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I have "respond to the rest of the values difference stuff" on my to do list but that is THREE posts and this is ONE post so it happens faster, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality
When I was a teenager, I was lazy.
When I was at home during the summer, I didn’t do my chores; instead, I read books all day. My parents were deeply frustrated. They tried everything they could think of to deal with my laziness. They explained in great detail that I needed to contribute to the household. They yelled at me. They punished me for not doing chores. They rewarded me for doing chores.
Eventually, my mom happened to write down the chores she wanted me to do on a list. When she came home that night all the chores were done.
Turns out I can’t process auditory information very well.
Whoops.
—
I once had a partner who was lazy. I told him “it’s only fair that we both contribute fifty percent to the household,” and he agreed, and we decided that he would sweep the floor when it was dirty. However, the floor just got dirtier and dirtier. Even when I nagged him to sweep the floor, he’d say “it looks clean enough to me” or– even more frustrating– he’d sweep half the floor and leave the other equally dirty half undone.
Goddamn male-privileged assholes who expect other people to do all the chores while they laze around in their underwear and play video games, this is the 21st century, we believe in equality!
One day I took him and pointed to a pile of dirt and said “do you see this dirt?” He responded with “holy shit! Our floor is extremely dirty!” and immediately got a broom and swept it.
It turns out that while I am constantly low-level stressed by mess, my partner literally just did not see it unless it was explicitly pointed out to him.
Whoops.
—
For most of my life, I’ve been lazy.
I’ve flunked classes and lost jobs and let dishes pile up in the sink until they make towers. My resume has so many holes it looks like it’s made out of Swiss cheese. When I was in college, I was so lazy I flunked a class it was supposed to be literally impossible to flunk, and the only reason I didn’t have to repeat the year was that my adviser pulled strings to get me to graduate because she didn’t want to deal with me anymore. I spent a lot of time hating myself about how lazy I was. My inner monologue usually resembled the following comic:
[Source: Allie Brosh’s book Hyperbole and a Half.]
I talked a good game about knowing I had depression, but secretly I was pretty suspicious that this was all a coverup for my innate lack of moral fiber.
Then I took Zoloft.
Magically, the pill caused my moral fiber to grow in.
Whoops.
—
Last week, I was lazy.
I had been lazy for more than a month. I was too lazy to take my infant son to the library, or to play with him, or to sing to him, or to do anything other than the bare minimum to keep him alive and not crying. I was too lazy to write. I was too lazy to read books. I was certainly too lazy to do work for my job. I spent all my time thinking about how much I wanted to sleep, which was pretty much the laziest thing I could imagine. I spent a lot of time breaking into tears about how miserable being so lazy made me and how I wished I could just willpower myself into wanting to do more things.
Then, I extremely lazily took a nap for three hours last weekend, instead of doing work that I absolutely needed to do because there was a deadline and I had procrastinated on it. I think we can all agree that was the absolute laziest thing I have done in this entire anecdote so far.
I woke up, wrapped up the thing I needed to do in a couple hours, and have been astonishingly productive for the past few days, a fact that is no doubt related to the fact that since then I’ve been making sure to stay in bed for at least eleven hours a day.
It turns out that what I was calling “laziness” was, in fact, chronic sleep deprivation.
Whoops.
—
Scott Alexander recently wrote a post called The Whole City is Center, which has a very extended bit about laziness in it:
Simplicio: I think we’re treating the word “laziness” differently. I’m thinking of “lazy” as a way to communicate a true fact about the world. You agree that the true fact should be communicated by some word, but you’re interpreting “lazy” to mean some sort of awful concept like “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad, and so we should hurt them and make them suffer”. Are you sure this isn’t kind of dumb? Given that we need a word for the first thing, and everyone currently uses “lazy” for it, and we don’t need a word for the second thing because it’s awful, and most people would deny that “lazy” means that, why don’t we just use “lazy” for the very useful purpose it’s served thus far?
