I very much doubt Wayne was in "perfect mental health" before the long COVID. In so many cases highly successful entrepreneurs are bipolar. But they are manic 98% of the time and manic in a highly productive way. This is of course not limited to entrepreneurs. If you read about Winston Churchill's time during the Boer War he was absolutely fearless and convinced he couldn't die. And at other times he encountered what he called his black dog (depression).
I've heard about people using meditation to manage fibromyalgia. And I belong to a synesthesia email list / discussion group where people occasionally talk about filtering out obstructive synesthesia by training themselves to pay less attention to it. Those examples seem to indicate there's room for people to learn to filter out unhelpful signals, as you've done with tinnitus, and we might expect some to be better at it than others.
Then again, my own experiences give me reason to doubt that someone who is good at filtering will be less prone to developing psychosomatic pain in the first place. I've been filtering tinnitus pretty well since I was nine years old. As someone with hyperfocus, I'm good at filtering out distracting environmental noise in general. But I've experienced psychosomatic pain as a result of anxiety (for me, it came on as a skin sensitivity, like being really sunburned). I wouldn't expect that to happen if my filter were guarding me against background signals becoming over-represented in my consciousness. Ignoring it got me through the day, but the thing that made it actually go away was reducing my anxiety.
I suppose you could argue that anxiety itself is a signal booster, in that it makes people hypersensitive. Perhaps the anxiety punched a bunch of holes in my filter for a while. But I didn't notice any reduction in my capacity to focus on tasks to the total exclusion of everything else around me, and I don't recall the tinnitus being any worse. I tend to block out the world more when I'm anxious.
On the subject of tinnitus, I notice that certain environmental triggers make it "louder", like drinking, being dehydrated, changes in altitude, and migraines.
It would seem that the obvious answer is something akin to "you find things in the last place you looked", i.e. you always turn around at 'rock bottom' because wherever you turn around gets defined as rock bottom
That sounds like a sophism though. When people describe hitting rock bottom and quiting, they really describe very harsh situations (if that's the very bottom the could go to is irrelevant, rock bottom is a casual expression meaning being impacted very hard, not some absolute measurement). And conversely, people who easily quit, or quit while they were ahead, don't describe their turn as having happened at "rock bottom".
Maybe not a "sophism". People who claim to have hit "rock bottom" aren't trying to pull one over on everyone else, and neither is EternalTango!
I think "rock bottom" is a fuzzy concept whose application is weakly conditional on a combination of the phenomena you and EternalTango point out.
When someone represents a time in their life as "rock bottom," they might be "wrong" by some criteria, but that doesn't really matter: what's really interesting about the concept is that its application reveals how people are representing their lives to themselves.
In "Things I have been meaning to look up for a long time and I have finally been triggered to do something about right now", do you have any recommendations for good first-hand accounts of people who were prescribed those dangerously high levels of antipsychotics? It sounds like a fascinating result.
I can't think of one! But I bet it's common enough (despite my saying it's usually not done these days) that someone will show up here who can tell you about it first-hand.
I sometimes watch youtube videos from schizophrenics on such medication. And it seems common for their schizophrenia to be comorbid with a mood disorder, which in their depressive phase causes them to just lay in bed rather than do anything. So how do you model someone taking both an antipsychotic which is reducing their odds of hearing voices with an antidepressant getting them up and out of bed at the same time. Are they somehow both more and less confident at the same time? Do anti-depressants target the lowest/muscular level well enough not to cause voices whereas antipsychotics are not so well targeted to their level? And why isn't it anti-depressants that are known for causing physical tics?
You know, I bet this makes the combination of bipolar and schizophrenia absolute hell to treat.
Off the top of my head it also points toward why aripiprazole is one of the better-liked drugs for this - doesn't kick you in the "do nothing" button as hard as something like haloperidol or thorazine does and apparently also does something to mitigate depression (in ways that are utterly mysterious to me).
Schizoaffective disorder is by far the most common diagnosis in psychiatric hospitals. It enables psychiatrists to prescribe antipsychotic, mood stabilizing, and antidepressant medication without filling out extra paperwork
I'm not sure this is worth arguing against, but as a psychiatrist, I can say this isn't really true. The amount of paperwork is really the same, and using the schizoaffective diagnosis doesn't offer a short cut to anything practical.
I'm curious how this interacts with the idea of willpower as a finite resource. It's a lot easier to skip dessert at a restaurant for example than to walk by the doughnuts on kitchen counter all day. Maybe this is due to the "eat doughnut now" agent updating its belief every time you see them, whereas your frontal cortex only has a baseline prior? If your brain accumulates evidence over a time period instead of just polling at a given instant, then "reusing" evidence might lead to that particular failure mode.
Studies of willpower as an expendable resource in the traditional sense haven't really replicated. And yet I agree with you about the donuts. Maybe it's just that you have to "reroll" every time you pass them (I don't know what that would actually cash out to)?
I do find that if, the first time I reject them, I promise myself I'm not going to have them today, I can usually stick to that pretty easily - it's having to remake the decision each time which is hard.
Will power is best modeled as an "impulse" force, not a continuous force. It's not about running out of willpower, it's mainly just only suitable to overcome certain kinds of problems (and then, only for a short amount of time).
If you need willpower to accomplish something long term, you will likely fail. Instead, you should focus on altering your thinking so that willpower isn't need at all (i.e. you actually _want_ to do the thing). Harder than it sounds, but it's the only path forward.
Or better yet, alter the environment/structures so you don't have to face the temptation at all. Keep the donuts out of the kitchen, set up your schedule so you CAN'T lie in bed once awake, make a routine out of going to the gym ....
Hmmmm, possibly. But the way I think about is that we only need will power when the decision system isn't doing what our higher cognitive functions prefer, because other preferences are too strong. So allowing those higher cognitive functions to set the world around us up in such a way that this happens less often is actually an indirect application of will power.
And then we get to experience the rewards of doing what our higher cognitive functions prefer, which reinforces its power, which increases will power overall ....
A very nice working "definition" of "will power" as an enforcer of the system-2 higher cognitive function over the system-1 instincts/evolutionary instincts... So now we take our issue up with the cognitive function, the "supreme court" one: SHOULD we delegate some tasks to the pool of being enforced in the law/practice? To go for a dip and to swim instead of just sitting one's lunch break out is a good use of our will... but say dishes? no! engage your family to help, re-organize so you do less of it, a fair share... and so on. So if we "must" force ourselves, must we indeed? it depends...
I think that's the point. No matter how strong your will is it's not as strong as just not being tempted in the first place, so the latter is more reliable if you can arrange it.
What you say is true for the end purpose to perform a task A which is according to your system-2 mind but against your system-1 instinct, but is a hypothetical task A the ultimate goal of a will exercise?
What if your purpose is to practice your willpower for a future task far higher than a task A (or to train somebody for a higher task)?
A couple of "silly oversimplified" yet sufficient to illustrate examples:
A municipality installs sidewalks and "zebra" road crossings at the spots picked by people's instinctive conveniences. For example, where they stomp on the grass more and a trail appears.
Nobody is tempted to stroll on grass or cross a road at the wrong spot.
The municipality's objectives are achieved in a better way (as you state correctly) than to have each person fight the urge to shortcut.
People from this municipality travel to another locale, another country, where it is expected of a pedestrian to mind the cars (and not the other way around). They travel for a conference.
On the second day of the conference, the hosting country sends a horse-mounted police regiment to block the road by their hotel each time there is a break in the talks for a lunch and when the talks end.
In order to guard the visitors' crossing the road separating the hotel from the beach.
Because all the locals are shocked the visitors step straight into traffic to go to the beach across from their hotel. And only the first-rate reaction time of the local drivers saves the lives of the visitors.
The drivers are not expecting they need to slow down, they expect the pedestrians to wait for them to pass before crossing.
A few conference guests are ok though, with or without such special guards. These have been raised in a similar to the host country set of rules.
Instead of hurrying to the welcoming beach, they restrain themselves (here is the spot where the willpower comes in our discussion 😁) to look left-right-left-again before crossing the road.
You may generalize for smth more important, sports or ...
But this particular example I was an eyewitness to :)...
this is happening automatically when you achieve professionalism in something, it becomes a pleasure, not a painful effort, but then you need your willpower again to expand your realm of topics you are professional at...
"Decision fatigue" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ) is a concept with a name which maps well onto my experience of this phenomenon, but I have no idea whether it actually has any evidence behind it. It's possible that this reflects some distinct but intermingled phenomenon, which accounts for the anecdotal experience of exhaustible willpower?
Much like an Iron Man athlete will perform ~300x more athletic actions per day than an average person, a trained "decision maker" can make 100s more decisions per hour without additional fatigue. For example, active gamers or day traders(pre-HF trading) could be making a decision per second. These are actual conscious decisions. Yes, it's tiring, but is several orders of magnitude than medium decision rate.
Well, speaking as a ex-pro poker player, this isn't quite right. The vast majority of decisions they make are obvious (to a pro but not necessarily to an amateur). Almost always the right choice clearly outweighs the alternatives, and it's effortlessly provided by subconscious systems, which in turn were created and trained by thousand of hours of training and practice.
I've noticed that low end restaurants try to make their menu more appealing by adding extra choices (four types of bun, eight optional toppings, three types of patty, three types of fries, two sizes of fries, four sauces, etc.) while high end restaurants try to make their menu more appealing by taking away choices (prix fixe for the whole table, $75 per person, plus the cost of the suggested wine pairings). My explanation of this had been that people who go to a casual burger place in their off hours are often people who spend all day following orders from someone else, while someone who eats at a high end restaurant like that mentioned above is a person who spends all day making complex strategic decisions.
It could also be that a truly world class chef is able to choose better than me but a mediocre chef isn't. So if the chef is world class I want him to decide the whole menu but if he's mediocre I want customization
Making a promise to yourself to reject them next time might be a way for the frontal cortex to increase its evidential weight, or add to the accumulator. If evidence is only added in response to events, that would make sense. So something like making a promise or reading an article saying that doughnuts are bad for you would do it, while just passively resisting wouldn't, which squares with my experience.
If eating now, promising not to eat next time, one only re-enforces the bad habit of feeling good through promising, yes? And brainwashing your own brain (even as a promise to read an article) will be met by a fierce resistance of your inner self: on may promise to RESEARCH about healthy eating habits instead... Donuts are ugly, maybe use a fine 3D printed pastry for this example, otherwise, there is little temptation!
In the particular case of dessert at a restaurant, you've probably also just eaten a (possibly large) meal immediately before the point at which you're deciding about dessert. I don't think you need finite willpower to explain this one. :)
Do you not distinguish different types of "willpower", stuffed in the same term? Some are indeed expEndable, some, on the contrary, expAndable, that is they increase the more one uses them...-?
'Rerolling' makes sense to me; you'd expect the confidence of the 'eating donut will be good' bid to be higher if you're hungry or low blood sugar, for instance.
Another explanation might be the fact that doing this calculation is not itself a costless process; all these brain systems are bidding dopamine and making a decision each time you look at the donut, and that neural process costs glucose! This might put increasing confidence on the prediction 'just leaving that donut on the table will hurt me' every time you see it, at which point you feel compelled to do *something* about it, and usually choose to eat it over throw it away.
This matches the folk ontology that has 2 types of people: those who decide to go on a run once and then never consider the question again while they run, and those who have to decide at basically every step whether to take the next step or not. The first, the story goes, are the types of people who can stick to running, and the second generally can’t. Relatedly, the first group suffers less during the run, while the second group suffers anew with each step.
I don’t have a solid model of exactly what’s happening here, but the first group rhymes with precommitting to not eat the donut that day.
Oh, this is cool! I didn't know there were these two types. I'm the first type, but do hate running, so getting over that decision hill is hard, but once I'm out there, it's much easier. It truly must be torture to have to decide again and again ....
Easier still to just figure out which type of physical activity I enjoy, though. In my case, that's anything 'smooth'; biking, roller blading, ice skating, skiiing.... Apparently I hate jolts. Or anything involving loud lively music and someone yelling at me about what to do next, with little repetition - greatly reduces the boredom. Lifting weights or working on machines makes me want to shoot myself, so repetitive. Oh, damn, for those, I DO have to decide every. single. rep. No wonder I can't do it .....
Saying those are two kinds of people is wrong, though. Those are two different decision processes. One can switch from one to another (though it isn't easy). And actually there are considerably more than two kinds of decision process. Each kind is better at some things and worse at others...but just which things varies considerably with the process.
E.g.: How to you add 2 and 2? How do you multiply 12 times 11? In the second case it's generally easier to see that there are multiple approaches. But notice that almost nobody uses as their first step "well, first you convert to hexadecimal" or "first you convert to binary", even though those can both work. (Of course the hexadecimal version requires a table lookup into a set of memorized values...but it can still work.)
Now generalize this. How do you represent the decision to yourself? Do you hear it? Is it your own voice? Etc.
I strongly distrust arguments that evaluate people as Bayesian reasoners. I have a strong belief that they tend to use heuristic short-cuts whenever possible. Ideally those short-cuts would arrive at the same answer, but often they don't. However they're enough quicker and "cheaper" that some amount of error is accepted as "worth it". After all, Bayesian reasoning isn't infallible either.
All 3 of binary, decimal, and hexadecimal versions of multiplying 12 times 11 require table lookups into a set of memorized values... except you only do it once for hexadecimal.
You have the most interesting points, but please please change the main item on the menu of the analogies: Krispy now offers FREE DAILY DONUTS to all immunized from COVID-19, and I doubt there will be many claimers! Donuts suck, they are too sweet and not artistically presented and not tasty at all... use, say, a huge juicy steak, or an elaborate 3D printed cake, etc - yes?no?
I've never liked doughnuts - too fatty and sugary - except when I went to Japan and encountered Mr Donut. Their doughnuts are delicious! https://favy-jp.com/topics/430
This might be the same thing, in some ways. If you have a good willpower day, you might a 95% chance of avoiding doughnuts, so you can go an average of 20 doughnut-based thoughts before succumbing to temptation. On a bad-willpower day, you only have a 50% chance, so you'll get up for a tasty doughnut the second time you think about it, on average. It can feel like it's a finite and depleting resource, even if it's totally independent every time, because of how that works out - you stop counting when you fail.
"I do find that if, the first time I reject them, I promise myself I'm not going to have them today, I can usually stick to that pretty easily - it's having to remake the decision each time which is hard."
This accords with my experience of weight management. I find it far easier to rule out classes of food (e.g. sweets) than to moderate my consumption of them. However, apparently this is not everyone's experience.
I'm guessing that this is the Bayesian update for the strength of the evidence. If your conscious process starts sending very strong signals (e.g. because you power through using willpower), maybe your aggregator has a strong prior on what proportion of overall evidence throughout the day will come from your conscious reasoning and what proportion will come from more instinctive RL stuff or from the prior on motionlessness, and after a while starts giving lower weight to intellectual impulses.
E.g., calling prior on motionlessness/inertia = S0, reinforcement learning stuff = impulses = S1, intellectual agent = conscious reasoning = S2, suppose that the aggregator expects to receive signals of a proportion something like 40%, 40%, 20% for S0/S1/S2 respectively. Meaning that throughout a period of time, the aggregator has a strong prior that the Sum(Signals from S_i) / (Sum(Signals from S_0) + Sum(Signals from S_1) + Sum(Signals from S_2)) = 40%, resp. 20%.
S2 normally sends signals in the 1-10 range, but now starts sending signals in the 10-100 range (forcing yourself to do something). This works less and less as times goes on, because S2 was only supposed to send signals worth 20% of the total evidence, but is now sending much stronger evidence throughout a period of time, and so they e.g., get applied a lower weight. I.e., if S2 misuses a fire alarm of intensity 80/100 to signal something normal, like a lunch break or the end of a period of class, that fire alarm will get reinterpreted to mean something normal (and now you don't have a signal for a fire alarm).
So far this is just a restatement of "intellectual willpower is a thing", but it also sort of feels reasonable that you'd have a prior of how much evidence throughout a period of time S2 is supposed to contribute.
Don't forget that how hungry you are and how recently you've had a dopamine hit from a similar source will also impact the importance/wieght of the signal to 'eat that sweet' into the decision making process. When you've just finished a satisfying meal, hunger is low and rewards from eating are recent and high - much easier to resist.
to the specifics of the metaphor, this donut on the table is totally non-tempting and cr*py, while dessert at a restaurant is usually very tempting... and you do not have to clean up the table after you have it :)
Though I'm probably taking the example too seriously, it seems to me that there are major differences between the temptation a box of doughnuts on a counter and dessert at a restaurant.
Firstly, ordering dessert at the restaurant requires me to choose a dessert, tell that choice to the waiter, and then sit patiently and wait for it to arrive. While the doughnuts on the counter can be had by simply opening the box and grabbing one. Way less investment in time and calories for the latter.
Secondly, ordering dessert at a restaurant requires paying money. And I don't like paying money for things. Plus if it's a good restaurant you know that dessert wont be cheap. While a box of doughnuts on the kitchen counter have a) already been paid for and thus require no new expenditure of resources to acquire and b) probably cost a lot less per calorie then a restaurant dessert. This leads directly to point c) the doughnuts will go stale if nobody eats them today, and if they do then the money to buy them was wasted. It's usually point c) that tips me over into eating the doughnut. We don't waste food in this house.
Highlighting this: in a restaurant, the decision is social—immediately visible to at least the person you are ordering from, and also any people you are eating with. Their expected disapproval—or your status in general—is thus more salient than when you're alone in your house sneaking a donut.
It is probably not the same for everyone but *immediate* social reinforcement can certainly be a factor in willpower: if the boss who wants me working is looking over my shoulder, Civ isn't even going to be on the screen.
It might be that attention plays a role that looks like "willpower is a finite ressource". For attention, it is well-established that this is a finite ressource in some sense. Predictive Processing would even say that by definition, attention is when your predictions fail. So if you can predict input from some brain subsystem well enough, you are unable to pay attention to it.
In terms of the donut being available all day, it can totally happen to me that I will eat it eventually. And it would usually happen when I am distracted, or otherwise not paying attention, and I grab it on automatic mode. One of the most common lessons for eating healthy is that you should only eat when you are paying attention to it. (Only at meals, without distractions.) Perhaps "eating absently" is a mode where the baseline prior and the reinforcement evidence are actively sending signals to the decision center, but the logical brain is not? According to predictive processing, the decision center would still take the opinion of the logical brain into account, but only in a generic way: "as always, your logic center probably would want you to do the dishes, nothing special today".
Taking this thought one step further, predictive processing turns your brain into a device for Bayesian reasoning. If you are faced with the decision to do homework for the hundredth time, and every time your logical reasoning has told you that it is totally good for your career, then this output is predictable and thus no longer propagated into your decision center. Old information is generally not re-evaluated. If you are lucky, then the information is properly accounted for in the decision that your decision center predicts (rumours say that some people actually do the dishes right after cooking as a matter of routine), but it should be quite hard to re-evaluate this information. Perhaps you still hear the tiny little voice telling you that sitting on the couch is bad for you, but you shrug it off because you already know what it's saying. Well, unless something surprising or specific comes into play: if you suddenly remember the test for tomorrow, this information might be new enough to be accounted for. Or if you actually discuss you thought processes with someone else, it might actually "give" you the willpower to do it, against your usual habits.
This fits with what we know about tonic and phasic dopamine signaling. As a stimulus becomes habituated, phasic release decreases into the more background tonic dopamine release. The stimulus of a test tomorrow changes the low level dopamine release to more phasic impulses to drive across to study. Meds that affect dopamine signaling have a big effect on the balance or efficacy of the tonic/ phasic system of dopamine release.
Imagine you tell someone "You need to stand perfectly still, and jump every ten seconds, until I tell you otherwise, or else you'll *die*!". And then you show them an extremely complicated, but sensible-sounding explanation of how they'll die if they don't comply.
If you ask them to do that for five minutes, they're probably going to listen. They really don't want to die, after all. After three hours of this, though, unless you have *really* compelling evidence, they're going to tell you to fuck off. You probably made up your fancy science papers explaining why their life is in danger. At some point the ground-up "I hate this and I don't want to do this" mode takes over and overrules the top-down evidence.
(for a more grounded metaphor, look at what happens when politicians try to pass carbon taxes to fight climate change)
if you want to play Civilization in a way that doesn't require willpower to stop playing, I recommend "Play By Email"-style, one turn at a time. You can't binge, and it makes it social. This website facilitates it well, and here's a game for ACX readers ( password: willpower ) https://www.playyourdamnturn.com/game/a7c9c3ae-6165-45d7-8241-0b5a082d90d7
Dude, don't tempt me when only at a nearly two month streak of not playing games.
Also, several times when I started playing a game for social reasons, I found myself within the next week compulsively playing single player strategy games like Civ for the next month or so.
I once played a game of office Diplomacy, with 48 hour turns, lasting a few weeks. I got less done at work than I have ever done, before or since, despite each "turn" taking at most a minute or so to input moves.
It depends on how you play. A lot of people like to play Civ VI "gunboat" where there's no out-of-game negotiating and everything needs to be done through the limited in game diplomatic options, which really cuts down on the potential time-sink aspect.
Also I haven't done "Play by email" but in the "play by cloud" option that's built-into the game, you literally can't look at the map between turns.
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But, yeah I used to play correspondence Diplomacy in college, and it was an incredible time-sink for something that theoretically only *needed* a few minutes every other day. I "took a break" years ago and still haven't gone back.
I've long thought that it is game designer malpractice that Civilization just has a "next turn" button - it should also have a "one more turn" button, which lets you play the next turn, but then converts the "next turn" button at the end to "save and quit". It would be so much easier to actually hit the "one more turn" button, and while you could always re-open the game after the forced save and quit after the next turn, it would give you a much cleaner break, and would be directly reinforcing a choice that you yourself made.
I find the nature of my own willpower to be quite perplexing. My willpower seems to suffer from a strong inertia that resets each day after a night's sleep. If I wake and begin my day by sitting down at my desk (or doing some other 'productive task') then I am on a clear track towards 12+ hours of productive work that comes easily. However, if I begin my day with a non-productive indulgence (youtube, social media, even reading something without a clear purpose) I am catapulted into a repetitive cycle of lethargy that is likely to consume my day, and I am unlikely to get fully back on track until I start again the next morning.
The strange thing is that the dominant variable seems to exclusively be the arbitrary decision I make at the start of the day (sit at desk and work or sit on desk/couch and browse), and not any of the variables you might expect (amount of sleep the night before, caffeine intake, general mood). Curious to know if others experience something similar or if this is just my own quirky psychology.
Perhaps your sleep, caffeine intake, and general mood influence the "arbitrary" starting decision. Especially since you have realized its large effect on the rest of your day.
Certainly true, but I really feel that these and the other expected factors have an R^2 of less than 50% for me. Even in the presence of the typical negative influences, including those that are clearly negative such as hangover, I find that if the right starting decision is made then the entire trajectory of the day is different. To use the dopamenergic theory, its as though the initial decision sets off a feedback loop in either direction, either: 1) begin working, mood/dopamine levels improve because I am being productive, which causes me to continue to be more productive, which causes my mood to continue to increase and so on, or 2) I start with something indulgent, which reduces mood/dopamine levels, which leads to more unproductive behavior and so on. Still the weird thing for me, and it seems others, is that this initial decision seems to be significantly independent from the expected factors and further seems instigate a set point for the days mood neurochemical balance that is not easily overturned.
I found the same thing as Monty, and greatly increased my productivity by habitually turning my internet off every evening before going to sleep, and having some rules about when / for what reasons it was allowed to turn it back on the next day after waking.
I'm the same way. I don't know why it happens, but I always figured it was something about:
* The sheer amount of time (or perception of which) at the beginning of the day gives me a boost in confidence that I have enough time to do it, and I'm relaxed and in a positive state of mind because I don't feel a need to rush.
* The initial failure kickstarting a negative self-confidence loop.
* The overall ambiance and aesthetic of morning time is strongly associated with energy and positivity for me. As quality of the day itself gradually changes into regular daytime hours, so too do my mood and thought processes. And, maybe that initial wrong-choice actually took enough time that the change in daylight quality is actually noticeable.
Yes, totally agree with the first two points. There is probably something insightful to be gleaned from the fact that these initial decisions can be so important - and I was more able to direct this initial decisions that initiatives the feedback loop. Agree with three too, though this is more idiosyncratic for me as an early morning is one of the few times that I know I am free of meetings and so can actually get deep work done
My experience is similar. I can almost guarantee my work-day will be an unproductive struggle if I go anywhere near Hacker News, Substack, YouTube, social media, or similar while I'm having breakfast. My solution is to avoid any sort of "content consumption" before starting work. I do Stoic exercises or just think about the day ahead instead.
Agreed. though yet to find something that works perfectly for myself. Modifying routine enviornment so that friction required to engage in unproductive habits has been helpful for me. Stoic exercises are an interesting idea and I'll try and give them a shot
If Scott's theory is true, which... Seems a little too convenient for me... Days when you have less dopamine in the frontal cortex would mean you're more likely to watch YouTube during breakfast, and for the rest of the day
This. The observations cannot distinguish between "the first action determines the rest of the day" and "something else determines both the first action and the rest of the day".
Base your first action on a coinflip, and see whether the corellation persists.
If I had the willpower to let a coin flip determine the start of my day for a sufficient number of days in a row, then I'd presumably have the willpower to just start every day productively. Which perhaps answers the question, at least for me.
Probably the right intuition, and maybe true but per response to DrShiny this really does not seem to be the controlling factor for me. May just be my own idiosyncracies
I have the same basic pattern. My pet theory about it is that the crux is how difficult it is for me to switch contexts. Like my attention regulation system is practically categorical rather than a subtle gradient.
If I’m reading, I want to read. If I’m watching, I want to watch. If I’m playing I want to play. On the other hand, if I’m working, I want to work. If I’m focused I want to focus.
When my wife comes to me and says “Hey, do you want to suddenly start doing <activity that I really like, in the abstract>?” my initial reaction is almost always “that sounds like torture,” which is a reaction I sometimes manage to override and sometimes do not.
It does seem subjectively mediated though. If I know ahead of time that the plan for the day includes changing activities, it’s very much easier. In my mind it’s like the activity I’m doing before the change is itself plus some emotional sense of it being a prelude or preparation for the later activity, such that it all kind of feels like one thing to me, even though it’s not. Obviously my understanding is very fuzzy here.
Pete, this is an interesting observation. I would say that I experience something similar, probably a function of how we focus. I've found that structure and habit are the most effective means for getting me to focus on what I actually want to focus on long-term, as otherwise, I will also become immersed by the flavor of the day. Also, I tend to agree with your last point, I suppose expectations are important
I saw this pattern, then realized the whole day was based in how much urgency there was to the tasks I needed to do. Low urgency (no looming deadlines or just a few small tasks with deadlines), I start the day writing replies on astralcodex and similarly fritter away lots of time. Higher urgency, I start working right away and am very productive all day.
My solution to that was to have two jobs that both have lots of very strict deadlines, and to create artificial deadlines with accountability to others for the other important tasks. Still a lot of last-minute work, often not enough sleep, but high productivity! Recently I've been getting better even at the getting almost enough sleep part - but that's taken 5 and 1/2 decades ....
Karen, completely agree, sense of urgency makes all the difference in the morning (and genuine sense of urgency is probably the thing that is most likely to force me to begin a day correctly). We are fortunate to have this pathology and not the opposite. Evolution has served us well
I have the absolute opposite - I work best in the moments before bedtime and am totally incapable of doing anything useful/not immediately rewarding for about one to three hours after waking up.
If you're doing the unproductive things with your phone, the solution might be to charge it overnight in a place that you would have to physically get completely out of bed (no hacks by getting to the edge of the bed and reaching as far as you can) to access it. This would give you a small amount of time to redirect towards more productive tasks instead of just mindlessly checking your phone as soon as you wake up. If you use your phone as an alarm clock, here's a fairly sophisticated one on Amazon for only $0.01 (plus shipping and handling): https://www.amazon.com/Projection-Digital-Weather-Backlight-Patricks/dp/B08TX3QRW5/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=alarm+clock+for+bedroom&qid=1616862523&sprefix=alarm&sr=8-2
I'd go a step further, and say every exertion of willpower seems to make my willpower stronger, and every capitulation makes it weaker. Sleep acts as a reset maybe? Per Scott's depression article?
I think of mania as close to (probably not exactly the same as) natural stimulant - increased confidence in all mental assessments/predictions/evidence.
Let us distinguish two TOTALLY DIFFERENT (in practice, "opposite") notions:
(1) increased confidence at the expense of a loss of accuracy // pharmaceuticals-induced
(2) increased confidence as a consequence of an independently assessed increase of accuracy // natural as ...-> egg-> chicken->... : ... -> practice->accuracy->confidence->more practice->... etc
I expect manic people would be more likely to find food when it is available. So depressed people survive famine and manic people thrive in times of plenty.
> which might make you more sympathetic to people with low willpower
Which suggests the prediction that people who struggle less with willpower won't really get the point; maybe a single straight edge is enough to see through the illusion, while others have to obscure more of the pattern and have more contrast on the straightedge?
I think the implication was that people with low willpower are struggling with something fundamental in their brain, it's not a matter of laziness. Just like it's not possible to "trick" your brain into seeing the straight lines just by "trying harder", it's not possible to make a brain change it's fundamental state just by "trying harder". Something else in the situation actually had to change (the straight edge)
I said nothing about laziness, and it's very common for there to be variance between people's ability to "see through" various illusions by applying effort. The prediction is precisely that the ability to do that, or the effectiveness of it when you do it for a given level of effort, may be correlated.
Look at that last paragraph of section three. What if there were a way in Substack to code it up so that the order of the elements in the experiment were randomized per reader? Nothing too fancy, just enough to be a natural experiment
Likewise for me. Reading this in bed, I did the finger and arm ones, but the threshold of taking off the covers and getting out of bed to do the others was *definitely* more than I was going to do just to follow the prompt.
Scott, this is an interesting theory... but how would you factor in the (very common) perception that one's willpower is depleted? Or the feeling that, having faced an unpleasant experience one "deserves" a treat of some sort, even if it is unhelpful.
That is, your analysis of willpower makes a lot of sense in many ways, but it doesn't seem to capture the waxing and waning of willpower, or why one's "intellectual" signal might be able to override the "reinforcement" signal sometimes, but eventually fails.
If one part of your brain is constantly sending a signal that you need to do something, the controlling module is eventually going to start asking whether you *really* need to do that thing, or if the module is wrong. Or at the least, whether you should start prioritizing other goals despite the need for the original goal. So the controlling module will start down-regulating that goal. Alternatively, perhaps the other modules start saying "Hey, I haven't gotten to do my goal in a while, so I'm going to try to outbid the current module."
In the lamprey example, if the "flee-predator" region is constantly saying that the lamprey needs to flee a predator, eventually the lamprey will die of other causes (no food, for example). So over time it wants either to have the "flee-predator" goal down-regulate, or to have the "find-food" goal start to increase its priority.
Isn't willpower depletion usually framed as it being harder to resist a thing many times rather than just once? In that case, shouldn't the brain also be down-regulating e.g. the impulse to eat doughnuts every time you pass them?
If the goal is always being outbid, then over time it should continue to bid more, right? If you're at an auction house and you really just want to get something, and you keep being outbid on items, you're probably going to start bidding higher over time.
Of course lots of this is a just-so story. In a world where brains worked the opposite way, I could postulate instead that a module should bid the same amount each time, since the material conditions haven't changed, only time.
To make that more concrete, the jelly-doughnut goal isn't being down-regulated since its never actually accomplishing the goal. The only things that are down-regulated are goals that are actually accomplished. Instead the jelly-doughnut goal up-regulates itself since it keeps on not getting itself accomplished.
Basically, the system is set up so that all the goals get a chance. That generally seems to match my intuition - the "diet" goal up-regulates until it outbids, then you diet for a bit until it is down-regulated enough that the "eat junk food" goal outbids, and the cycle repeats.
I think the answer here is regression to the mean. As you walk down the street, there are untold billions of actions that you neither pursue nor feel drained for not pursuing. We notice sometimes 'struggling' with our willpower in the highly unusual circumstance that there isn't a clear winner, but most of the time some path of action is obvious. Given that, the things that we see as hard to overcome with willpower cause apparent depletion because just the very fact that there's disagreement implies that *something* unusual has taken place. Win or lose, it's likely that the next time lightning won't strike.
