5 ms·
Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things
- dcminter 2mo agoI have a trick for writing (I used to write tech books) where I allow myself to write one sentence of the current in-progress chapter instead of aiming for anything more. The activation energy for writing one sentence is so low that it's almost easier to do this than make excuses. Once you've written that first sentence... well, it wasn't unusual to sit down to write a sentence and write a couple of chapters instead. I'm not saying I never found an excuse instead of writing ONE FEEBLE SENTENCE of the damn things, but tricking my stupid brain did work quite often.
- Tade0 2mo agoI occasionally internally yell "dopamine!" and get up to do the thing I'm supposed to.
- altruios 2mo agoMy first instinct was to .gif comment "you sonnavabitch, I'm in", but that would degrade the comments far too much. I will give this a go and see if your trick works. It sounds promising.
- tosh 2mo agowhen you want something to happen (more): - increase energy for activation (motivation, habit, …) - make obstacle lower (break it down, find an onramp, …) sometimes one is easier than the other other times working on both is what makes it happen
- phrotoma 2mo agoI often think of this as "attacking from both ends" (although I wonder how often this binary framing causes me to miss OTHER interventions that would help). Eg. when I was aiming to do 10 pull ups - gain strength and lose weight. Trying to build my savings, save more and spend less, etc.
- roenxi 2mo agoI quite like the article, but I think it is missing reflection on what other common models are and why activation energy is more helpful. In practice the model par excellence is the humble linear model - put a bit more effort in, get a bit more result out. Increase the widget budget by 10%, get 10% more widget. People seem to default to that sort of thinking quite readily. And then obviously if someone applies linear thinking to a fire hazard they're going to get really bad results, because once enough energy has gathered to spark a flame, reducing the available energy by 10% is not going to be enough to get the situation back under control. There are really important non-linear situations - many involving soft skills. Relationships, reputation, motivation and the like. Having a nonlinear model for them is quite important.
- 0xf8 2mo agoI love this take. You hear a lot about non-linearity dynamics of complex systems in academia and even more practically in conceptualizing commonplace phenomena we tend to interpret linearly or assume it’s governed by complete chaos. but I could see how it underlies many soft skills as you ascribed. Do you happen to have any reading recs on the topic in this domain ?
- sfink 2mo agoAnother model: nihilism. Putting in 10% more effort isn't going to achieve enough to be worthwhile, so it's short-term at best and ultimately pointless, so why bother doing anything at all? Or closely related: I'll call it inertia. The belief that anything I do will only provide benefit as long as I keep it up, and the minute I lose vigilance, the benefit will drain away. Another: certitude. I am fundamentally a godlike being and whatever I choose to spend effort on is the Right thing, whether I understand why or not, and therefore whatever I am doing is critically important to keep doing regardless of actual or perceived benefit. Another: diminishing returns. Initial effort brings outsized rewards, but later effort becomes less effective over time. Another: compound interest. 10% effort initially doesn't achieve much, but the longer I keep at it, the more the benefits compound. (This one is interesting, in that it can lead to positive behavioral changes yet is, in a way, the opposite of the activation energy model.) Another: behaviorism. Effort doesn't matter, only observable outcomes. There's no point in doing things that have no short-term visible effects. Related: momentum. (Also note that it's a synonym of inertia!) I need to do things where I can feel the success, in order to fuel the next thing, and then the next. Meta-model: optimization (aka desperation). There is no single right model, and so I need to choose a different model for each situation, and it's critically important that I choose the best one. ---- I doubt the activation energy model dominates[1] all of the above, but it very well may be the best one to focus on. At least for a time, as the author suggested at the end of the article. [1] Is better in all circumstances.
- EagleEdge 2mo agoThis reminded me one of PG's article about how to get started when you are not really feeling it on a certain day. You just tell yourself that you will go through what you have done yesterday for 10 minutes. That trick works wonderfully in most cases for me. This small trick, to some degree, helps with that activation energy to start working on what I want to work on.
- largePanda9 2mo agoLink to said PG article?
- leetrout 2mo agohttps://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html > When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.
- jmbwell 2mo agoProcrastinators HATE this one weird trick!
- EagleEdge 2mo agowhy? because they cannot procrastinate?
- jmbwell 2mo agoI’ll explain later
- vbarrielle 2mo agoI guess they can always procrastinate tomorrow.
- largePanda9 2mo ago
- travisjungroth 2mo agoA good person to have on a team is someone with high sensitivity and high activation energy. They’re the ones who notice it’s getting stuffy and open a window (or onboarding is a total pain and rewrite it, etc).
