The spirit of the Fun Criterion

Video articulating my thoughts on the Fun Criterion

Transcript of the video:
Edwin De Wit (00:00)
Hi everybody, my name is Edwin. I am really interested in optimizing problem solving and personal effectiveness. Specifically using the philosophy of critical rationalism with the enhancements of David Deutsch. And one of the ideas of David Deutsch is this thing called the Fun Criterion,

which is a moral heuristic that helps us choose how we should take action in the most enjoyable way which also is therefore the most effective way. And that's why I think it's such an interesting concept and today's video is about unpacking what exactly the fun criterion is, what it isn't and showcasing some practical application.

This is largely based on the original video by David Deutsch and Lulie Tanett on the Fun Criterion and I'll link that below.

Today in this video I'll be expanding and elaborating upon it little bit. I'll go beyond what is discussed in the original video and make my own interpretations. therefore they are possible to be wrong and contain inconsistencies. So please do let me know if you notice it. I just want to clarify that so that you don't think I'm

paraphrasing or quoting David Deutsch when explaining this concept. This is more my own interpretations and reframing of some of the nuances of the fun criterion Okay, so let's start with the basics. What is the fun criterion

Well it's actually the same thing we discussed in a previous video, which was the video on taking the mind seriously. There we said we have three types of knowledge or three categories of knowledge. have our statements, which are our explicit knowledge. We can express fully in words. We have intuitions, which are know how skills we know how to do it, but

we cannot articulate it fully in words but we can approximate it and then the third category is our drives which are completely unconscious knowledge

We have no idea what's driving it, but they make themselves known to our consciousness via our feelings. So we sense something and then we have to wonder, hey, what may have caused that? So these are the three types of

have in our mind. And those are the types of knowledge we use when problem

we should...

take all of these types of knowledge seriously and evaluate them based on their content and then decide what we do about them. So we're analyzing each sensation and each type of knowledge inside of our

carefully considering what we do about it and how we factor it into our problem solving and therefore also our activities in daily life. And this is of course contrasted with not doing that

And that can take the shape of rejecting certain types of knowledge purely based on their category, not even looking at the content. So suppressing our feelings is one of the ways that is not fun and coercive is a good way to put it. We're really forcing ourselves to suppress one part of our mind and

not even evaluate the contents of those theories.

expressing your feelings is one, but it also can manifest in being coerced by someone else. So for instance, when we were still in school, we had these fixed rules and fixed curriculums we had to follow in a certain order and classroom we had to be in. All of these are imposed limits imposed rules which can easily conflict with other

Ideas in our mind that we wish we would be enacting with but we simply could not enact them because we had to do this other thing Well, then there is this coercion happening in your mind. We also call it often a thwarting of problem-solving because there's just something that is like blocking it and not allowing you to take serious all of the sensations and your statements and ideas that you wish to be acting on It's not fun. It's not effective

and can cause also damage and actual physical tension

It also manifests itself in anxiety that you might experience or fear of failure or like some bad ideas like no pain, no gain.

and just push through that that's all forms of inner conflicts of coercion, suppression, all of those words describe the state of no fun.

Okay, so now we've described fun and Next, it's important to make a clarification that fun is really this mode of action or this way of interpreting our mind and it's not necessarily a positive emotion or a positive property of an activity and it's really important to make the distinction. So...

While we're doing an activity, we can be doing it either in a fun way, in the sense that we're just...

taking seriously the sensations and the feedback that is happening in our mind while doing the problem solving and then not coercing or suppressing it. Or we can be suppressing it, but then we're doing it in a not fun way. It doesn't mean that the fun way is always a positive emotion. It can also sometimes be a struggle to work through an important problem. It can be tiring. It doesn't have to be positive emotions all the way through. This is an important distinction because when you think of like other life advice,

They will often say things like follow the fun or do what you enjoy and that advice is more geared towards the other common interpretation of fun which is activities that feel good and if you take this to the extreme that's completely a hedonistic lifestyle so you're just chasing like the pleasures and the happiness buzz and the ups and the dopamine

But this is not what we mean with the fun criterion

In fact, it's very much counter to the

fun criterion because if we would make, let's say, a list of activities that you enjoy doing that's like going for a walk in the evening and doing a meditation and going to eat with my friends. So you have this list and you make that basically your rules or your maxims for, what I should prioritize.

But in doing so, you're turning it into an authority. let's say a situation arises where you do want to go for a walk, it's on your list of the fun activities, but you don't really feel like doing it today or your knee hurts a bit. If you didn't push through and still go for the walk and suppress those other sensations, you're in a not fun state. So seeing certain activities as categorically a fun thing can lead to not fun quite easily. So we have to be

aware of that distinction when discussing fun. Now this leads to a second question because okay if fun is not inherently enjoyment how do I recognize if I'm having fun or not in the moment? That's a good question because if you cannot judge it based on like the type of emotional sensation you're feeling then what is it?