I would say that the worse you feel, the more confident you are that a minor comfort will make a big difference to your mood.
A piece of bread is way more appealing and rewarding to a starving man than to a man that just ate. The same may be true of minor mood-stabilizers, like cheating on your diet or skipping out on a meeting. If you already feel good, there's only room for those things to make you feel a tiny bit better; if you feel awful, they could make a much bigger delta.
This implies that the keys to getting chores done are either to break them up into small enough pieces (finger wiggles / arm wiggles instead of rolling around) or to increase how satisfying they are to do.
Maybe whenever you do your dishes, look upon your drying rack and think "nice."
Making the chores more rewarding works well for me. I like audiobooks, but ever since I first started listening to them I never let myself just sit and listen (if I am just sitting around I read real books), I only listen while exercising, doing chores, or on long car trips. I find myself actually looking forward to doing the dishes and vacuuming because I want to find out what happens next in whatever book I am in the middle of! I suspect something like this would be more effective than trying to 'treat' yourself after doing a task, because the reward being simultaneous with the task, and persisting over the duration of the task, makes it associate more strongly.
Oddly enough, I find that starting things is the hardest part for me. Once I start doing the dishes, I find it really easy to keep going, and I'll probably end up vacuuming and doing the laundry while I'm at it. But sometimes it's really hard to get off my phone and just do that first step. Even something like standing in front of the sink is usually enough to get me going, but my brain often wants to just keep being lazy.
And then once I'm being all productive I stop for a second and glance at my phone, and I'm back where I started. Sigh.
This is essentially how I deal with tasks I don't want to do, I try to break them up in as many subtasks as possible and make them as easy as possible to start. I was never able to hold a diary when I tried to schedule a regular "write stuff down now" time, but since just leaving it open a keystroke away the whole day it has been effortless. Same with piano exercises, or more recently with exercising.
Specifically on dishes, it's a known phenomenon in my family at least that the difficulty of doing them goes up exponentially with the amount of dishes to be done, because it's a bigger task.
This fits with the research on procrastination, where breaking tasks into smaller subtasks is one of the most effective strategies. This may work because we reduce over-estimation of how unpleasant/boring the tasks is going to be when we think about doing just a small section of it. Then once we start the task, we re-adjust our estimation (it's not so bad, as a matter of fact it's kind of satisfying to turn dirty dishes into clean ones), and continue the task. Until something better comes along ....
There's also research that shows that if you pause for a moment at the end of your workout to focus on the satisfaction you are feeling at having completed it, and the good feelings the endorphins/dopamine are giving you at that moment, you are more likely to work out another day. So yup, yup, yup.
One trick along these lines that I've adopted is naming my tasks on my task list something like 'Start X' instead of 'Do X'. That reminds me that I'll probably get _something_ done for 'X' even if I just start trying to do something.
Making tasks immediately doable is also a great trick.
And the immediately-doable trick is one reason why I _do_ wash my dishes pretty close to 'right away' – I know that that will make 'make food' much much easier afterwards.
People often say "just break your tasks up into pieces", but my experience (at least before being diagnosed with ADHD) has been that this is easier said than done.
I take prescribed stimulants these days, but I'm not on them at this second, and when I read through that bit of the post I didn't even wiggle my finger. Which is interesting, but n=1.
This sounds like a partial re-hash of Freud's Superego-Ego-Id. Not a direct mapping, but if the Ego is the basal ganglia, and you add the prior for motionlessness, it seems like the same theory.
One theory I have glommed onto from experience + study is that you increase willpower by extending the timeframe over which the Reinforcement Learner does its reinforcement learning. Perhaps this is the "popular science" interpretation of ADD in adolescents. If a mouse needs to receive a reward within a short duration in order to train that part of its brain, it's less likely to "figure out" longer strategies (because its conscious calculation faculties are weak). If you can train a kid to resist their impulses for longer (the Marshmallow experiment), then maybe that means that more long-term and bigger-impact stimuli are encoded into the Reinforcement Learning systems. And thus they end up with better alignment with the cognitive "right thing to do". But if your reinforcement learning is only of a short-duration, you're going to get in conflict between the two systems more frequently.
Doesn't 80% of the issue come down to just accepting something resembling the William James bear-approach, Kurzban-press-secretary-theory, modular-brain, Lamprey-experiment model of the brain.
I think I’ll waste some time at work tomorrow making an animated version of that illusion image, where you can rotate the four-pointed stars back and forth with a slider control.
yes please share if/when it is done! would you also consider two more features:
(a) turning the entire image (turning the monitor makes the lines straight to me)
(b) enabling a slight controlled "unfocusing", when at some level of it the lines appear straight (as if you squint a bit) because the small disorienting dots are gone
Has anyone ever stared at an optical illusion long enough that it stopped working? Or otherwise figured out how to do that? I guess it's tough to test, I could just say that I perceive the lines as straight and you won't know if I'm lying. And I don't mean just being able to see that it's an illusion and check and come to the answer that the lines are straight. I mean, really rewire your perception so that you actually perceive them as straight. I wonder, if one could do this kind of thing, and do it enough over various optical illusions, that you'd eventually develop the meta skill of being able to will your perception to be different as you wished.
C'mon, the first thing I did was to access the physical distances to confirm I am observing an optical illusion, the second thing was to turn the monitor a bit and my head a bit to look from the side: the lines became perfectly straight, the illusion was defeated :)
When I try doing this I can only get the lines to look straight if I tilt it so far that parts of the illusion are smeared out so I can't properly see them. And as soon as I actually look straight at it again, the lines are as nauseatingly crooked as ever.
great point: yes, so u r right, it is not *the* permanent defeat of the illusion, it goes back as the monitor straightens... to win again, tilt it again :)
(i can focus on individual sections and see that they look the same length and tell myself that therefor the lines must be straight, but when glancing at the image as a whole, it's always crooked. Turning it sidewise doesn't seem to help me)
about "small sections": a fine idea, which indeed would straighten these lines.... as well as almost anything :). A small section of the (roundish) Earth equator looks straight to us as we walk it! Most curves can be "linearized" by taking their small segment.
But you propose to take it a step further: to replace a straight line with a non-zero slope (already linear) on a small sub-interval with a horizontal straight line (slope 0), yes? To make a staircase in place of an apparent ramp only to see all the stair tops are at the same level, so the ramp degenerates into a horizontal?
This "small interval" technique fails to work for me (not omnipotent cognitive powers, strong, but not omnipotent *laughs*), except at the leftmost and the rightmost edges it works.
The small squares with dots get in the way (somebody said in the thread they will rotate the dotted small squares with an app to see the effects, I hope they will post it here when they do!)
In case other readers also don't have the dopamine to fetch a ruler, you can also confirm the lines are horizontal with the ol' magic eye trick. Interestingly, that didn't defeat the illusion (for me).
here probably we suppose to apply "the willpower" to focusing/defocusing the mind wrt the illusion, less literary "standing up and fetching the ruler" (?)
Alternatively, the same people who are strongly-willed - those on stimulants - are the same people who are able to just sit down and accomplish their assigned task without thinking about how unpleasant it is. That's exactly what capitalism desires.
I think there's a difference between "strongly-willed" and "delusional". Workers are usually well aware of how unpleasant their jobs are, even if they take stimulants.
Very true - it's more that they're aware that the jobs are unpleasant, but the stimulants make their willingness to do the unpleasant job override the want to do other things.
I don't think that's true at all. I once accidentally took my morning Adderall dose three times (forgot I took it twice in a row) and spent around 2 hours picking crumbs off the floor. No music, no podcast, not a single distraction, and I was happy as a clam to see those crumbs leave the floor one by one. Very little work is *fundamentally* unpleasant, it becomes unpleasant because it's boring, or you want to do other things, or the repetitive action of picking up crumbs eventually wears down your soul. It's not delusional to enjoy those things, because how they feel isn't a factual detail about them, but a product of the task and the person performing it.
Sure, you can find plenty of good Marxist feminist works on women's domestic work. But I do not think that someone picking up crumbs for a couple of hours because they took too much of something is comparable to general capitalist drudgery which lasts days, weeks, months, years and decades.
Right. Whereas under communism, like the Soviet Union or Cuba, I could "do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind".
It seems very odd to say that willpower isn't encouraged for or selected for in the Western world at the start of the twenty-twenties. How do you explain the existence of entire industries focused on teaching people (without success) to be more willpowery?
The self help industry (which is actually very small) is largely dedicated to reinforcing the behaviour that the bourgeois class wants from its lower classes. So it's the exact opposite of willpower.
It sounds like we should be able to test that hypothesis with populations which haven't been living under capitalism for long. Get some hunter-gatherers/swiddeners to take something like the marshmallow test. It would have to be food they'd recognize rather than a marshmallow though.
AFAIK it *has* been tested : people raised in pre-modern conditions make for poor factory workers because they're not used to be focused on a single repetitive task for so many hours .
Do tell... really? It was so in Marx's head, sure. In practice, it wasn't so nice.
As many theoreticians, he forgot about both the human nature and the economics of real humans.
For his times, it was a science break-through, but for the next generations, the theory resulted in the oppression of the former Soviet Union. Why would you pick such a handle?
Marx didn't forget about human nature or the economics of real humans, in fact, he considered all that stuff much more deeply than bourgeois economists.
The Soviet Union was a great beacon of freedom. I picked such a handle because I'm a big fan of liberation, human flourishing and ingenuity.
I hesitate to debate a Marx Bro, but I think strong-willed people are highly desirable under capitalism because they are motivated to become entrepreneurs, CEOs, and other high-value roles.
I am unable to force myself to perceive the lines as straight, while my wife can do it with only a bit of concentration (actually, intentional dissociation). And she also has a lot more willpower.
Only helps a little bit for me (the lines still won't be fully straight) and the effect changes immediately once I turn my monitor back to it's usual position.
When the pic is turned, do not focus on the "little squarish marks with dots" (or whichever they are), does it work now? I was able to "abstract" from them, but if this seems hard, one could "squint" out of focus a bit to ignore them, then from the side, the lines look consistent with the measurement (parallel to the monitor bottom line)
"Millions of people throughout history have failed to reproduce because they became monks for false religions; if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem."
How to even begin to reply to such a statement is beyond me. But to imply that not reproducing is a "problem" is problematic, as is the related assumption that not following one's "reinforcement/instinctual processes" is dumb. What is has no necessary implications on what should be - when's the last time metaphysics and ethics had an enlightening discussion?
That's to not even address the "false religions" jab - false according to whom and in what way? Even if we were to give you the benefit of the doubt and presume you have unshared inside knowledge here, the implication that just because a religion is not materially true by no means implies that following it is dumb. Indeed, even if we went by your vulgar measure of reproduction - what groups in the US have the the most children? Which city has the higher fertility rate: Oakland, CA or, say, Provo, UT?
The literature on the benefits of religious belief is voluminous - far larger than that on rationalism, I can assure you of that. And that's taking the giant leap of presuming a pragmatic/instrumental view of life is the "right" one.
A little less time reading Ezra Klein and more time reading folks like William James or, to indulge your bias for modernity, T.M. Luhrmann, may be instructive in that regard.
That is the stereotypical Western materialist view.
But is it true?
Traditionally it's been religious folk.who"ve been accused of over-simplcity, but here it appears the shoe is on the other foot. Wherever is that nuance secular thinkers are rumored to be capable of?
Some religions are definitely incompatible by their core doctrine. For example, the basically the core belief of Trinitarian Christianity is that Jesus really is the messiah who is going to come again and is part of a trinity with the Father, and the Holy Spirit. While some of the core beliefs of Judaism throughout the last two thousand years has been that the messiah has not come yet and that G*d is not part of a trinity like that. Similarly, some religions say that they are compatible with other ones - I have heard that Hinduism allows Christianity to also be true - but it's definitely not true both ways, since Christianity, as it has been actually practiced throughout history, definitely cannot also allow Hinduism to be true. Perhaps you could say that that one doctrine or the other is wrong and that really all religions are compatible, but I'm not sure that makes you morally superior to the original belief that one religion or the other is false.
I apologize for not giving more detail, but you didnt really give anything to contend with in the reply. perhaps you have the unshared inside knowledge? please share how every one can be true?
The statement appears to come from a threadbare view of religion, combined with a failure to consider the varieties of the possible.
For example, the practice of listing the problems with the mainstream American interpretation of parts of the Bible, particularly Genesis 1, seems to be enjoyed by a particular kind of person. But if anyone actually lost their faith because they got persuaded by these arguments, I'd be surprised. How big was the mass exodus from Christianity when Joshua 10:13 was broadly reinterpreted? And while there are psychological explanations of this, the truth is that this is at the periphery of the religion. The vast majority (perhaps all?) of claims and disputes in religion fall into that category.
If somehow it got proven that Jesus was and is God, but that virtually everything else Christians believed was wrong, would that make Christianity false? Alternatively, if Jesus was somehow proven to not be god, but virtually everything else true, then would that render Christianity false? If every claim made by Christianity were proven wrong, would it then be false?
The second and third are the more difficult questions, without a doubt. But anyone who claims certainty in either regard is engaging in their own dogma.
And to say any are necessarily answered in the affirmative is to misunderstand religion. Kierkegaard's phrase on prayer being not about changing god but about changing oneself applies to most of religion - it's about contending with the unknown, and what that does to a person and a community.
All of the tomes on the history and development of religion I've seen suggest that almost across the board practice preceded rationalization. The explanation is, in essence, besides the point. Throw all that out, and would religion lose anything? No, I'd argue it would gain, perhaps immeasurably. To a degree, arguing a religion false is like arguing throwing up chalk before a game is “false”. Turning religion into a series of falsifiable "hypotheses" is an absurdity; a parochial, ethnocentric, history-blind reading of it. Name one ancient text that even attempted a “dry” telling of anything? The idea was an absurdity.
When Herodotus relayed the story of the meeting of Solon and Croesus - a meeting his contemporary readers would have immediately known was an impossibility, was he telling a lie? Was that a falsehood?
To even ask the question is to miss the point.
Does that mean that there is no such thing as a realist view of religion? Of course not. But that begins and ends with the experience of God, a la Augustine. Everything else is extrapolation from that. But throw out all the extrapolations and the experience remains.
And so from an oversimplified position that reduces religion to merely these extrapolations or the afore-mentioned rationalizations, can all the religions be “true”? I don’t know how this is even a question. Is there some evidence or logic by which 5 bazillion gods couldn’t all exist? That the entire universe couldn’t be a lab experiment the size of a marble in a world of “gods” that sometimes deign to commune - or not - with us?
I don’t see how the existence of Jesus as God somehow necessarily cancels out the possibility of Param Brahma, or Allah or any of the other millions of deities in all the civilizations that have ever existed. And of course another option is the beaten-to-death blind man and elephant analogy. And there are a million others, the limits of the possibilities are the limits of the imagination. This is the unknown we’re talking about - which despite all our efforts, lies out there in its massiveness licking its lips and likely laughing at us stumbling around with our tiny candles in the darkness.
There are plenty of people who lost their faith after reading the Bible, Penn Jillette for instance.
The divinity of Christ is pretty much the defining feature of Christianity, so if that isn't true, you'd need a fairly baroque definition of "false" to argue that Christianity isn't.
It's true that religion has many positive benefits regardless of any factual claims, but calling something false is explicitly an evaluation of those factual claims. If you object that religion is more than just the factual claims, then okay, just replace "X religion" with "factual claims made by X religion". I'd argue that's what most people mean when they say "X is false", not that X has no benefits.
And there are lots of people who would say that a universe where all possible incarnations of gods exist explicitly contradicts their own religion. If you ask a Christian "is it possible that Para Brahman exists?", do you think they'd all say yes? Perhaps all religions are just a facet of a higher truth, but if the blind man feels an elephant's tusk and proclaims "an elephant is a loose collection of bones!", he's still wrong. I know people who say that each other's religions are incompatible. Are you going to tell them that they misunderstand their own religion?
That most people misunderstand their religion should be as self-evident as that most people misunderstand their own politics, or indeed anything remotely abstract or complex. But if for some reason that isn't self-evident, the evidence is ample and easily found (indeed you can test this out for yourself).
But indulging that POV, the answers you get are going to depend on how the question is framed. Tell them Jesus is God but everything else is wrong, and I'd bet good money most would, at the end of the day, cling to the former and walk away convinced they were right all along. Jesus is the center of the intellectual aspect of the religion, there is no controversy about that. The other stuff it's difficult to get a hard read on its degree of essentiality (this is not a science), but that is lies far below the divine is easy to divine.
As for the rest, it's difficult to respond to, in part because the difference in your mind between, say, information, facts, knowledge and truth is not clear to me. You seem to be conflating a number of these, and repeatedly appealing to folk wisdom, which is a questionable tactic. Also, there's numerous disconnects as you have either misread or misinterpreted a number of my arguments and/or I've failed to explain them adequately. Either way, I don't believe I can do much better ATM than how I put it above.
Thank you for the reply, I enjoyed it, it made some good points, and got me thinking.
So first, let me reiterate that I was addressing only if Scott’s claim of religion being false is defensible.
Now, if I may try to summarize some of what you said:
A religion has a set of claims. Each claim can individually be true or false, but it is unclear how to translate this into calling the entire religion ‘true’ or ‘false’. For example, consider a book of 100 math proofs. If 99 were correct, and 1 had a mistake and was false; you would still consider the book ‘true’, just with a mistake.
If the book had 99 false proofs, and only 1 correct one, you probably would then call it ‘false’. But what if the 99 were minor, trivial, inconsequential proofs, and the 1 correct one was ground breaking, world changing, best proof ever? It would then be wrong to dismiss the book as ‘false’, even though 99 of its 100 claims are false. And if the book that had 99 correct had only trivial proofs correct, and got the most important one wrong; well maybe you could dismiss that book then? But either way, it is not entirely accurate to call the book ‘true’ or ‘false’, but each claim can be evaluated independently.
Same for a religion. If Christianity is right about Jesus being a deity, but wrong about monotheism, does that make it true or false? If it is wrong about Jesus, but right about heaven/hell/afterlife, is it ‘true’ or ‘false’? If it is wrong about heaven, but right about not eating meat on Fridays, is it true or false?
So we can’t say religion X is true or false, only which of its claims are true or false. (As an aside, you seem to imply atheists are very concerned with these differences. I would note that theists are just as obsessed with these minor differences as atheists; and these differences have often led to schisms or wars.)
So with this in mind, Scott’s claim that ‘celibacy for a false religion’ isn’t the correct question. Rather, the question should maybe be something like…. “It is possible that there is a deity that wants some devout people to be celibate (even if it is in the service of a different, or non existent deity). Like maybe Zeus is real, and he wants you to be religiously celibate, even if it is in the name of a different religion.
Now, here is where you may have moved my needle. The above statement about Zeus is kind of weird. What does it mean that some other deity I wants me to be religiously celibate? My first thought was ‘well, there is some positive utility to me being celibate in the name of Yaweh, even though the utility is granted by Zeus. Zeus will still reward me (in this life or the afterlife)’. But suddenly I am talking about utility. And utility doesn’t need to be granted by a deity, it can be granted by the world.
So Scott’s question needs to be something like “these monks are celibate, even though there is no positive utility in celibacy”. This is indeed a more complicated question, and the answer is not obvious. For example, grandparents past reproductive age still have positive evolutionary utility since they assist in raising children. So just the fact that a monk doesn’t reproduce does not necessarily mean they have negative evolutionary utility.
I appreciate the close reading and compliment, and overall you captured well one of the arguments I was making, which rolled with the presuppositions underlying Scott's claim.
But it doesn't address what I'd suggest is the more fundamental argument, which is that religion is not a book of theorems but akin to a yoga instructional manual which moderns have misinterpreted as a physiology textbook. But even that misses the mark - religion is not a book. Words, ideas, theorems - this is all so much dust in the wind.
Religion is primarily practice and ritual. Accompanied by a particular attitude and disposition, and oriented towards a particular kind of experience. And bookended by some words which fail utterly to capture any of the above, which some people have interpreted as a set of "really important" theorems about the material world.
As I've said elsewhere, no one does anything anymore so words have taken on an absurd level of importance. Set off a nuclear bomb in debuque, iowa with a letter of explanation to the nytimes and they'll pay more attention to pronouns used in the manifesto than the pile of corpses.
And this is not limited to identity politic liberals. Religious folk are just as conformist to this, which is probably why secularists are so confused on the subject. Entire religions get reduced to scribblings, which then gets further reduced to caricatured treatments of a few hand-picked footnotes. History is abandoned, tradition shat on as rich discourses get butchered to adapt to the cultural gestalt. Religion trying to battle the present age with its own weapons (I.e. "facts"). A battle it will always lose, or win to it's own detriment - leaving it as penniless as the age it's fighting. "Whoever fights monsters…"
So "false religion" is not even a contradiction in terms, it's worse: a complete nonsensical statement. Like sour pajamas or hoarse scrotum.
But to address the line of logic you so precisely laid out, a few clarifications:
I'm not generally disposed to looking at human phenomena through an evolutionary lens. As a weed species, we're wired for flexibility, which often limits the usefulness of that larger lens. Also much appears to be second and third order effects as a result of our sheer complexity.
It's like: yes our peripheral vision is particularly adept at noticing movement from animals vs. trees, and there are a few large scale phenomena it explains, but was it useful - at all - to Scott's meditation on will power? Besides the recent finding on sibling proximity and selfishness (and there its helpfulness was limited to the level of hypothesis generation), I can't think of many times it's helped me grapple with the human.
But to your question, my experience is that things are far more connected than we can possibly imagine. But modern thinking remains overwhelmingly myopic, forever worshipping at the altar of monomania.
Against that, my argument was that both the religious person with 15 kids and the monk are (partially of course) the fruits of the same force, and one that is overwhelmingly pro-natal - and so to treat the monk in isolation is to miss the point.
But where you went, in terms of the larger effects of this "dumb" evolutionary decision to be celibate, appears to coalesce with this broader view. In both hinduism and christianity the writings and works of monks and nuns and those who spent large spans of time in monasteries (and prison, for that matter) are outsized both in quantity and their social effect. That its effect may be comparable to that of grandparents seems on reflection to be almost obvious.
But I wasn't thinking of that, so thank you. It's not every day that a stranger's comment on the internet is actually considered, or a "needle moved" as a result.
I'm talking about the evolutionary perspective here - evolution will tend to evolve away from things that make you not reproduce.
I think it's fair to say that all but one among a set of mutually exclusive religions must be factually false, although of course they can still be beneficial in lots of ways.
I agree some varieties of religious belief can encourage having more children - unlike other varieties of religious belief which encourage having fewer children, which were the kind I was talking about.
I really didn't mean that statement in a culture war anti-religion way; I think it's just boringly true that it's possible for people to logic themselves into not having children, that monastic religions are an example of that, and that evolution would select against these kinds of tendencies.
Strictly speaking, the anthill is a single organism, and the worker ants are its parts (among others). If they would be acting individually, they would outcompete humans. But the analogy of our brain signals for an anthill is in physical-chemical macroscopic trails the ants leave for other ants to analyze and emissions of chemicals by ants. Human chemicals of thoughts move shorter distances, are enclosed. One can argue the statement, but not with this analogy-?
according to professionals dealing with the anthills :) it is called a "superorganism"... I do not know if we are allowed to link in this blog because I am new here, so I will post the link in a separate reply below
Strictly speaking, a "superorganism" is not the same as a "single organism", which is what you previously claimed. Remember, we're speaking strictly here.
"I'm talking about the evolutionary perspective here - evolution will tend to evolve away from things that make you not reproduce."
There's plenty of eusocial organisms that physically cannot reproduce.
Also Scott got another basic evolution thing wrong a couple of days ago, saying that evolution created organisms "perfect" for their surroundings - evolution actually creates things that are good enough to continue reproducing, not "perfect".
If Scott cannot get simple stuff like that correct one wonders what other things regarding genetics he might be getting wrong...
I would suggest you're painting in too broad strokes.
The largest religion in the world is one with strong monastic strains running through its history, and I know of no evidence that it has harmed the church or its "evolutionary non-dumb-ness". I'd argue it's actually helped in that regard - has the sharp decline in monasticism coincided with a fall or a rise in the Christian fertility rate? When monasticism was at its peak of popularity, what did the fertility rate look like?
On the contrary, all the evidence I've seen suggests that modern acquisitive secularism - and the instrumental rationality based on it - is the true anti-natalist force in the modern world, and a far more apt punching bag than the tired and stereotypical one you chose.
The same exact force or "logic" as you decided to frame it, can have negative evolutionary effects on certain individuals but positive ones on the group as a whole. As has been argued elsewhere, fanaticism in any direction is a sign of vigor and vitality, and it is far easier to apply that vitality in a different direction than conjure it out of thin air. That christianity was able to inspire individuals to go to such extremes was a sign of its health - both in evolutionary and non-evolutionary terms. Vigor that expressed itself in seemingly contradictory ways, at least from a simplistic materialist point of view.
So I get your larger meaning, but on multiple levels this example falls short. I have a hard time believing any monk or nun would not - at best - laugh to hear religion and their devoting their lives to something other than this blink of an eye existence as primarily being based on a "logical/intellectual process".
You seem to think that Scott's making an argument that I don't think he's making. Namely, that monasticism is a bad thing for a religion, or religions suck, or something like that. He's not saying that. He's saying that non-monastic individuals are more likely to reproduce (duh) and have higher instincts toward reproduction. That's an example to illustrate why we may not have infinite willpower.
This is in no way a judgement about any religion, except through the lens of the Blind Idiot God. You're right, you could say the same thing with a secular framing - something about career stability and hormones.
Whether you agree that monasticism is the result of intellect/logic or not (many of the great theologians seem to have approached religion from that view), it's a frontal cortex process rather than an animal hindbrain process, which is the point.
Your impression is justified; "punching bag" in particular was a poor choice of words.
But I'm of two minds on this. One, there are terms other than "dumb" "failure" and "problem" that one could use that are both more accurate and don't mimic the exact terms that have been and sometimes still are used to denounce various things, including religion, in the name of evolution.
And in particular, if all he's doing is describing its effects as regards evolution, why does he add the "false" qualifier to religions? It does not appear to serve any purpose - regardless of the veracity of the religion the monk in question gave up procreation for - his genes still disappear from the gene pool, no?
And overall compare the language (and frame) he used in talking about monks and those he used to talk about moralists and sophists. It's quite different, which was partially what I was reacting to. It's worded in a strongly evaluative manner. The other two, much less so. It's at least suggestive of an underlying attitude.
Having said that, I did interpret it out of context of the larger argument made in the article - which I should have acknowledged. The bluntness of the evaluative language took me out of the flow of thought, and I reacted to the bare sentences and the ways in which they, interpreted literally, reflect "common sense" views.
But outside of language and framing, my critique of the idea that monasticism can be described primarily as a logical/intellectual process remains. He's very clear there - he lumps millions of people together under this, and I don't know of a single monk or nun of which this could be said - and particularly so if we're talking about the saints (you mention theologians - they are another matter). I mean the whole idea of it, almost invariably as I understand it, is that in silence and solitude one is better able to experience the divine and/or commune with him/them - away from the distractions of the world (such as sex). And of course the writings we have - that I have seen at least - are filled with these experiences. So if one is going to shoehorn this into some basic psychological process, it appears far more akin to reinforcement than logic.
But of course in religion, in war, and in love all kinds of things happen for which there are no simple explanations, and likely no universal ones. Which is just another reason why I question the inclusion of this example. Regardless of whether or not there's an attitude behind it, it seems an ill-fitting choice.
I'll admit I've never had the opportunity to talk to any monks, let alone saints. I still think it could be framed as a victory of willpower, but I'll concede I don't know what I'm talking about.
I certainly agree that the passage can give the impression of religion bashing - it does pattern match to similar stuff I've heard, and you're right, whether a religion true or not doesn't matter to evolution. Though I do think he's going for a sarcastic comedic effect there ("All you have to do is follow the 3 Fs, especially that last one, and everything will be okay!"). Regardless, it doesn't seem to have the best usefulness:distraction ratio.
"And in particular, if all he's doing is describing its effects as regards evolution, why does he add the "false" qualifier to religions?"
He answered that in a March 26 comment that is now slightly above this:
"I think it's fair to say that all but one among a set of mutually exclusive religions must be factually false"
Of course, "mutually exclusive" is doing all the work in that sentence. At least one of the commenters seems to think there is no such thing when it comes to religion because religion is all about experience, not doctrine or logic.
> I think it's fair to say that all but one among a set of mutually exclusive religions must be factually false, although of course they can still be beneficial in lots of ways.
Alternatively, every religion is true, including Roko's basilisk, and you get judged in the afterlife by the standards of the one you adhere to. Unless you are an atheist and then you just stop existing. If you are an agnostic, you get to choose.
No, you are saying that the judgement criteria of every religion is applied to the people who believed it, which is a very different claim than that those religions are true.
I am afraid that the evangelical God who I grew up believing in is going to send you to hell for not accepting Jesus into your heart even though you know that Jesus died for you, and have had ample opportunities to hear the truth and accept the truth. That you were worried about Roko's basilisk is irrelevant to Him.
> I'm talking about the evolutionary perspective here - evolution will tend to evolve away from things that make you not reproduce.
Better include several generations in the assessment, as well as non-reproducing individuals who nevertheless contribute to the reproductive fitness of the species. Grandparents live longer than their fertile time span even if they are competing with their offspring for resources. And homosexual, asexual, celibate individuals can contribute to the reproductive success of the species.
This requires a minimum of a society (pack, herd, troop), that has positions or activities (hunt, scout, defend, guard) for the non-reproducing. And once language and teaching evolved the contribution to the species' welfare is obvious. The example of religion is unfortunate, it blends culture with biology.
Kin selection stories don't really add up for homosexuality. They don't act like ants, dedicating themselves to their kin's ability to reproduce. Greg Cochran has written about this.
Considering the state of the Church in the middle ages, I'm not at all sure that becoming a priest or a monk would be associated with reproductive failure...
Even as a metaphor it doesn't seem like a very good one to say choosing to be celibate is *dumb* from an evolutionary perspective. For one thing it seems like there's some sort of anthropomorphizing of natural processes. For another If being celibate is "dumb" it should follow that anyone choosing to have less that the maximum number of children they can handle is *dumb* which probably makes everyone here *dumb*. So why target religious monks with this metaphor?
He's talking from the perspective of evolution, in which the only goal is to reproduce. People with instincts to reproduce do so more often, "saving" them from an evolutionary perspective and leading to those traits getting more traction in the gene pool. This is an explanation for why those instincts are still around. You'll notice he then goes on to talk about how altruism is dumb. Again, all this is in the context of an evolutionary perspective.
As for the false religions, well just choose your favorite false religion and assume he's talking about that one. If a given religion is false, it *is* dumb (from an evolutionary perspective!) to give up having kids to pursue it. Though I suppose for evolution, whether a religion true or false is irrelevant if it doesn't lead to more kids.
All the above having been said, evidence points to the fact that celibates saying they are celibate and them actually being celibate is not a given. Similar to telling everyone I have willpower and am working when I am actually taking naps and reading this for extended periods of time.
To say that the religions are false, to me, misses the point. I know atheists who practice celibacy for the same reason as religious people: they want to achieve certain mental and emotional states and they think it will do the job.
Me, I'm asexual. I couldn't practice celibacy any more than I could give up eating a food I really dislike.
But I can do things like give up language (to the extent that it's possible without an aphasia helmet or a Fischer-Price My First Brain Surgery Playset), spending a day without reading, writing, speaking, listening to speech, trying not to focus on 'wordy' trains of thought day. It's an intense experience, the whole way of relating to the world feels radically different, there's the feeling of abstaining from something one intensely craves.
People who practice celibacy have described it and it sounds similar, if less intense. (And, you know, you don't have to put your entire life on hold and take time off from work and everything else.)
By the way, if you post a link, you have to add a space after it or else substack will think anything that comes after is also part of the url. In this case, removing the last dash fixes the link.
> Does this theory tell us how to get more willpower?
