Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

The ability to stay on task *unsupervised* is an incredibly valuable life skill, & I think externalizing the rewards & punishments related to maintaining focus is a very risky move — particularly with children, who overall work with implicit motivation very well when permitted

Many people who seem to lack the "ability to stay on task" that *other people have assigned to them* are really just people who are incredibly good at preventing rewards and punishments from distracting them from the task they assigned themselves.

Many people who have difficultly staying on task that others assign them also have difficult staying on task that they assign themselves. I’m one of them.

So in such situations what makes you think that "staying on task" is the right thing to do as opposed to going with the subconscious mind (dropping the task) and doing something else?

Um, every time. Everyone wants to live a life of agency, not operate at the whims of their subconscious.

"Whims" is misleadingly pejorative. All sophisticated knowledge has conscious and unconscious components. When they conflict there is no automatic rule for adjudicating. Creative resolution is needed and the condition for that to be possible is to do only what is fun—hard or not.

“Unconscious knowledge” is just a fancy way of describing our mostly stupid “lizard brains” that evolved for life as hunter gatherer not modern life. Yes sometimes we unconsciously understand something valuable but that’s the exception not the rule.

Can't really be true because the vast majority of subconscious ideas are culturally transmitted. For example the meanings of most words are understood subconsciously, reading works subconsciously etc.