Here is my thought. I agree that “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad, and so we should hurt them and make them suffer” is a terrible concept. “Lazy” is how I personally express that concept (well, actually my concept replaces the “and so we should hurt them and make them suffer” with “and so we should be resentful about them forever,” but close enough). That is why I am trying to avoid using the word “lazy”.
Look, if you personally use the word “lazy,” and it doesn’t come along with the connotation of “this person is bad and horrible and I should spend lots of time and energy feeling resentful and bitter about how bad and horrible they are,” and it doesn’t impair your ability to think thoughts like “maybe the reason that I, the person who does all of the nighttime parenting for a six-month-old, can’t do anything and keep fantasizing about sleep is because I am sleep-deprived,” then please keep using the word “lazy.” I encourage you to do so. My one caution is that you should take care about calling other people “lazy” unless you’re really certain that they won’t interpret you as meaning the “bad and horrible” meaning, because it is good to make sure that when you insult people it is deliberate.
Maybe you’re able to voluntarily shift the definitions of words that you use as soon as someone points out to you that the word definition is kind of stupid, no matter how many emotions you have wrapped up in the definition of the word you were originally using. That’s a useful skill. Unfortunately, like many useful skills, such as obstetrics or car repair or leaving the house promptly, I don’t have it. My brain just keeps using the word definition it’s always had.
I fully admit that I am a deeply unreasonable person in this way as in many other ways. However, I observe that when I don’t use the word “lazy,” I am more likely to notice the actual causes of someone avoiding responsibilities, and I am less likely to spend lots of emotional energy seething about how they or I are/am a bad horrible person who deserves to be hated forever. No doubt this is an unreasonable coping mechanism. As an unreasonable person, I often use unreasonable coping mechanisms. But you reasonable people, with your reasonable-person privilege, should not go around saying I shouldn’t use my coping mechanism which I was using just because reasonable people don’t need it.
Now, it might be that I’m totally unique in my unreasonableness here (or perhaps that it’s genetic, because my parents share it). However, I think a similar unreasonableness is actually quite common. Exhibit A: people keep writing blog posts about it.
Scott Alexander later writes:
Simplicio: If you’re right, I worry you’re going up against the euphemism treadmill. If we invent another word to communicate the true fact, like “work-rarely-doer”, then anyone who believes that people who play video games instead of working deserve to suffer will quickly conclude that work-rarely-doers deserve to suffer.
Sophisticus: Then let’s not invent something like “work-rarely-doer”. Let’s just say things like “You shouldn’t have Larry as a dog-sitter, because due to some social or psychological issue he usually plays video games instead of doing difficult tasks.”
Simplicio: I think people are naturally going to try to compress that concept. You can try to stop them, but I think you’ll fail. And I think insofar as you can communicate the concept at all, people are going to think less of Larry because of it. It’s possible you can slightly decrease the degree to which people think less of Larry, but only by slightly decreasing their ability to communicate useful information.
This is true. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis doesn’t really work. I can prevent myself from using the concept “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad” by not letting myself use the word “lazy” and– if I observe the concept attaching itself to another word– adding that word to the blacklist too. I can’t prevent everyone else from using that concept by blacklisting the word: anyone who doubts it should see the snarl some people can put on the word “transgender.” Nevertheless, I have two objections to Scott’s argument.
First, most people do not have a particularly sophisticated ontology of language, so when they say “laziness doesn’t exist” they mean “the concept we unreasonable people use the word ‘laziness’ to describe doesn’t exist”. Scott Alexander actually agrees with their point.
Second, even if it wouldn’t work that well if everyone adopted it, if I personally adopt it, then I am less likely to be chronically sleep deprived for several weeks because I think taking a nap would be Extremely Lazy and that if I am going to be lazy I should at least have the grace to be conscious so I can hate myself about it. This is a win. Since I am not a Kantian, I do not have to go “hmm, well, this works for me, but if I check it against the categorical imperative it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, guess I’m going to have to be sleep-deprived until I have a failure of willpower and take a nap anyway.”
Scott Alexander has talked a lot about the typical mind fallacy and how it’s a mistake to assume that everyone is the same as we are. Unfortunately, awareness of a fallacy doesn’t necessarily stop you from falling victim to it. (As I know very well, because as I said above I am a deeply unreasonable person.) Scott is a very reasonable person, with reasonable coping mechanisms; he should not in this way generalize to those of us who behave in stupid and counterproductive ways constantly and are desperately trying to figure out how not to.
Thing of Things 
This whole thing, and especially this paragraph:
>Maybe you’re able to voluntarily shift the definitions of words that you use as soon as someone points out to you that the word definition is kind of stupid, no matter how many emotions you have wrapped up in the definition of the word you were originally using. That’s a useful skill. Unfortunately, like many useful skills, such as obstetrics or car repair or leaving the house promptly, I don’t have it. My brain just keeps using the word definition it’s always had.
Are absolutely fascinating to see being written by a pro-trans author
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My opinion on trans stuff is “many people cannot volitionally change their definitions of words such that I am nonbinary, but the classification of me as a binary gender is still very unreasonable.”
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I can’t tell what you mean by “unreasonable”.
I was thinking of the definition of words like “woman”, where most of the populace has a lot of emotions wrapped up in the “adult female human” definition, and a few people really want everyone to use a different one.
It sounds like the thing you’re calling “unreasonable” is “people continuing to use the old definitions of man and woman”, which is also the thing it sounds like you’re arguing people _should_ do with the old definition of “lazy”
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I called the way I use the word “lazy” unreasonable like a dozen times. I think the words “stupid” and “counterproductive” also appeared. I’m not sure what I need to do to convey my belief that the way I use “lazy” is in fact a really dumb concept.
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> I fully admit that I am a deeply unreasonable person in this way as in many other ways. However, I observe that when I don’t use the word “lazy,” I am more likely to notice the actual causes of someone avoiding responsibilities, and I am less likely to spend lots of emotional energy seething about how they or I are/am a bad horrible person who deserves to be hated forever. No doubt this is an unreasonable coping mechanism. As an unreasonable person, I often use unreasonable coping mechanisms. But you reasonable people, with your reasonable-person privilege, should not go around saying I shouldn’t use my coping mechanism which I was using just because reasonable people don’t need it.
This seems like a defence that could apply equally to any kind of delusion/self-deception. Like, if the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is telling myself that planet zorkwad is going to be blown up by Queen Beryl unless I make it into work on time today, who are normal people to deny me my coping mechanism?
That feels like the wrong conclusion to me. I think reasonable people should go around telling me a) Queen Beryl doesn’t exist b) I shouldn’t tell myself that people who don’t exist exist.
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To the extent there’s any sort of truth claim involved, it’s “neither Ozy nor their partners avoid responsibilities purely because they are bad and with no other reason,” which seems factual. Or I guess “what does the word ‘laziness’ really truly mean?”, but in that case I’d like to point you to A Human’s Guide To Words and say there’s nothing contradictory about different people having different concepts attached to the same word.
…Uh, if you meant to imply that I’m actually bad and self-deluding myself into thinking that my badness was solved through taking a nap, then I disagree with you.
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> Or I guess “what does the word ‘laziness’ really truly mean?”, but in that case I’d like to point you to A Human’s Guide To Words and say there’s nothing contradictory about different people having different concepts attached to the same word.
My takeaway from A Human’s Guide To Words was that while (and indeed because) it’s entirely normal for different people to have different concepts attached to the same word, it’s a mistake to think that it’s important which concepts are given which labels. To behave differently when you label a given behaviour as “lazy” compared to when you don’t label that same behaviour as “lazy” seems like a (mild) delusion, analogous to only opening letters with your left hand during the first half of the hour or something. And it’s easy to imagine scenarios where it would lead you to make less optimal decisions: you might respond differently to people who did or didn’t use the word “lazy” even if you knew they held the same underlying concept, or get into semantic arguments with people you had no real disagreement with.
You seemed to come to a similar position when you said “this is an unreasonable coping mechanism.” I think people are right to say “being unreasonable is bad, you should be reasonable”, in the same way people are right to say “excessive drinking is bad, you should drink less” even if drinking is working for me as a coping mechanism at the moment and they don’t propose anything better.
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When I don’t use the word “lazy”, then I am playing taboo with myself. Sometimes, one consequence of playing taboo is that when you actually have to use the whole definition of the concept every single time, you notice that the concept itself does not actually connect to anything in the real world. If you use the word, however, this may be harder to notice.
Not having a word for a concept also just straightforwardly makes it harder to use; that’s why we have words in the first place.
I don’t think that behaviors can reasonably be considered delusions. Only opening letters with your left hand during the first half of the hour can be a delusion if you’re doing it because you don’t want to anger the fairies, but if you’re helping yourself remember to use your non-dominant hand in order to reduce the risk of repetitive stress injury under orders from your physical therapist*, it is certainly not a delusion at all. And the fairy belief would be a delusion, even if you didn’t change your behavior at all as a product of the belief.
*I don’t know if this actually works to prevent RSI.
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> When I don’t use the word “lazy”, then I am playing taboo with myself. Sometimes, one consequence of playing taboo is that when you actually have to use the whole definition of the concept every single time, you notice that the concept itself does not actually connect to anything in the real world. If you use the word, however, this may be harder to notice.
Interesting.
This doesn’t seem to match how thinking feels to me? I’m not even sure I’m using words when thinking about concepts – it feels more like I think in terms of the concept itself and would apply words to concepts only when describing my thinking. I don’t imagine that I could play taboo with myself, at least not at a level of words. I can imagine having a concept of “failing to do things in a blameworthy way” and wanting to avoid thinking about that concept, but I don’t think telling myself not to use particular words would help me do that.
(Whereas to the extent that you’re just saying “laziness doesn’t exist” to yourself to mean “neither Ozy nor their partners avoid responsibilities purely because they are bad and with no other reason” there doesn’t seem to be anything unreasonable there at all. I had the impression that you were doing something more specifically focused on the word itself but maybe I’m misunderstanding)
> And the fairy belief would be a delusion, even if you didn’t change your behavior at all as a product of the belief.
Taking a belief-in-belief/making beliefs pay rent view, if your beliefs don’t change your behaviour then to what extent are they beliefs at all? I don’t think I can distinguish between someone who believes in fairies but never acts on it, and someone who doesn’t believe in fairies.
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@m50d
From your first comment, I thought your takeaway missed (and somewhat contradicted) an important point from a Human’s Guide to Words, which is that concepts/words almost always have myriad connotations attached to them, which are impossible to separate out by simply trying to “define” the word “precisely”. Even if you try to say “A human is defined as a featherless biped,” the word will still *really* mean…you know, the things we are, with 10 fingers and language and some hair but not as much as monkeys and complex social hierarchies and so forth. And have connotations such as “it is generally morally wrong to kill one of these” and “these would be good things to try to have a conversation with.”
But from your last comment, it seems that you generally don’t use words to think (in contrast to myself and presumably Ozy and Eliezer), and thus actually might *not* have those word-based challenges in your own thinking. I’ve heard about this difference in thinking styles before (possibly related to sub-vocalization apparently) and always found it fascinating. For someone like myself who thinks in words, labelling something differently *can* change how I think about it, not because of any delusion but because different words have different connotations. This is a feature, not necessarily a bug; I want to be able to distinguish between e.g. my “house” (the physical residential building in which I live) and my “home” (the place where I feel like I belong). Now yes, they refer to the same location, but they call attention to different aspects of it. Likewise, “lazy” connotes “moral failure requiring increased willpower” while “unproductive because I’m probably tired or depressed or something” connotes, well, pretty much what it says on the tin. Using the wrong word internally can be a real problem.
I’d be interested to hear whether you have analogous problems when thinking non-verbally, or if not, whether you have any unique ones due to your lack of words.
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Unyielding pursuit of epistemic rationality is often instrumentally irrational.
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@thevoiceofthevoid
I definitely have different and overlapping concepts that refer to different aspects of the same thing. And I certainly have times when I’m thinking about something the wrong way and a different concept makes it make more sense. (“Why am I so upset about having lost $thing_of_minimal_value? Oh, $thing_of_minimal_value was a gift from a friend and I care about it because of that”).
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To behave differently when you label a given behaviour as “lazy” compared to when you don’t label that same behaviour as “lazy” seems like a (mild) delusion
Terms like “lazy” aren’t simply conveying factual information (e.g. m50d is unreliable, unpunctual, and you shouldn’t hire them because they won’t turn up to work in the morning), they carry moral judgements and connotations (e.g. m50d is a morally culpable scammer who cheats their employer into paying them for work they don’t do, and they don’t do that work because they prefer to loll around in bed snoring their stupid head off rather than get up and go to work on time).
Supposing I start a new job, and one of my co-workers is Larry whom I haven’t met yet, and on my first day I have to move a huge pile of files from the downstairs office to the upstairs file room. There isn’t a lift, I’m going to have to slog up and down the stairs carrying armloads of files.
Someone mentions that Larry is coming back to work today after his vacation, and I ask “So can Larry help me?” and they laugh and say “Oh, don’t bother asking Larry for this kind of work!”
So I fume about lazy useless Larry who had a fine time on holidays and can’t be bothered to put in a little effort to help the new person at work.
Then Larry comes in and I see he’s a wheelchair user.
Am I mildly delusional if I change my mind on judging Larry’s behaviour? After all, he is still not doing-the-work, is still not-helping, is still don’t-bother-to-ask-Larry. Should I stick to my guns and say “No, I said Larry was lazy and Larry is still lazy?”
I think it’s really putting a lot of strain on the term “lazy” to make it apply in this situation, where there is a good reason why Larry can’t “move a pile of files from downstairs to upstairs so I have to do it”, and even more so to declare “no, I don’t think less of Larry when I call him lazy, I’m just communicating factual information!”
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I think that the distinction between ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’ is useful in a framework that grants greater leeway for ‘can’t.’
Of course, one can debate which is which (is a depressed person able to do something, but choosing not to, or can’t they?). Or even more fundamentally: does free will even exist?
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> I think it’s really putting a lot of strain on the term “lazy” to make it apply in this situation, where there is a good reason why Larry can’t “move a pile of files from downstairs to upstairs so I have to do it”
The statement that a wheelchair user has a good reason for not moving a pile of files seems more of a factual claim than a moral judgement.
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In all of these cases mentioned, it sounds like you are suggesting that “lazy” was mistakenly attributed to you. You weren’t lazy; you just don’t respond to auditory input well. You’re not lazy; you’re just depressed. You’re not lazy; you’re just sleep-deprived.
You’re right that laziness carries with it an implication of moral judgment. When Scott used the laziness example, he was responding to the notion that laziness doesn’t exist. But surely there are some people that do less work than they should because they just don’t feel like it, even though it hurts themselves and others and they could if they wanted to and they have tons of energy, but they just don’t care and say “screw everyone” when asked to contribute. In my head I have a stereotypical rich playboy who has inherited all their wealth and doesn’t add anything to society. Are *those* people lazy? We can cash this out in non-moral terms, e.g. “The neurological features and conditioning of this individual are such that they are deficient in empathetic reasoning as it pertains to exertion of effort and feel no attachment or responsibility to larger social groups.” It’s not their fault that they were born with certain mental features and raised in certain environments, but at some point we draw the line and make room for moral culpability, or else abandon any moral claims altogether.
Perhaps we should be seeing articles named (some catchy version of) “Laziness is rarer than you think: an examination of common conditions that reduce motivation.”
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Overlapping with my comments on SSC here — On top of what you say, I think it’s worth noting that most people are basically essentialists; to not think that way is something one has to learn. I think “lazy” frequently does mean the imagined laziness-the-essence. So that if laziness-the-behavior has some actual explanation, why, then it’s not “laziness”, as they’re thinking of it.