How about artificially creating the overwhelming intellectual evidence? Not just naively, like visualizing how fit you'll be in a year if you get off your butt and exercise, but like with a commitment device (he says, all self-consciously) where you're meaningfully altering your actual circumstances. If the commitment device is harsh enough then it's like the alcoholic hitting rock bottom or the teacher telling you you'll fail the class if you don't pass tomorrow's exam.
PS: I'm rereading our old post -- 5 years old now! -- on "what is willpower?" in light of this Bayesian theory. https://blog.beeminder.com/willpower/ So far I think it's compatible and I stand by it.
Seems like a more straightforward hypothesis is that you have to do things that make your executive functions big and strong, so that anything they signal gets more weight than the stuff with which it's competing.
How do you make them big and strong? Mostly by having your parents make you eat your vegetables when you're three years old, and other not-so-fun tasks that buzzkill parents force their kids to do. Can you do it later in life? Sure--as long as somebody is making you do it. Can it be a self-motivated process? I guess so, but I don't even have the willpower to imagine how that would work.
Here's a question: Are there any acts of willpower that don't involve deferred gratification?
It's been said that conscientiousness is the most important personality trait for positive outcomes. Is that just a manifestation of high serotonin levels?
Serotonin levels can be too high for sure, but would it be better if the median level in the population were higher?
I don't think we know enough about serotonin to talk about what "high serotonin levels" are like. If we use people on very high doses of SSRIs as an example, they don't have many emotions and feel kind of fuzzy all the time, but I don't think we can generalize.
One thing that this doesn't address for me is that my willpower seems to work totally differently from my parents' willpower.
I've said in conversations that my willpower is right-aligned while there's is left-aligned. This doesn't mean anything about politics, but visualize tasks as a sheet with ranges bounded by two events: "task entry" and "task deadline". My parents will tend to prefer doing tasks close to the entry (left-aligned); I tend to prefer doing tasks close to the deadline (right-aligned). I don't understand that one. But I do know I have a low unhappiness reaction to unfinished tasks, so I wonder to what extent the difference is whether you're motivating intellectual task completion by unhappiness over an undone task or expectation of failure - which would lead to right-alignment, since certainty of failure goes up the more you put a task off.
Re: the idea of different thoughts “bidding” in an auction, Crystal Society is a good sci-if book along these lines. It’s about an android whose AI uses “strength points” that different cognitive modules award or receive based on proposed decisions.
I've recently been looking at Karl Fristons free energy principle. That the brain works by minimising free energy, ie wants to get to homeostasis / reduce dissonance in sub-functions of cognition expectation/Brain model versus sampled reality). Eg) Eat when hungry. Correct visual field with incoming optical data. But harder to explain complex actions with homoestasis?
Think it gels with this theory of willpower? We can think of the brain model as this hierarchy of competing processes. And can probably do this for any higher level function: willpower, or decision-making in general.
Take exercise. You do it if it felt good to do so previously and/or if intellectually you've learned that it's right thing to do. If you've neither the experience/memory of positive exercise (stronger motivator) or some intellectual model of exercise aiding health then you won't overcome inaction/inertia. If you weren't trained to exercise from young, even intellectualizing the benefits often doesn't create the habit.
Base evolutionary processes like hunger win out over positively reinforced learned action which in turn trumps the intellectually understood right thing to do (when there is conflict). This, like you said, maybe explains addiction. So maybe the best productivity advice is that dissonance (and negative inaction) can be reduced with alignment of goals, with time. But you'd need to override the positive reinforcement patterns in the short-term to escape bad spirals.
As for neurochemical imbalances, no idea, but hopefully it's possible that aligning goals over some period is possible to get better attuned to evidence / improve chemical outputs.
Of course, it's easy to say align goals. Harder to (a) actually identify these goals , and (b) plan some program you'll follow; when you're currently not in a state that your intellectual brain is given much authority in action. (Explains recourse to/through meds/therapy/life coaches/etc)
I think a good way to think of the free energy principle (FEP) is "one level more meta than predictive processing (PP)". PP tells you something about the way the brain handles perception and action, the FEP tells you something about why PP has the structure it has. If you ask very general questions, like "what is the brain trying to do", the FEP provides a possible answer ("it minimizes free energy"). If you happen to implement a hierarchical model (say in a robot), the FEP gives you a general direction of how learning and balancing of tasks should be handled. In a way the FEP is just what happens if evolution is at works long enough: all creatures alive are efficient in a way that allows them to make the best out of the limited resources they have for perception and action, so per definition they have arrived at a structure that resembles the FEP's definition.
So I'm not really sure how to apply this to the willpower question.
Does this imply that we should expect people with lots of willpower to have more dopamine than the rest of the population? Or is this only a model to explain how certain changes in relative dopamine levels can produce changes within a person?
Additionally, are we thinking that high willpower people are a conceptually distinct class to high conscientiousness and high ability-to-delay-gratification people? The latter two groups seem quite good at things like writing essays and not getting distracted, implying there's significant overlap. But shouldn't we then expect these good-at-essays people to also display behaviours one sees when most people take stimulants e.g. being more chatty and interested in others, since they have more dopamine which is enabling them to write the essays?
My experience with willpower is that if I imagine myself completing the task and I don't get any taste of feeling better than I do now, then I probably won't be able to convince myself to do it. If the simulated future makes me feel good, then there's a good chance I will.
I think this can explain, for example, procrastination. Sufficiently long time periods before the due date, I don't feel panicked about the upcoming deadline yet. So I imagine myself completing the work early, I still feel just normal, and I don't do it. Come just-before-deadline time, now I'm filled with dread, and now imagining the done-state gives me the taste of relief I need to push me forward.
Yeah. Behavior is shaped by rewards and punishments, but many of those rewards and punishments happen in our imagination.
Otherwise we couldn't do the "time-binding" (to use Korzybski's language). You can't teach a dog a new trick by giving them a reward 1 hour after doing it. But you can make a human do something by promising them a reward in 1 hour, because although the actual reward only comes in 1 hour, the pleasant prediction of the reward already exists now, and each step of the task feels connected to it.
The rewards and punishments in our imagination are partially based on actual previous experience (e.g. experience of people keeping their promises), but can also be based on hearsay, lies, brainwashing, illusions, insanity, whatever.
An excellent question. From the totality of the past experiences (particularly if say u use your own finger or a standard 8.5x11" sheet folded as needed as an impromptu ruler)... You would not question your totality of the past knowledge based on a single illusion... or would you? Turn your head, look from the side: they are parallel to the bottom of the screen, and they DO look so FROM THE SIDE
The intervention this suggests to me is manipulating the reward center. Taking a hit of sugar or another happy drug every time you do homework doesn’t work, because your brain is definitely smart enough to just short circuit to “take the pill”. But what if you had a little hip injector that upped your blood sugar while you were working, automatically? Seems like the kind of thing that should actually work pretty well over time (assuming you prevent diabetes)
I AM able to see the lines of your optical illusion as indeed straight lines by slightly turning the monitor and my head to look at them from the side! This is MY triumph over your analogy. But YOU also have your victory over me as your blog's reader: well, I have performed ALL these tricks (from the index finger to rolling on the floor) expecting some results from the exercise... only to learn immediately you simply made me jump through these "hoops of the tasks"... ok, 1x1...
It is possible the brain reacts not just to the "bulk" of dopamine "bribes" from the competing regions, but to the time-space dynamic of their delivery:
a complex PDE, and perhaps with some chaotic regimes not impossible.
Mathematically thus it is harder, than the probabilities: I would expect the actual process (with all the chem involved) to be harder, than, say HFT. And why would the human brain be less complex, than the markets?
Nonetheless, there is an attractive simplicity in the Bayesian idea: maybe it can be used for *some* simple situations...
This perfectly fleshes out the sloppy sentence I wrote here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death#comment-1522219 : "we could do a random selection of task priorities comparable to the mechanisms described in the chamber of guf / guyenet on motivation posts." - your post feels like the perfect explanation of the mechanism I was looking for.
I still think our understanding of the feedback mechanisms involved is lacking. Your explanation seems fully correct, and as I pointed out, there should by something like a slowly-oscillating biochemical process in manic depression, but what is this feedback loop? And can we tap into it?
"These didn't actually require different amounts of useful resources from you, like time or money or opportunity cost"
I was reading this and doing the actions, but when it came time to jump my brain said "unable to jump while sitting down, do you want to also stand up?" which sounded like a lot of extra hassle and would make it harder to keep reading, so I didn't.
It doesn't disprove your overall point, but I think it's relevant to this example.
Thanks, Scott. Already much to consider, but what about the increasing evidence that host-microbe interactions play a key role in homeostasis, or the research on Toxoplasma gondii? Could the very notion of a singular organism making decisions, weighing evidence… be too imprecise to capture the whole story? Might viewing human behavior more as a cross-species, negotiated phenomenon get us closer to clarity?
What I liked about this statement is that many religious people would probably agree with it as well (bc they would think that most other religions are false). The statement holds without assuming whether there are true religions or not. It only assumes that if there is a true religion, it's in the minority.
Still dk why we say reproduction is requisite for a good human life tho. Evolution's ends are not necessarily my ends.
There are no false religions. Perception is reality. Remember the woman and the hair dryer.
I say this because monks have often been the safeguard of our cultural heritage. You think it's about what they said they believed and you didn't understand it's about what they did.
I don't know how to be anything but blunt: this is catastrophic to get wrong, and Rationalists often suffer this way. It's as if people who could become convinced of things by words could be convinced of anything at all.
You were astute about the reason you can't give the intellect total power over the system of the human mind: erratic behavior would result and often does. But you picked an example of intellect and willpower functioning correctly to produce the desired result: a culture which preserves the study of its heritage.
(Hint: People like Scott Aaronson who dream of leaving the world of sex have been around for literal, actual centuries. People pick their beliefs. Then the systems of human culture, oft 'society,' find a place for them.)
Scott Aaronson may dream of leaving sex behind, but he still has two kids. Like, no one's arguing that monks are a bad thing. Just that they tend not to pass on their genes very much.
In this specific instance, when he calls forebrain decisions dumb, he means *in the context of evolution*. He goes on to say the same thing about altruism. All this is to illustrate why we don't have infinite willpower: because doing so may lead to less reproduction. That's the limit of his claim.
(1) how about passing on ideas, not just genes? the monks and nuns were doing it, and their learning-based "descendants" inherited this trait of teaching from them in a non-biological but in a teacher-follower way, here Sui Juris has a point indeed;
(2) also, their communities have lots of genes associated with their genes in a closer way that a far-off community would, say, a daughter of a wealthy family becomes an abbess in the middle ages and promotes her family procreation by improving the standing of her siblings...
Memetic evolution can certainly happen, though it's usually somewhat divorced from biological evolution. I'm not sure kin selection is strong enough to help in the case of the abbess though - if I'm doing the math correctly, she'd need to save two of her nieces/nephews for every potential child she gives up, which seems a rather tall order.
I think the two processes interconnected, the evolution of ideas and of the physicalities (of a group), but the question is, on which temporal and geo scales, one could make a monograph of it :). Think the priest casts of India of the old for example. Of course they could be unrelated, as ideas inherited in modern times from a scientific advisor to their student. So I would replace "usually" with "sometimes" in your first argument. As for how many to save, it depends on the dominant trait(s), it is neither some uniformly distributed continuous "essence" of a person nor a uniform discrete distribution ...
Anyway, coming in with a cryptic one liner isn't particularly helpful. I can't tell if you take exception to evolution as presented, or you're still just trying to argue that monks are a force for good.
Is perception reality or is that just your perception? ;) If it is just your perception, why should we (who perceive things differently) believe you? What truth are you trying to communicate?
To me, this is like claiming (as a universal truth) "there are no universal truths," i.e. a contradiction in terms.
A partial solution to the illusion at the end (and it’s metaphor) is to cross your eyes, blurring the image, but simplifying the data stream entering your brain. Doing this causes the illusion to disappear and one can easily visualize the perpendicular black and white lines being perfectly straight. This solution applied to the greater post could suggest that low willpower is a result of too much information overwhelming underlying logical/rational truths - if you simplify the challenges in your life and focus less on the details - somewhat paradoxical - things become “clearer”/easier to parse.
Maybe stimulants just increase the amount of dopamine (= instrumental confidence) in the brain?
Also you mentioned that meth triggers gay sex orgies and Adderall triggers cleaning sprees, but meth != Adderall, so maybe meth targets the low-level brain parts and Adderall targets the high-level brain parts. If this guess is so, we should expect that there are no gay Adderall sex orgies and no meth-induced cleaning sprees.
Well there aren't really Adderall orgies but it definitely makes you horny. That might just come down to a ROI issue (you can't smoke adderall). And Meth cleaning sprees definitely are a thing.
Reinforcement learning offers another candidate theory: discount factor. When tuning RL algorithms a key choice is how much to discount future (uncertain) rewards over immediate (certain) ones. The reward delta for doing the dishes or your homework _now_ instead of later is small and distant. The reward for playing just one more round of Civ immediate.
Perhaps willpower is about increasing the discount factor; people do unpleasant things now for astonishingly distant future rewards. It makes sense that this would be regularised to prevent us always sacrificing immediate reward for larger future ones, because this leads into all sorts of traps.
Well said. Hyperbolic discounting. Are you saying that that's incompatible with Scott's Bayesian theory? Time-proximity could be the key factor in the predictive processing.
I think it is compatible with and modulates Scott's theory. Rather than just competing on "weight of evidence" we can think of this as "discounted weight of evidence" with the frontal cortex providing not just the evidence for future reward but the discount factor for that. It also provides a compelling reason why "willpower" would be limited by evolution; very long discount horizons are sometimes beneficial but can also be evolutionarily-risky behaviour e.g. choosing not to reproduce in favour of a better life after death.
Prediction is complex and I'm sure there's a lot more to it, but this has to be a piece of the puzzle.
How do psychedelics fit into this picture? Psychedelic assisted therapy seems to often be useful against alcoholism. I'm not sure about how strong the evidence for this is. (Here's a section on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_therapy#In_alcoholism)
Here's a quote by Fadiman where he talks about an interview with a former alcoholic who recovered over night in one of the Spring Grove Experiments with psychedelics in the 60s:
"The filmmaker is saying, well can you talk about your drinking? I haven't had a drink in 40 years. The filmmaker talks about willpower and the man laughs and says: It has nothing to do with willpower, I haven't had any interest in drinking ever since."
This is super speculative but could it be the case that psychedelics smack the neurophysiology of the brain in some way that it can sometimes cause the reinforcement learner part of the mind to lose interest in e.g. alcohol?
"The lines here are perfectly straight - feel free to check with a ruler. Can you force yourself to perceive them that way? If not, it sounds like you can’t always make your intellectual/logical system overrule your instincts, which might make you more sympathetic to people with low willpower."
I can. Just squint hard enough to obscure the elements leading to the optical illusion.
I'm going to be a curmudgeon here and argue that we are confusing several things under the 'willpower' label. Yes, I suspect that Scott's Bayesian model is worthy... but it is a model for the initial decision to act (or not). But once you have decided to act continuing to act is another set of conditions, repeated over and over until your Bayesian factors combine into stopping to act.
So, take the famous 'willpower' experiment where the subjects sits on a chair and extends their right leg horizontal to the floor. (That's the initial decision). The subject keeps their leg parallel to the floor for some time. (That's the continuing decisions to continue). The subject then decides to relax their leg. (That's the stop condition). This is taken to be a measure (or perhaps proxy) for the strength of their will. But we are not measuring 'will power', we are measuring how long it takes for the original Bayesian decision to be replaced by fresh Bayesian decisions to stop the actions of the first decision. There is (perhaps) no 'willpower' - that's folk psychology, a false internal model, or a handy social label, so talking of what can deplete willpower is misleading.
One thing you didn't seem to consider here is that we can collect evidence for the generic proposition "i am capable of accomplishing my goals." Or, more simply, "i can control myself", or, to speak a modern heresy, "I have free will."
If evidence for generic propositions like this plays a role in the Bayesian computation - and i don't see why it wouldn't - then you might expect there to be something like an exponential process at work in a person who repeatedly tells themselves they have a strong will, and, in exercising it, finds additional pieces of evidence that they do, in fact, have a strong will.
This notion of 'a pile of evidence that i can control myself' lines up with my own experience. I wrote about it here:
I think you can extend this to mapping to self-efficacy and burnout.
Alberto Bandero defines self-efficacy as "a personal judgment of how well or poorly a person is able to cope with a given situation based on the skills they have and the circumstances they face" (there's a 10 question scale at http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~health/engscal.htm - scroll down!) Assuming that there is a substantial feedback component, this gives us Bayesian priors and posteriors for the hypothesis that we can cope with whatever today will throw at us, and - in an ideal world - a benevolent positive feedback loop as those with high self-efficacy are indeed more likely to engage with their challenges and succeed.
Burnout is characterised by Schaufeli and Enzmann (1998) as experiencing persistent negative mental states, negative emotions and feelings, exhaustion, and the overall mindset of reduced competence.
What happens if someone with high self-efficacy encounters an environment where they cannot cope with the given situation, where for whatever reason, efforts do not deliver results? Presumably their self-efficacy level goes down, as done their performance, as they end up in a damaging positive feedback loop heading towards depression, and burnout as defined above.
It seems like the Bayesian perspective provides a great model for how this would work.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
So in psychotherapy is common to fail to induce change just through fear (eg smoking will give you cancer and such) or logic. But once you align reinforcement (pleasure/pride) level and high level consciousness it works more frequently. What i mean is: creating a solid, stable and strong FELT sense of how much happier an exsmoker is (anticipating emotionally the prize of the right course of action) adds up and if done properly can more frequently build up enough willpower/dopamine in that direction. Just a thought.
I feel like a theory of willpower/motivation needs to somehow include the social/dominance aspect (especially given that human brains likely evolved for processing of social structures/events). In the low willpower case, the reinforcement learner/lizard brain tends to view signals from the logical brain as external dominance attempts and thus tries to resist it (evaluating "doing homework" as a low reward activity). This does not actually depend on there being a real separate physical external entity exerting that dominance. It may also be why, for example, doing dishes is much easier when there's something else (and more important, like homework) that you're supposed to be doing, because the lizard brain sees submitting to the dominating influence in a small way (dishes) as being preferable to submitting to it in a big way (homework). In that case, doing dishes may actually feel preferable to e.g. playing video games, perhaps because playing video games feels like rebelling against the authority (even if the authority is of your own logical brain), and openly rebelling is dangerous.
great point about being social creatures, but developed all wrong: doing dishes does NOT feel good! but you can think about smth else while doing it and thus ignore doing it and also share the task with the rest of the family... In terms of being social creatures, this is a point suitable to develop further...
I've been reading Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Other Minds" and he also seems to believe in a two-stage brain. What first evolves is a kind of subjective experience that is like the reinforcement learner, though he emphasizes that a brain exists not just to make predictions but also to coordinate action among the many bodily players. That's important point for some of the potential effects of drugs that Scott mentions in the post. Seems just as likely that those drugs are messing with the coordination system?
Subjective experience comes first, and you can see it in our reinforcement learning, instincts, reflexes, experiences of pain and pleasure. Then there's consciousness, which he thinks of as also deeply connected to the coordinating purposes of the brain. Consciousness for him involves a broadcasting of ideas across the brain, which makes that idea/thought/inner speech available throughout the systems. (I think, I'm trying to understand.) Broadcasting is meant in a fairly literal sense.
(I think this means that working memory is not a "space" but instead the effect of the brain's broadcasting system at work. There would be a fundamental limit on how much information you can broadcast without the signals conflicting.)
Anyway, a divided brain seems like the oldest idea about the mind. Reinforcement learning vs high-level consciousness. System 1 vs. System 2. Hume's constant correlation vs causation. Ego vs Id. Higher and lower desires. Good angel on one shoulder vs little devil on the other. The snake vs. the law of God.
I can't help but see this as an insight that people who think about the self have come to over and over again. The details are complex enough that each generation feels a need to reinvent the distinction and provide it with new shadings and details. But the idea feels like one that people have been thinking about ever since we've been thinking.
Good post. Regarding the prior on 'motionlessness', I would generalize it, and rename it to something like prior on 'low effort / pleasant activity'. And instead of the 'reinforcement learner' prior I would consider it responsible for playing Civilisation for 10h instead of doing some more mentally/physically strenuous work. This prior also would also nicely explain procrastination.
Neither did I. Either we are the laziest ACX readers, or we just realized something like "oh Scott is trying to do a trick to make some point" and moved on. It was like 10 minutes ago now so I can't be bothered to remember anymore.
I appreciate your hypotheses. I think of myself as lazy, but I was reading this post after exercising, so I'm not *that* lazy (and I also was a bit fatigued). Your second hypo—Scott's trying to do a trick—rings true. I wasn't sure what the trick was about, so I kept reading rather than playing along.
When I started the paragraph, I predicted that the trick had something to do with the context of the finger wiggle. In particular, I thought he was going to run through movements from simple/small to complex/large and then would return to simple—making some point about how motivation to do a simple movement changes, i.e., motivation is X the first time you wiggle the finger and then is Y when you wiggle the finger after rolling on the floor. When I saw that there was no second finger wiggle, I realized that I'd predicted wrongly. And by then I saw his actual point.
But in any event, I only barely considered moving my finger.
I think it's useful to differentiate willpower and motivation.
Willpower is the ability to keep doing something even if you find it unpleasant; motivation is the ability to get up and go start a new task.
I don't struggle with willpower much at all. Once I've started a task, I can usually see it through. Motivation is another story. The hardest part of my daily workout is deciding to get up and put my shoes on.
For whatever reason my brain doesn't like shifting gears from one mode to the other. I can have meetings all day at work, or I can do a deep-dive into spreadsheets, but Lord don't ask me to do both on the same day. The best analogy I have is a multi-purpose arena that functions for both basketball and hockey. The way to draw the most fans might be to have basketball on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday with hockey on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, but if you put the facilities crew in charge, they'd prefer to schedule four or five hockey games all back-to-back. That's why the facilities crew shouldn't be in charge, but if you run those guys needlessly ragged, everything will end up falling apart.
ADHD sometimes involves hyperactivity, impulsivity, and fidgeting, and Adderall/Ritalin reduces these symptoms. (Something roughly like this is true even in fruit-flies, btw: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_anderson_your_brain_is_more_than_a_bag_of_chemicals ). Your explanation based on a prior of motionlessness does not seem to account for why fidgeting would result both from too much and from too little dopamine. (Related question: does giving mild-to-moderate doses of antipsychotics to (young) children with normal dopamine levels result in hyperactivity? (I guess you'd need this to be an animal study or a control group to pass the ERB?))
In my experience ADHD individuals have a very poor prior against action. They're acting constantly, because the baseline level of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain is too low - sitting still results in a reward (or anticipation of reward) deficit.
There's also weak signal from the rational mind - sitting still in a classroom setting, even when you don't want to accomplishes the long-term (over like 5 minutes) goal of the teacher not yelling at you. But low signal from the prefrontal cortex makes the ganglia interpret that as a low-confidence bid for action.
That leaves "strongest prior reward actions" but again, you're looking at a brain that just *doesn't get* reward anticipation responses, so prior actions also tend to be pretty low confidence bids.
This is all super speculative but my ADHD experience has been that the "strongest prior reward" comes from falling very heavily on the exploration side of the exploration/exploitation dichotomy. Doing the same action repeatedly, even if it's highly rewarding, tends to have diminishing returns. Meanwhile, doing random actions usually is useless, but occasionally hits on a dopamine goldmine.
My bet would be that this is why the fidgeting and impulsiveness - prior against action is unrewarding, rational action is unrewarding, doing what you were doing is unrewarding, random thrashing about is, on very rare occasions only, super rewarding. Since rewards are hard to find, may as well try that.
When you increase the overall dopamine levels in the brain, both the prefrontal cortex and the prior against action become stronger. "Just randomly look for reward responses" becomes a less good strategy, because it was always a bad strategy.
Meanwhile, with a typical brain, the prior against action is pretty strong already, and new signals need to override it. An increase in dopamine levels gives more strength to the other two signals. This increases the rational signal, but *also* introduces just a general bias towards action, including random action.
Dopamine is complicated, and "too little" and "too much" dopamine reduces this complexity with loss of nuance. Dopamine has tonic and phasic signaling. Too much tonic is way different than too much phasic. Too little tonic can result in more effect phasic release. Adhd kids with decreased tonic release are more discrimination to phasic signaling, hence the scattered, impulsive behavior.
It does seem that this model is broadly correct - that our brain is making forecasts and acting accordingly. What I find fascinating is how we cannot convince our brain of something on an intellectual level - the brain has to convince itself of this with real experiences to update from.
But it sounds like if we had a drug that was able to temporarily turn off the "reinforcement" part of the brain for short periods, we could make huge advances in public health and crime (things like gambling, smoking and alcohol), politics and science (digging into biases and refusing to change opinions seems like a "reinforcement" thing to me), education and business, etc.
At the risk of being way too optimistic, this sounds like a Very Important Problem.
I'm not sure this is coherent. Turning off basic mental processes is neither really possible nor desirable.
But naltrexone is a sort of very weak thing in a sort of similar direction. Medication that blocks opiates, which are heavily involved in the reinforcement system, and seems to be generally helpful (though not 100% success rate) against addictions.
So what I'm hearing is: Ketamine to weaken old priors and hence make setting new ones easier, followed by amphetamines for a temporary boost to frontal cortex / "higher logical reasoning" priors, which due to the ketamine is cemented, so now you permanently have higher willpower! It's the perfect ploy!
(I know nothing, there's no way this would just work, it's just the obvious synthesis of Scott's post's on these matters)
> But it also improves willpower (eg Adderall helping people study).
Does it? When I take my methylphenidate for ADHD, I don't feel any significant willpower surge, my thoughts and impulses are just far less labile – it often manifests in doing one particular task (the one I find myself doing when I start to feel the effects of MPH), be it productive or not.
I’m surprised to see Scott endorse the idea that people who drink too much need to “hit rock bottom” before changing. That’s an AA platitude that is not supported by evidence. In fact, if you ask people who overcome drinking problems, they don’t necessarily say there was a “rock bottom”—sometimes they naturally grow out of the heavy drinking, sometimes they decide to change without any particular low moment. Look at survey data from Anne Fletcher.
Absolutely the research doesn't support this 'rock bottom' idea. The impediment to seeing that is that the vast majority of people who develop substance abuse problems pull themselves out of it, with the assistance/insistence of family/friends, BEFORE they need to see a psychiatrist, join AA etc. So they don't register on the radar until population level research is done. The psychiatrists and groups like AA only SEE the people who couldn't manage on their own.
Ditto for eating disorders, compulsive gambling, self-harm .... (Lots of co-morbidity with personality disorders for the ones psychiatrists do get to see, btw. But then we could have a whole convo about what a PD is or isn't .... In any case, many of those traits don't help people out of their compulsive consumption/behaviours.)
What is meant by rock bottom? If you see where things are going and stop before you get fired and your wife leaves you, is that rock bottom? In that situation, I would say you haven't hit rock bottom but your brain has convinced itself of where things are headed if you don't stop. I'm speaking from personal experience.
I've heard of the concept of a high bottom. Some people don't hit bottom until they suffer some serious disaster, and others stop when their drinking is defaulting to a little more than they think is a good idea.
I agree that not all cases of abandoning drinking involve rock bottom.
What I was trying to say is that addictions are very hard to break, but sometimes if they cause sufficiently bad things, that makes you able to break them.
Maybe a better (because less-politicized) example - I once had a patient who ate terribly. He knew he should diet, but he felt like he didn't have enough willpower to make it stick. One day he had a heart attack and almost died. After that he never touched junk food again.
I don't think he was "dishonest" about wanting to diet before. And I don't think he was too ignorant to know that bad diet could cause heart attacks. I think the heart attack was something so overwhelmingly scary that it recalibrated his "evidence" on the pros and cons of dieting. I think hitting rock bottom for alcoholism is the same sort of thing.
Obviously many people are able to diet well without heart attacks and many alcoholics are able to quit without hitting rock bottom, I'm more interested in the existence of cases where this does work.
I assume this tricks your brain into placing more weight on the incoming perceptions than prior expectations. Fun trick to try: If the moon is close to the horizon, it will look larger. This optical illusion stops when you look at it bent over looking through your legs.
This would make a lot of sense with recent evidence showing that procrastination isn't about 'time management' or any of those logical processes, but about negative emotion. Doing the 'whatever I SHOULD be doing right now' may trigger negative emotion in all sorts of ways, including fear of failure (what if I put a lot of work into this paper/work presentation and it's still not very good?), fear of success (if I do well, everyone will expect me to KEEP ON doing well, which sounds like ... a lot of work and stress), and fear that the task will be boring/unpleasant/overwhelming.
There's also recent research showing that while people in general aren't great at estimating how boring or unpleasant a task will be, those with ADD/ADHD are even worse at it, tending to severely over-estimate the boringness and unpleasantness of tasks. (Ask people to rate the task before starting, then ask them again once they're in the middle of the task.) They're also worse at estimating how enjoyable/satisfying something will be, making them more reluctant to get up off the couch and go see their friends or go to a show, to work out etc. All this fits with the role of dopamine in these processes. We see, now, that dopamine is not just a reward system, but also part of that anticipation system that motivates us.
Gotta love the stimulants. I'm sure civilizations were only built once people started consistently using tea, coffee, mate ....
Buddhists describe liberation escaping the grips of "clinging" and "aversion", which in a sense is freeing oneself from strong, impulsive motivators. In my anecdotal experience, this may contribute to anhedonia to those predisposed (like me). But over the long haul, I think it serves to de-habituate from such strong motivators, which in turn permits weaker but consciously-chosen motivations to win. Perhaps developing willpower is a matter of reducing the strength of impulsive motivations so that these weaker, chosen motivations have a chance. This, in turn, allows for the cultivation of "vīrya" ("the mind intent on being ever active, devoted, unshaken, not turning back and being indefatigable. It perfects and realizes what is conducive to the positive" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C4%ABrya).
Does this say anything about why people have various sorts of actions which are easier for them to do, or even feel like a default while other people need willpower to do those sorts of things? Some people find thinking and research to be a default, and there are people who like exercise.
I was talking with a man who really *likes* keeping things clean and in good order. I don't think he was BSing-- the seafood section behind him looked very good. It sounded like it would be a strain for him to not clean up.
As a general point, willpower is good, but not an unlimited good. People with anorexia or exercise disorders are overdoing it.
And people in charge are reasonably likely to impose tasks with insufficient concern for their subordinates-- just having willpower for what you're told to do is not reliably the best thing.
I'm studying <a href="https://www.energyarts.com/">a style of qi gong</a> which includes the 70% rule. When you're practicing, only do 70% of what you can do, physically and mentally. This applies with a good bit of subtlety. When you're raising your arms, if you feel a little glitch, don't raise them that high. And do less than 70% if you're sick or injured. 50%! 30%!
I've been doing this for a few years, and (aside from making injury much less likely) it pays off because what I can do easily has increased and movement has become more pleasant.
However, *not* using willpower to push through pain or stiffness takes a good bit of willpower and conscientiousness itself, though taking care has become somewhat of a habit.
I love cleaning! Honestly, I cherish the time I spend every Saturday cleaning the whole house top to bottom. By the time I'm done it sparkles. Obviously I have no control of really enjoying it.
Recording this before I finish reading so I can remember my "naive" priors about willpower: At first blush, I'm not sure willpower is a thing-in-itself that resides in our minds/thoughts/selves and governs our ability to work toward goals. Maybe it's a value we hold, a useful concept, like trustworthiness, that helps us make sense of the world and express should-bes and oughts. Maybe it's a story we tell ourselves. Why did I eat too big a breakfast? No willpower. Why did I persevere and finish my exercise? I owe it all to my willpower. I strongly suspect that any study in the general neighborhood of willpower (the marshmallow test, for example) is measuring other things.
Back after reading: The thing that I think will stick with me from this article is the image of different parts of a lamprey brain "bidding" dopamine/expressing confidence levels to determine an eel's next action. I think my beliefs updated toward the position that certain brain processes work in a way analogous to the way we think about willpower. And I more strongly believe I'm unable to helpfully wade into arguments among experts in matters of brains and mental health and whatnot about whether there is a "willpower" or not.
My recent ADHD diagnosis and subsequent stimulant prescription have not affected my willpower much - while I can do some tasks more easily, I still struggle a lot with the "important" ones (i.e. I sought treatment because I was worried about being fired and it has only barely improved my work product). My work trajectory has been a degrading orbit for years - the stimulant addition was like a booster rocket, but not strong enough to keep the orbit from degrading.
In Bayesland this all makes sense. I've been attempting to live a "secure" lifestyle in a way that's incompatible with my personality, telling myself that providing for myself and my wife and performing work tasks is what a good person does. But my lower-level brain is deeply unconvinced by that argument because when I perform tasks, there is no reward feedback. My prefrontal monologue can yell "no this is rewarding!" at the top of its lungs, but if it's not, the ganglia will give it less and less weight over time until my insistence that, "no really, this time you're going to feel good about completing this" has no impact on my actions.
I don't care for this idea because it takes "the things I've decided to do" as not only a weak influence on my actions, but currently as "not an influence on my actions at all." That's not exactly an uplifting theory of the mind. :/
Visualization and/or focused cultivation of intentions is one of the only real magic willpower fixes, and I think it basically works this way. You improve your Bayesian credence that the course of action will yield a desirable state by flooding your brain with a vivid sensorial simulation of what that will be like. You are putting your finger on the Bayesian scale by, in a sense, fabricating some evidence in the direction you want to push.
Amusingly, the main place where visualization-type interventions fail is ... failing to do the visualization intervention in the first place because your credence that doing such an intervention will work is low.
My impression is that the willpower (or whatever it is) to do things is more common and possibly easier than the willpower to do new thinking about whether what you're doing makes sense in terms of your larger goals.
I think this fits well with theories of superstimulus. In part what superstimulus is doing is providing far too much evidence.
In particular, this explains a bunch of "productivity hacks" as "willpower hacks" (where a 'hack' is a very specific solution to a very specific problem) -- that work by turning homework into a superstimulus, or otherwise making it supersalient.
Even simple things like leaving the box you need to unpack on your desk (in your visual field) act here to increase willpower to unpack the box, because it's more salient/stimulus when its inside your visual field than outside of it.
This also suggests further hacks, like having your homework be in bright colors or large/sharp letters. Maybe purely cognitive things like visualizing a stadium of people cheering you on (if you like that sort of thing -- maybe some people would be terrified of that). Anything that would increase the provided stimulation would increase the "evidence" to the basal ganglia.
Also, this would fit with why productivity hacks / willpower hacks tend to lessen in effect over time. Superstimulus / supersalience is in part a function of your sensitivity to it, and the more you use it, the more resistance you'll build up (as the odds ratio of supersalient evidence decreases to that of normal evidence).
Which fits with what I've observed personally and in others: the best productivity hacks / willpower hacks are actually lots of experimenting and rotating hacks, instead of finding one that works well and sticking with it.
To me, this suggests you should focus productivity hacks on all bidders, not just on the bid you wish to have win. For example, say you want homework to win, but playing games wins instead. You could focus on increasing homework's bid, but that strategy is going to require you to continue to motivate yourself every time you have to do homework, with diminishing returns. If instead you find a way to reduce the payoff for playing games you'll reduce that bid and make it easier for homework to win. Not sure how you'd go about hacking the game's bid though?
If "Willpower is the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals"' , forming a probabilistic theory of willpower with Bayesian mathematics is a very simplistic or superficial approach to human behavior. Consider willpower and panic attacks, drug and other addictions, OCD, ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder...
All very well put! Also many in the threads to this view their "long term goal" to have the day's dishes done, while the short - term competition of the goal is a computer game, and a reward is listening to a podcast or an audiobook... And a donut is somehow a temptation! To be avoided with elaborate strategies! It is all "overintellectualizing". I think the original post had some practical goal, say, to discuss how to help people seriously in trouble, and then things drifted away. Of course, this simple Bayesian model cannot explain the complexities of human decision-making. So whoever replies tries to trivialize the "decision situation" in the comments to make the simple model a better approximant for a simpler task :)
And the willpower struggle is between "but playing games is fun!" versus "doing the dishes/doing my homework is not fun". Sticking to plain boiled broccoli is less fun than a slice of Black Forest Gateau. Exercise is less fun than sitting at the computer surfing the Internet. Fun is fun, duty is not.
And the prior on motionlessness is simple inertia: the tendency of a body at rest to stay at rest.
I'm not sure it has to do with the idea of "fun". I feel very confused now about the role of dopamine now: early on I thought it had to do with happiness, then it was surprise, and now Bayesian-evidence-weighting-ness. Thanks Scott Alexander (I guess).
Surprise and evidence-weightingness should be the same thing I think. Suppose the LHC is trying to discover new physics, it does some experiments, and it gets exactly what the Standard Model predicted. There is zero surprise, and so it has produced no new evidence (ie you should update your existing theories by zero). Suppose it gets something completely bizarre and unpredicted. Now there is high surprise, and you should update a lot (ie weight the evidence very highly) in favor of whatever theory did/could have predicted that.
I think this is linked to "fun" in the sense that something is fun if it sends a high surprise signal to the reinforcement learner part of the brain. IE receiving your paycheck provides lots of reinforcement (money is reinforcing!) but it doesn't really register as fun because you knew you would get it. Winning at gambling is fun because it's a surprise reinforcement.
(technically "fun" is not the right term, it should be reinforcement, and although I gave any example where "fun" also works if you try you can break the equivalence because "fun" is really a much more complicated concept, sorry. But you can see why dopamine = fun is a pop science thing)
"Completely bizarre and unpredicted" would make me start tests and searches for what the heck is broken in the machine. A "surprise" that is no longer comprehensible is better not used to base updates upon.
Imagine a graph with y = information and x from 'nothing new' to 'everything new' (ie not even parseable, completely random). Then information follows an inverted U curve. The optimal surprise to update from would be in its maximum, not the 'everything new' tail. (Was that graph by Shannon himself?)
With "completely bizarre and unpredicted", a new theory/paradigm is required (if the machine turned out to work correctly, of course), and here we are in definition territory whether that counts as 'update'. Do Bayesians have 'upgrades'?
So true about paycheck analogy, and think of it: people feel gradient more, that the absolute values (within certain safety range of course);
a bit smaller paycheck would worry and upset them greatly and send them in search of a reason, a hidden deduction. An added small value is more likely to go unnoticed (we are tuned to "dangers") but still would make one disproportionally (with the value) happy-feeling-appreciated.
The same goes for sales at stores and surprising finds, which are also addictive to some.
Think of cats: they like to chase a surprising new toy, but if they do not win, they are frustrated.
The unpredictability as fun you write about in humans is more complex, yet similar on this base level: if we can master and control it, it is fun. Not otherwise.
But we conditioned to claim otherwise (in the USA culture, not in a number of other cultures).
Gambling is only fun if the gambler blames the losses on misfortune and credits the winnings on his supermind.
If you explain an underdog at the table how "it" was his own miscomputaiton, the fun is gone!
Oh, exactly; this quote from "The Screwtape Letters" has always resonated strongly with me because yeah, you look up and it's hours later and what have you been doing all that time? Nothing:
"As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."
(1) Monks and nuns were passing on the evolution of ideas and if becoming abesses/ abbots facilitating the standing of their families with genes close to them
(2) Young people volunteer for wars to defend their country and often perish before they have offspring, but their community survives because of it, and procreates, with genes closer to theirs (than the genes of their farther away based enemy)
(3) The margins of survival in human history are very narrow: this very behavior commonly contributes to at least something related to them to survive
(4) It is debatable with part of going to the monastery or going to defend your country is due to the higher enforcing by a cognitive function which fights the instincts, or by a "selfless" gene instinct to defend your own!
(5)A smaller example: if one sees "bad guys" attacking a small child or a defenseless woman the instinct is to interfere, to mobilize, and to fight the bad guys off, while the reasoning stops some from doing so - so in this case the willpower is aligned with the instinct and not with the reasoning
Also, an observation that I think is either extremely deep or shallow: I think that this might have to do with the idea of Lagrangian multipliers. Suppose that you want to maximize f(x) subject to the constraint g(x) = c, and suppose f and g are sufficiently "nice" functions. The direct maximization is hard. However, we observe that at a local maxima, the gradients of f and of g must be parallel, so this turns out that we can do this optimization by maximizing f(x) + lambda*g(x) for generic lambda, then tuning lambda so that g(X) = c for the local maxima X.
More concretely, because we only have a finite amount of energy and moving muscles consumes energy, evolution or whatever wants to maximize reproductive success subject to using a fixed amount of energy. Instead of searching through the strategies that use that amount of energy to maximize reproductive success, evolution can instead program (proxy for reproductive success) - lambda*(proxy for energy), and then tune lambda. So what feels from the inside like a prior against using energy could turn out to be just a hacky means of doing constrained optimization.
"Millions of people throughout history have failed to reproduce because they became monks for false religions; if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem."
So the true religions are the one where clergy marry and have families, like Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism? 😁
The problem with that, though, is evidenced in Trollope's characters in "Barchester Towers": Mr Quiverful and his wife are very fruitful by their instinctual processes but this means that they are dependent on the wife of the new Bishop for promotion in order to support their large family, and that causes dislike and problems due to her meddling:
"Barchester Towers concerns the leading clergy of the cathedral city of Barchester. The much loved bishop having died, all expectations are that his son, Archdeacon Grantly, will succeed him. Owing to the passage of the power of patronage to a new Prime Minister, a newcomer, the far more Evangelical Bishop Proudie, gains the see. His wife, Mrs Proudie, exercises an undue influence over the new bishop, making herself as well as the bishop unpopular with most of the clergy of the diocese. Her interference to veto the reappointment of the universally popular Mr Septimus Harding (protagonist of Trollope's earlier novel, The Warden) as warden of Hiram's Hospital is not well received, even though she gives the position to a needy clergyman, Mr Quiverful, with 14 children to support."
Secondly, so what is the reason for the problem today of those who are not monks or clergy of any religion, but are not reproducing? They are listening to their instinctual processes in that they are bound and determined to have sex, but they cut off the connection between sex and reproduction.
Should we be crying "shame, shame!" at them and at those lay persons who are childless and unmarried today? They don't have the religious precepts stopping them, so why don't they have fourteen children each? 😁
> My model has several different competing mental processes trying to determine your actions. One is a prior on motionlessness; if you have no reason at all to do anything, stay where you are. A second is a pure reinforcement learner - "do whatever has brought you the most reward in the past". And the third is your high-level conscious calculations about what the right thing to do is.
Hah, this is very Freudian. Freud first posits the "Nirvana Principle": the goal of the nervous system is to reduce stimulus as much as possible. Hence the prior on motionlessness. Then, the split between Death Drive (compulsive repetition, i.e. "follow past rewards") vs Life Drive (do something new, and whether this results from conscious calculations or pure impulse isn't necessarily relevant. Although, if we look at older Freud texts, we see a distinction between "primary" unconscious and "secondary" conscious processes, which also vaguely maps to asimilar position).
> Guyenet describes various brain regions making "bids" to the basal ganglia, using dopamine as the "currency" - whichever brain region makes the highest bid gets to determine the lamprey's next action.
Freud also used this metaphor back in the late 1800s (The Interpretation of Dreams), describing desire as a "little entrepreneur" which is "backed" by the unconscious "capitalist", which we might call predictive confidence. This is commonly known as his "economic model", in contrast to his "dynamic" and "structural" models, and there's a lot of literature on the interplay of these metaphors (of particular note is Paul Ricoeur's "Freud and Philosophy").
Speaking of dopamine too, I'm sure Freud's prior (1880s) work on cocaine helped him come to these conclusions regarding the structure of the psyche.
The use of having a theory like this, which addresses the "psyche" rather than the "brain", is that we can look at the role of *fantasy*, which is to say: we have some capacity to simulate situations and imagine the rewards, and it is the fantasy which ultimately convinces us to try something different (because otherwise, how can we even make judgments about the worth of what will happen if we try something new?).
"Hah, this is very Freudian. Freud first posits the "Nirvana Principle": the goal of the nervous system is to reduce stimulus as much as possible. "
Huh! I didn't realize this. This is very PCT/PC - the idea is to reduce "surprise" - given that your brain is already predicting certain stimuli (like the feeling of wearing clothes) your goal is to reduce the amount of unpredicted new stimuli, ie the only ones that feel like real stimuli and are noticeable.
I recommend his paper "Instincts and their Vicissitudes". Short, readable, and tries to posit a evo-biological grounding for psychoanalytic theory. Nirvana Principle is elaborated in the footnoted and had apparently been floating around since the late 1800s.
Seems like "short term vs long term" might be a factor. The rewards for finishing my paper are long term, while the rewards for playing Civilization are quick. And if you're potential prey a bias toward short term is useful.
> naive attempts to "provide more evidence" that a certain course of action is good will fail; the brain is harder to fool than people expect.
I would disagree with that.
Every time I lose motivation to lift weights, reading bodybuilding forums/subreddits, watching progress videos etc helps a lot.
In general, hanging out with people in the same boat provides a lot of evidence in favor of the correct course of action: if everyone around you is doing it, it must be something worth doing.
My brain sometimes is just too easy to fool. Just make it consume sufficiently many blog/reddit/forum posts and tweets uncritically, and it will believe anything.
Scott Alexander's brain may be harder to fool, and maybe it needs to get sufficiently tired before consuming motivational material? So perhaps reading r/CleaningTips or r/konmari after a long working day will provide enough evidence to do the dishes?
"You can't have nice thing until you do the thing!" "Er, I can, though?"
"Well, everything's ruined now" "Oh no, how did that happen?"
The 'trick' about "do the thing or you can't have nice thing" "you're just trying to trick me so I'll do the thing, I can too have nice thing without doing thing" is where the carrot doesn't work for me. And the stick needs to be *really* bad before I get motivated.
How does this relate to people who have a high levels of executive function or workaholics? From what I've been able to gather it's not willpower as they genuinely enjoy working/doing what they need to do. I'm sure we all know people who love crossing things off their todo list.
> The lines here are perfectly straight - feel free to check with a ruler. Can you force yourself to perceive them that way?
I _used to be_ able to force myself to do that by pure force of will, for basically any optical illusion. (The inverted face was the one exception I remember.) I'm not sure when I lost that ability but the change was probably packaged with a decrease in depression.
Just wondering where Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop smoking fits into this schema. People who have used it know that he claims you don’t need to use willpower to stop smoking. In the UK the ASA banned his ads as a result. Of course you need willpower. But people like me who used the book report that well, no, you don’t need willpower provided you follow his method. Which is basically to persuade you (intellectually) that you don’t enjoy smoking.
Pretty sure that is part of it. But I did hypnosis properly and stopped for 6 months after which . . . With the Allen Carr thing a light went on in my head and that was the end of it.
When I find I "don't need willpower" for something, it usually means one of two things:
a) the instinctual/reinforcement system is on board with it. For example, I find that planning even complicated dates with someone I'm attracted to is easy, because my instinctual/reinforcement system expects a big payoff.
b) the logical argument for doing something is overwhelming, eg someone is threatening to shoot me if I don't, or offering a million dollar reward if I do. I guess this could also be a subtype of a, since my instinctual system is on board with not getting shot.
I think the feeling of needing willpower is what it feels like from the inside when the two systems are very nearly balanced and one either just barely succeeds at or just barely fails to overcome the other.
Simplistic IFS answer to dishes: Musician part does not want to do dishes, Doctor thinks you should do dishes but making you do it is definitely not his top priority. With strong enough inner conflict Doctor barely has enough inner power to make you study for a test. So there is no one to do dishes: Musician just doesn't want, for Doctor this means trade-off he doesn't want to make.
I just noticed I can significantly diminish the optical illusion by squinting my eyes almost closed, so my eyelashes obscure much of my vision but still leave a blurred image. That blurred image seems like a simple, straight grid.
Do you think it's fair to say that at that point my sensory input is diminished and some prior of a grid is taking over? Or is it just that I'm obscuring the part of the sensory input that makes the lines seem to be bent (all the little details) and what's left just looks like a grid?
I often find that a lot of optical illusions don't work as well on me as on other people - I have some of the hallmarks of schizophrenia and gender issues, both of which interact with optical illusions weirdly - but that last optical illusion is the strongest version of that effect I've seen by a WIDE margin. A lot of the horizontal-bar images seem more or less horizontal to me, less so if seen quickly, but this one is brain-hurty in a good way.
I'm curious how this fits with Kahneman's system 1/2 stuff (which is more descriptive, not mechanistic like the discussion here, so it probably isn't really a question of agree/disagree). He talks about how using system 2 is effortful/tiring, and your description of the intellectual/logical system trying to fight the intuitive system certainly sounds like system 2 fighting system 1.
I think willpower depletion would be something that these two frames view differently, so whether it's real (I have no clue) is probably useful. I don't immediately see why, in your model, the bayesian calculus falling one way would influence how it falls 10 minutes later, whereas in Kahneman's framing that phenomenon jumps out. Does anyone know how real willpower depletion is?
Credit to AC Harper for mentioning the notion of a person holding their leg out and then keeping it out to contrast deciding to do something with continuing to do something.
What I think is getting missed there is not continuing to do something doesn't necessarily happen because of insufficient willpower. Muscle failure is a real thing. Presumably, there is some analog with purely mental effort. All of these activities you mention as being "reinforcing" aren't necessarily reinforcing so much as passive. Doom scrolling requires no effort. You can do it forever well past the point of having no mental energy left. Clearly, eating falls into a category like this. Unless you're eating something extremely low in calorie density, it is inherently an energy giving activity.
Notably, the ability to make your muscles last longer is about more than just grabbing more calories and accumulating ATP. Muscles can be trained. They can learn to move more efficiently. The absolute capacity to generate force can be increased. I see no reason to think brains can't do the same. Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to express this without contrasting mental strength with mental weakness, which seem taboo thanks to moral judgments in the larger culture that obtain about those notion in a way they don't about physical strength and weakness. For whatever reason, we don't (mostly) assign moral value to physical strength, but we do mental strength, which makes it hard to talk about because it inevitably sounds like you're implying some people are worse than others because their brains are less naturally strong or less trained.
Remember that book you reviewed about the guy who thought people in the classical period didn't think they had their own thoughts, but instead thought Gods were talking to them? I was thinking about that in the context of AA and their insistence on accepting a higher power the other day. Maybe accepting a higher power moves the thoughts about not drinking back into the God realm. So before AA you'd think to yourself "aww Gee I really shouldn't have a drink", but you're not going to take advice from some drunk. But when you go to drink after accepting the higher power you hear Gods voice in your head telling you not to drink, and him you listen to.
My basal ganglia doesn't seem to believe in independence of irrelevant alternatives. If I'm given the choice of doing nothing in particular or repetitive level grinding in a game, I find it hard to summon up enthusiasm for level grinding. But if I have the choice between doing nothing, level grinding, and doing unplesant but very important homework, I suddenly have a great deal of enthusiasm for level grinding.
"a quick experiment: wiggle your index finger for one second. Now wave your whole arm in the air for one second. Now jump up and down for one second......"
1 minute after reading this I watched the 5 year old I'm staying with go down into a crab crawl and dance/run/shimmy his way down the hall to his parents bedroom. Why does this not seem to apply to kids?
I think it's because they have a lower weight for the motionlessness prior/component, so the other components don't need to fire as strongly in order to overcome it.
I mean you would have to explain why though for the theory to make any sense right? Why would adults have such a strong prior against moving but children not?
Using Scott's model we would say kids have a low propensity for doing nothing, a low propensity for talking ourselves out of things or top down inhibition and a high propensity for motor action as pleasure/play
Interesting. Spencer Greenberg also just wrote about self-control/willpower, and his solution between the conflict of "willpower is used up"-studies not replicating and the strong anecdotal evidence of willpower being used up was the following: split it up into a few subcategories (classical self-control, helpful preferences, pain tolerance), some of which could be subject to being used up and others not.
I think it is a good thing that attention is coming to the topic, because it is one of the bigger mysteries in cognition, and a little more graspable than, let's say, consciousness or free will.
There’s nothing Bayesian about this account - it’s just argmaxing over inputs from different areas of the brain. Unless there’s some specific evidence the Basal Ganglia does marginalisation (even then, this would result in v. different behaviour to picking the recommendation with the strongest signal, it’d be some weird blend or maybe the MAP). It just seems like more fetishisation of Bayes rule where people want to believe this simple probability theorem is the silver bullet to everything
So the idea here is that willpower is an illusion? We want and do stuff, and sometimes we may have an intellectual notion that we should be doing something other than what we're doing, but it's not like we can "will" ourselves into doing something that we wouldn't otherwise be doing already?
I mean, this is fine - free will is also an illusion. Error theory about the mind is completely legitimate.
I do wonder why playing Civilization is such an easy option, though - it's not as though it does much to help either survival or reproductive success.
When in play mode, we want to do stuff: there are no real risks and it counts as training for the real thing. It can even be fun to find all our failure modes and laugh about them, absorb the lessons, get better.
When in serious mode, only do it if we have to. If we poke the bear just for kicks, we won't end up well.
But now, we take training seriously, so we don't want to do most stuff, and we don't *really* have to so we usually don't. And when we do, it's not as good for learning.
But yeah, playing civilization would be play-mode for what? Maybe we didn't need to evolve a very nuanced filter about what's useful play-training and what's not. Or at the very least, in evolutionary times, we didn't have much pressure to make a special case out of these games. Or, you know, games of the sort actually train us somewhat (it is said that we evolved our big brains because of the evolutionary pressure of politics, human dynamics, strategy...). Now they look like games about contexts we don't find in real life, but probably throughout evolutionary history the strategy games were more similar to possibly real situations.
> My model has several different competing mental processes...These all submit "evidence" to your basal ganglia
> Guyenet describes various brain regions making "bids" to the basal ganglia, using dopamine as the "currency"
> the predictive coding community uses a different one: they describe it as representing the "confidence" or "level of evidence" for a specific calculation.
> My theory of willpower asserts that [dopamine] affects decision-making [by] representing the amount of evidence for a hypothesis.
Why do you think that? It's ironic to suggest without evidence that a "Bayesian evidence" theory is better than a simpler "brain regions making bids" theory — assuming the latter is governed not by something Bayesian but just ordinary physics produced by evolution, which might resemble something bayesian but not really well.
Also, while I have read a lot of Scott Alexander, Yudkowsky and other rationalists (and much enjoyed it), none of these authors have addressed basic questions like where priors (should) come from, or like "if Bob tells me X, and then Cathy tells me X, and then Dan tells me X, is that three pieces of evidence for X or just one?"
How can we claim something is "Bayesian" when we don't have any criteria to distinguish Bayesian reasoning from "I heard something that sounded subjectively plausible from someone I subjectively felt was credible, so I 'updated'"?
> You could give an evolutionary explanation - in the past, animals were much less smart, and their instincts were much better suited to their environment, so the intellectual/logical processes were less accurate, relative to the reinforcement/instinctual processes, than they are today. Whenever that system last evolved, it was right to weight them however much it weighted them.
This isn't a bad approach, except that final sentence. No, it wasn't "right to weight them however much it weighted them". Evolutions are stupid (but work anyway - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway); evolutionary results aren't "right" except relative to the animals that died young or went extinct. As you said, even today, logical/intellectual processes can be pretty dumb.
> Even today, logical/intellectual processes can be pretty dumb. Millions of people throughout history have failed to reproduce because they became monks for false religions; if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem.
How did you conclude that religious beliefs are a consequence of "intellectual/logical reasoning" rather than "reinforcement/instinctual processes"? I just checked: it's not April 1, it's just a strange thing for an atheist to say.
> Any convincing sophist can launch an attack through the intellectual/logical processes; when they do, the reinforcement/instinctual processes are there to save us
The intellectual/logical processes are what save people from intellectual/logical attacks.
The reinforcement/instinctual processes are there to say "gee, those statements sure *feel* true and I can't help but be impressed with the confident manner with which that sophist speaks." But wait, how does this even relate to your thesis?
On the whole, I think your theory muddies the waters. When I am deciding whether to procrastinate an important task to play a video game, I my intellect can dig up genuine "evidence", like "you procrastinated before and you were unhappy with the consequences", and still lose the debate against Mr. "video games are SO fun!!!" — I mean, how is that "evidence"? It's evidence I will temporarily feel high, okay, but not evidence that it's a good idea from any practical standpoint such as replicating my genes in offspring. But still it wins.
I agree in this post he doesn't give any arguments for why he'd prefer the inference engine view rather than the auction/economy, and I agree too that the economy analogy feels more natural here. But, there's context from other posts about predictive coding and the arguments for a computational view of the brain in general as an engine trying to minimize prediction errors (of sensory input for example) and in that sense, an economy analogy seems more forced. Given that, it makes sense to prefer a unified analogy of the brain.
> No, it wasn't "right to weight them however much it weighted them". Evolutions are stupid
This seems more like a gotcha than a clarification to a possible confusion of Scott or any reader (like, as if I now wrote back that evolutions aren't "stupid" either because etc... true but I know what you mean.)
> where priors (should) come from, or like "if Bob tells me X, and then Cathy tells me X, and then Dan tells me X, is that three pieces of evidence for X or just one?"
That's a hard question, and it's outside anything "bayes". But I think all the stuff about making predictions hints in this direction, in practical terms -- like, no matter where your priors come from, train to get them calibrated and then it doesn't matter much. And the stuff Yudkowski wrote about Occam's razor and Solomonoff induction triiiiies to put some theory on where to ground the recursive bayes loop.
> "if Bob tells me X, and then Cathy tells me X, and then Dan tells me X, is that three pieces of evidence for X or just one?"
This one is interesting. It shouldn't make any difference as long as the data points are independent given your hypothesis. (so, e.g. if in the world where X is true, the chances of Cathy telling you X don't change regardless of whether Dan told you X or not, and viceversa.).
But in general (e.g. if Cathy also talks with Dan and tends to repeat what he tells her) it's more precise (though more complex) to treat them as a single piece of combined evidence.
I mean, you can do it in 2 steps too, but then the first step becomes part of your hypothetical worlds, which I find more complicated (you'd have to ask yourself about the relative chances of Cathy telling you X in worlds where Dan told you X already.)
> How can we claim something is "Bayesian" when we don't have any criteria to distinguish Bayesian reasoning from "I heard something that sounded subjectively plausible from someone I subjectively felt was credible, so I 'updated'"?
If you are thinking in terms of probabilities (and not just yes/no nor yes/no/dunno), then you are 1/3 there to bayesian thinking in the sense people use it around here (iiuc). If additionally you are viewing the thinking as the process of updating priors and not just of reaching conclusions, then you are 2/3 there. Both are there in your example.
The remaining 1/3, I'd say, would be that, when you heard that thing, you stopped to ask yourself: "if the world was not as I think it is, what are the chances I would have heard a similar thing?" and then tried to update based on your (surely subjective sense of their) relative likelihoods. I'd say that people don't mean anything stronger than that around here when they talk about bayesian reasoning. Subjectivity allowed.
> How did you conclude that religious beliefs are a consequence of "intellectual/logical reasoning" rather than "reinforcement/instinctual processes"?
Haha. Good point. I think the problem you just found is mainly a problem with Scott's description of that competing mental process as "logical/intellectual reasoning". Earlier he had called it "high level conscious calculations". He hasn't nailed the wording, but I imagine a priest all self disciplined, trained in self sacrifice, with clear ideas of what he "should" be doing, and following them at the expense of "temptation". I agree our tendency to that might not be well described as intellectual/logical, but it clearly falls in the same bucket of "stuff you consciously believe/feel you should do", whatever you name it.
> On the whole, I think your theory muddies the waters.
> I mean, how is that "evidence"?
Yeah, I totally agree here. I think he's trying too hard to fit all in the predictive coding framework, which is cool, but at least by itself, it feels shoehorned in while pretending its not. Or, I'd appreciate further posts with more examples of what that this framing explains and simpler ones don't.
Scott, I'm curious how you would integrate your ideas with what is known about the tonic and phasic release of dopamine. The difference between them doesn't obviously grant a bayesian process at play for motivation. But perhaps that could be flushed out.
Any recommendations for an actual exercise? The ones I can come up with seem physically demanding or time-consuming. How bad of an idea is it to take high levels of antipsychotics and practice getting out of bed? Could that translate to anything useful in real-life (even just making it easier to get out of bed on a normal day)?
It's a pretty bad idea. I get where you're going with this, but practically it's really not a good idea. Antipsychotics are not benign sandbags, they have lots of side effects and can really alter the whole dopamine system. Receptor levels and sensitivity change, which could lead to adverse outcomes when you stop them. This happens clinically quite frequently, albeit for patients who are have psychiatric conditions (as opposed to a 'healthy control' who would be using the drug as analogous to weight lifting).
I've been confused about willpower for a long time, and this explanation makes more sense than anything I've read before.
However, in my experience, the whole sub agent thing, defiantly works, and I know many other people who have successful used this method. So I'm not going to accept a framework that completely disregard this experience. But the sub agent model is not trying to be accurate, it's just trying to be useful. I actually expect it to work worse if you take it to literally, instead of just a framework to play around with.
So assuming that Scott Alexander is correct, why does the sub agent method work?
Both the Bayesian model and the sub agent model says that the experience of willpower failure happens because some other part of you make a stronger bid or present stronger evidence.
The sub agent method is saying that you can query those other bids, and consciously look at the evidence for each bid. If you can accept and incorporate all evidence into your conscious reasoning, you will less often find yourself in an internal struggle over what action to take.
But shouldn't this just make your concision reasoning more inline with your other drives, and not the other way around, which will result in more playing computer games and less productive work? In my experience the answer is "no", and I have some speculation why this is.
As my conscious reasoning get better at listening to and incorporate *all* the evidence and argument, (including arguments like "computer games are fun") this system will start to output better suggestions. Going along with my conscious choice of action will become reinforced. This sort-of also explain the experience of running out of willpower. If my conscious reasoning is suggesting too many non rewarding actions, it will loose in trust and influence.
I'd be curious to hear more about your model of these other agents/hypotheses. You talk about three of them - the motionlessness prior, the reinforcement learner, and the logical planner. Do you think there's actually a small discrete number of them? Maybe there's a small discrete number of top level kinds, but the reinforcement learner and planner are composed of sub-agents with similar dynamics among each other?
For me having more willpower is all about reducing any sources of discomfort or annoyance (I'm guessing this is true for most). So willpower suffers if I'm sleep deprived, feel fat, need haircut, knee hurts, hungry/too full...etc. The tricky part is I need to have some willpower to achieve these states of lowered annoyance, but it is definitely a reinforcing cycle in either direction. Transforming the intellectual/logical inputs into instincts by making them regular habits is key.
Relaxation, or mental detachment from false beliefs or needs, is willpower. Imprinting habits works, but not if it conflicts with the aforementioned principle.
Yes of course. Humans are perfectly logical beings rationally weighing evidence. "reinforcement/instinctual processes" get a mention at the end, expressed in a negative light, yet this is the greatest source of motivation/willpower in existence.
I had to look at the optical illusion a couple of times to see them as other than straight and parallel. They automatically look straight to me. I've done a lot of art training, which seems to be affecting this more than some other optical illusions.
Looking closely is like other things -- we probably *can* use alternative systems to overrule instinctual ones, but not immediately. In the case of seeing in a way that's useful for things like drawing complex patterns, it usually involves several months of intentional practice. The first several dozen times I had to do visual exercises like live figure drawing, blind contour drawing, or perspective from life, it was unpleasant and I felt sort of angry about it. It took a lot of -- not exactly willpower, but actually going to live classes where someone was telling me what to do, and timing it. But afterwards it was fine and even enjoyable. It felt like visual muscle building, very analogous to other forms of exercise. I still don't draw or paint for my own amusement, though; I only ever do it for other people, even though I don't mind it once I've started.
