If we had only known......

People do stupid things, even if they know that they are stupid things to do; it's a kind of predestination.

The more educated, might be less likely to make mistakes, but are also likely to get cocky overestimate their competency. If information gives us an increased ability to "predict" the future, then we use our more accurate knowledge (or decreased level of risk) to make riskier choices, like the Peltzmann effect. Maybe the stock market is a picture of real life....

I would tend to say that more knowledge is an improvement, but not when people start to think that their models (whether they be economic, cosmological or psychological) actually exist, rather than being useful approximations of reality. It becomes ludicrous, people start with nativism vs. behaviorism type wars and when things cool down you get the people in the middle of the two camps and the only thing that they have right is that they believe that the first two camps were wrong.

Maybe we make poor choices because we don't have enough information? Do people like doing stupid things or are we just wired that way?

Maybe it initially requires "too much" effort to anticipate your making mistakes and minimizing the damage caused by them.....

Procrastination and Perfectionism/ flawed time valuation

Procrastination as a side effect of perfectionism on Meteuphoric, she has a good poing but

I don't know that it is perfectionism, so much as a failure to realize that your idealization of the future will not affect the "future present," and your effectiveness and the amount of effort required will not change by letting time pass.

"Driven" people probably have the opposite problem; they idealize how much they can do and plan a minimum amount of time and then put forth maximum effort, which often involves extra time ----- so they are always busy.

Or they are organized and work hard, but they attribute value to things that aren't necessarily more important to most people because of their own peculiarities i.e. they find that they are tired from sorting all of their canned goods alphabetically and then everything seems like really hard work......

this is all probably inaccurate, or at least a drastic oversimplification.....but I'm all for chunking.

La Siesta

Because of the Industrial Revolution, western rates of productivity are pretty high.  But what about when rest of the world catches up? How are we going to eke out that last smidgen of production per person?

Napping, napping is the answer! Unfortunately, we don't take naps as a rule; and surely we all want to be more productive. Maybe napping just doesn't look productive, or a manic caffeine-orgy followed by it's inevitable depressive torpor feels more industrious.
Maybe we enjoy living in the clouds, simply floating, coasting on the magnificent pollution of the 19th century.

Now that we are assured that napping does in fact mean that we are resting our magnificent midbrains, instead of meaning that we are lazy louts------- the spanish will take over the world (again.)
The Japanese sometimes have special rooms for workers to nap in, and they seem to be doing okay. (haven't fallen of the edge of the earth, or become a third world nation or anything.)