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- sanderjd 2mo agoAm I thinking about activation energy wrong? This seems like a description of a person with low activation energy to me?
- jmbwell 2mo agoI was confused for half a sec also, as someone who often finds I will do anything other than what I need to be doing I think it’s meant to be an example of a more, “see problem → fix problem” kind of approach The number of times when something minor has been suboptimal, like a TV being on a dumb channel or an appliance beeping or something on the floor being in the way, and just … nobody wants to do anything about it when it would take mere seconds to deal with it… I think activation energy is real for most people. It’s certainly very real for me
- sfink 2mo agoNo, you're right, but it's really the ambiguity of language. Activation energy is the energy required to trigger a result. You can read that two different ways: either as the threshold, or as the energy required to reach the threshold. They are sadly opposites. When used to describe a person: are they high activation energy in that it takes a lot to get them going, or are they high activation energy in that they frequently do things that are hard to get started on?
- travisjungroth 2mo agoI was using it in a way not totally compatible with the article and that was misleading. I think of the activation energy in a person as what flows out, what overcomes the activation energy of a task.
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoExcept, of course, for economics, where the only way to spur growth is to increase the spoils for the victors and any suggestion that barrier reduction could be a good investment makes you dumb and wrong and anti-growth. Why are you anti growth? Don't you want to grow the economy? (/s -- which is important to say, because this line of thinking isn't just common, it's consensus)
- sanderjd 2mo agoThis seems like a very hyperbolic simplification of what economics minded people think and say.
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoThe Chicago School likes to imagine and behave as if it has a monopoly on economic thought. It does not, and I certainly agree that it would be inappropriate to cast all economists in the same light, but it is not inappropriate to needle Chicago School propaganda from both of these angles.
- CompoundEyes 2mo agoA thing I go back to from the book “Unf*ck Yourself” is a firm identification with things that you have set out to do early on. Rather than saying “I need to exercise.” instead “I exercise.” With that mindset adopted pretty quickly into your campaign any slacking is genuinely you no longer being yourself. A rejection of your identity is stronger activator than a spoken aspiration of a future self that does said thing. Identities are hard to shake.
- sanderjd 2mo agoThis is also central in the book Atomic Habits.
- 0xf8 2mo agoThe most productive feedback loop to cultivate deeper knowledge / intellect is to shatter any personal identity as a robust intellect, and actually internalize the limitations of one’s own knowledge and intellect to foster more growth. No one who thinks they know everything is inherently poised to learn much. On a social level it involves surrounding yourself with individual who constantly challenge you to grow intellectually which can literally feel like an attack on said identity.
- order-matters 2mo agoidentities spoken of in this way are tools and we often get very caught up in self reflection and the level of worthiness we feel we have earned certain labels. your true and actual identity is out of your control and not something you would ever think twice about. you arent someone who exercises or not. your identity is the part of you that believes exercising is good for you to begin with. thinking you need to and telling yourself you are someone who does it are both the same identity. If you believe it is good for you and you dont do it, then there is another part of your identity that is asserting you dont always need to good things for yourself. The part you really need to challenge, which will help in all areas of your life, is to settle the question: "to what extent do I believe I should do things that are good for me?". Every day you go without any plan or committed effort towards your health and exercising is a day you answered, "very little extent". for sake of text length im going to skip a lot of detail, but if you're like me then this eventually leads to a question of "how do I restore faith in myself?" a thought experiment that i read somewhere (and maybe tweaked) that i use is a "post body swap" mentality. If you are willing to accept accountability and responsibility for whatever is in your past, then you no longer need to identify with it, and can treat every single new day as if it is your first time in this body. A kind of "live every day like it's your first" mentality. It has helped me recover from a lot of tough spots where i had an overwhelming amount of 'backlog' to deal with. phrased differently, you look at your life as if you have just inherited it. you died, met God, and He said "i dont normally do this, but im sending you back for another shot in a random <yours> body". the point isnt to trick yourself, you dont need to, there is no trick. it is simply a reminder of the free will you had already possessed prior to the thought experiment. that this is always your life to live however you want moving forward. imagine you woke up in someones body who is more out of shape than you are currently, to the point you cant do things you currently enjoy doing. would you take the obvious path to start training to at least be able to do the things you were previously used to doing and see how far you get, or would you put in work to figure out how to change the way you live to better fit the new body? your life is the way it is right now largely due to momentum from your past, not your current identity. identity updates really are not necessary to improve your life, and you arent identified by your momentum - even if that momentum has labels people use to describe it
- jobuildsstuff 2mo ago[flagged]
- jmbwell 2mo agoI forget where I read it but I have not forgotten that sometimes, a task reads as a threat. like, physiologically. Stack of unhandled tickets: menacing workload, guilt for being behind, internal judgment, fear of external judgment … fight or flight. Or difficult task: all the same things. Or, and this was my own ah-ha moment: losing valuable context on where you are currently. Exiting one activity to start another, in the fear of losing progress and momentum on something you -did- manage to activate on. Not wanting to give up the -previous- victory over inertia. So one of the many things I can try now (none of which ALWAYS work) is naming the physiological aspect. My body is recoiling as if I’m about to fight a bear. But do I actually see a bear? No. So shake it off (And move on to the next procrastination complex…)
- QuercusMax 2mo agoFor me, filing taxes and dealing with medical bills take a LOT of extra effort to overcome my dislike of these tasks. Not because of having to pay money - but because in the past I experienced a large amount of real physical pain doing these tasks when I had hand and shoulder problems. Even things like filing receipts for reimbursement feels similar enough that I procrastinate, even though I'm going to get money back. Brains are weird things.