As to why I'm posting here instead of painting, even though I know I'd feel better about myself after painting, and would get social approval for that... I think it has more to do with some tasks being much easier to switch in and out of than others. I'm married with a toddler, and know that writing an essay requires a four hour uninterrupted block of time, during a part of the day when I'm not tired, or at night when I won't have to get up the next morning. So I haven't written an essay in years, even though I like writing and feel accomplished afterwards. I also haven't read a challenging novel in years for similar reasons. To make a painting, I know I need something like a three hour uninterrupted block of time in a well ventilated area. This can be at night, so every once in a while I do make a painting when my daughter goes to bed, and could do so more if I bought a window fan for proper ventilation.
Reading blogs and message boards, on the other hand, can be done very easily with background noise on in three minute chunks of time (though I don't usually comment -- I have a bit more uninterrupted time at present than usually).
I've found that many of my willpower problems are actually environmental, and I can do the tasks perfectly well if I change contexts. That was also true when I was single, so it's probably not other people's fault, but simply that I'm constantly underestimating how important setting up the physical space is to achieving "willpower," and have the space set up to encouraging sitting on the couch on my laptop.
That's also true of dishes -- I have much less problem doing dishes if there's a drainer near the sink, and a plastic tub in the sink, and a clean dishrag, and a place to put the clean dishes. However, I have gone months in some houses without setting any of that up, and had dirty dishes sitting around all the time as a result.
For my money, "willpower" in the classic sense of your "intellectual agent" overpowering your "reinforcement learner" is a suckers game. The "intellectual agent" has to put in increasingly loud and desperate bids to temporarily overcome the resistance of the "reinforcement learner". Sounds like an unpleasant brain to be in! And exhausting.
How much better it would be for your "reinforcement learner" to experience doing your homework as rewarding. But the more your "intellectual agent" tries to exert pressure, the less likely the "reinforcement learner" is to think of homework as a fulfilling and worthwhile pursuit.
Incidentally, I disagree on your assessment of an alcoholic hitting rock bottom. To me, for the most part, hitting rock bottom doesn't work because your intellectual agent finally receives enough ammunition for his fight with the reinforcement learner - rock bottom is powerful because the negative effects finally have become so obvious that they were felt by the "reinforcement learner". I'm a bit uncomfortable keeping the binary distinction between brain functions here. In essence, rock bottom in my opinion is not about thoughts, it is about *feeling* the impact in a way that causes a significant Bayesian update by the brain.
Not sure how your theory differs materially from the "subagent" model, aside from terminology relabeling. Also, your model seems to have some trouble addressing the concept of willpower fatigue. Why would the balance between the processes change merely because of the length of time they have been in conflict -- if their respective power is entirely based on the quality of their evidence? The quality of the evidence doesn't change with time (or duration of the struggle).
Are you suggesting willpower *doesn't* fade, that this is an illusion? I have certainly personally experienced a fading of willpower -- you are able to do X or Y because of a determination to do so, but after a certain length of success it *does* appear more difficult not to fall off the wagon, so to speak. Have you not?
So how would your model explain why the balance of power between the processes can shift based on nothing more than the passage of time? (One possibility: that the intellectual process always tends to overestimate the rewards attendant on "doing your homework" -- a version of the Planning Fallacy -- and that therefore after the intellectual process succeeds for a while, and more concrete evidence is gathered for its actual rewards, the evidence of its superiority begins to weaken.)
If this decision making willpower process runs on dopamine, could general increase in dopamine (like by antidepressants) make it better in some people?
The alcoholism example is illustrative of the non-triviality of willpower deficits (as Scott suggests), since, biologically, after the disease has progressed past a certain point, alcohol itself becomes the medicine that treats the acute illness that rises to the surface whenever alcohol is absent.
Critics with deficiencies of empathy enjoyed mocking disease theories of addiction, preferring to celebrate willpower as something, well, simply ordered up by the will. But this example illustrates the conflict isn't purely a standoff between the intellect and instinct -- and I would guess this phenomenon bleeds over into more pedestrian examples of employing will (like, say, doing homework), whereby some people, for varying reasons, struggle against brain-chemical imbalances that utterly muddle the ways in which the mind uses its tools.
Maybe it's his consequentialist leanings throwing me off course, but I can't really make sense of Scott's conclusion -- that what he finds most valuable about theorizing on willpower is that it provides evidence that willpower actually exists. I thought Scott effectively ripped apart Caplan's gun-to-the-head "test" (which ludicrously insists that if you can do something with a gun to the head you should be able to do it anytime, anywhere), so why so insistent about defending such a loaded and archaic term?
Once again I find myself reading along pretty much in synch, but then baffled by the conclusions and memes Scott manages to extract from the exploration process. It's probably all tangled up with the great difficulty I have comprehending how any empathetic determinist could settle on libertarianism as the most rational response to the lottery that is life. I'm just a boring old liberal, but the more I learn about how much is just chemistry, the more I prioritize taking care of one another, whereas the consequentialist libertarian impulse always seems to default to motionlessness when it comes to politics.
Perhaps paternalistic consequentialism is useful in a therapeutic setting, but I think the most reasonable political conclusions for an increasingly rational society will sooner or later (hopefully sooner) be perfectly aligned with the universal basic income (for example).
I don't think that particular sequence of requests demonstrates the point, although I don't know how you could have done it better.
I've had blogs ask me to get up, reach for the sky, take a couple deep breaths, touch my toes, and come back to the blog. And I did it. For yours, I did the first one, but I was reading ahead to the second, and the third, and the fourth, and it just seemed like a lot of stuff to do. If you had asked me immediately to just stand up and jump, I probably would have: I wouldn't have rolled around on the floor in any case, that just isn't the sort of thing that I do.
There is an inhibitory force that pushes against going down a chain of arbitrary instructions. I'm ADD, so it's stronger for me, but I'm fairly confident everyone experiences this.
I have no valid comment on willpower, having none myself. However, I do understand that the opportunity cost for putting away dishes is 5 seconds less of Civ time, then the dishes have to wait.
I like posts like this a lot, but at the same time it often seems too convenient to completely subscribe to the views presented. It seems a little *too* simple, elegant, and fortunate, that we often end up analyzing important critical systems (e.g. willpower) and conclude that they operate on a well-known, mathematically elegant system, which we all happen to know and love quite a bit.
I still think they're useful systems and models for analyzing and reasoning about the underlying substrates, but I do wonder how accurate such models really will end up being.
If your conception of the will generates the problem of akrasia, and thus the necessity of a concept of willpower to explain deficiencies in will then maybe it's your conception of the will that's deficient. Aristotle framed the problem wrong and we won't get on the right track again until we question our greek inherited conceptions of the problem.
This paper gives a brief introduction to an alternative, for the problem of moral akrasia specifically, that I'm partial to.
One of the problems with this theorising is the lack of empirical basis. I come from a linguistics background, and what was interesting about what Chomsky did early on was that he very explicitly divorced his theory from the underlying brain mechanisms. He sought a formal theory of language, and only decades later did he attempt to map it to any kind of neurological process. He was able to do that because language corpora are massive and easily available, and come in discrete chunks of easily-evaluated data.
Willpower theorising doesn't have that empirical base to work off, and so it seems stuck in a theoretic-empirical mush.
What would be useful would be to have some - pretty much any - operational definition of willpower that can be easily empirically assessed. The problem at the moment is that anything that someone does can be evaluated as either (a) an example of willpower (because they did something they willed themselves to do) or (b) an example of failure of willpower (because they did something they were willing themselves not to do); and there doesn't seem to be any good formal model that allows us to distinguish between the two.
I object to the claim about hitting bottom. We have no evidence anything is going on here other than things tending to get worse once they get out of control until the person finally decides to stop.
Are you familiar with Robert Pirsig's thoughts on electroconvulsive therapy? Here is a passage from Lila that seems relevant to your model:
"The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. Its value is that it destroys all patterns, both cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporally in a Dynamic state. All the shock does is duplicate the effect of hitting the patient over the head with a baseball bat. It simply knocks the patient senseless. . . . But what goes unrecognised in a subject-object theoretical structure is the fact that this senseless unpatterned state is a valuable state of existence. Once the patient is in this state the psychiatrists of course don't know what to do with it, and so the patient often slips back into lunacy and has to be knocked senseless again and again. But sometimes the patient, in a moment of Zen wisdom, sees the superficiality of both his own contrary patterns and the cultural patterns, sees that one gets electrically clubbed day after day and the other sets him free from the institution, and thereupon makes a wise mystic decision to get the hell out of there by whatever avenue is available."
Of course Pirsig was largely focused on his particular East-West philosophical fusion, and his attitudes toward ECT were very much a product of his time. But your Bayesian take on rock-bottom alcoholism reminded me of this "moment of Zen wisdom" Pirsig describes from his own experience with ECT.
I find that things that I don't think of as productive or don't contain valuable experiences become less attractive to me over time, such that I often don't feel like finishing side objectives in games, and am not attracted at all to mobile "time waster" games. But I'll still play the tales gacha game because it's my favourite series so I attach value to experiencing it.
I do have trouble resisting sweets especially if they're nearby, but once I researched micro and macro nutrients and low fodmap foods etc, it became much easier to eat them (eg now I'm quite fond of spinach). And once I set an imaginary "max weight" on the scale it became much easier for me to stay under it... once I determine the benefits of a specific exercise it becomes much easier to keep doing it consistently.
I don't know if this anecdote is helpful at all I just felt motivated to share it.
"Failed to replicate" + Kurtzban glucose arguments.
Those are very distinct issues.
1. The glucose explanation isn't critical to echo depletion theory. It is a possible explanation, that even Baumeister himself wasn't sure about as early as 2010. And he never bothered that much to sustain it
2. Replication trials have failed miserably in the eyes of the strong replication crowd - not always the most reputable crowd, as any replication - however badly summer - is always a decisive refutation in their eyes.
There was a RRR multi lab study, which tried to get the full procedure pre-approved by Baumeister himself, and it failed to replicate. But there were interesting cover arguments but Baumeister himself.
Generally, there is no consensus that it is a refuted effect. With even some replication fans refusing to have a revised view
Wife (After 1 sec): Yes. They didn’t *look* parallel at first, but I could tell from the distances at the ends that they must be. Then I squinted my eyes and they *looked* parallel, too.
I think there's a way to test this...sorta. If you have someone who regularly takes Adderall and is productive on Adderall, what happens when you replace the Adderall with a bottle that's 50% Adderall and 50% placebo? Does the effect of the Adderall get weaker even on the days where's he's taking real Adderall? Is the placebo impressively effective? Does the placebo get stronger if they're given a bottle with 75% Adderall and told as much?
Also possibly useful is this excerpt summarizing Scott's theory:
His theory says that your brain collects and weights evidence from different mental subprocesses to determine every action you take. The three subprocesses are:
1. Do nothing
2. Do what’s most immediately rewarding
3. Do what you consciously deem best
These all submit evidence via dopamine to your basal ganglia and the winner determines what action you take. There’s a high prior probability on “do nothing” being best, which can be overridden by high enough anticipation of reward, which can be overridden by high enough evidence from your conscious mind.
In this theory, akrasia — Scott Alexander says “lack of willpower” — is an imbalance in these subprocesses. Physiologically maybe that means insufficient dopamine in your frontal cortex such that the evidence from your conscious brain is underweighted. (Dopaminergic drugs seem to increase willpower so I guess that argues in favor of the theory? I’m so out of my depth here.) Hacking your motivation would mean increasing the evidence supplied by your intellectual/logical brain.
Among the godfathers of A.I. research, Geoff Hinton has proposed neural network models in recent years ("Capsule Networks" and "GLOM") which operate as you describe. Yet, it seems critical to remember, also, that many impulses are paradoxical *on purpose*. For example, you have a drive for stability and comfort, while also having a drive toward curiosity and surprise - the result is often a subtle compromise, *sensitive* to the environment. When two *springs* oppose each other this way, neither extreme is meant to win - they are a spring-gauge, measuring with sensitivity. I'd gone into this concept in more detail in "Inertia of Loss", Anthony Repetto.
1. The tendency to do conscious planning is an assembly of stimulus/response behaviors just like doing what worked in the past is a stimulus/response behavior. So it makes some difference how you do your conscious planning - a scheme that succeeds will be easier to do than a scheme that doesn't. Willpower is the extent to which the assembly of stimulus/response behaviors that constitute conscious planning is functioning.
2. If you have a false model of how the world works, then conscious planning that presupposes the false belief won't give good results. That detrains the stimulus/response chains that are conscious planning, so it decreases the ability to do conscious planning. So beliefs matter and false beliefs are harmful to willpower.
I would like feedback on whether these additions are plausible and useful.
This predicts that, other things being equal, succeeding at an intentional act gives you more willpower and failing gives you less. I don't remember this claim being stated in the willpower research, so either it is new, it is already disproven, or I haven't read and retained as much of the existing willpower research as I would have liked.
WIllpower seems to decrease over the course of the day. Eg, most people break diets at night. Yet, the 'evidence' does not seem to fluctuate as much within a day. How is your theory of willpower consistent with this empirical fact?
I very much doubt Wayne was in "perfect mental health" before the long COVID. In so many cases highly successful entrepreneurs are bipolar. But they are manic 98% of the time and manic in a highly productive way. This is of course not limited to entrepreneurs. If you read about Winston Churchill's time during the Boer War he was absolutely fearless and convinced he couldn't die. And at other times he encountered what he called his black dog (depression).
I've heard about people using meditation to manage fibromyalgia. And I belong to a synesthesia email list / discussion group where people occasionally talk about filtering out obstructive synesthesia by training themselves to pay less attention to it. Those examples seem to indicate there's room for people to learn to filter out unhelpful signals, as you've done with tinnitus, and we might expect some to be better at it than others.
Then again, my own experiences give me reason to doubt that someone who is good at filtering will be less prone to developing psychosomatic pain in the first place. I've been filtering tinnitus pretty well since I was nine years old. As someone with hyperfocus, I'm good at filtering out distracting environmental noise in general. But I've experienced psychosomatic pain as a result of anxiety (for me, it came on as a skin sensitivity, like being really sunburned). I wouldn't expect that to happen if my filter were guarding me against background signals becoming over-represented in my consciousness. Ignoring it got me through the day, but the thing that made it actually go away was reducing my anxiety.
I suppose you could argue that anxiety itself is a signal booster, in that it makes people hypersensitive. Perhaps the anxiety punched a bunch of holes in my filter for a while. But I didn't notice any reduction in my capacity to focus on tasks to the total exclusion of everything else around me, and I don't recall the tinnitus being any worse. I tend to block out the world more when I'm anxious.
On the subject of tinnitus, I notice that certain environmental triggers make it "louder", like drinking, being dehydrated, changes in altitude, and migraines.
I know some people who say they have hit rock bottom and that's helped, I don't know how common the phenomenon is.
Thanks for the links - I was in the middle of writing something on this exact thing when I came across your comment, and somehow had missed these.
If you skip to the bottom there's a list of a bunch more, in case you're interested - https://soterion.substack.com/p/on-the-heights-of-rock-bottom
It would seem that the obvious answer is something akin to "you find things in the last place you looked", i.e. you always turn around at 'rock bottom' because wherever you turn around gets defined as rock bottom
That sounds like a sophism though. When people describe hitting rock bottom and quiting, they really describe very harsh situations (if that's the very bottom the could go to is irrelevant, rock bottom is a casual expression meaning being impacted very hard, not some absolute measurement). And conversely, people who easily quit, or quit while they were ahead, don't describe their turn as having happened at "rock bottom".
Maybe not a "sophism". People who claim to have hit "rock bottom" aren't trying to pull one over on everyone else, and neither is EternalTango!
I think "rock bottom" is a fuzzy concept whose application is weakly conditional on a combination of the phenomena you and EternalTango point out.
When someone represents a time in their life as "rock bottom," they might be "wrong" by some criteria, but that doesn't really matter: what's really interesting about the concept is that its application reveals how people are representing their lives to themselves.
In "Things I have been meaning to look up for a long time and I have finally been triggered to do something about right now", do you have any recommendations for good first-hand accounts of people who were prescribed those dangerously high levels of antipsychotics? It sounds like a fascinating result.
I can't think of one! But I bet it's common enough (despite my saying it's usually not done these days) that someone will show up here who can tell you about it first-hand.
I sometimes watch youtube videos from schizophrenics on such medication. And it seems common for their schizophrenia to be comorbid with a mood disorder, which in their depressive phase causes them to just lay in bed rather than do anything. So how do you model someone taking both an antipsychotic which is reducing their odds of hearing voices with an antidepressant getting them up and out of bed at the same time. Are they somehow both more and less confident at the same time? Do anti-depressants target the lowest/muscular level well enough not to cause voices whereas antipsychotics are not so well targeted to their level? And why isn't it anti-depressants that are known for causing physical tics?
You know, I bet this makes the combination of bipolar and schizophrenia absolute hell to treat.
Off the top of my head it also points toward why aripiprazole is one of the better-liked drugs for this - doesn't kick you in the "do nothing" button as hard as something like haloperidol or thorazine does and apparently also does something to mitigate depression (in ways that are utterly mysterious to me).
Schizoaffective disorder is by far the most common diagnosis in psychiatric hospitals. It enables psychiatrists to prescribe antipsychotic, mood stabilizing, and antidepressant medication without filling out extra paperwork
I'm not sure this is worth arguing against, but as a psychiatrist, I can say this isn't really true. The amount of paperwork is really the same, and using the schizoaffective diagnosis doesn't offer a short cut to anything practical.
Isn't it supposed to be similar to the "natural" version of people with Parkinsons'?
I'm curious how this interacts with the idea of willpower as a finite resource. It's a lot easier to skip dessert at a restaurant for example than to walk by the doughnuts on kitchen counter all day. Maybe this is due to the "eat doughnut now" agent updating its belief every time you see them, whereas your frontal cortex only has a baseline prior? If your brain accumulates evidence over a time period instead of just polling at a given instant, then "reusing" evidence might lead to that particular failure mode.
Studies of willpower as an expendable resource in the traditional sense haven't really replicated. And yet I agree with you about the donuts. Maybe it's just that you have to "reroll" every time you pass them (I don't know what that would actually cash out to)?
I do find that if, the first time I reject them, I promise myself I'm not going to have them today, I can usually stick to that pretty easily - it's having to remake the decision each time which is hard.
Will power is best modeled as an "impulse" force, not a continuous force. It's not about running out of willpower, it's mainly just only suitable to overcome certain kinds of problems (and then, only for a short amount of time).
If you need willpower to accomplish something long term, you will likely fail. Instead, you should focus on altering your thinking so that willpower isn't need at all (i.e. you actually _want_ to do the thing). Harder than it sounds, but it's the only path forward.
Or better yet, alter the environment/structures so you don't have to face the temptation at all. Keep the donuts out of the kitchen, set up your schedule so you CAN'T lie in bed once awake, make a routine out of going to the gym ....
being forced to (even by a self-arranged set-up) is the OPPOSITE to being strong of will ... is it not?
Hmmmm, possibly. But the way I think about is that we only need will power when the decision system isn't doing what our higher cognitive functions prefer, because other preferences are too strong. So allowing those higher cognitive functions to set the world around us up in such a way that this happens less often is actually an indirect application of will power.
And then we get to experience the rewards of doing what our higher cognitive functions prefer, which reinforces its power, which increases will power overall ....
A very nice working "definition" of "will power" as an enforcer of the system-2 higher cognitive function over the system-1 instincts/evolutionary instincts... So now we take our issue up with the cognitive function, the "supreme court" one: SHOULD we delegate some tasks to the pool of being enforced in the law/practice? To go for a dip and to swim instead of just sitting one's lunch break out is a good use of our will... but say dishes? no! engage your family to help, re-organize so you do less of it, a fair share... and so on. So if we "must" force ourselves, must we indeed? it depends...
I think that's the point. No matter how strong your will is it's not as strong as just not being tempted in the first place, so the latter is more reliable if you can arrange it.
What you say is true for the end purpose to perform a task A which is according to your system-2 mind but against your system-1 instinct, but is a hypothetical task A the ultimate goal of a will exercise?
What if your purpose is to practice your willpower for a future task far higher than a task A (or to train somebody for a higher task)?
A couple of "silly oversimplified" yet sufficient to illustrate examples:
A municipality installs sidewalks and "zebra" road crossings at the spots picked by people's instinctive conveniences. For example, where they stomp on the grass more and a trail appears.
Nobody is tempted to stroll on grass or cross a road at the wrong spot.
The municipality's objectives are achieved in a better way (as you state correctly) than to have each person fight the urge to shortcut.
People from this municipality travel to another locale, another country, where it is expected of a pedestrian to mind the cars (and not the other way around). They travel for a conference.
On the second day of the conference, the hosting country sends a horse-mounted police regiment to block the road by their hotel each time there is a break in the talks for a lunch and when the talks end.
In order to guard the visitors' crossing the road separating the hotel from the beach.
Because all the locals are shocked the visitors step straight into traffic to go to the beach across from their hotel. And only the first-rate reaction time of the local drivers saves the lives of the visitors.
The drivers are not expecting they need to slow down, they expect the pedestrians to wait for them to pass before crossing.
A few conference guests are ok though, with or without such special guards. These have been raised in a similar to the host country set of rules.
Instead of hurrying to the welcoming beach, they restrain themselves (here is the spot where the willpower comes in our discussion 😁) to look left-right-left-again before crossing the road.
You may generalize for smth more important, sports or ...
But this particular example I was an eyewitness to :)...
this is happening automatically when you achieve professionalism in something, it becomes a pleasure, not a painful effort, but then you need your willpower again to expand your realm of topics you are professional at...
"Decision fatigue" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ) is a concept with a name which maps well onto my experience of this phenomenon, but I have no idea whether it actually has any evidence behind it. It's possible that this reflects some distinct but intermingled phenomenon, which accounts for the anecdotal experience of exhaustible willpower?
Much like an Iron Man athlete will perform ~300x more athletic actions per day than an average person, a trained "decision maker" can make 100s more decisions per hour without additional fatigue. For example, active gamers or day traders(pre-HF trading) could be making a decision per second. These are actual conscious decisions. Yes, it's tiring, but is several orders of magnitude than medium decision rate.
Well, speaking as a ex-pro poker player, this isn't quite right. The vast majority of decisions they make are obvious (to a pro but not necessarily to an amateur). Almost always the right choice clearly outweighs the alternatives, and it's effortlessly provided by subconscious systems, which in turn were created and trained by thousand of hours of training and practice.
I've noticed that low end restaurants try to make their menu more appealing by adding extra choices (four types of bun, eight optional toppings, three types of patty, three types of fries, two sizes of fries, four sauces, etc.) while high end restaurants try to make their menu more appealing by taking away choices (prix fixe for the whole table, $75 per person, plus the cost of the suggested wine pairings). My explanation of this had been that people who go to a casual burger place in their off hours are often people who spend all day following orders from someone else, while someone who eats at a high end restaurant like that mentioned above is a person who spends all day making complex strategic decisions.
It could also be that a truly world class chef is able to choose better than me but a mediocre chef isn't. So if the chef is world class I want him to decide the whole menu but if he's mediocre I want customization
Making a promise to yourself to reject them next time might be a way for the frontal cortex to increase its evidential weight, or add to the accumulator. If evidence is only added in response to events, that would make sense. So something like making a promise or reading an article saying that doughnuts are bad for you would do it, while just passively resisting wouldn't, which squares with my experience.
If eating now, promising not to eat next time, one only re-enforces the bad habit of feeling good through promising, yes? And brainwashing your own brain (even as a promise to read an article) will be met by a fierce resistance of your inner self: on may promise to RESEARCH about healthy eating habits instead... Donuts are ugly, maybe use a fine 3D printed pastry for this example, otherwise, there is little temptation!
In the particular case of dessert at a restaurant, you've probably also just eaten a (possibly large) meal immediately before the point at which you're deciding about dessert. I don't think you need finite willpower to explain this one. :)
Do you not distinguish different types of "willpower", stuffed in the same term? Some are indeed expEndable, some, on the contrary, expAndable, that is they increase the more one uses them...-?
'Rerolling' makes sense to me; you'd expect the confidence of the 'eating donut will be good' bid to be higher if you're hungry or low blood sugar, for instance.
Another explanation might be the fact that doing this calculation is not itself a costless process; all these brain systems are bidding dopamine and making a decision each time you look at the donut, and that neural process costs glucose! This might put increasing confidence on the prediction 'just leaving that donut on the table will hurt me' every time you see it, at which point you feel compelled to do *something* about it, and usually choose to eat it over throw it away.
This matches the folk ontology that has 2 types of people: those who decide to go on a run once and then never consider the question again while they run, and those who have to decide at basically every step whether to take the next step or not. The first, the story goes, are the types of people who can stick to running, and the second generally can’t. Relatedly, the first group suffers less during the run, while the second group suffers anew with each step.
I don’t have a solid model of exactly what’s happening here, but the first group rhymes with precommitting to not eat the donut that day.
Oh, this is cool! I didn't know there were these two types. I'm the first type, but do hate running, so getting over that decision hill is hard, but once I'm out there, it's much easier. It truly must be torture to have to decide again and again ....
Easier still to just figure out which type of physical activity I enjoy, though. In my case, that's anything 'smooth'; biking, roller blading, ice skating, skiiing.... Apparently I hate jolts. Or anything involving loud lively music and someone yelling at me about what to do next, with little repetition - greatly reduces the boredom. Lifting weights or working on machines makes me want to shoot myself, so repetitive. Oh, damn, for those, I DO have to decide every. single. rep. No wonder I can't do it .....
Saying those are two kinds of people is wrong, though. Those are two different decision processes. One can switch from one to another (though it isn't easy). And actually there are considerably more than two kinds of decision process. Each kind is better at some things and worse at others...but just which things varies considerably with the process.
E.g.: How to you add 2 and 2? How do you multiply 12 times 11? In the second case it's generally easier to see that there are multiple approaches. But notice that almost nobody uses as their first step "well, first you convert to hexadecimal" or "first you convert to binary", even though those can both work. (Of course the hexadecimal version requires a table lookup into a set of memorized values...but it can still work.)
Now generalize this. How do you represent the decision to yourself? Do you hear it? Is it your own voice? Etc.
I strongly distrust arguments that evaluate people as Bayesian reasoners. I have a strong belief that they tend to use heuristic short-cuts whenever possible. Ideally those short-cuts would arrive at the same answer, but often they don't. However they're enough quicker and "cheaper" that some amount of error is accepted as "worth it". After all, Bayesian reasoning isn't infallible either.
All 3 of binary, decimal, and hexadecimal versions of multiplying 12 times 11 require table lookups into a set of memorized values... except you only do it once for hexadecimal.
You have the most interesting points, but please please change the main item on the menu of the analogies: Krispy now offers FREE DAILY DONUTS to all immunized from COVID-19, and I doubt there will be many claimers! Donuts suck, they are too sweet and not artistically presented and not tasty at all... use, say, a huge juicy steak, or an elaborate 3D printed cake, etc - yes?no?
I've never liked doughnuts - too fatty and sugary - except when I went to Japan and encountered Mr Donut. Their doughnuts are delicious! https://favy-jp.com/topics/430
One D&D blogger I read refers to "roll to failure" game systems - i.e., just keep doing checks until one fails, then it's over. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38798/roleplaying-games/gm-dont-list-2-rolling-to-failure
This might be the same thing, in some ways. If you have a good willpower day, you might a 95% chance of avoiding doughnuts, so you can go an average of 20 doughnut-based thoughts before succumbing to temptation. On a bad-willpower day, you only have a 50% chance, so you'll get up for a tasty doughnut the second time you think about it, on average. It can feel like it's a finite and depleting resource, even if it's totally independent every time, because of how that works out - you stop counting when you fail.
"I do find that if, the first time I reject them, I promise myself I'm not going to have them today, I can usually stick to that pretty easily - it's having to remake the decision each time which is hard."
This accords with my experience of weight management. I find it far easier to rule out classes of food (e.g. sweets) than to moderate my consumption of them. However, apparently this is not everyone's experience.
This "decision to decide automatically" exist in the literature
"Implementation Intention" is the name of it. And a large experimental literature supports it
I'm guessing that this is the Bayesian update for the strength of the evidence. If your conscious process starts sending very strong signals (e.g. because you power through using willpower), maybe your aggregator has a strong prior on what proportion of overall evidence throughout the day will come from your conscious reasoning and what proportion will come from more instinctive RL stuff or from the prior on motionlessness, and after a while starts giving lower weight to intellectual impulses.
E.g., calling prior on motionlessness/inertia = S0, reinforcement learning stuff = impulses = S1, intellectual agent = conscious reasoning = S2, suppose that the aggregator expects to receive signals of a proportion something like 40%, 40%, 20% for S0/S1/S2 respectively. Meaning that throughout a period of time, the aggregator has a strong prior that the Sum(Signals from S_i) / (Sum(Signals from S_0) + Sum(Signals from S_1) + Sum(Signals from S_2)) = 40%, resp. 20%.
S2 normally sends signals in the 1-10 range, but now starts sending signals in the 10-100 range (forcing yourself to do something). This works less and less as times goes on, because S2 was only supposed to send signals worth 20% of the total evidence, but is now sending much stronger evidence throughout a period of time, and so they e.g., get applied a lower weight. I.e., if S2 misuses a fire alarm of intensity 80/100 to signal something normal, like a lunch break or the end of a period of class, that fire alarm will get reinterpreted to mean something normal (and now you don't have a signal for a fire alarm).
So far this is just a restatement of "intellectual willpower is a thing", but it also sort of feels reasonable that you'd have a prior of how much evidence throughout a period of time S2 is supposed to contribute.
Don't forget that how hungry you are and how recently you've had a dopamine hit from a similar source will also impact the importance/wieght of the signal to 'eat that sweet' into the decision making process. When you've just finished a satisfying meal, hunger is low and rewards from eating are recent and high - much easier to resist.
to the specifics of the metaphor, this donut on the table is totally non-tempting and cr*py, while dessert at a restaurant is usually very tempting... and you do not have to clean up the table after you have it :)
Though I'm probably taking the example too seriously, it seems to me that there are major differences between the temptation a box of doughnuts on a counter and dessert at a restaurant.
Firstly, ordering dessert at the restaurant requires me to choose a dessert, tell that choice to the waiter, and then sit patiently and wait for it to arrive. While the doughnuts on the counter can be had by simply opening the box and grabbing one. Way less investment in time and calories for the latter.
Secondly, ordering dessert at a restaurant requires paying money. And I don't like paying money for things. Plus if it's a good restaurant you know that dessert wont be cheap. While a box of doughnuts on the kitchen counter have a) already been paid for and thus require no new expenditure of resources to acquire and b) probably cost a lot less per calorie then a restaurant dessert. This leads directly to point c) the doughnuts will go stale if nobody eats them today, and if they do then the money to buy them was wasted. It's usually point c) that tips me over into eating the doughnut. We don't waste food in this house.
> tell that choice to the waiter
Highlighting this: in a restaurant, the decision is social—immediately visible to at least the person you are ordering from, and also any people you are eating with. Their expected disapproval—or your status in general—is thus more salient than when you're alone in your house sneaking a donut.
It is probably not the same for everyone but *immediate* social reinforcement can certainly be a factor in willpower: if the boss who wants me working is looking over my shoulder, Civ isn't even going to be on the screen.
It might be that attention plays a role that looks like "willpower is a finite ressource". For attention, it is well-established that this is a finite ressource in some sense. Predictive Processing would even say that by definition, attention is when your predictions fail. So if you can predict input from some brain subsystem well enough, you are unable to pay attention to it.
In terms of the donut being available all day, it can totally happen to me that I will eat it eventually. And it would usually happen when I am distracted, or otherwise not paying attention, and I grab it on automatic mode. One of the most common lessons for eating healthy is that you should only eat when you are paying attention to it. (Only at meals, without distractions.) Perhaps "eating absently" is a mode where the baseline prior and the reinforcement evidence are actively sending signals to the decision center, but the logical brain is not? According to predictive processing, the decision center would still take the opinion of the logical brain into account, but only in a generic way: "as always, your logic center probably would want you to do the dishes, nothing special today".
Taking this thought one step further, predictive processing turns your brain into a device for Bayesian reasoning. If you are faced with the decision to do homework for the hundredth time, and every time your logical reasoning has told you that it is totally good for your career, then this output is predictable and thus no longer propagated into your decision center. Old information is generally not re-evaluated. If you are lucky, then the information is properly accounted for in the decision that your decision center predicts (rumours say that some people actually do the dishes right after cooking as a matter of routine), but it should be quite hard to re-evaluate this information. Perhaps you still hear the tiny little voice telling you that sitting on the couch is bad for you, but you shrug it off because you already know what it's saying. Well, unless something surprising or specific comes into play: if you suddenly remember the test for tomorrow, this information might be new enough to be accounted for. Or if you actually discuss you thought processes with someone else, it might actually "give" you the willpower to do it, against your usual habits.
This fits with what we know about tonic and phasic dopamine signaling. As a stimulus becomes habituated, phasic release decreases into the more background tonic dopamine release. The stimulus of a test tomorrow changes the low level dopamine release to more phasic impulses to drive across to study. Meds that affect dopamine signaling have a big effect on the balance or efficacy of the tonic/ phasic system of dopamine release.
or the doughnuts have already been paid for
My understanding:
Imagine you tell someone "You need to stand perfectly still, and jump every ten seconds, until I tell you otherwise, or else you'll *die*!". And then you show them an extremely complicated, but sensible-sounding explanation of how they'll die if they don't comply.
If you ask them to do that for five minutes, they're probably going to listen. They really don't want to die, after all. After three hours of this, though, unless you have *really* compelling evidence, they're going to tell you to fuck off. You probably made up your fancy science papers explaining why their life is in danger. At some point the ground-up "I hate this and I don't want to do this" mode takes over and overrules the top-down evidence.
(for a more grounded metaphor, look at what happens when politicians try to pass carbon taxes to fight climate change)
if you want to play Civilization in a way that doesn't require willpower to stop playing, I recommend "Play By Email"-style, one turn at a time. You can't binge, and it makes it social. This website facilitates it well, and here's a game for ACX readers ( password: willpower ) https://www.playyourdamnturn.com/game/a7c9c3ae-6165-45d7-8241-0b5a082d90d7
Indeed, I do mull things over between turns, but that's more of a pleasant distraction rather than actually interfering with life. Maybe?
Dude, don't tempt me when only at a nearly two month streak of not playing games.
Also, several times when I started playing a game for social reasons, I found myself within the next week compulsively playing single player strategy games like Civ for the next month or so.
I once played a game of office Diplomacy, with 48 hour turns, lasting a few weeks. I got less done at work than I have ever done, before or since, despite each "turn" taking at most a minute or so to input moves.
That's because it's Diplomacy, in which the action occurs in the time between inputting moves.
Of course- but some measure of that would be true in a multiplayer PBEM Civ game too, if composed of people that think like Diplomacy players.
It depends on how you play. A lot of people like to play Civ VI "gunboat" where there's no out-of-game negotiating and everything needs to be done through the limited in game diplomatic options, which really cuts down on the potential time-sink aspect.
Also I haven't done "Play by email" but in the "play by cloud" option that's built-into the game, you literally can't look at the map between turns.
---
But, yeah I used to play correspondence Diplomacy in college, and it was an incredible time-sink for something that theoretically only *needed* a few minutes every other day. I "took a break" years ago and still haven't gone back.
Freeciv (the open source clone of Civilization) also has play by email, and also has "long turn" games where every player does 1 turn/day.
http://freeciv.org/
I've long thought that it is game designer malpractice that Civilization just has a "next turn" button - it should also have a "one more turn" button, which lets you play the next turn, but then converts the "next turn" button at the end to "save and quit". It would be so much easier to actually hit the "one more turn" button, and while you could always re-open the game after the forced save and quit after the next turn, it would give you a much cleaner break, and would be directly reinforcing a choice that you yourself made.
'member Civilization Anonymous ?
https://web.archive.org/web/20050526235309/http://www.civanon.org/
"No more turns ! No more turns !"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLqW7G8797U
I find the nature of my own willpower to be quite perplexing. My willpower seems to suffer from a strong inertia that resets each day after a night's sleep. If I wake and begin my day by sitting down at my desk (or doing some other 'productive task') then I am on a clear track towards 12+ hours of productive work that comes easily. However, if I begin my day with a non-productive indulgence (youtube, social media, even reading something without a clear purpose) I am catapulted into a repetitive cycle of lethargy that is likely to consume my day, and I am unlikely to get fully back on track until I start again the next morning.
The strange thing is that the dominant variable seems to exclusively be the arbitrary decision I make at the start of the day (sit at desk and work or sit on desk/couch and browse), and not any of the variables you might expect (amount of sleep the night before, caffeine intake, general mood). Curious to know if others experience something similar or if this is just my own quirky psychology.
Perhaps your sleep, caffeine intake, and general mood influence the "arbitrary" starting decision. Especially since you have realized its large effect on the rest of your day.
Certainly true, but I really feel that these and the other expected factors have an R^2 of less than 50% for me. Even in the presence of the typical negative influences, including those that are clearly negative such as hangover, I find that if the right starting decision is made then the entire trajectory of the day is different. To use the dopamenergic theory, its as though the initial decision sets off a feedback loop in either direction, either: 1) begin working, mood/dopamine levels improve because I am being productive, which causes me to continue to be more productive, which causes my mood to continue to increase and so on, or 2) I start with something indulgent, which reduces mood/dopamine levels, which leads to more unproductive behavior and so on. Still the weird thing for me, and it seems others, is that this initial decision seems to be significantly independent from the expected factors and further seems instigate a set point for the days mood neurochemical balance that is not easily overturned.
I found the same thing as Monty, and greatly increased my productivity by habitually turning my internet off every evening before going to sleep, and having some rules about when / for what reasons it was allowed to turn it back on the next day after waking.
I'm the same way. I don't know why it happens, but I always figured it was something about:
* The sheer amount of time (or perception of which) at the beginning of the day gives me a boost in confidence that I have enough time to do it, and I'm relaxed and in a positive state of mind because I don't feel a need to rush.
* The initial failure kickstarting a negative self-confidence loop.
* The overall ambiance and aesthetic of morning time is strongly associated with energy and positivity for me. As quality of the day itself gradually changes into regular daytime hours, so too do my mood and thought processes. And, maybe that initial wrong-choice actually took enough time that the change in daylight quality is actually noticeable.
Yes, totally agree with the first two points. There is probably something insightful to be gleaned from the fact that these initial decisions can be so important - and I was more able to direct this initial decisions that initiatives the feedback loop. Agree with three too, though this is more idiosyncratic for me as an early morning is one of the few times that I know I am free of meetings and so can actually get deep work done
My experience is similar. I can almost guarantee my work-day will be an unproductive struggle if I go anywhere near Hacker News, Substack, YouTube, social media, or similar while I'm having breakfast. My solution is to avoid any sort of "content consumption" before starting work. I do Stoic exercises or just think about the day ahead instead.
Agreed. though yet to find something that works perfectly for myself. Modifying routine enviornment so that friction required to engage in unproductive habits has been helpful for me. Stoic exercises are an interesting idea and I'll try and give them a shot
Maybe it's corellated, not causated.
If Scott's theory is true, which... Seems a little too convenient for me... Days when you have less dopamine in the frontal cortex would mean you're more likely to watch YouTube during breakfast, and for the rest of the day
This. The observations cannot distinguish between "the first action determines the rest of the day" and "something else determines both the first action and the rest of the day".
Base your first action on a coinflip, and see whether the corellation persists.
If I had the willpower to let a coin flip determine the start of my day for a sufficient number of days in a row, then I'd presumably have the willpower to just start every day productively. Which perhaps answers the question, at least for me.
Probably the right intuition, and maybe true but per response to DrShiny this really does not seem to be the controlling factor for me. May just be my own idiosyncracies
I have the same basic pattern. My pet theory about it is that the crux is how difficult it is for me to switch contexts. Like my attention regulation system is practically categorical rather than a subtle gradient.
If I’m reading, I want to read. If I’m watching, I want to watch. If I’m playing I want to play. On the other hand, if I’m working, I want to work. If I’m focused I want to focus.
When my wife comes to me and says “Hey, do you want to suddenly start doing <activity that I really like, in the abstract>?” my initial reaction is almost always “that sounds like torture,” which is a reaction I sometimes manage to override and sometimes do not.
It does seem subjectively mediated though. If I know ahead of time that the plan for the day includes changing activities, it’s very much easier. In my mind it’s like the activity I’m doing before the change is itself plus some emotional sense of it being a prelude or preparation for the later activity, such that it all kind of feels like one thing to me, even though it’s not. Obviously my understanding is very fuzzy here.
Pete, this is an interesting observation. I would say that I experience something similar, probably a function of how we focus. I've found that structure and habit are the most effective means for getting me to focus on what I actually want to focus on long-term, as otherwise, I will also become immersed by the flavor of the day. Also, I tend to agree with your last point, I suppose expectations are important
I saw this pattern, then realized the whole day was based in how much urgency there was to the tasks I needed to do. Low urgency (no looming deadlines or just a few small tasks with deadlines), I start the day writing replies on astralcodex and similarly fritter away lots of time. Higher urgency, I start working right away and am very productive all day.
My solution to that was to have two jobs that both have lots of very strict deadlines, and to create artificial deadlines with accountability to others for the other important tasks. Still a lot of last-minute work, often not enough sleep, but high productivity! Recently I've been getting better even at the getting almost enough sleep part - but that's taken 5 and 1/2 decades ....
Karen, completely agree, sense of urgency makes all the difference in the morning (and genuine sense of urgency is probably the thing that is most likely to force me to begin a day correctly). We are fortunate to have this pathology and not the opposite. Evolution has served us well
I have the absolute opposite - I work best in the moments before bedtime and am totally incapable of doing anything useful/not immediately rewarding for about one to three hours after waking up.
If you're doing the unproductive things with your phone, the solution might be to charge it overnight in a place that you would have to physically get completely out of bed (no hacks by getting to the edge of the bed and reaching as far as you can) to access it. This would give you a small amount of time to redirect towards more productive tasks instead of just mindlessly checking your phone as soon as you wake up. If you use your phone as an alarm clock, here's a fairly sophisticated one on Amazon for only $0.01 (plus shipping and handling): https://www.amazon.com/Projection-Digital-Weather-Backlight-Patricks/dp/B08TX3QRW5/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=alarm+clock+for+bedroom&qid=1616862523&sprefix=alarm&sr=8-2
I'd go a step further, and say every exertion of willpower seems to make my willpower stronger, and every capitulation makes it weaker. Sleep acts as a reset maybe? Per Scott's depression article?
<I> prior on motionlessness (which makes you want to lie in bed doing nothing)</I>
Which is a very good idea in an environment where food is scarce. Whatever you do don’t waste energy.
Hum...how does this relate to mania?
Great post BTW! So much to think about in a way I’ve never thought about things. This is so worth the money!!!!
I think of mania as close to (probably not exactly the same as) natural stimulant - increased confidence in all mental assessments/predictions/evidence.
Let us distinguish two TOTALLY DIFFERENT (in practice, "opposite") notions:
(1) increased confidence at the expense of a loss of accuracy // pharmaceuticals-induced
(2) increased confidence as a consequence of an independently assessed increase of accuracy // natural as ...-> egg-> chicken->... : ... -> practice->accuracy->confidence->more practice->... etc
I expect manic people would be more likely to find food when it is available. So depressed people survive famine and manic people thrive in times of plenty.
> which might make you more sympathetic to people with low willpower
Which suggests the prediction that people who struggle less with willpower won't really get the point; maybe a single straight edge is enough to see through the illusion, while others have to obscure more of the pattern and have more contrast on the straightedge?
I think the implication was that people with low willpower are struggling with something fundamental in their brain, it's not a matter of laziness. Just like it's not possible to "trick" your brain into seeing the straight lines just by "trying harder", it's not possible to make a brain change it's fundamental state just by "trying harder". Something else in the situation actually had to change (the straight edge)
I said nothing about laziness, and it's very common for there to be variance between people's ability to "see through" various illusions by applying effort. The prediction is precisely that the ability to do that, or the effectiveness of it when you do it for a given level of effort, may be correlated.
Look at that last paragraph of section three. What if there were a way in Substack to code it up so that the order of the elements in the experiment were randomized per reader? Nothing too fancy, just enough to be a natural experiment
There is another issue: it's 4am where I am and I might have done the last two but I didn't want to risk waking everyone...
Likewise for me. Reading this in bed, I did the finger and arm ones, but the threshold of taking off the covers and getting out of bed to do the others was *definitely* more than I was going to do just to follow the prompt.
Same for me, but with me being in the office and not wanting everyone to look at me funny.
Scott, this is an interesting theory... but how would you factor in the (very common) perception that one's willpower is depleted? Or the feeling that, having faced an unpleasant experience one "deserves" a treat of some sort, even if it is unhelpful.
That is, your analysis of willpower makes a lot of sense in many ways, but it doesn't seem to capture the waxing and waning of willpower, or why one's "intellectual" signal might be able to override the "reinforcement" signal sometimes, but eventually fails.
If one part of your brain is constantly sending a signal that you need to do something, the controlling module is eventually going to start asking whether you *really* need to do that thing, or if the module is wrong. Or at the least, whether you should start prioritizing other goals despite the need for the original goal. So the controlling module will start down-regulating that goal. Alternatively, perhaps the other modules start saying "Hey, I haven't gotten to do my goal in a while, so I'm going to try to outbid the current module."
In the lamprey example, if the "flee-predator" region is constantly saying that the lamprey needs to flee a predator, eventually the lamprey will die of other causes (no food, for example). So over time it wants either to have the "flee-predator" goal down-regulate, or to have the "find-food" goal start to increase its priority.
Isn't willpower depletion usually framed as it being harder to resist a thing many times rather than just once? In that case, shouldn't the brain also be down-regulating e.g. the impulse to eat doughnuts every time you pass them?
If the goal is always being outbid, then over time it should continue to bid more, right? If you're at an auction house and you really just want to get something, and you keep being outbid on items, you're probably going to start bidding higher over time.
Of course lots of this is a just-so story. In a world where brains worked the opposite way, I could postulate instead that a module should bid the same amount each time, since the material conditions haven't changed, only time.
To make that more concrete, the jelly-doughnut goal isn't being down-regulated since its never actually accomplishing the goal. The only things that are down-regulated are goals that are actually accomplished. Instead the jelly-doughnut goal up-regulates itself since it keeps on not getting itself accomplished.
Basically, the system is set up so that all the goals get a chance. That generally seems to match my intuition - the "diet" goal up-regulates until it outbids, then you diet for a bit until it is down-regulated enough that the "eat junk food" goal outbids, and the cycle repeats.
I think the answer here is regression to the mean. As you walk down the street, there are untold billions of actions that you neither pursue nor feel drained for not pursuing. We notice sometimes 'struggling' with our willpower in the highly unusual circumstance that there isn't a clear winner, but most of the time some path of action is obvious. Given that, the things that we see as hard to overcome with willpower cause apparent depletion because just the very fact that there's disagreement implies that *something* unusual has taken place. Win or lose, it's likely that the next time lightning won't strike.
Yes!
I would say that the worse you feel, the more confident you are that a minor comfort will make a big difference to your mood.
A piece of bread is way more appealing and rewarding to a starving man than to a man that just ate. The same may be true of minor mood-stabilizers, like cheating on your diet or skipping out on a meeting. If you already feel good, there's only room for those things to make you feel a tiny bit better; if you feel awful, they could make a much bigger delta.
This implies that the keys to getting chores done are either to break them up into small enough pieces (finger wiggles / arm wiggles instead of rolling around) or to increase how satisfying they are to do.
Maybe whenever you do your dishes, look upon your drying rack and think "nice."
Making the chores more rewarding works well for me. I like audiobooks, but ever since I first started listening to them I never let myself just sit and listen (if I am just sitting around I read real books), I only listen while exercising, doing chores, or on long car trips. I find myself actually looking forward to doing the dishes and vacuuming because I want to find out what happens next in whatever book I am in the middle of! I suspect something like this would be more effective than trying to 'treat' yourself after doing a task, because the reward being simultaneous with the task, and persisting over the duration of the task, makes it associate more strongly.
Oddly enough, I find that starting things is the hardest part for me. Once I start doing the dishes, I find it really easy to keep going, and I'll probably end up vacuuming and doing the laundry while I'm at it. But sometimes it's really hard to get off my phone and just do that first step. Even something like standing in front of the sink is usually enough to get me going, but my brain often wants to just keep being lazy.
And then once I'm being all productive I stop for a second and glance at my phone, and I'm back where I started. Sigh.
Something I've seen recommended for this is set your phone to greyscale, which makes it less subconsciously rewarding to stare at.
Tried it, it works a little bit at first but in the long run is exactly as stupid as it sounds.
Perhaps the brain adjusts its expectations as the novelty is still coming in, just from a less colorful source.
This is essentially how I deal with tasks I don't want to do, I try to break them up in as many subtasks as possible and make them as easy as possible to start. I was never able to hold a diary when I tried to schedule a regular "write stuff down now" time, but since just leaving it open a keystroke away the whole day it has been effortless. Same with piano exercises, or more recently with exercising.
Specifically on dishes, it's a known phenomenon in my family at least that the difficulty of doing them goes up exponentially with the amount of dishes to be done, because it's a bigger task.
This fits with the research on procrastination, where breaking tasks into smaller subtasks is one of the most effective strategies. This may work because we reduce over-estimation of how unpleasant/boring the tasks is going to be when we think about doing just a small section of it. Then once we start the task, we re-adjust our estimation (it's not so bad, as a matter of fact it's kind of satisfying to turn dirty dishes into clean ones), and continue the task. Until something better comes along ....
There's also research that shows that if you pause for a moment at the end of your workout to focus on the satisfaction you are feeling at having completed it, and the good feelings the endorphins/dopamine are giving you at that moment, you are more likely to work out another day. So yup, yup, yup.
One trick along these lines that I've adopted is naming my tasks on my task list something like 'Start X' instead of 'Do X'. That reminds me that I'll probably get _something_ done for 'X' even if I just start trying to do something.
Making tasks immediately doable is also a great trick.
And the immediately-doable trick is one reason why I _do_ wash my dishes pretty close to 'right away' – I know that that will make 'make food' much much easier afterwards.
" look upon your drying rack and think "nice." - or have a shot of heroin!
People often say "just break your tasks up into pieces", but my experience (at least before being diagnosed with ADHD) has been that this is easier said than done.
I take prescribed stimulants these days, but I'm not on them at this second, and when I read through that bit of the post I didn't even wiggle my finger. Which is interesting, but n=1.
This sounds like a partial re-hash of Freud's Superego-Ego-Id. Not a direct mapping, but if the Ego is the basal ganglia, and you add the prior for motionlessness, it seems like the same theory.
One theory I have glommed onto from experience + study is that you increase willpower by extending the timeframe over which the Reinforcement Learner does its reinforcement learning. Perhaps this is the "popular science" interpretation of ADD in adolescents. If a mouse needs to receive a reward within a short duration in order to train that part of its brain, it's less likely to "figure out" longer strategies (because its conscious calculation faculties are weak). If you can train a kid to resist their impulses for longer (the Marshmallow experiment), then maybe that means that more long-term and bigger-impact stimuli are encoded into the Reinforcement Learning systems. And thus they end up with better alignment with the cognitive "right thing to do". But if your reinforcement learning is only of a short-duration, you're going to get in conflict between the two systems more frequently.
It sounds more like Aristotle's vegetative, animal and rational souls to me.
Doesn't 80% of the issue come down to just accepting something resembling the William James bear-approach, Kurzban-press-secretary-theory, modular-brain, Lamprey-experiment model of the brain.
It's not obvious to me why this would be true or why all of these are the same model (if that's what you're asserting).
I think I’ll waste some time at work tomorrow making an animated version of that illusion image, where you can rotate the four-pointed stars back and forth with a slider control.
Please share if you do. Could also be nice (if you're taking requests) to be able to translate horizontally.
yes please share if/when it is done! would you also consider two more features:
(a) turning the entire image (turning the monitor makes the lines straight to me)
(b) enabling a slight controlled "unfocusing", when at some level of it the lines appear straight (as if you squint a bit) because the small disorienting dots are gone
Has anyone ever stared at an optical illusion long enough that it stopped working? Or otherwise figured out how to do that? I guess it's tough to test, I could just say that I perceive the lines as straight and you won't know if I'm lying. And I don't mean just being able to see that it's an illusion and check and come to the answer that the lines are straight. I mean, really rewire your perception so that you actually perceive them as straight. I wonder, if one could do this kind of thing, and do it enough over various optical illusions, that you'd eventually develop the meta skill of being able to will your perception to be different as you wished.
C'mon, the first thing I did was to access the physical distances to confirm I am observing an optical illusion, the second thing was to turn the monitor a bit and my head a bit to look from the side: the lines became perfectly straight, the illusion was defeated :)
If you switch back to looking at it straight on, does it still appear wrong?
When I try doing this I can only get the lines to look straight if I tilt it so far that parts of the illusion are smeared out so I can't properly see them. And as soon as I actually look straight at it again, the lines are as nauseatingly crooked as ever.
great point: yes, so u r right, it is not *the* permanent defeat of the illusion, it goes back as the monitor straightens... to win again, tilt it again :)
*bows to your superior cognitive powers*
(i can focus on individual sections and see that they look the same length and tell myself that therefor the lines must be straight, but when glancing at the image as a whole, it's always crooked. Turning it sidewise doesn't seem to help me)
about "small sections": a fine idea, which indeed would straighten these lines.... as well as almost anything :). A small section of the (roundish) Earth equator looks straight to us as we walk it! Most curves can be "linearized" by taking their small segment.
But you propose to take it a step further: to replace a straight line with a non-zero slope (already linear) on a small sub-interval with a horizontal straight line (slope 0), yes? To make a staircase in place of an apparent ramp only to see all the stair tops are at the same level, so the ramp degenerates into a horizontal?
This "small interval" technique fails to work for me (not omnipotent cognitive powers, strong, but not omnipotent *laughs*), except at the leftmost and the rightmost edges it works.
The small squares with dots get in the way (somebody said in the thread they will rotate the dotted small squares with an app to see the effects, I hope they will post it here when they do!)
In case other readers also don't have the dopamine to fetch a ruler, you can also confirm the lines are horizontal with the ol' magic eye trick. Interestingly, that didn't defeat the illusion (for me).
here probably we suppose to apply "the willpower" to focusing/defocusing the mind wrt the illusion, less literary "standing up and fetching the ruler" (?)
I didn't have a ruler so I scrolled the page down until the lines matched up with the bottom of the screen
Well, clearly that doesn't work for the "no blind spot" optical illusion...
Strongly-willed people aren't desirable under capitalism as it would lead to more labor disputes and stuff like that.
Alternatively, the same people who are strongly-willed - those on stimulants - are the same people who are able to just sit down and accomplish their assigned task without thinking about how unpleasant it is. That's exactly what capitalism desires.
I think there's a difference between "strongly-willed" and "delusional". Workers are usually well aware of how unpleasant their jobs are, even if they take stimulants.
Very true - it's more that they're aware that the jobs are unpleasant, but the stimulants make their willingness to do the unpleasant job override the want to do other things.
I don't think that's true at all. I once accidentally took my morning Adderall dose three times (forgot I took it twice in a row) and spent around 2 hours picking crumbs off the floor. No music, no podcast, not a single distraction, and I was happy as a clam to see those crumbs leave the floor one by one. Very little work is *fundamentally* unpleasant, it becomes unpleasant because it's boring, or you want to do other things, or the repetitive action of picking up crumbs eventually wears down your soul. It's not delusional to enjoy those things, because how they feel isn't a factual detail about them, but a product of the task and the person performing it.
Cleaning your house is not a capitalist job, 2 hours would be an extremely short shift.
because it is not paid for and has no benefits like retirement contributions and sick days attached to it only, a job otherwise...
Sure, you can find plenty of good Marxist feminist works on women's domestic work. But I do not think that someone picking up crumbs for a couple of hours because they took too much of something is comparable to general capitalist drudgery which lasts days, weeks, months, years and decades.
Why do we not have a 'laughing and nodding head' emoji?
Right. Whereas under communism, like the Soviet Union or Cuba, I could "do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind".
Turning a willpower post into condemnation of capitalism! You'd make a great Pharisee.
I'm not really condemning capitalism there, I'm just saying why willpower isn't really selected for or encouraged in capitalism.
It seems very odd to say that willpower isn't encouraged for or selected for in the Western world at the start of the twenty-twenties. How do you explain the existence of entire industries focused on teaching people (without success) to be more willpowery?
What industry is that?
Self help
The self help industry (which is actually very small) is largely dedicated to reinforcing the behaviour that the bourgeois class wants from its lower classes. So it's the exact opposite of willpower.
It sounds like we should be able to test that hypothesis with populations which haven't been living under capitalism for long. Get some hunter-gatherers/swiddeners to take something like the marshmallow test. It would have to be food they'd recognize rather than a marshmallow though.
AFAIK it *has* been tested : people raised in pre-modern conditions make for poor factory workers because they're not used to be focused on a single repetitive task for so many hours .
of course, you are condemning: your handle is MARX BRO 1917 1917 *laughs* (where can I find some "reaction emojis" for this blog)
You can type them the old-fashioned way :D
👌 yes, I figured it out!!! 😊
Marxism isn't about moral condemnation, it's about rational analysis.
Do tell... really? It was so in Marx's head, sure. In practice, it wasn't so nice.
As many theoreticians, he forgot about both the human nature and the economics of real humans.
For his times, it was a science break-through, but for the next generations, the theory resulted in the oppression of the former Soviet Union. Why would you pick such a handle?
Marx didn't forget about human nature or the economics of real humans, in fact, he considered all that stuff much more deeply than bourgeois economists.
The Soviet Union was a great beacon of freedom. I picked such a handle because I'm a big fan of liberation, human flourishing and ingenuity.
Communism needs them even less, once the revolution is over anyway. Whatever the party says goes, or to the gulag with you.
I think most people have the willpower not to do illegal things.
Many of the classic failures of willpower involve people succumbing to the temptation to do illegal things (aka, drugs).
Xpym, yes, indeed!
Do you think weak-willed people are more likely to succeed in a capitalist system? In your own life, have you mainly seen weak willed people succeed?
I hesitate to debate a Marx Bro, but I think strong-willed people are highly desirable under capitalism because they are motivated to become entrepreneurs, CEOs, and other high-value roles.
Best not to 'feed the trolls' as they say.
Those are not "high value" roles, those are roles which siphon value.
In Marxist systems (or at least systems that pay homage to Marx), strong-willed people become Commissars.
I am unable to force myself to perceive the lines as straight, while my wife can do it with only a bit of concentration (actually, intentional dissociation). And she also has a lot more willpower.
The weirdest thing is that you can see the black and white squares as a rectilinear grid, and the blue lines will still not be straight.
people look from the side, the lines' appearance will rectify fully
Only helps a little bit for me (the lines still won't be fully straight) and the effect changes immediately once I turn my monitor back to it's usual position.
When the pic is turned, do not focus on the "little squarish marks with dots" (or whichever they are), does it work now? I was able to "abstract" from them, but if this seems hard, one could "squint" out of focus a bit to ignore them, then from the side, the lines look consistent with the measurement (parallel to the monitor bottom line)
"Millions of people throughout history have failed to reproduce because they became monks for false religions; if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem."
How to even begin to reply to such a statement is beyond me. But to imply that not reproducing is a "problem" is problematic, as is the related assumption that not following one's "reinforcement/instinctual processes" is dumb. What is has no necessary implications on what should be - when's the last time metaphysics and ethics had an enlightening discussion?
That's to not even address the "false religions" jab - false according to whom and in what way? Even if we were to give you the benefit of the doubt and presume you have unshared inside knowledge here, the implication that just because a religion is not materially true by no means implies that following it is dumb. Indeed, even if we went by your vulgar measure of reproduction - what groups in the US have the the most children? Which city has the higher fertility rate: Oakland, CA or, say, Provo, UT?
The literature on the benefits of religious belief is voluminous - far larger than that on rationalism, I can assure you of that. And that's taking the giant leap of presuming a pragmatic/instrumental view of life is the "right" one.
A little less time reading Ezra Klein and more time reading folks like William James or, to indulge your bias for modernity, T.M. Luhrmann, may be instructive in that regard.
false as in they are mutually exclusive. even if there exists a true one, his statement is still valid.
(i am not adressing any of your other claims, only the false religion one)
That is the stereotypical Western materialist view.
But is it true?
Traditionally it's been religious folk.who"ve been accused of over-simplcity, but here it appears the shoe is on the other foot. Wherever is that nuance secular thinkers are rumored to be capable of?
Some religions are definitely incompatible by their core doctrine. For example, the basically the core belief of Trinitarian Christianity is that Jesus really is the messiah who is going to come again and is part of a trinity with the Father, and the Holy Spirit. While some of the core beliefs of Judaism throughout the last two thousand years has been that the messiah has not come yet and that G*d is not part of a trinity like that. Similarly, some religions say that they are compatible with other ones - I have heard that Hinduism allows Christianity to also be true - but it's definitely not true both ways, since Christianity, as it has been actually practiced throughout history, definitely cannot also allow Hinduism to be true. Perhaps you could say that that one doctrine or the other is wrong and that really all religions are compatible, but I'm not sure that makes you morally superior to the original belief that one religion or the other is false.
But is it true?
yes. yes it is.
I apologize for not giving more detail, but you didnt really give anything to contend with in the reply. perhaps you have the unshared inside knowledge? please share how every one can be true?
The statement appears to come from a threadbare view of religion, combined with a failure to consider the varieties of the possible.
For example, the practice of listing the problems with the mainstream American interpretation of parts of the Bible, particularly Genesis 1, seems to be enjoyed by a particular kind of person. But if anyone actually lost their faith because they got persuaded by these arguments, I'd be surprised. How big was the mass exodus from Christianity when Joshua 10:13 was broadly reinterpreted? And while there are psychological explanations of this, the truth is that this is at the periphery of the religion. The vast majority (perhaps all?) of claims and disputes in religion fall into that category.
If somehow it got proven that Jesus was and is God, but that virtually everything else Christians believed was wrong, would that make Christianity false? Alternatively, if Jesus was somehow proven to not be god, but virtually everything else true, then would that render Christianity false? If every claim made by Christianity were proven wrong, would it then be false?
The second and third are the more difficult questions, without a doubt. But anyone who claims certainty in either regard is engaging in their own dogma.
And to say any are necessarily answered in the affirmative is to misunderstand religion. Kierkegaard's phrase on prayer being not about changing god but about changing oneself applies to most of religion - it's about contending with the unknown, and what that does to a person and a community.
All of the tomes on the history and development of religion I've seen suggest that almost across the board practice preceded rationalization. The explanation is, in essence, besides the point. Throw all that out, and would religion lose anything? No, I'd argue it would gain, perhaps immeasurably. To a degree, arguing a religion false is like arguing throwing up chalk before a game is “false”. Turning religion into a series of falsifiable "hypotheses" is an absurdity; a parochial, ethnocentric, history-blind reading of it. Name one ancient text that even attempted a “dry” telling of anything? The idea was an absurdity.
When Herodotus relayed the story of the meeting of Solon and Croesus - a meeting his contemporary readers would have immediately known was an impossibility, was he telling a lie? Was that a falsehood?
To even ask the question is to miss the point.
Does that mean that there is no such thing as a realist view of religion? Of course not. But that begins and ends with the experience of God, a la Augustine. Everything else is extrapolation from that. But throw out all the extrapolations and the experience remains.
And so from an oversimplified position that reduces religion to merely these extrapolations or the afore-mentioned rationalizations, can all the religions be “true”? I don’t know how this is even a question. Is there some evidence or logic by which 5 bazillion gods couldn’t all exist? That the entire universe couldn’t be a lab experiment the size of a marble in a world of “gods” that sometimes deign to commune - or not - with us?
I don’t see how the existence of Jesus as God somehow necessarily cancels out the possibility of Param Brahma, or Allah or any of the other millions of deities in all the civilizations that have ever existed. And of course another option is the beaten-to-death blind man and elephant analogy. And there are a million others, the limits of the possibilities are the limits of the imagination. This is the unknown we’re talking about - which despite all our efforts, lies out there in its massiveness licking its lips and likely laughing at us stumbling around with our tiny candles in the darkness.
There are plenty of people who lost their faith after reading the Bible, Penn Jillette for instance.
