
A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation (2011) - jeremynixon
http://lesswrong.com/lw/71x/a_crash_course_in_the_neuroscience_of_human/
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vlokshin
Thank you.

The piece is a bit too long to keep the attention of most, but it's one of the
most important things someone can and should understand about themselves: how
they get things done, how they make decisions to get things done.

I wish this is how the brains behind Asana, Wunderlist, Calendars, etc really
thought about the end-user-human.

~~~
jjoonathan
If only I could motivate myself to read the lengthy article about motivation
maybe I could understand how to better motivate myself in other aspects of my
life. But it really is a long article and I have other things to do, so...
chicken, meet egg. Egg, meet chicken.

~~~
DanBC
Here's an article about procrastination which is so long many people put off
reading it until they have more motivation and time.

[http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/procrastination/](http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/procrastination/)

~~~
rndn
I like the thought that Wikipedia the result of massive collaborative
procrastination.

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joe_the_user
A lot of "neuropsychology" and related approaches are questionable. The
combination of some current machine-learning methods and some neuroscience
results doesn't add up to anything like a global theory of how the brain works
- such a global theory is just not yet in [1]. It's simpler to stick with
established psychological theory if you want a theory of what makes people do
thing on average.[2] But oppositely, if you're interested in how naive utility
functions and the neoclassical economic view of human behavior, "homo
economicus", fails to account for much of human behavior, take a lot at
evolutionary game theory. [3]

[1] Learning How Little We Know About the Brain
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/science/learning-how-
littl...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/science/learning-how-little-we-
know-about-the-brain.html?_r=0)

[2] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition Revised Edition
by Robert B. Cialdini, Harper Business

[3] Game theory Evolving, Herbert Gintis, Princeton

~~~
charles2013
agreed. interesting read, yet far from complete, and certainly questionable.

a couple that jumped out to me as questionable:

the "discounting" section reminds me of the stanford marshmallow experiment
(itself questionable iirc). i'm not convinced a marshmallow is worth an
additional 5 minutes of delayed gratification, and i'm even less convinced an
additional 0.07ml of juice (or a whole 0.002oz) is worth waiting at all.

the "Relative and Absolute Utility" section, and particularly the quoted
section of Glimcher's example, fail to acknowledge a fundamental component of
human motivation: context.

for example, strand someone on a remote, uninhabited, desert island (with no
way to escape, etc.), and offer her a choice of $1,000,000 worth of goods or
$1,000 worth of goods. her choice at this point is uninteresting because
currency is arguably worthless in the absence of trade; she assigns value
based on what these goods can _do_ for her rather than what they would fetch
at auction back home.

for example, let's say the $1,000,000 worth of goods is a lifetime supply of
jello, and the $1,000 is a safe ride home on a fishing vessel. the safe ride
home is arguably the better choice despite its lower monetary value. this is
why i believe it's silly to blindly apply the transitive property of
inequality (in terms of monetary value) as a predictor of human motivation
while ignoring context.