- bestham 2mo agoI also have the same problems with reimbursements, but I think that is because my brain has already given me the dopamine of getting the money back, simply because it is my money to claim. The tiny problem that I won't get the money unless I claim it, seems to be ignored by my brain.
- ghostbrainalpha 2mo agoIt seems like you have fought procrastination and put some real thought and effort into it. Do you have any other recommendations like books to read or strategies you have tried?
- ghaff 2mo ago
- chermi 2mo agoAlong the same lines, tanh-like curves describe a lot of shit across many domains, especially technology. Plateaus due to some fundamental limit, rapid rise after long slow start, then marginal gains become harder. Both also follow from very simple physical/mathematical arguments. See strogatz book or ken dill's thermo book for example. I'm partial to energy landscape perspective for most everything. Free energy and entropy - entropy balance applies to more than you'd expect if you allow some liberty in interpretation
- gw32 2mo agoI'm glad to find someone who shares this perspective. Sigmoids show up everywhere (e.g. elo). One big area is AI ability. Coding agents have gone from completely unreliable to quite reliable at basic tasks. Maybe this could be true about practiced abilities in general. For example, at some point circus entertainers must go from almost never succeeding to succeeding enough to put their lives at stake. It seems that at a certain point, with enough practice or intelligence, you reach a critical threshold where success rate switches from almost never to almost certain. And I am also a big fan of potential energy surfaces - it always seemed like a huge upgrade going from crude 1D to multi-dimensional reaction coordinates. A big conceptual shift for me was to learn that transition states are not maxima, but first order saddle points. Though I do wish I could have a better grasp on entropy's role. Also for example PES's connection to diffusion models and flow matching
- chermi 2mo agooops meant energy - entropy balance
- 8note 2mo agoIm surprised they couldnt find a good pair of activation energy graphs. i think theres good ones everywhere and theyre easy to draw? This is also a fun contrast with an amazon talk about s3, where increasing checks and trying to avoid errors happening is described as trying to raise the activation energy higher and higher for getting bad data, and how theres diminishing benefits to doing so, vs building anti-entropy tools that find and fix the bugs and bad data
- UltraSane 2mo agoOne of the best things I've done for productivity is to try hard to make execution of todos as automatic as possible. I actually try to imagine myself as a CPU executing instructions with no free will.
- swah 2mo ago"Robot mode"
- awavering 2mo agoI like Jamie Wong's take on this too: https://jamie-wong.com/post/the-pit/ https://jamie-wong.com/post/the-pit/
- dalmo3 2mo agoI've always framed that as "Newton's first". I absolutely loathe the idea of doing the very thing I'll spend tem hours straight on once started. The subtle difference to TFA's framing is that it's not only harder to start moving, but it also takes mental energy to stop moving. I'm sure there is a medical condition or two being described here but I'm too lazy to find out.
- tonic_note 2mo ago> Some people get disproportionately large AE from negative stuff—they’re highly motivated to avoid bad outcomes. Others find that the big boosts come from positive, “toward” energy, visualizing the things that are exciting and happy. Oh look, it's Behavioral Activation (BA).
- gw32 2mo agoI have found satisfaction in thinking about activation multidimensionally (free energy surfaces). It lends the interpretation of reactants trying to escape gravity well-like local minima, crossing marginally more unstable transition states* to reach more stable global minima. *A misconception is that transition states are local maxima. They are first order saddle points: maxima along one direction but minima along every other direction. To drive a reaction forward, it doesn't always have to be lowering the transition state energy. Another technique is by destabilizing the resting state. In the analogy, the message would be: to not get too settled into one's comfort zone.