The divinity of Christ is pretty much the defining feature of Christianity, so if that isn't true, you'd need a fairly baroque definition of "false" to argue that Christianity isn't.
It's true that religion has many positive benefits regardless of any factual claims, but calling something false is explicitly an evaluation of those factual claims. If you object that religion is more than just the factual claims, then okay, just replace "X religion" with "factual claims made by X religion". I'd argue that's what most people mean when they say "X is false", not that X has no benefits.
And there are lots of people who would say that a universe where all possible incarnations of gods exist explicitly contradicts their own religion. If you ask a Christian "is it possible that Para Brahman exists?", do you think they'd all say yes? Perhaps all religions are just a facet of a higher truth, but if the blind man feels an elephant's tusk and proclaims "an elephant is a loose collection of bones!", he's still wrong. I know people who say that each other's religions are incompatible. Are you going to tell them that they misunderstand their own religion?
That most people misunderstand their religion should be as self-evident as that most people misunderstand their own politics, or indeed anything remotely abstract or complex. But if for some reason that isn't self-evident, the evidence is ample and easily found (indeed you can test this out for yourself).
But indulging that POV, the answers you get are going to depend on how the question is framed. Tell them Jesus is God but everything else is wrong, and I'd bet good money most would, at the end of the day, cling to the former and walk away convinced they were right all along. Jesus is the center of the intellectual aspect of the religion, there is no controversy about that. The other stuff it's difficult to get a hard read on its degree of essentiality (this is not a science), but that is lies far below the divine is easy to divine.
As for the rest, it's difficult to respond to, in part because the difference in your mind between, say, information, facts, knowledge and truth is not clear to me. You seem to be conflating a number of these, and repeatedly appealing to folk wisdom, which is a questionable tactic. Also, there's numerous disconnects as you have either misread or misinterpreted a number of my arguments and/or I've failed to explain them adequately. Either way, I don't believe I can do much better ATM than how I put it above.
That is basically the Asimov quote:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/94609-properly-read-the-bible-is-the-most-potent-force-for
Thank you for the reply, I enjoyed it, it made some good points, and got me thinking.
So first, let me reiterate that I was addressing only if Scott’s claim of religion being false is defensible.
Now, if I may try to summarize some of what you said:
A religion has a set of claims. Each claim can individually be true or false, but it is unclear how to translate this into calling the entire religion ‘true’ or ‘false’. For example, consider a book of 100 math proofs. If 99 were correct, and 1 had a mistake and was false; you would still consider the book ‘true’, just with a mistake.
If the book had 99 false proofs, and only 1 correct one, you probably would then call it ‘false’. But what if the 99 were minor, trivial, inconsequential proofs, and the 1 correct one was ground breaking, world changing, best proof ever? It would then be wrong to dismiss the book as ‘false’, even though 99 of its 100 claims are false. And if the book that had 99 correct had only trivial proofs correct, and got the most important one wrong; well maybe you could dismiss that book then? But either way, it is not entirely accurate to call the book ‘true’ or ‘false’, but each claim can be evaluated independently.
Same for a religion. If Christianity is right about Jesus being a deity, but wrong about monotheism, does that make it true or false? If it is wrong about Jesus, but right about heaven/hell/afterlife, is it ‘true’ or ‘false’? If it is wrong about heaven, but right about not eating meat on Fridays, is it true or false?
So we can’t say religion X is true or false, only which of its claims are true or false. (As an aside, you seem to imply atheists are very concerned with these differences. I would note that theists are just as obsessed with these minor differences as atheists; and these differences have often led to schisms or wars.)
So with this in mind, Scott’s claim that ‘celibacy for a false religion’ isn’t the correct question. Rather, the question should maybe be something like…. “It is possible that there is a deity that wants some devout people to be celibate (even if it is in the service of a different, or non existent deity). Like maybe Zeus is real, and he wants you to be religiously celibate, even if it is in the name of a different religion.
Now, here is where you may have moved my needle. The above statement about Zeus is kind of weird. What does it mean that some other deity I wants me to be religiously celibate? My first thought was ‘well, there is some positive utility to me being celibate in the name of Yaweh, even though the utility is granted by Zeus. Zeus will still reward me (in this life or the afterlife)’. But suddenly I am talking about utility. And utility doesn’t need to be granted by a deity, it can be granted by the world.
So Scott’s question needs to be something like “these monks are celibate, even though there is no positive utility in celibacy”. This is indeed a more complicated question, and the answer is not obvious. For example, grandparents past reproductive age still have positive evolutionary utility since they assist in raising children. So just the fact that a monk doesn’t reproduce does not necessarily mean they have negative evolutionary utility.
Does this capture at all what you were saying?
I appreciate the close reading and compliment, and overall you captured well one of the arguments I was making, which rolled with the presuppositions underlying Scott's claim.
But it doesn't address what I'd suggest is the more fundamental argument, which is that religion is not a book of theorems but akin to a yoga instructional manual which moderns have misinterpreted as a physiology textbook. But even that misses the mark - religion is not a book. Words, ideas, theorems - this is all so much dust in the wind.
Religion is primarily practice and ritual. Accompanied by a particular attitude and disposition, and oriented towards a particular kind of experience. And bookended by some words which fail utterly to capture any of the above, which some people have interpreted as a set of "really important" theorems about the material world.
As I've said elsewhere, no one does anything anymore so words have taken on an absurd level of importance. Set off a nuclear bomb in debuque, iowa with a letter of explanation to the nytimes and they'll pay more attention to pronouns used in the manifesto than the pile of corpses.
And this is not limited to identity politic liberals. Religious folk are just as conformist to this, which is probably why secularists are so confused on the subject. Entire religions get reduced to scribblings, which then gets further reduced to caricatured treatments of a few hand-picked footnotes. History is abandoned, tradition shat on as rich discourses get butchered to adapt to the cultural gestalt. Religion trying to battle the present age with its own weapons (I.e. "facts"). A battle it will always lose, or win to it's own detriment - leaving it as penniless as the age it's fighting. "Whoever fights monsters…"
So "false religion" is not even a contradiction in terms, it's worse: a complete nonsensical statement. Like sour pajamas or hoarse scrotum.
But to address the line of logic you so precisely laid out, a few clarifications:
I'm not generally disposed to looking at human phenomena through an evolutionary lens. As a weed species, we're wired for flexibility, which often limits the usefulness of that larger lens. Also much appears to be second and third order effects as a result of our sheer complexity.
It's like: yes our peripheral vision is particularly adept at noticing movement from animals vs. trees, and there are a few large scale phenomena it explains, but was it useful - at all - to Scott's meditation on will power? Besides the recent finding on sibling proximity and selfishness (and there its helpfulness was limited to the level of hypothesis generation), I can't think of many times it's helped me grapple with the human.
But to your question, my experience is that things are far more connected than we can possibly imagine. But modern thinking remains overwhelmingly myopic, forever worshipping at the altar of monomania.
Against that, my argument was that both the religious person with 15 kids and the monk are (partially of course) the fruits of the same force, and one that is overwhelmingly pro-natal - and so to treat the monk in isolation is to miss the point.
But where you went, in terms of the larger effects of this "dumb" evolutionary decision to be celibate, appears to coalesce with this broader view. In both hinduism and christianity the writings and works of monks and nuns and those who spent large spans of time in monasteries (and prison, for that matter) are outsized both in quantity and their social effect. That its effect may be comparable to that of grandparents seems on reflection to be almost obvious.
But I wasn't thinking of that, so thank you. It's not every day that a stranger's comment on the internet is actually considered, or a "needle moved" as a result.
"I don’t see how the existence of Jesus as God somehow necessarily cancels out the possibility of Param Brahma"
I don't see how the existence of 2 + 2 = 4 cancels out the possibility of 2 + 2 = 5.
That is a poor analogy, Mr. Sweeny. A better one is that the existence of you does not cancel out the possibility of me.
Not everything is mathematics (to the mathematicians dismay, no doubt).
I'm talking about the evolutionary perspective here - evolution will tend to evolve away from things that make you not reproduce.
I think it's fair to say that all but one among a set of mutually exclusive religions must be factually false, although of course they can still be beneficial in lots of ways.
I agree some varieties of religious belief can encourage having more children - unlike other varieties of religious belief which encourage having fewer children, which were the kind I was talking about.
I really didn't mean that statement in a culture war anti-religion way; I think it's just boringly true that it's possible for people to logic themselves into not having children, that monastic religions are an example of that, and that evolution would select against these kinds of tendencies.
"I'm talking about the evolutionary perspective here - evolution will tend to evolve away from things that make you not reproduce."
Does it? Eusociality? Worker ants?
Strictly speaking, the anthill is a single organism, and the worker ants are its parts (among others). If they would be acting individually, they would outcompete humans. But the analogy of our brain signals for an anthill is in physical-chemical macroscopic trails the ants leave for other ants to analyze and emissions of chemicals by ants. Human chemicals of thoughts move shorter distances, are enclosed. One can argue the statement, but not with this analogy-?
"Strictly speaking" according to who? Because that doesn't seem like strict speech to me.
according to professionals dealing with the anthills :) it is called a "superorganism"... I do not know if we are allowed to link in this blog because I am new here, so I will post the link in a separate reply below
... post above, how interesting, they post the latest on top...
Strictly speaking, a "superorganism" is not the same as a "single organism", which is what you previously claimed. Remember, we're speaking strictly here.
https://askabiologist.asu.edu/explore/secrets-superorganism#:~:text=Like%20humans%2C%20ants%20are%20social,%2C%20or%20a%20%E2%80%9Csuperorganism.%E2%80%9D
Yes, kin selection is a thing. No, it doesn't make a material difference to his point.
It seems like Scott Alexander is getting a lot wrong about evolution lately.
I mean, you still haven't established that he is wrong, so...
"I'm talking about the evolutionary perspective here - evolution will tend to evolve away from things that make you not reproduce."
There's plenty of eusocial organisms that physically cannot reproduce.
Also Scott got another basic evolution thing wrong a couple of days ago, saying that evolution created organisms "perfect" for their surroundings - evolution actually creates things that are good enough to continue reproducing, not "perfect".
If Scott cannot get simple stuff like that correct one wonders what other things regarding genetics he might be getting wrong...
"kin" can be a bio-kin or an "ideological/professional" kin... think about an advisor as an "ideological parent" for a scientist
I would suggest you're painting in too broad strokes.
The largest religion in the world is one with strong monastic strains running through its history, and I know of no evidence that it has harmed the church or its "evolutionary non-dumb-ness". I'd argue it's actually helped in that regard - has the sharp decline in monasticism coincided with a fall or a rise in the Christian fertility rate? When monasticism was at its peak of popularity, what did the fertility rate look like?
On the contrary, all the evidence I've seen suggests that modern acquisitive secularism - and the instrumental rationality based on it - is the true anti-natalist force in the modern world, and a far more apt punching bag than the tired and stereotypical one you chose.
The same exact force or "logic" as you decided to frame it, can have negative evolutionary effects on certain individuals but positive ones on the group as a whole. As has been argued elsewhere, fanaticism in any direction is a sign of vigor and vitality, and it is far easier to apply that vitality in a different direction than conjure it out of thin air. That christianity was able to inspire individuals to go to such extremes was a sign of its health - both in evolutionary and non-evolutionary terms. Vigor that expressed itself in seemingly contradictory ways, at least from a simplistic materialist point of view.
So I get your larger meaning, but on multiple levels this example falls short. I have a hard time believing any monk or nun would not - at best - laugh to hear religion and their devoting their lives to something other than this blink of an eye existence as primarily being based on a "logical/intellectual process".
You seem to think that Scott's making an argument that I don't think he's making. Namely, that monasticism is a bad thing for a religion, or religions suck, or something like that. He's not saying that. He's saying that non-monastic individuals are more likely to reproduce (duh) and have higher instincts toward reproduction. That's an example to illustrate why we may not have infinite willpower.
This is in no way a judgement about any religion, except through the lens of the Blind Idiot God. You're right, you could say the same thing with a secular framing - something about career stability and hormones.
Whether you agree that monasticism is the result of intellect/logic or not (many of the great theologians seem to have approached religion from that view), it's a frontal cortex process rather than an animal hindbrain process, which is the point.
Your impression is justified; "punching bag" in particular was a poor choice of words.
But I'm of two minds on this. One, there are terms other than "dumb" "failure" and "problem" that one could use that are both more accurate and don't mimic the exact terms that have been and sometimes still are used to denounce various things, including religion, in the name of evolution.
And in particular, if all he's doing is describing its effects as regards evolution, why does he add the "false" qualifier to religions? It does not appear to serve any purpose - regardless of the veracity of the religion the monk in question gave up procreation for - his genes still disappear from the gene pool, no?
And overall compare the language (and frame) he used in talking about monks and those he used to talk about moralists and sophists. It's quite different, which was partially what I was reacting to. It's worded in a strongly evaluative manner. The other two, much less so. It's at least suggestive of an underlying attitude.
Having said that, I did interpret it out of context of the larger argument made in the article - which I should have acknowledged. The bluntness of the evaluative language took me out of the flow of thought, and I reacted to the bare sentences and the ways in which they, interpreted literally, reflect "common sense" views.
But outside of language and framing, my critique of the idea that monasticism can be described primarily as a logical/intellectual process remains. He's very clear there - he lumps millions of people together under this, and I don't know of a single monk or nun of which this could be said - and particularly so if we're talking about the saints (you mention theologians - they are another matter). I mean the whole idea of it, almost invariably as I understand it, is that in silence and solitude one is better able to experience the divine and/or commune with him/them - away from the distractions of the world (such as sex). And of course the writings we have - that I have seen at least - are filled with these experiences. So if one is going to shoehorn this into some basic psychological process, it appears far more akin to reinforcement than logic.
But of course in religion, in war, and in love all kinds of things happen for which there are no simple explanations, and likely no universal ones. Which is just another reason why I question the inclusion of this example. Regardless of whether or not there's an attitude behind it, it seems an ill-fitting choice.
I'll admit I've never had the opportunity to talk to any monks, let alone saints. I still think it could be framed as a victory of willpower, but I'll concede I don't know what I'm talking about.
I certainly agree that the passage can give the impression of religion bashing - it does pattern match to similar stuff I've heard, and you're right, whether a religion true or not doesn't matter to evolution. Though I do think he's going for a sarcastic comedic effect there ("All you have to do is follow the 3 Fs, especially that last one, and everything will be okay!"). Regardless, it doesn't seem to have the best usefulness:distraction ratio.
"And in particular, if all he's doing is describing its effects as regards evolution, why does he add the "false" qualifier to religions?"
He answered that in a March 26 comment that is now slightly above this:
"I think it's fair to say that all but one among a set of mutually exclusive religions must be factually false"
Of course, "mutually exclusive" is doing all the work in that sentence. At least one of the commenters seems to think there is no such thing when it comes to religion because religion is all about experience, not doctrine or logic.
So if a religion is "true", it suddenly renders not procreating evolutionarily "smart"? How exactly does that work, Mr. Sweeney?
I'd love to hear you actually make an argument of your own, instead of wasting my time making substance-less snide remarks.
> I think it's fair to say that all but one among a set of mutually exclusive religions must be factually false, although of course they can still be beneficial in lots of ways.
Alternatively, every religion is true, including Roko's basilisk, and you get judged in the afterlife by the standards of the one you adhere to. Unless you are an atheist and then you just stop existing. If you are an agnostic, you get to choose.
No, you are saying that the judgement criteria of every religion is applied to the people who believed it, which is a very different claim than that those religions are true.
I am afraid that the evangelical God who I grew up believing in is going to send you to hell for not accepting Jesus into your heart even though you know that Jesus died for you, and have had ample opportunities to hear the truth and accept the truth. That you were worried about Roko's basilisk is irrelevant to Him.
> I'm talking about the evolutionary perspective here - evolution will tend to evolve away from things that make you not reproduce.
Better include several generations in the assessment, as well as non-reproducing individuals who nevertheless contribute to the reproductive fitness of the species. Grandparents live longer than their fertile time span even if they are competing with their offspring for resources. And homosexual, asexual, celibate individuals can contribute to the reproductive success of the species.
This requires a minimum of a society (pack, herd, troop), that has positions or activities (hunt, scout, defend, guard) for the non-reproducing. And once language and teaching evolved the contribution to the species' welfare is obvious. The example of religion is unfortunate, it blends culture with biology.
You need to think at the level of the gene, rather than the species.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-tragedy-of-group-selectionism
And grandmothers stop being fertile, it's true, but grandfathers are another story.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/08/today-im-50.html
Kin selection stories don't really add up for homosexuality. They don't act like ants, dedicating themselves to their kin's ability to reproduce. Greg Cochran has written about this.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/group-selection-and-homosexuality/
does anything change if we view evolution on the level of the gene, not the organism?
Considering the state of the Church in the middle ages, I'm not at all sure that becoming a priest or a monk would be associated with reproductive failure...
Even as a metaphor it doesn't seem like a very good one to say choosing to be celibate is *dumb* from an evolutionary perspective. For one thing it seems like there's some sort of anthropomorphizing of natural processes. For another If being celibate is "dumb" it should follow that anyone choosing to have less that the maximum number of children they can handle is *dumb* which probably makes everyone here *dumb*. So why target religious monks with this metaphor?
He's talking from the perspective of evolution, in which the only goal is to reproduce. People with instincts to reproduce do so more often, "saving" them from an evolutionary perspective and leading to those traits getting more traction in the gene pool. This is an explanation for why those instincts are still around. You'll notice he then goes on to talk about how altruism is dumb. Again, all this is in the context of an evolutionary perspective.
As for the false religions, well just choose your favorite false religion and assume he's talking about that one. If a given religion is false, it *is* dumb (from an evolutionary perspective!) to give up having kids to pursue it. Though I suppose for evolution, whether a religion true or false is irrelevant if it doesn't lead to more kids.
All the above having been said, evidence points to the fact that celibates saying they are celibate and them actually being celibate is not a given. Similar to telling everyone I have willpower and am working when I am actually taking naps and reading this for extended periods of time.
To say that the religions are false, to me, misses the point. I know atheists who practice celibacy for the same reason as religious people: they want to achieve certain mental and emotional states and they think it will do the job.
Me, I'm asexual. I couldn't practice celibacy any more than I could give up eating a food I really dislike.
But I can do things like give up language (to the extent that it's possible without an aphasia helmet or a Fischer-Price My First Brain Surgery Playset), spending a day without reading, writing, speaking, listening to speech, trying not to focus on 'wordy' trains of thought day. It's an intense experience, the whole way of relating to the world feels radically different, there's the feeling of abstaining from something one intensely craves.
People who practice celibacy have described it and it sounds similar, if less intense. (And, you know, you don't have to put your entire life on hold and take time off from work and everything else.)
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/will- John Michael Greer on increasing your willpower. I've tried it, it works.
By the way, if you post a link, you have to add a space after it or else substack will think anything that comes after is also part of the url. In this case, removing the last dash fixes the link.
Thanks.
> Does this theory tell us how to get more willpower?
How about artificially creating the overwhelming intellectual evidence? Not just naively, like visualizing how fit you'll be in a year if you get off your butt and exercise, but like with a commitment device (he says, all self-consciously) where you're meaningfully altering your actual circumstances. If the commitment device is harsh enough then it's like the alcoholic hitting rock bottom or the teacher telling you you'll fail the class if you don't pass tomorrow's exam.
PS: I'm rereading our old post -- 5 years old now! -- on "what is willpower?" in light of this Bayesian theory. https://blog.beeminder.com/willpower/ So far I think it's compatible and I stand by it.
Seems like a more straightforward hypothesis is that you have to do things that make your executive functions big and strong, so that anything they signal gets more weight than the stuff with which it's competing.
How do you make them big and strong? Mostly by having your parents make you eat your vegetables when you're three years old, and other not-so-fun tasks that buzzkill parents force their kids to do. Can you do it later in life? Sure--as long as somebody is making you do it. Can it be a self-motivated process? I guess so, but I don't even have the willpower to imagine how that would work.
Here's a question: Are there any acts of willpower that don't involve deferred gratification?
What are you comparing with exactly when you say "a more straightforward hypothesis"?
As for acts of willpower other than deferring gratification, I guess some acts of willpower involve quashing gratification altogether.
> Are there any acts of willpower that don't involve deferred gratification?
Actively hurting oneself?
But presumably one would only exercise the will to actively hurt oneself in pursuit of some future outcome that one thought profitable?
Hmm. Even the extreme, suicide, can be seen that way.
It's been said that conscientiousness is the most important personality trait for positive outcomes. Is that just a manifestation of high serotonin levels?
Serotonin levels can be too high for sure, but would it be better if the median level in the population were higher?
I don't think we know enough about serotonin to talk about what "high serotonin levels" are like. If we use people on very high doses of SSRIs as an example, they don't have many emotions and feel kind of fuzzy all the time, but I don't think we can generalize.
One thing that this doesn't address for me is that my willpower seems to work totally differently from my parents' willpower.
I've said in conversations that my willpower is right-aligned while there's is left-aligned. This doesn't mean anything about politics, but visualize tasks as a sheet with ranges bounded by two events: "task entry" and "task deadline". My parents will tend to prefer doing tasks close to the entry (left-aligned); I tend to prefer doing tasks close to the deadline (right-aligned). I don't understand that one. But I do know I have a low unhappiness reaction to unfinished tasks, so I wonder to what extent the difference is whether you're motivating intellectual task completion by unhappiness over an undone task or expectation of failure - which would lead to right-alignment, since certainty of failure goes up the more you put a task off.
Re: the idea of different thoughts “bidding” in an auction, Crystal Society is a good sci-if book along these lines. It’s about an android whose AI uses “strength points” that different cognitive modules award or receive based on proposed decisions.
It's a great start to a book with an amazing fan made audiobook but it gets worse after they escape.
I've recently been looking at Karl Fristons free energy principle. That the brain works by minimising free energy, ie wants to get to homeostasis / reduce dissonance in sub-functions of cognition expectation/Brain model versus sampled reality). Eg) Eat when hungry. Correct visual field with incoming optical data. But harder to explain complex actions with homoestasis?
Think it gels with this theory of willpower? We can think of the brain model as this hierarchy of competing processes. And can probably do this for any higher level function: willpower, or decision-making in general.
Take exercise. You do it if it felt good to do so previously and/or if intellectually you've learned that it's right thing to do. If you've neither the experience/memory of positive exercise (stronger motivator) or some intellectual model of exercise aiding health then you won't overcome inaction/inertia. If you weren't trained to exercise from young, even intellectualizing the benefits often doesn't create the habit.
Base evolutionary processes like hunger win out over positively reinforced learned action which in turn trumps the intellectually understood right thing to do (when there is conflict). This, like you said, maybe explains addiction. So maybe the best productivity advice is that dissonance (and negative inaction) can be reduced with alignment of goals, with time. But you'd need to override the positive reinforcement patterns in the short-term to escape bad spirals.
As for neurochemical imbalances, no idea, but hopefully it's possible that aligning goals over some period is possible to get better attuned to evidence / improve chemical outputs.
Of course, it's easy to say align goals. Harder to (a) actually identify these goals , and (b) plan some program you'll follow; when you're currently not in a state that your intellectual brain is given much authority in action. (Explains recourse to/through meds/therapy/life coaches/etc)
I think a good way to think of the free energy principle (FEP) is "one level more meta than predictive processing (PP)". PP tells you something about the way the brain handles perception and action, the FEP tells you something about why PP has the structure it has. If you ask very general questions, like "what is the brain trying to do", the FEP provides a possible answer ("it minimizes free energy"). If you happen to implement a hierarchical model (say in a robot), the FEP gives you a general direction of how learning and balancing of tasks should be handled. In a way the FEP is just what happens if evolution is at works long enough: all creatures alive are efficient in a way that allows them to make the best out of the limited resources they have for perception and action, so per definition they have arrived at a structure that resembles the FEP's definition.
So I'm not really sure how to apply this to the willpower question.
Does this imply that we should expect people with lots of willpower to have more dopamine than the rest of the population? Or is this only a model to explain how certain changes in relative dopamine levels can produce changes within a person?
Additionally, are we thinking that high willpower people are a conceptually distinct class to high conscientiousness and high ability-to-delay-gratification people? The latter two groups seem quite good at things like writing essays and not getting distracted, implying there's significant overlap. But shouldn't we then expect these good-at-essays people to also display behaviours one sees when most people take stimulants e.g. being more chatty and interested in others, since they have more dopamine which is enabling them to write the essays?
My experience with willpower is that if I imagine myself completing the task and I don't get any taste of feeling better than I do now, then I probably won't be able to convince myself to do it. If the simulated future makes me feel good, then there's a good chance I will.
I think this can explain, for example, procrastination. Sufficiently long time periods before the due date, I don't feel panicked about the upcoming deadline yet. So I imagine myself completing the work early, I still feel just normal, and I don't do it. Come just-before-deadline time, now I'm filled with dread, and now imagining the done-state gives me the taste of relief I need to push me forward.
Yeah. Behavior is shaped by rewards and punishments, but many of those rewards and punishments happen in our imagination.
Otherwise we couldn't do the "time-binding" (to use Korzybski's language). You can't teach a dog a new trick by giving them a reward 1 hour after doing it. But you can make a human do something by promising them a reward in 1 hour, because although the actual reward only comes in 1 hour, the pleasant prediction of the reward already exists now, and each step of the task feels connected to it.
The rewards and punishments in our imagination are partially based on actual previous experience (e.g. experience of people keeping their promises), but can also be based on hearsay, lies, brainwashing, illusions, insanity, whatever.
How do I know that my ruler isn't just crooked?
An excellent question. From the totality of the past experiences (particularly if say u use your own finger or a standard 8.5x11" sheet folded as needed as an impromptu ruler)... You would not question your totality of the past knowledge based on a single illusion... or would you? Turn your head, look from the side: they are parallel to the bottom of the screen, and they DO look so FROM THE SIDE
The intervention this suggests to me is manipulating the reward center. Taking a hit of sugar or another happy drug every time you do homework doesn’t work, because your brain is definitely smart enough to just short circuit to “take the pill”. But what if you had a little hip injector that upped your blood sugar while you were working, automatically? Seems like the kind of thing that should actually work pretty well over time (assuming you prevent diabetes)
I AM able to see the lines of your optical illusion as indeed straight lines by slightly turning the monitor and my head to look at them from the side! This is MY triumph over your analogy. But YOU also have your victory over me as your blog's reader: well, I have performed ALL these tricks (from the index finger to rolling on the floor) expecting some results from the exercise... only to learn immediately you simply made me jump through these "hoops of the tasks"... ok, 1x1...
your blog is really something!
Turned my head, they still look crooked to me.
It is possible the brain reacts not just to the "bulk" of dopamine "bribes" from the competing regions, but to the time-space dynamic of their delivery:
a complex PDE, and perhaps with some chaotic regimes not impossible.
Mathematically thus it is harder, than the probabilities: I would expect the actual process (with all the chem involved) to be harder, than, say HFT. And why would the human brain be less complex, than the markets?
Nonetheless, there is an attractive simplicity in the Bayesian idea: maybe it can be used for *some* simple situations...
This perfectly fleshes out the sloppy sentence I wrote here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death#comment-1522219 : "we could do a random selection of task priorities comparable to the mechanisms described in the chamber of guf / guyenet on motivation posts." - your post feels like the perfect explanation of the mechanism I was looking for.
I still think our understanding of the feedback mechanisms involved is lacking. Your explanation seems fully correct, and as I pointed out, there should by something like a slowly-oscillating biochemical process in manic depression, but what is this feedback loop? And can we tap into it?
If things are bidding on actions, it would make more sense to think of the bids as representing expected values, rather than evidence.
"These didn't actually require different amounts of useful resources from you, like time or money or opportunity cost"
I was reading this and doing the actions, but when it came time to jump my brain said "unable to jump while sitting down, do you want to also stand up?" which sounded like a lot of extra hassle and would make it harder to keep reading, so I didn't.
It doesn't disprove your overall point, but I think it's relevant to this example.
Thanks, Scott. Already much to consider, but what about the increasing evidence that host-microbe interactions play a key role in homeostasis, or the research on Toxoplasma gondii? Could the very notion of a singular organism making decisions, weighing evidence… be too imprecise to capture the whole story? Might viewing human behavior more as a cross-species, negotiated phenomenon get us closer to clarity?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24997043/ https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/33/3/757/1882426
Also, this just out - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.648475/full
"Millions of people throughout history have failed to reproduce because they became monks for false religions"
As opposed to true religion(s)?
You're right, not having kids will put you at an evolutionary disadvantage, regardless of whether your religion is True or False.
What I liked about this statement is that many religious people would probably agree with it as well (bc they would think that most other religions are false). The statement holds without assuming whether there are true religions or not. It only assumes that if there is a true religion, it's in the minority.
Still dk why we say reproduction is requisite for a good human life tho. Evolution's ends are not necessarily my ends.
There are no false religions. Perception is reality. Remember the woman and the hair dryer.
I say this because monks have often been the safeguard of our cultural heritage. You think it's about what they said they believed and you didn't understand it's about what they did.
I don't know how to be anything but blunt: this is catastrophic to get wrong, and Rationalists often suffer this way. It's as if people who could become convinced of things by words could be convinced of anything at all.
You were astute about the reason you can't give the intellect total power over the system of the human mind: erratic behavior would result and often does. But you picked an example of intellect and willpower functioning correctly to produce the desired result: a culture which preserves the study of its heritage.
(Hint: People like Scott Aaronson who dream of leaving the world of sex have been around for literal, actual centuries. People pick their beliefs. Then the systems of human culture, oft 'society,' find a place for them.)
Scott Aaronson may dream of leaving sex behind, but he still has two kids. Like, no one's arguing that monks are a bad thing. Just that they tend not to pass on their genes very much.
In this specific instance, when he calls forebrain decisions dumb, he means *in the context of evolution*. He goes on to say the same thing about altruism. All this is to illustrate why we don't have infinite willpower: because doing so may lead to less reproduction. That's the limit of his claim.
But communities with celibates may pass on their genes (or their memes) more than communities without celibates.
But the people passing on those genes will not, on balance, be the ones geared towards celibacy.
(1) how about passing on ideas, not just genes? the monks and nuns were doing it, and their learning-based "descendants" inherited this trait of teaching from them in a non-biological but in a teacher-follower way, here Sui Juris has a point indeed;
(2) also, their communities have lots of genes associated with their genes in a closer way that a far-off community would, say, a daughter of a wealthy family becomes an abbess in the middle ages and promotes her family procreation by improving the standing of her siblings...
Memetic evolution can certainly happen, though it's usually somewhat divorced from biological evolution. I'm not sure kin selection is strong enough to help in the case of the abbess though - if I'm doing the math correctly, she'd need to save two of her nieces/nephews for every potential child she gives up, which seems a rather tall order.
I think the two processes interconnected, the evolution of ideas and of the physicalities (of a group), but the question is, on which temporal and geo scales, one could make a monograph of it :). Think the priest casts of India of the old for example. Of course they could be unrelated, as ideas inherited in modern times from a scientific advisor to their student. So I would replace "usually" with "sometimes" in your first argument. As for how many to save, it depends on the dominant trait(s), it is neither some uniformly distributed continuous "essence" of a person nor a uniform discrete distribution ...
Genetics don't determine as much as you think they do.
What happened to perception being reality?
Anyway, coming in with a cryptic one liner isn't particularly helpful. I can't tell if you take exception to evolution as presented, or you're still just trying to argue that monks are a force for good.
Is perception reality or is that just your perception? ;) If it is just your perception, why should we (who perceive things differently) believe you? What truth are you trying to communicate?
To me, this is like claiming (as a universal truth) "there are no universal truths," i.e. a contradiction in terms.
A partial solution to the illusion at the end (and it’s metaphor) is to cross your eyes, blurring the image, but simplifying the data stream entering your brain. Doing this causes the illusion to disappear and one can easily visualize the perpendicular black and white lines being perfectly straight. This solution applied to the greater post could suggest that low willpower is a result of too much information overwhelming underlying logical/rational truths - if you simplify the challenges in your life and focus less on the details - somewhat paradoxical - things become “clearer”/easier to parse.
