.

Pacing

When I'm making plans, it's very easy for me to get overwhelmed by my current mental or physical state. This is especially a problem when I'm deciding how to allocate my time after class, because how I feel right after lecture is very different from how I feel an hour later.

If I'm aware of this, though, it's easier to manage time efficiently, because I can pace my activities based on how I'll feel while doing them, rather than how I feel when I'm making the plan. There's a degree of uncertainty, but trying to predict my mood later is a better heuristic than assuming my current mood is eternal.

Hyperbolic Discounting in Education

From Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics on LessWrong:

We all instinctively assign a lower weight to a reward further in the future than one close at hand; this is "discounting the future". We don't just account for a slightly lower probability of recieving a more distant award, we value it at inherently less for being further away. It's been an active debate on overcomingbias.com whether such discounting can be rational at all. However, even if we allow that discounting can be rational, the way that we and other animals do it has a structure which is inherently irrational: the weighting we give to a future event is, roughly, inversely proportional to how far away it is. This is hyperbolic discounting, and it is an empirically very well confirmed result.
I say "inherently irrational" because it is inconsistent over time: the relative cost of a day's wait is considered differently whether that day's wait is near or far. Looking at a day a month from now, I'd sooner feel awake and alive in the morning than stay up all night reading comments on lesswrong.com. But when that evening comes, it's likely my preferences will reverse; the distance to the morning will be relatively greater, and so my happiness then will be discounted more strongly compared to my present enjoyment, and another groggy morning will await me. To my horror, my future self has different interests to my present self.

Compare to a college student's tendency to procrastinate, rush assignments, not study, and consequently get lower grades than they would otherwise. I'm looking at you, 2013!Nathaniel.

Actually, I still have this problem (though to a much lesser extent), which is why I'm writing this post when I have two final exams in the next 48 hours. While I dislike the university alarmism, the grades (and more importantly, habits) one obtains during their tertiary education has a tremendous impact on the trajectory of their life. Yet extremely little attention is given to the innate psychology of human beings which makes us act against our own long-term interests.

I'm not sure how to solve it, beyond increased self-vigilance while inculcating better behaviors. I've done better this semester (my first proper engineering courseload since 2014) and my grades, though far from ideal, are passable. I study a lot more than I did at Purdue and don't procrastinate as much. But there's been quite a few trivial inconveniences and general willpowers sinks that I'm hoping to avoid in the future (and would have already, if contract hadn't required me to endure them through May).

Agnostic Lent

“Even now,” declares the Lord,
  “return to me with all your heart,
  with fasting and weeping and mourning.”
Rend your heart
  and not your garments.
--Joel 2:12-13

I am not a very religious person. This probably isn't much of a surprise to those who know me, but in case there was any doubt, there is it. Most of my spiritual life has been spent in the agnostic/deist/rationalist school of thought, thanks in no small part to my secular parents and a wide range of reading materials.

Since my grandmother died, however, Mom and Dad have started attending church again regularly. Naturally I've been towed along to a few services over the months, which for the most part haven't impressed me. Without the promise of eternal life, true altruism breaks down as a moral system.

(I may have to do a post on that sometime.)

So naturally, I wasn't expecting very much when we piled in the car for my first ever Ash Wednesday service. Lent, after all, is traditionally presented as a time of penance and self-denial. We give up something we like to grow closer to God (and each other). Not exactly an egoist nonbeliever's cup of tea.

But that wasn't the path our pastor took. Many people give things up for Lent, she said, things like junk food or alcohol or cigarettes. For the most part, they give up things they should be giving up anyway, because they're self-destroying. She asked us to abstract that into the intellectual sphere. She asked us to try--for 40 days--to give up self-destructive mindsets and behaviors, like blame, procrastination, and greed.

I disagreed on some of her particulars (thought it might've been a case of the definitions), I still think that's a very good message. Lent makes a good Schelling point for changing one's behavior. So does the New Year--yes, making resolutions does have value, if you know what you're doing, and are willing to stick with it.

I'm not giving up anything in particular this Lent, in part because I need to figure out what behaviors to modify. Thanks to our pastor, though, I have a better notion of how to approach this.

Oh, and I got one of those dorky ash crosses: