At best, the only thing punishment teaches any organism is how to avoid punishment.

This means that if someone hits you, they do not teach you a lesson or make you behave in new specific ways by punishing you.

What they might teach you is how to run away from them when they’re trying to hit you, or escape altogether.

If a man is put in jail, the only thing that might teach a man is how to escape, quickly (the illegal way) or slowly (the legal way), and nothing else.

Why do you think there are so many prison escape films? That may be one of the contributing factors or variables.

If you slowly build your own prison, you will eventually want to escape it.

Therefore will power is nothing but ineffective or insufficient behavioral engineering. It’s aversive stimuli (pain / punishment) one forces upon oneself now in order to avoid aversive stimuli (pain / punishment) in the future, or in order to achieve positively reinforcing (rewarding) consequences in the future.

Punishment is the worst form of control or change in any organism.

Punishment is like a diffused light, and positive reinforcement (reward) is like a laser.

When you punish anyone or yourself, you’re not necessarily putting the organism (or person) in control, but you are putting the environment that shaped them in control.

It’s like a diffused light because there are many lines of light coming out (many behaviors an organism could pick to escape the punishment), but the organism will try to find the easiest fastest way to escape the punishment, and that may come down to a reflex, or to operant conditioning or a learned behavior.

It’s very hard to properly engineer a new behavior using punishment because of this.

Not to mention the numerous chronic negative byproducts that come with punishment, such as a development of dislike towards the task, subject, field, associates, environment, and the emerging and suppressing of ticks, and so on.

Whereas with positive reinforcement (reward), it’s like a laser, you get to pick the behavior you want to condition with great accuracy (if you know what you’re doing).

But what happens when you keep forcing yourself not to have a cookie?

Eventually, you really want a cookie. If you deprive someone of something they want long enough, you increase their hunger for it.

Now imagine this compounding over time…the stress and negative associations of work.

And since (the second most important thing in the teaching of behaviorism)

Any organism will try to find the easiest fastest way to the highest reward possible at any given point in time (including the reward of escape from pain)

Your escape will happen sooner than later. Before you get a chance to finish your diet and lose weight, make money, or reach your goal.

Not only that, our language is equipped with a whole host of expressions that self-punish us. For instance “I let myself go” or “Johnny let himself go” as though Johnny was not a domino. “I’m a failure” “I blame myself for that”

Blaming or crediting anyone for anything is as ridiculous as blaming or crediting a domino for being shoved by a finger or another domino.

This, I believe, is how and why people are so unscientific in attempting to control themselves.

This is the picture we end up with:

Deadline (implemented with things you don’t want to do) = “Will power” use or forcing yourself (self-inflicted pain you eventually want to escape) + form negative associations that pile on + an emerging state of stress + Eventual burn out

It’s like a typical dietician “Eat healthy! It’s good for you!”

The concerned generalist and scientifically oriented nutritionist will figure out how to truly make healthy food taste better than what you’re currently eating. Yes…a person and book like this exists. And many other books like it

Deadline (particularly when applied to things you don’t want to do, and an expectation to finish) may be: a dietician forcing you to eat healthy, and you potentially developing a bitterness towards healthy food through the numerous times you might not have been rewarded by your brain for that action, the times you might’ve been shamed, or may have shamed yourself for not eating healthier, for not reaching your weight loss goals, for looking at yourself in the mirror and mentally punishing yourself, developing and compounding negative associations with the word “health” and most other things linked to it.

Deadlines rely on something called negative reinforcement. Which, in layman’s terms, means “the reward of escape from pain”

The problem with negative reinforcement, under deadlines, is it gives one permission to wait. Because whatever it is you need to do, assuming you’re not doing it, is not rewarding, or is painful in some way, you put it off until the last minute.

In fact, this is a great way to find out if you are relying on negative reinforcement.

If your performance or work goes up sharply near the end (right before the deadline), then that might be an indication that you’re using negative reinforcement (escape from pain) as your drive.

This problem compounds when you set deadlines you can’t meet, which are not based upon any evidence, and you make the assumption that those are accurate.

The reason is: expectation or prediction that doesn’t correspond with reality may hurt you. You might feel sad or upset or disappointed that you haven’t finished in time.