(This comment isn’t really about laziness; we could substitute any number of other traits here, to be clear.)
If we’re not essentialists, though, even though we no longer believe in an essence of laziness, we still might find ourselves needing to refer to what you might call “residual laziness” — laziness that we can’t currently explain. But note how unlike an essence of laziness, residual laziness is not only a matter of the state of the world but also our knowledge of it.
Either way, regardless of how they’re thinking of it, people don’t really tend to use the word “laziness” for things that are explained, only things that are unexplained. In the essentialist case — well, this tends to be the moralizing case, as you describe, and it goes along with such ideas as that to explain something is to excuse it, and, well, all those associated confusions (including the use of that unified notion of “excuse” 😛 ) which I won’t bother to describe in detail.
But if you’re trying to be practical rather than moralistic, of course, this seems like an appropriate time to bring up this old post of Sarah’s again. Basically it’s a matter of how much we want to zoom in. If you don’t have the time or other resources to inspect the situation, or don’t judge it to be worth it, you might want to just throw it all under the residual “laziness” label and leave it at that. If you do, though, it makes to see if there’s anything you can do — particularly, anything low-cost you can do — to address the situation. First you have to realize to be practical rather than moralistic, though, which may require doing away with your ideas about essences…
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Yes. That kind of laziness-the-behaviour is associated with selfishness: Larry could look after the dog, he just is too selfish and prefers to indulge himself in what he finds enjoyable.
If Larry can’t be trusted to look after the dog because he means well but gets confused about time and so will not be able to keep track of when the old sick dog should get its medication, or is very nervous and anxious and will be so scared of the dog he won’t be able to go near it, or has some other physical or mental barrier to being able to do the task, then we don’t see it as primarily selfishness and “me-first”, and so we don’t judge it as “lazy”.
There are all kinds of folktales about “lazy so-and-so”, and the classic example is the one the Grimms recount, of the Laziest Man in the World. Of course, being folk tales, there is a twist in the tale and the negative behaviour that leads to failure in real life is rewarded instead:
There is the lazy son who eventually wins a rich wife (and so never has to toil again), the lazy servant who saves their master, other examples. But they all depend on a behaviour which is judged to be blameworthy actually turning out well in the end. Nobody is surprised when virtuous Jack the hard-working farm boy succeeds in life and does well for himself and ends up rich and happy, that doesn’t make for entertainment. What does is laziness taken to so exaggerated a degree that, in the words of the proverb, “he is so lazy he wouldn’t scratch himself if he had an itch”. But in real life, the lazy son or lazy servant is beaten and berated and punished, not seen as a clever winner.
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Larry Wall famously said the three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris, but you definitely need applied laziness in that case.
http://wiki.c2.com/?LazinessImpatienceHubris
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I would like to state strong opposition to using the concept of euphemism treadmill to just go ‘well I guess it’s all the same, then, whatever’. (OP didn’t do this; was referencing quoted stuff).
For a lot of people (qualifying just in case there’s apparently some people for whom it’s different), ‘laziness’ is a pejorative. That’s how it’s used, that’s how it’s meant, that how it was used on them growing up, how they still hear it used from people all over. It’s been one for at least over a century, it is one in multiple languages, that is a central connotation and point. ‘Laziness’ goes with a paradigm and it’s a bad paradigm. People who talk about disability and how human psychology just works and etc use other words to go with their (better) paradigms.
Does euphemism treadmill stuff happen? Yes, of course (though I do think having self-advocates and stuff involved and center matters quite a bit). Will whatever happens right away have that same force and history and weight, as the wide, wide majority of its associations? No. That matters.