So that's a good question, I think it's best answered.

by looking at what not fun is and that is you identify coercion or force. you're basically, you turn your awareness or your focus on like what's going on in the mind and do you notice that you're suppressing certain things for instance like, I'm in this moment just pushing through this deadline because I have to make it and I'm kind of ignoring my feelings or my sleepiness. Like this is a common way we coerce I think in daily life at least for people who

job is quite common.

That's a way to recognize when we're not having fun, when there is that suppression going on.

So these are things that you can learn to recognize and sense and you sense them by turning your attention inward

And I think this is actually one of the most important moral lessons from the Fun Criterion is to try and regularly check in with yourselves and notice, hey, am I doing some coercion now? Am I instinctively rejecting a certain sensation?

And quite often you'll realize that is the case, at least with me it is the case. And as soon as you acknowledge it and don't instinctively reject it, but take it seriously and then decide if you have to act on it or not, it'll already release some tension

Another way to recognize fun is this

notion of flow state where we are really immersed in an activity and doing it in our consciousness or awareness is really almost turned off or neutral and we're just doing the thing which is just slightly on the edge of our competencies and therefore challenging but not too difficult. Really being in the moment that is a good example of fun. However not every fun state is flow. flow is a fun state but the inverse it's not always true. So it's just one way to

recognize it but I don't think it's foolproof and we're better off looking at are we coercing ourselves or not and that's a better gauge to understand if we're having fun.

Another implication of the fun criterion being fun or not fun is that it's really binary. So there's not really any value in thinking in degrees of funness. At least not when talking about the fun criterion. We should really be aware, are we coercing ourselves or not in a given moment? That is at least a helpful lens to take. I'm not saying that there aren't various levels of positive emotion that we can experience when doing certain activities. Certainly there can be a

gradient or even like a little hierarchy in your mind but that doesn't necessarily relate to this process of fun so making this list of like your most pleasurable default activities

is really a different exercise and it's different than the fun criterion.

Okay, so this leads us to actually an interesting question. Why call it Fun then if it's really more of a neutral state? Why would you give it a name which still has a bit of a positive connotation to it? I think it's a good question. I thought about this myself too and I think I have two reasons why David Joyce probably went with the label of Fun, although I don't know if he's actually confirmed it.

The first reason is that fun really encompasses a lot of variation in experience. So it is quite common actually to say, I did a very tough hike. The weather was poor. was tired.

But it was fun. So people still will often assign the label to something that was difficult, challenging, tiring, maybe even stressful at times as fun. of course you would also say like sipping mojitos on the beach was fun. So it can encompass both the positive aspects as well as the more, negative ones.

and therefore it's a nicely applicable term that is already in language associated with that type of activity. So I think it fits quite well for that reason.

The second reason I think that Fun is still good label

is because it still carries this distinction of being more desirable than the alternative being not fun. So it's not about specifically positive emotion, but it's still quite self-evident and natural also in English language to say, yeah, I'd rather be having fun than not fun.

it's a good word or term to use when trying to distinguish a desirable state from an undesirable state. Okay, now let's move from the theory, because we just covered quite a bit of the boundaries and the distinctions and definitions. And I want to now go more into practice of like, okay, in daily life, how do you apply the fine criterion on where do you encounter it?

applying the funcriterion in daily life.

entails maximizing

this state of having fun and minimizing the moments where we're in not fun The first way to do that is

try to prune out activities that are notoriously going to give you a not fun time because you simply will know you have Resisting or competing desires that are not that and you're just going to try to get those minimized

One example would be, we all need to eat every day, but maybe some of us hate cooking. In that case, you could find a way to get around it by, for instance, having a great roommate and making an arrangement with them, or ordering takeaway, or ordering in restaurant every day. This way you can avoid this friction of cooking.

It's not entirely feasible for all of our problems, although I think we can for a great degree still craft our daily lives, but we still have some problems like...

taking care of our health or paying taxes or working our job in a more of a rigid setting.

so those might by default not be fun, but we can still try to make them fun.

For instance, we might hate cleaning our house and we still have to do it, there's no way around it, but we could combine it with listening to a podcast or doing it together with a friend and this way

nothing more than reluctance and friction and therefore it's a fun state and an uncoerced state that you find yourself in when cleaning, which is better.

Another thing that has helped me a lot is to really proactively reflect on given moments and then check with myself, am I now in a state of fun or not fun? Because It happens quite regularly that I'm instinctively in a non-fun state, meaning that I'll just have this idea in my head that I need to be...

laser focused or get this done and therefore Suppressing signals that are telling me I would like to do something else or I'm a tired I'm just actively suppressing them without even being very aware of it, but it's just like a habitual reaction I have so for me it really helps

to practice being mindful of if I'm coercing myself or not in the given moment.

And let's say in a moment I am coercing self, simply just taking note of the content of the ideas and the feelings. Just taking note of that already make me...

Likely go into that fun state where that tension is gone. I'm not anymore suppressing it Yes, there still might be negative signals coming in that says hey, dude, this is so boring I don't want to be doing but just by acknowledging that feeling and being aware of it and Accepting it's like okay. Yeah, I realize I feel bored right now But I still want to keep this done because it's more important to me that is not coercion that is acknowledging the sensations and then just still going on with it this helps me a lot because I

I for a lot of people probably the coercion or the friction has just been so conditioned or ingrained because how for instance we're taught in schools that it helps to train ourselves to recognize when we are doing these unhealthy patterns.