“Everybody that has problems always has the same cerebral disadvantage. They have a set of standards in their heads that the world does not recognize. Here’s what that means: I plant a seed in the ground. I put the best soil there. I water it like it says in the book, and it falls over and dries up. And I say “That shouldn’t be!” What shouldn’t be? That plant behaved in accordance with physical laws. Maybe it had what you would call “damaged genetic structure” Maybe the soil had certain types of bacteria that that plant could not accommodate to. Maybe it needed shade and you didn’t accommodate for that need. But when the plant falls over it is correct for the sum total of the interaction between the environment and plant. Now, when you love a human being very much, and you do everything you can do for them and they run off with somebody else… There’s nothing wrong with that human being, what is wrong is your estimation of that human being. Does that make sense? Now, if you said “Look I’m not gonna judge anybody cause I don’t know them” when they run off with your candlesticks, you light a cigar and say “How interesting… My judgment has now improved.” Now, that would mean you would never suffer. Everybody in this room that suffers has a fixed notion of what ought to be.” — Jacque Fresco, Classic Lecture 3b

If one can apply the same perspective to one’s life — that we, ourselves, are operating according to the physical laws of nature, whatever it is we do, we can mitigate the concept of “shame” which is a crude concept that does not really correspond with the science of behavior since people are victims of their environment and sum total of their experiences.

You, in essence, and everyone around you, are as unblameable as the plant that dries up.

This is why if you believe in right and wrong, you may become depressed, because you say to yourself “I must’ve done the wrong thing” when it isn’t the wrong thing that you do, it’s the less valid, or less appropriate thing.

“Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.”— Jacque Fresco

I recommend Jacque Fresco’s lecture on Depression, and his classic lecture 3b for more on this perspective.

On Menial Tasks & External Deadlines

A reader, after reading this article, told me these findings and musings are great and all, but what about people like him — people who work at office jobs where there are external deadlines with real world negative consequences attached to them?

He made some excellent points on how this might not apply if you don’t have time to devote to the development of the obsession.

My answer to him was: it depends on what one’s goals are, and how much time one can devote to the development of an obsession. My reader asked how this could be more applicable to his situation. He said that making quarterly reports an obsession is a difficult if not impossible task, and ignoring or going at his own pace would definitely be more harmful.

I agreed that in his circumstance, ignoring a deadline could mean losing his job, and so it would actually create much worse negative consequences.

My suggestion was to introduce a new variable to make the creation of quarterly reports a learning experience. For instance, automation, and coding. What if he developed an obsession in the area of automation in order to lessen the menial workload? (particularly if it’s an ongoing long term task)

If the quarterly reports involved presentations, perhaps the development of the obsession could be in public speaking.

My overall suggestion is to make a list of all of the most painful parts of the job, and to prioritize them by how aversive or painful they are. Then to fix each problem going down the list.

I recommended doing that by either building an obsession (if it’s a field one can learn more about), or by building an obsession that progressively reduces the amount of needed work in that task, and progressively increases your efficiency or work output, for instance automation, may or may not be more useful.

This is just one suggestion, and it needn’t be, and isn’t the only way to solve this problem. I don’t have all the answers, in fact I have very few, and I try my best to emphasize the fact that I, like everyone else, am still learning. What I present here is the best that I know of up til now, and can and will be surpassed by people who are much further along than me, or who make more discoveries. I actually think that this solution is a kind of temporary one, whereas a more permanent solution is changing our economic system to a resource based economy like The Venus Project. This solves the root cause of the problem

Side note: An evidence-based marker or checkpoint is very different than a deadline. You may develop an evidence-based degree of predictability about when you’ll finish a project, but it’ll never be as accurate as just doing it and seeing. A marker is different in that the world will not end if you do not finish. Instead, you’re more able to make slightly more precise predictions about when you’ll finish, rather than blame yourself for not finishing. Developing a scientific attitude by exploring general semantics helps greatly in this area. For more on this I recommend Jacque Fresco’s thoughts on Depression and Expectation, Wendell Johnson’s book “People in Quandaries” and Irving J. Lee’s General Semantics series. Just know that depending on how you define deadline, this may or may not apply to your situation.

How to use science to truly be more productive