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Words are tools for conveying mental concepts. If Bob believes that when Alice says “floofy” she is making a different concept/value judgement from when she says “lazy” then either Bob misunderstands Alice when she says “floofy”, Bob misunderstands Alice when she says “lazy”, or Alice genuinely does mean something different. In the euphemism-treadmill case where Alice only says “floofy” because she’s been told to, the last possibility is excluded, so the only way Bob feels better about things is if he’s misunderstanding. And if a policy only produces value when people misunderstand each other, it doesn’t seem like a valuable policy.
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I mean yes obviously if someone only changes their specific word use that doesn’t super help, but you can also get communities of people who are working on changing paradigms and the word use goes with that, or you extent the word and paradigm together, etc.
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What word should we use instead of “lazy” if we don’t know or suspect the root causes though? For example, if I’m working in a group with the unfortunately-yet-accurately named Sam Slacker, and I want to communicate the situation in which he fails to complete his parts of the project on time?
…I’ve just answered my own question, haven’t I. “Sam isn’t finishing his parts of the project on time.” Come to think of it, “unproductive” captures that sentiment succinctly while being (at least slightly) less pejorative than “lazy” if I’m looking for a single word.
Of course, if I’m just privately griping about him, I’ll probably still go ahead and call him a lazy slacker who I hope never to have the misfortune of working with again.
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It probably will depend as well on what Sam is like; is he a well-meaning person who tends to take on more than he can handle/can’t say no to people so gets loaded down with work and so he fails to complete his part of the project on time because he is snowed under? Or is he a slob who is just punching the clock and letting everyone else do the work?
Sam who takes advantage of others is more likely to be called lazy (and to be actually lazy) than Sam who can’t say no. Both Sams are unproductive, but yelling at and shaming Sam who can’t say no is unlikely to work well – ironically, because that kind of person will feel the sting of reproof and will be ashamed, but it won’t help them with their people-pleasing problem, while the truly lazy Sam will simply shrug it off and not change unless faced with very, very severe consequences that they can’t wiggle out of.
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When you call someone lazy – you are putting the onus on the lazy person to fix what is making them lazy, whether that’s “not being able to notice dirtiness” or “being on the wrong depression meds” or “can’t process auditory information well”.
When you explicitly state the underlying cause of the laziness and tell someone to stop that, you are doing the work of identifying the root cause yourself.
When someone is lazy, I personally want them to figure out why themselves, because I don’t think I am obligated to figure that out for them.
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Figuring it out from the inside is hard, though? Like, it took me 8 years to come up with an explanation (because that’s how long it took to get enough data, then think of how to quantify it), and two years after that before I could do anything with that information—and that was more like a Chess or Tetris move, since I couldn’t (can’t?) address the thing directly.
This situation is perhaps the worst I have ever experienced, certainly the worst that has lasted more than a few minutes/hours. I have every incentive to solve it, and if there are any incentives to the contrary, they are not known to me. I only found the answer 4.3 years ago, and only was able to confirm it 2 years ago, and am still struggling to find a way to implement it long-term. I have no idea how this could have been helped by someone else earlier than that, other than ridiculously entitled perfect magic fairy scenarios. I can identify things that anti-helped, but a genuine solution 10 or more years ago would have required a ton of dedicated effort from someone whose stake would have been … I don’t know what.
So, on the one hand, it is generally unfair (at best) to expect others to debug your activation problems for you. OTOH, how in the world do you fix these things unaided? (Or, heck, even aided by professionals, seeing as the numerous therapists I tried only accomplished anything when I mentioned something where they could make the phone-call to get the ball rolling?) It seems like some kind of compromise is necessary, but I have no idea where it should start or end.
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I don’t know whether, in our society, the professional expertise exists to help people solve those problems in a structured, rather than ad hoc way.
However, even if it does, I would argue that one needs to distinguish between those from whom one can expect help (medical/psychological professionals) vs other people. I don’t think that those other people generally have an obligation to solve to problems for you, nor that they have to accept the consequences if those are a large burden on them. An employer may legitimately chose to employ an employee who does do the work required, over someone who doesn’t. A person may chose to choose to end a friendship with someone often flakes and instead choose to be friends with someone who is a more pleasant friend. Etc.