Then a brief note on discipline

Discipline is deliberate.

coercion and going into a not fun state to get something important done. It is really a short-term measure to do something a push through if we really have to but it is definitely not sustainable and it's also definitely overrated in culture. We often look at people who are working very hard when it's like athletes or like top.

executives or whatever and we think my god they must be so disciplined to be able to maintain those levels of those hours and that intensity but actually what's going on is those people are having fun they are completely uncoerced and enjoying this process of problem solving and working on those things what they're doing they are not disciplined if you're trying to diet and lose weight you want to find an approach that is fun that can be done without coercion or force because if you have to rely on force it's going to be

painful, it's gonna be slow, you're gonna make begrudgingly progress, you're always gonna fight yourself all along the way, it is really not a sustainable or healthy way to go. So the message is don't try to rely on discipline, see it as really the last resort. It is just deliberate injection of not fun It's not recommended.

Now let's talk a little bit about the intervals of fun and not fun. It's not the case that we just start a day and we just say, hey, today's gonna be a fun day and then we're in this fun mode for rest of the day and we've aced it. Of course, throughout the day we have different ideas constantly popping into our minds, different feelings popping into our minds. And therefore what is fun or not fun in moments can change quite rapidly. So.

It is normal and it's again good to practice this habit of reflecting regularly upon whether we're having fun or not fun.

But another thing that's good to note is if you notice that you're frequently distracted or you find it really hard to stay in that fun state and do this activity in a sustainable way, there's likely some underlying coercion or repression going on that is causing, that's kind of seeping in and kind of trying to pull you into a different mode of action that is, that is fun.

So if you notice that the answer again is not discipline or just optimizing it, just take a step back and realize, okay, what is actually under the surface? What am I telling myself? What self-deprecating thought patterns? Like, you're not good enough. You have to do this better. That might be lingering beneath the surface and really impeding whatever activity you're doing because you're just constantly judging yourself and judging yourself. Again, not a fun thing.

Okay, so that was kind of an examination of the practical application of the fun criterion in daily life. I have two additional

supplements to the Fun Criterion that I thought about when considering the Fun Criterion, These things are not mentioned by David Deutsch, but I think they go very well hand in hand with the Fun Criterion and are good to keep in mind when trying to be in this mode of fun.

And the first thing is to be proactive about tackling new problems or exploring new problem areas. Because by default, what the fun criterion is about is maximizing the amount of fun you have in a day by really assessing what activities are in that local problem space in that day. So what sensations come up and what activities you have lined up for the day and optimizing those.

but that ignores the fact that you might want to be engaging with completely different problems that require you to proactively or deliberately take charge and make decisions to course adjust, to take a new project on or to think about a new career opportunity. All of these require more proactive attention and those will actually get you to maybe greater states of fun in the future. Because if you only focus on the now and your current present state, you can of course maximize

that fun in that to a certain degree but it's not going to give you the global maximum that you could achieve if you experiment and try other things.

that's why I think experimentation and agency go really hand-in-hand with the fun criterion if you want to maximize the amount of fun you want to have in a day.

So you want to be doing deliberate exploration and trying new things to get to this state where you can have globally ideal fun. But then also the question remains, what type of activity is a good thing to do?

there's this curious phenomenon where if we try to create something or help something and basically adopt responsibility for making that thing a success.

we also enter the state of fun. So if we want to complete a project and we take it seriously or we're working on an event for a nonprofit organization, signing up for that thing and doing the thing, it will inherently go through ups and downs. definitely not all going to be sunshine and roses, but.

there's this interesting connection between taking responsibility for the completion of a project and fun.

something I don't really have an explanation for why it is the case. This idea of taking responsibility for something comes from the Man's Search for Meaning, which is a book by Viktor Frankl,

The general claim in that book is that a will to live comes from having meaning and you get meaning in your life by adopting responsibility for indeed taking on such a project or supporting someone or helping someone

So, all that to say.

If you're in this state of experimenting and trying something new to have your days become more full of fun, I would say try to do something different, experiment, but also when you're experimenting, do a meaningful project. So don't just half-heartedly do an activity,

Take it seriously. do your best at it, work on that project and then really you'll understand if you like it or not. Okay, that was today's video covering the fun criterion.

If you want to know more about the fun criterion and you find it interesting, can highly recommend the Reason is Fun podcast with Lulie Tanett and David Deutsch. They already have a couple of episodes where they talk about how to take the mind seriously and also the fun criterion gets touched upon a couple of times. Of course, watch the original fun criterion video which I'll also list below. And if you liked my interpretation of the ideas or rendition of the ideas and the practical examples,

I gave you then I think you also will enjoy my upcoming book the four acts which is a general purpose problem solving framework which also includes this notion of taking seriously your mind and deciding what you do based on the idea of critical rationalism so creativity and agency and optimism is all baked into that framework

So the link to everything is in the description. Thank you for listening. See you next time.

Relevant: #1689