Thursday, September 30, 2010

Ego-depleting Blog Post

It was a little bit difficult to read this blog post about commitment contracts (e.g., Stikk.com) and its comments and inhibit the impulse to post a response like:

"Read Deci & Ryan (self-determination theory) on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (and the sub-types within these categories). 

Read Higgins on regulatory fit.

Read about the differences among goal initiation, goal achievement, and maintenance (note: maintenance is hard, even for people with high commitment, due to the self-regulatory complexity). 

Read about behavioral economics so you do not mistakenly characterize it as claiming that "people respond to carrots and sticks" (that's behaviorism in psychology, and it works more consistently with lower-order animals) (but a finger-gun shot at commenter #9 for calling you on this already). 

Etc. Etc."

Fortunately, I'm also motivated to not be an asshole to random people on the Internet to their face (so to speak) and I have my own outlet.

I am trying and failing to imagine the kind of blog post that would evoke a similar response (i.e., wanting to point out "dude this is a hugely complicated issue and you don't know what you're talking about") from my mathematically-focused readers.

2 comments:

Tam said...

Well, in my (undergrad) prob/stats course last year, people were wondering how you could do a dissertation in math, since it's (obviously) not like you can write papers in it. Do you just turn in a bunch of problems or what? But I'm not sure what would make someone want to write a blog post like that.

Math is definitely not one of the fields that everyone thinks they know all about without having studied it.

Lee Ryan said...

Stephen King had a much more entertaining version of that blog post in "Quitters Inc..."