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I’m not so sure what the point of the article was.
It seem to me that maybe the author was trying to advocate for not using the word lazy to describe people because of the judgmental attachments “unreasonable” people like the author have with the word. One of the points used to support this was the fact that the author finds the practice of personally not using the word lazy helpful to them in identifying the root causes of their lazy behaviour.
The point I was trying to make in my comment is that if I am calling someone lazy, my aim is not to help the person, but to tell either them or others that they are unreliable. Why not sue the word unreliable? Because I can’t tell why they are unreliable, I want them to know that there doesn’t appear to be an easily discernible reason as to why that person is unreliable. And it’s not my job to debug it for that person like you said.
So frankly, the article as an advocacy piece for not using the word lazy was not effective for me because I frankly don’t consider helping fix the lazy person’s laziness problem in the first place when I use the word.
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If you don’t attribute that comic to Allie Brosh/Hyperbole And A Half, the copyright monster is going to GET YOU.
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Gah, I totally thought I did.
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Reblogged this on Livin' on a Prayer and commented:
All of this hit home for me to the point of tears. Somebody else gets it. Somebody understands the awful burden that wraps itself around your spine when you are told constantly as a child that you are lazy.
I have chronic fatigue and chronic pain. But I still believe somewhere in my C-PTSD riddled heart that I am lazy and undeserving. This post resonated to a ridiculous degree.
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Thank you, this is what I was thinking reading the original post, expressed beautifully.
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At a certain point, we get down to whether any behavior is seen as voluntary, and whether shame is a useful tool in modifying behavior, right?
I know more about weight loss than most others – I’m gluttonous, in that I eat more than is good for my long term goals or health, I’m much heavier than I want to be, and I am constantly struggling with that. You can say that I don’t have the ability to eat less, but I’d prefer to say that it’s much harder for me than it is for some other people.
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I have a coffee table book of different posters from the WPA during the Great Depression. One of these posters is of a young boy at a desk and a teacher to his left. The caption is something like “Johnny might not be dull, he just might need glasses.” I don’t have the book at hand for ready reference.
For most of human existence we really didn’t have any good grasp on why things or people are the way they are because we did not have the knowledge. Without any really understanding we couldn’t really tell whether a person was lazy or whether they had some sort of illness that could be treated. Now we do have a much better understanding, not perfect but a lot better than previous generations had, of why things or people are the way they are. The problem is that our history as developed a sort of folk memory that a lot of people still depend on in navigating the world and so we still call people lazy when it might be something else entirely.
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This seems to be missing the point of the original post, and not contextualizing it as part of the fundamental value difference debate. If I’m understanding Scott well, he is trying to make an analogy between “laziness” and concepts like “loyalty”, “authority”, “purity”, etc. I don’t think he is trying to argue for or against those being good concepts, I think he is trying to argue that some things that seem to be value differences are actually people being more or less willing to use those concepts.
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Also, while we’re on this subject… Scott is a psychiatrist. I think he already know this stuff, and it’s kinda rude for you to assume he doesn’t.
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> It turns out that while I am constantly low-level stressed by mess, my partner literally just did not see it unless it was explicitly pointed out to him.
The first explanation that comes to my mind is cognitive: dirt is in his field of view, but he doesn’t recognize it, and in that sense it is not seen. A second is behavioral: he never looks directly down.
In my own experience, I’ve failed to see it for an optical reason, I guess you could say. I wasn’t focusing my eyes correctly. I was working at a pizzaria, and I would be told to sweep somewhere, and even when looking directly at the floor, I wouldn’t see anything. I found that I had to deliberately focus my eyes on that area of the floor. Otherwise, I would be a little too “wall-eyed” (eyes pointing a bit too far to the sides, rather than the center). I guess my focusing reflex wasn’t strong enough? So after the first few days I had trained myself into it, and I could spot dirt.
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My favorite discussion of this subject is by Kelsey Piper / The Unit of Caring: https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/168725483756/mailadreapta-theunitofcaring-after-i
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