This seems very at odds with either gay meth sex orgies or adderall induced cleaning sprees. Both of which definitely exist.
How is it? This is not obvious at all to me.
Sex, low level brain, cleaning high level brain, both triggered by the same stimulants.
Maybe stimulants just increase the amount of dopamine (= instrumental confidence) in the brain?
Also you mentioned that meth triggers gay sex orgies and Adderall triggers cleaning sprees, but meth != Adderall, so maybe meth targets the low-level brain parts and Adderall targets the high-level brain parts. If this guess is so, we should expect that there are no gay Adderall sex orgies and no meth-induced cleaning sprees.
Well there aren't really Adderall orgies but it definitely makes you horny. That might just come down to a ROI issue (you can't smoke adderall). And Meth cleaning sprees definitely are a thing.
Reinforcement learning offers another candidate theory: discount factor. When tuning RL algorithms a key choice is how much to discount future (uncertain) rewards over immediate (certain) ones. The reward delta for doing the dishes or your homework _now_ instead of later is small and distant. The reward for playing just one more round of Civ immediate.
Perhaps willpower is about increasing the discount factor; people do unpleasant things now for astonishingly distant future rewards. It makes sense that this would be regularised to prevent us always sacrificing immediate reward for larger future ones, because this leads into all sorts of traps.
Well said. Hyperbolic discounting. Are you saying that that's incompatible with Scott's Bayesian theory? Time-proximity could be the key factor in the predictive processing.
I think it is compatible with and modulates Scott's theory. Rather than just competing on "weight of evidence" we can think of this as "discounted weight of evidence" with the frontal cortex providing not just the evidence for future reward but the discount factor for that. It also provides a compelling reason why "willpower" would be limited by evolution; very long discount horizons are sometimes beneficial but can also be evolutionarily-risky behaviour e.g. choosing not to reproduce in favour of a better life after death.
Prediction is complex and I'm sure there's a lot more to it, but this has to be a piece of the puzzle.
How do psychedelics fit into this picture? Psychedelic assisted therapy seems to often be useful against alcoholism. I'm not sure about how strong the evidence for this is. (Here's a section on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_therapy#In_alcoholism)
Regarding your section on willpower and alcoholism, I was reminded of a podcast I was listening to yesterday: Sam Harris and James Fadiman on Psychedelics (https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/242-psychedelics-self/ [paywalled; see 00:34:40])
Here's a quote by Fadiman where he talks about an interview with a former alcoholic who recovered over night in one of the Spring Grove Experiments with psychedelics in the 60s:
"The filmmaker is saying, well can you talk about your drinking? I haven't had a drink in 40 years. The filmmaker talks about willpower and the man laughs and says: It has nothing to do with willpower, I haven't had any interest in drinking ever since."
This is super speculative but could it be the case that psychedelics smack the neurophysiology of the brain in some way that it can sometimes cause the reinforcement learner part of the mind to lose interest in e.g. alcohol?
"The lines here are perfectly straight - feel free to check with a ruler. Can you force yourself to perceive them that way? If not, it sounds like you can’t always make your intellectual/logical system overrule your instincts, which might make you more sympathetic to people with low willpower."
I can. Just squint hard enough to obscure the elements leading to the optical illusion.
I'm going to be a curmudgeon here and argue that we are confusing several things under the 'willpower' label. Yes, I suspect that Scott's Bayesian model is worthy... but it is a model for the initial decision to act (or not). But once you have decided to act continuing to act is another set of conditions, repeated over and over until your Bayesian factors combine into stopping to act.
So, take the famous 'willpower' experiment where the subjects sits on a chair and extends their right leg horizontal to the floor. (That's the initial decision). The subject keeps their leg parallel to the floor for some time. (That's the continuing decisions to continue). The subject then decides to relax their leg. (That's the stop condition). This is taken to be a measure (or perhaps proxy) for the strength of their will. But we are not measuring 'will power', we are measuring how long it takes for the original Bayesian decision to be replaced by fresh Bayesian decisions to stop the actions of the first decision. There is (perhaps) no 'willpower' - that's folk psychology, a false internal model, or a handy social label, so talking of what can deplete willpower is misleading.
One thing you didn't seem to consider here is that we can collect evidence for the generic proposition "i am capable of accomplishing my goals." Or, more simply, "i can control myself", or, to speak a modern heresy, "I have free will."
If evidence for generic propositions like this plays a role in the Bayesian computation - and i don't see why it wouldn't - then you might expect there to be something like an exponential process at work in a person who repeatedly tells themselves they have a strong will, and, in exercising it, finds additional pieces of evidence that they do, in fact, have a strong will.
This notion of 'a pile of evidence that i can control myself' lines up with my own experience. I wrote about it here:
https://apxhard.com/2019/10/24/potty-training-predictive-processing-and-agency/
I think you can extend this to mapping to self-efficacy and burnout.
Alberto Bandero defines self-efficacy as "a personal judgment of how well or poorly a person is able to cope with a given situation based on the skills they have and the circumstances they face" (there's a 10 question scale at http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~health/engscal.htm - scroll down!) Assuming that there is a substantial feedback component, this gives us Bayesian priors and posteriors for the hypothesis that we can cope with whatever today will throw at us, and - in an ideal world - a benevolent positive feedback loop as those with high self-efficacy are indeed more likely to engage with their challenges and succeed.
Burnout is characterised by Schaufeli and Enzmann (1998) as experiencing persistent negative mental states, negative emotions and feelings, exhaustion, and the overall mindset of reduced competence.
What happens if someone with high self-efficacy encounters an environment where they cannot cope with the given situation, where for whatever reason, efforts do not deliver results? Presumably their self-efficacy level goes down, as done their performance, as they end up in a damaging positive feedback loop heading towards depression, and burnout as defined above.
It seems like the Bayesian perspective provides a great model for how this would work.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
So in psychotherapy is common to fail to induce change just through fear (eg smoking will give you cancer and such) or logic. But once you align reinforcement (pleasure/pride) level and high level consciousness it works more frequently. What i mean is: creating a solid, stable and strong FELT sense of how much happier an exsmoker is (anticipating emotionally the prize of the right course of action) adds up and if done properly can more frequently build up enough willpower/dopamine in that direction. Just a thought.
I feel like a theory of willpower/motivation needs to somehow include the social/dominance aspect (especially given that human brains likely evolved for processing of social structures/events). In the low willpower case, the reinforcement learner/lizard brain tends to view signals from the logical brain as external dominance attempts and thus tries to resist it (evaluating "doing homework" as a low reward activity). This does not actually depend on there being a real separate physical external entity exerting that dominance. It may also be why, for example, doing dishes is much easier when there's something else (and more important, like homework) that you're supposed to be doing, because the lizard brain sees submitting to the dominating influence in a small way (dishes) as being preferable to submitting to it in a big way (homework). In that case, doing dishes may actually feel preferable to e.g. playing video games, perhaps because playing video games feels like rebelling against the authority (even if the authority is of your own logical brain), and openly rebelling is dangerous.
great point about being social creatures, but developed all wrong: doing dishes does NOT feel good! but you can think about smth else while doing it and thus ignore doing it and also share the task with the rest of the family... In terms of being social creatures, this is a point suitable to develop further...
I've been reading Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Other Minds" and he also seems to believe in a two-stage brain. What first evolves is a kind of subjective experience that is like the reinforcement learner, though he emphasizes that a brain exists not just to make predictions but also to coordinate action among the many bodily players. That's important point for some of the potential effects of drugs that Scott mentions in the post. Seems just as likely that those drugs are messing with the coordination system?
Subjective experience comes first, and you can see it in our reinforcement learning, instincts, reflexes, experiences of pain and pleasure. Then there's consciousness, which he thinks of as also deeply connected to the coordinating purposes of the brain. Consciousness for him involves a broadcasting of ideas across the brain, which makes that idea/thought/inner speech available throughout the systems. (I think, I'm trying to understand.) Broadcasting is meant in a fairly literal sense.
(I think this means that working memory is not a "space" but instead the effect of the brain's broadcasting system at work. There would be a fundamental limit on how much information you can broadcast without the signals conflicting.)
Anyway, a divided brain seems like the oldest idea about the mind. Reinforcement learning vs high-level consciousness. System 1 vs. System 2. Hume's constant correlation vs causation. Ego vs Id. Higher and lower desires. Good angel on one shoulder vs little devil on the other. The snake vs. the law of God.
I can't help but see this as an insight that people who think about the self have come to over and over again. The details are complex enough that each generation feels a need to reinvent the distinction and provide it with new shadings and details. But the idea feels like one that people have been thinking about ever since we've been thinking.
Good post. Regarding the prior on 'motionlessness', I would generalize it, and rename it to something like prior on 'low effort / pleasant activity'. And instead of the 'reinforcement learner' prior I would consider it responsible for playing Civilisation for 10h instead of doing some more mentally/physically strenuous work. This prior also would also nicely explain procrastination.
I didn't even wiggle my finger. What does that say about me?
Neither did I. Either we are the laziest ACX readers, or we just realized something like "oh Scott is trying to do a trick to make some point" and moved on. It was like 10 minutes ago now so I can't be bothered to remember anymore.
I appreciate your hypotheses. I think of myself as lazy, but I was reading this post after exercising, so I'm not *that* lazy (and I also was a bit fatigued). Your second hypo—Scott's trying to do a trick—rings true. I wasn't sure what the trick was about, so I kept reading rather than playing along.
When I started the paragraph, I predicted that the trick had something to do with the context of the finger wiggle. In particular, I thought he was going to run through movements from simple/small to complex/large and then would return to simple—making some point about how motivation to do a simple movement changes, i.e., motivation is X the first time you wiggle the finger and then is Y when you wiggle the finger after rolling on the floor. When I saw that there was no second finger wiggle, I realized that I'd predicted wrongly. And by then I saw his actual point.
But in any event, I only barely considered moving my finger.
I think it's useful to differentiate willpower and motivation.
Willpower is the ability to keep doing something even if you find it unpleasant; motivation is the ability to get up and go start a new task.
I don't struggle with willpower much at all. Once I've started a task, I can usually see it through. Motivation is another story. The hardest part of my daily workout is deciding to get up and put my shoes on.
For whatever reason my brain doesn't like shifting gears from one mode to the other. I can have meetings all day at work, or I can do a deep-dive into spreadsheets, but Lord don't ask me to do both on the same day. The best analogy I have is a multi-purpose arena that functions for both basketball and hockey. The way to draw the most fans might be to have basketball on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday with hockey on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, but if you put the facilities crew in charge, they'd prefer to schedule four or five hockey games all back-to-back. That's why the facilities crew shouldn't be in charge, but if you run those guys needlessly ragged, everything will end up falling apart.
ADHD sometimes involves hyperactivity, impulsivity, and fidgeting, and Adderall/Ritalin reduces these symptoms. (Something roughly like this is true even in fruit-flies, btw: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_anderson_your_brain_is_more_than_a_bag_of_chemicals ). Your explanation based on a prior of motionlessness does not seem to account for why fidgeting would result both from too much and from too little dopamine. (Related question: does giving mild-to-moderate doses of antipsychotics to (young) children with normal dopamine levels result in hyperactivity? (I guess you'd need this to be an animal study or a control group to pass the ERB?))
In my experience ADHD individuals have a very poor prior against action. They're acting constantly, because the baseline level of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain is too low - sitting still results in a reward (or anticipation of reward) deficit.
There's also weak signal from the rational mind - sitting still in a classroom setting, even when you don't want to accomplishes the long-term (over like 5 minutes) goal of the teacher not yelling at you. But low signal from the prefrontal cortex makes the ganglia interpret that as a low-confidence bid for action.
That leaves "strongest prior reward actions" but again, you're looking at a brain that just *doesn't get* reward anticipation responses, so prior actions also tend to be pretty low confidence bids.
This is all super speculative but my ADHD experience has been that the "strongest prior reward" comes from falling very heavily on the exploration side of the exploration/exploitation dichotomy. Doing the same action repeatedly, even if it's highly rewarding, tends to have diminishing returns. Meanwhile, doing random actions usually is useless, but occasionally hits on a dopamine goldmine.
My bet would be that this is why the fidgeting and impulsiveness - prior against action is unrewarding, rational action is unrewarding, doing what you were doing is unrewarding, random thrashing about is, on very rare occasions only, super rewarding. Since rewards are hard to find, may as well try that.
When you increase the overall dopamine levels in the brain, both the prefrontal cortex and the prior against action become stronger. "Just randomly look for reward responses" becomes a less good strategy, because it was always a bad strategy.
Meanwhile, with a typical brain, the prior against action is pretty strong already, and new signals need to override it. An increase in dopamine levels gives more strength to the other two signals. This increases the rational signal, but *also* introduces just a general bias towards action, including random action.
Dopamine is complicated, and "too little" and "too much" dopamine reduces this complexity with loss of nuance. Dopamine has tonic and phasic signaling. Too much tonic is way different than too much phasic. Too little tonic can result in more effect phasic release. Adhd kids with decreased tonic release are more discrimination to phasic signaling, hence the scattered, impulsive behavior.
>Does this theory tell us how to get more willpower?
Yes! Cocaine, right?
(jk)
This reminds me of the recent thread on the subreddit of real life experiences with trapped priors: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/m4h1al/where_have_you_experienced_trapped_priors_in_your/
It does seem that this model is broadly correct - that our brain is making forecasts and acting accordingly. What I find fascinating is how we cannot convince our brain of something on an intellectual level - the brain has to convince itself of this with real experiences to update from.
But it sounds like if we had a drug that was able to temporarily turn off the "reinforcement" part of the brain for short periods, we could make huge advances in public health and crime (things like gambling, smoking and alcohol), politics and science (digging into biases and refusing to change opinions seems like a "reinforcement" thing to me), education and business, etc.
At the risk of being way too optimistic, this sounds like a Very Important Problem.
I'm not sure this is coherent. Turning off basic mental processes is neither really possible nor desirable.
But naltrexone is a sort of very weak thing in a sort of similar direction. Medication that blocks opiates, which are heavily involved in the reinforcement system, and seems to be generally helpful (though not 100% success rate) against addictions.
So what I'm hearing is: Ketamine to weaken old priors and hence make setting new ones easier, followed by amphetamines for a temporary boost to frontal cortex / "higher logical reasoning" priors, which due to the ketamine is cemented, so now you permanently have higher willpower! It's the perfect ploy!
(I know nothing, there's no way this would just work, it's just the obvious synthesis of Scott's post's on these matters)
> But it also improves willpower (eg Adderall helping people study).
Does it? When I take my methylphenidate for ADHD, I don't feel any significant willpower surge, my thoughts and impulses are just far less labile – it often manifests in doing one particular task (the one I find myself doing when I start to feel the effects of MPH), be it productive or not.
Typos, all in the paragraph beginning with "Now not only can the frontal cortex":
"to overcome the prior" (missing "to")
", even the limbic system" (missing comma)
And these read wrong to me, but are more likely to be correct:
"limbic system instinctual processes" -> system's?
"frontal cortex conscious processes" -> cortex's or cortex' or something?
I’m surprised to see Scott endorse the idea that people who drink too much need to “hit rock bottom” before changing. That’s an AA platitude that is not supported by evidence. In fact, if you ask people who overcome drinking problems, they don’t necessarily say there was a “rock bottom”—sometimes they naturally grow out of the heavy drinking, sometimes they decide to change without any particular low moment. Look at survey data from Anne Fletcher.
Absolutely the research doesn't support this 'rock bottom' idea. The impediment to seeing that is that the vast majority of people who develop substance abuse problems pull themselves out of it, with the assistance/insistence of family/friends, BEFORE they need to see a psychiatrist, join AA etc. So they don't register on the radar until population level research is done. The psychiatrists and groups like AA only SEE the people who couldn't manage on their own.
Ditto for eating disorders, compulsive gambling, self-harm .... (Lots of co-morbidity with personality disorders for the ones psychiatrists do get to see, btw. But then we could have a whole convo about what a PD is or isn't .... In any case, many of those traits don't help people out of their compulsive consumption/behaviours.)
What is meant by rock bottom? If you see where things are going and stop before you get fired and your wife leaves you, is that rock bottom? In that situation, I would say you haven't hit rock bottom but your brain has convinced itself of where things are headed if you don't stop. I'm speaking from personal experience.
I've heard of the concept of a high bottom. Some people don't hit bottom until they suffer some serious disaster, and others stop when their drinking is defaulting to a little more than they think is a good idea.
I agree that not all cases of abandoning drinking involve rock bottom.
What I was trying to say is that addictions are very hard to break, but sometimes if they cause sufficiently bad things, that makes you able to break them.
Maybe a better (because less-politicized) example - I once had a patient who ate terribly. He knew he should diet, but he felt like he didn't have enough willpower to make it stick. One day he had a heart attack and almost died. After that he never touched junk food again.
I don't think he was "dishonest" about wanting to diet before. And I don't think he was too ignorant to know that bad diet could cause heart attacks. I think the heart attack was something so overwhelmingly scary that it recalibrated his "evidence" on the pros and cons of dieting. I think hitting rock bottom for alcoholism is the same sort of thing.
Obviously many people are able to diet well without heart attacks and many alcoholics are able to quit without hitting rock bottom, I'm more interested in the existence of cases where this does work.
If I squint very hard I can make myself see straight lines in the picture. Dont know why.
I assume this tricks your brain into placing more weight on the incoming perceptions than prior expectations. Fun trick to try: If the moon is close to the horizon, it will look larger. This optical illusion stops when you look at it bent over looking through your legs.
This would make a lot of sense with recent evidence showing that procrastination isn't about 'time management' or any of those logical processes, but about negative emotion. Doing the 'whatever I SHOULD be doing right now' may trigger negative emotion in all sorts of ways, including fear of failure (what if I put a lot of work into this paper/work presentation and it's still not very good?), fear of success (if I do well, everyone will expect me to KEEP ON doing well, which sounds like ... a lot of work and stress), and fear that the task will be boring/unpleasant/overwhelming.
There's also recent research showing that while people in general aren't great at estimating how boring or unpleasant a task will be, those with ADD/ADHD are even worse at it, tending to severely over-estimate the boringness and unpleasantness of tasks. (Ask people to rate the task before starting, then ask them again once they're in the middle of the task.) They're also worse at estimating how enjoyable/satisfying something will be, making them more reluctant to get up off the couch and go see their friends or go to a show, to work out etc. All this fits with the role of dopamine in these processes. We see, now, that dopamine is not just a reward system, but also part of that anticipation system that motivates us.
Gotta love the stimulants. I'm sure civilizations were only built once people started consistently using tea, coffee, mate ....
Buddhists describe liberation escaping the grips of "clinging" and "aversion", which in a sense is freeing oneself from strong, impulsive motivators. In my anecdotal experience, this may contribute to anhedonia to those predisposed (like me). But over the long haul, I think it serves to de-habituate from such strong motivators, which in turn permits weaker but consciously-chosen motivations to win. Perhaps developing willpower is a matter of reducing the strength of impulsive motivations so that these weaker, chosen motivations have a chance. This, in turn, allows for the cultivation of "vīrya" ("the mind intent on being ever active, devoted, unshaken, not turning back and being indefatigable. It perfects and realizes what is conducive to the positive" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C4%ABrya).
Does this say anything about why people have various sorts of actions which are easier for them to do, or even feel like a default while other people need willpower to do those sorts of things? Some people find thinking and research to be a default, and there are people who like exercise.
I was talking with a man who really *likes* keeping things clean and in good order. I don't think he was BSing-- the seafood section behind him looked very good. It sounded like it would be a strain for him to not clean up.
As a general point, willpower is good, but not an unlimited good. People with anorexia or exercise disorders are overdoing it.
And people in charge are reasonably likely to impose tasks with insufficient concern for their subordinates-- just having willpower for what you're told to do is not reliably the best thing.
I'm studying <a href="https://www.energyarts.com/">a style of qi gong</a> which includes the 70% rule. When you're practicing, only do 70% of what you can do, physically and mentally. This applies with a good bit of subtlety. When you're raising your arms, if you feel a little glitch, don't raise them that high. And do less than 70% if you're sick or injured. 50%! 30%!
I've been doing this for a few years, and (aside from making injury much less likely) it pays off because what I can do easily has increased and movement has become more pleasant.
However, *not* using willpower to push through pain or stiffness takes a good bit of willpower and conscientiousness itself, though taking care has become somewhat of a habit.
I love cleaning! Honestly, I cherish the time I spend every Saturday cleaning the whole house top to bottom. By the time I'm done it sparkles. Obviously I have no control of really enjoying it.
nor would an individual ant be a counter-example for an example with an individual human :) strictly speaking!
Recording this before I finish reading so I can remember my "naive" priors about willpower: At first blush, I'm not sure willpower is a thing-in-itself that resides in our minds/thoughts/selves and governs our ability to work toward goals. Maybe it's a value we hold, a useful concept, like trustworthiness, that helps us make sense of the world and express should-bes and oughts. Maybe it's a story we tell ourselves. Why did I eat too big a breakfast? No willpower. Why did I persevere and finish my exercise? I owe it all to my willpower. I strongly suspect that any study in the general neighborhood of willpower (the marshmallow test, for example) is measuring other things.
Back after reading: The thing that I think will stick with me from this article is the image of different parts of a lamprey brain "bidding" dopamine/expressing confidence levels to determine an eel's next action. I think my beliefs updated toward the position that certain brain processes work in a way analogous to the way we think about willpower. And I more strongly believe I'm unable to helpfully wade into arguments among experts in matters of brains and mental health and whatnot about whether there is a "willpower" or not.
Very interesting stuff.
My recent ADHD diagnosis and subsequent stimulant prescription have not affected my willpower much - while I can do some tasks more easily, I still struggle a lot with the "important" ones (i.e. I sought treatment because I was worried about being fired and it has only barely improved my work product). My work trajectory has been a degrading orbit for years - the stimulant addition was like a booster rocket, but not strong enough to keep the orbit from degrading.
In Bayesland this all makes sense. I've been attempting to live a "secure" lifestyle in a way that's incompatible with my personality, telling myself that providing for myself and my wife and performing work tasks is what a good person does. But my lower-level brain is deeply unconvinced by that argument because when I perform tasks, there is no reward feedback. My prefrontal monologue can yell "no this is rewarding!" at the top of its lungs, but if it's not, the ganglia will give it less and less weight over time until my insistence that, "no really, this time you're going to feel good about completing this" has no impact on my actions.
I don't care for this idea because it takes "the things I've decided to do" as not only a weak influence on my actions, but currently as "not an influence on my actions at all." That's not exactly an uplifting theory of the mind. :/
Visualization and/or focused cultivation of intentions is one of the only real magic willpower fixes, and I think it basically works this way. You improve your Bayesian credence that the course of action will yield a desirable state by flooding your brain with a vivid sensorial simulation of what that will be like. You are putting your finger on the Bayesian scale by, in a sense, fabricating some evidence in the direction you want to push.
Amusingly, the main place where visualization-type interventions fail is ... failing to do the visualization intervention in the first place because your credence that doing such an intervention will work is low.
My impression is that the willpower (or whatever it is) to do things is more common and possibly easier than the willpower to do new thinking about whether what you're doing makes sense in terms of your larger goals.
I think this fits well with theories of superstimulus. In part what superstimulus is doing is providing far too much evidence.
In particular, this explains a bunch of "productivity hacks" as "willpower hacks" (where a 'hack' is a very specific solution to a very specific problem) -- that work by turning homework into a superstimulus, or otherwise making it supersalient.
Even simple things like leaving the box you need to unpack on your desk (in your visual field) act here to increase willpower to unpack the box, because it's more salient/stimulus when its inside your visual field than outside of it.
This also suggests further hacks, like having your homework be in bright colors or large/sharp letters. Maybe purely cognitive things like visualizing a stadium of people cheering you on (if you like that sort of thing -- maybe some people would be terrified of that). Anything that would increase the provided stimulation would increase the "evidence" to the basal ganglia.
Also, this would fit with why productivity hacks / willpower hacks tend to lessen in effect over time. Superstimulus / supersalience is in part a function of your sensitivity to it, and the more you use it, the more resistance you'll build up (as the odds ratio of supersalient evidence decreases to that of normal evidence).
Which fits with what I've observed personally and in others: the best productivity hacks / willpower hacks are actually lots of experimenting and rotating hacks, instead of finding one that works well and sticking with it.
To me, this suggests you should focus productivity hacks on all bidders, not just on the bid you wish to have win. For example, say you want homework to win, but playing games wins instead. You could focus on increasing homework's bid, but that strategy is going to require you to continue to motivate yourself every time you have to do homework, with diminishing returns. If instead you find a way to reduce the payoff for playing games you'll reduce that bid and make it easier for homework to win. Not sure how you'd go about hacking the game's bid though?
Bayes Theorem is a branch of Probability Mathematics {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability} which was the only published mathematical work of Bayes. {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem}
If "Willpower is the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals"' , forming a probabilistic theory of willpower with Bayesian mathematics is a very simplistic or superficial approach to human behavior. Consider willpower and panic attacks, drug and other addictions, OCD, ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder...
Bayesian inference {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference}
Bayesian Knowledge Tracing {Bayesian Knowledge Tracing}
_________
Interesting, the post is also reproduced on
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wZGpoZgDANdkwTrwt/toward-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower
All very well put! Also many in the threads to this view their "long term goal" to have the day's dishes done, while the short - term competition of the goal is a computer game, and a reward is listening to a podcast or an audiobook... And a donut is somehow a temptation! To be avoided with elaborate strategies! It is all "overintellectualizing". I think the original post had some practical goal, say, to discuss how to help people seriously in trouble, and then things drifted away. Of course, this simple Bayesian model cannot explain the complexities of human decision-making. So whoever replies tries to trivialize the "decision situation" in the comments to make the simple model a better approximant for a simpler task :)
So it's to do with fun, right? Dopamine is the "fun" brain chemical: https://www.healthline.com/health/dopamine-effects#how-it-makes-you-feel
And the willpower struggle is between "but playing games is fun!" versus "doing the dishes/doing my homework is not fun". Sticking to plain boiled broccoli is less fun than a slice of Black Forest Gateau. Exercise is less fun than sitting at the computer surfing the Internet. Fun is fun, duty is not.
And the prior on motionlessness is simple inertia: the tendency of a body at rest to stay at rest.
I'm not sure it has to do with the idea of "fun". I feel very confused now about the role of dopamine now: early on I thought it had to do with happiness, then it was surprise, and now Bayesian-evidence-weighting-ness. Thanks Scott Alexander (I guess).
Surprise and evidence-weightingness should be the same thing I think. Suppose the LHC is trying to discover new physics, it does some experiments, and it gets exactly what the Standard Model predicted. There is zero surprise, and so it has produced no new evidence (ie you should update your existing theories by zero). Suppose it gets something completely bizarre and unpredicted. Now there is high surprise, and you should update a lot (ie weight the evidence very highly) in favor of whatever theory did/could have predicted that.
I think this is linked to "fun" in the sense that something is fun if it sends a high surprise signal to the reinforcement learner part of the brain. IE receiving your paycheck provides lots of reinforcement (money is reinforcing!) but it doesn't really register as fun because you knew you would get it. Winning at gambling is fun because it's a surprise reinforcement.
(technically "fun" is not the right term, it should be reinforcement, and although I gave any example where "fun" also works if you try you can break the equivalence because "fun" is really a much more complicated concept, sorry. But you can see why dopamine = fun is a pop science thing)
"Completely bizarre and unpredicted" would make me start tests and searches for what the heck is broken in the machine. A "surprise" that is no longer comprehensible is better not used to base updates upon.
Imagine a graph with y = information and x from 'nothing new' to 'everything new' (ie not even parseable, completely random). Then information follows an inverted U curve. The optimal surprise to update from would be in its maximum, not the 'everything new' tail. (Was that graph by Shannon himself?)
With "completely bizarre and unpredicted", a new theory/paradigm is required (if the machine turned out to work correctly, of course), and here we are in definition territory whether that counts as 'update'. Do Bayesians have 'upgrades'?
So true about paycheck analogy, and think of it: people feel gradient more, that the absolute values (within certain safety range of course);
a bit smaller paycheck would worry and upset them greatly and send them in search of a reason, a hidden deduction. An added small value is more likely to go unnoticed (we are tuned to "dangers") but still would make one disproportionally (with the value) happy-feeling-appreciated.
The same goes for sales at stores and surprising finds, which are also addictive to some.
Think of cats: they like to chase a surprising new toy, but if they do not win, they are frustrated.
The unpredictability as fun you write about in humans is more complex, yet similar on this base level: if we can master and control it, it is fun. Not otherwise.
But we conditioned to claim otherwise (in the USA culture, not in a number of other cultures).
Gambling is only fun if the gambler blames the losses on misfortune and credits the winnings on his supermind.
If you explain an underdog at the table how "it" was his own miscomputaiton, the fun is gone!
That makes sense, thanks. I feel much clearer now about what dopamine does now.
Part of the problem with depression is that it can make having fun seem too much like work compared with very low-effort time-killing.
Oh, exactly; this quote from "The Screwtape Letters" has always resonated strongly with me because yeah, you look up and it's hours later and what have you been doing all that time? Nothing:
"As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."
Yes, I was thinking about that quote, though it didn't seem quite worth finding it.
Does fighting it out with optical illusions count? Probably only if you're not having much fun with it.
(1) Monks and nuns were passing on the evolution of ideas and if becoming abesses/ abbots facilitating the standing of their families with genes close to them
(2) Young people volunteer for wars to defend their country and often perish before they have offspring, but their community survives because of it, and procreates, with genes closer to theirs (than the genes of their farther away based enemy)
(3) The margins of survival in human history are very narrow: this very behavior commonly contributes to at least something related to them to survive
(4) It is debatable with part of going to the monastery or going to defend your country is due to the higher enforcing by a cognitive function which fights the instincts, or by a "selfless" gene instinct to defend your own!
(5)A smaller example: if one sees "bad guys" attacking a small child or a defenseless woman the instinct is to interfere, to mobilize, and to fight the bad guys off, while the reasoning stops some from doing so - so in this case the willpower is aligned with the instinct and not with the reasoning
I did all four of the literal exercises.
Also, an observation that I think is either extremely deep or shallow: I think that this might have to do with the idea of Lagrangian multipliers. Suppose that you want to maximize f(x) subject to the constraint g(x) = c, and suppose f and g are sufficiently "nice" functions. The direct maximization is hard. However, we observe that at a local maxima, the gradients of f and of g must be parallel, so this turns out that we can do this optimization by maximizing f(x) + lambda*g(x) for generic lambda, then tuning lambda so that g(X) = c for the local maxima X.
More concretely, because we only have a finite amount of energy and moving muscles consumes energy, evolution or whatever wants to maximize reproductive success subject to using a fixed amount of energy. Instead of searching through the strategies that use that amount of energy to maximize reproductive success, evolution can instead program (proxy for reproductive success) - lambda*(proxy for energy), and then tune lambda. So what feels from the inside like a prior against using energy could turn out to be just a hacky means of doing constrained optimization.
"Millions of people throughout history have failed to reproduce because they became monks for false religions; if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem."
So the true religions are the one where clergy marry and have families, like Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism? 😁
The problem with that, though, is evidenced in Trollope's characters in "Barchester Towers": Mr Quiverful and his wife are very fruitful by their instinctual processes but this means that they are dependent on the wife of the new Bishop for promotion in order to support their large family, and that causes dislike and problems due to her meddling:
"Barchester Towers concerns the leading clergy of the cathedral city of Barchester. The much loved bishop having died, all expectations are that his son, Archdeacon Grantly, will succeed him. Owing to the passage of the power of patronage to a new Prime Minister, a newcomer, the far more Evangelical Bishop Proudie, gains the see. His wife, Mrs Proudie, exercises an undue influence over the new bishop, making herself as well as the bishop unpopular with most of the clergy of the diocese. Her interference to veto the reappointment of the universally popular Mr Septimus Harding (protagonist of Trollope's earlier novel, The Warden) as warden of Hiram's Hospital is not well received, even though she gives the position to a needy clergyman, Mr Quiverful, with 14 children to support."
Secondly, so what is the reason for the problem today of those who are not monks or clergy of any religion, but are not reproducing? They are listening to their instinctual processes in that they are bound and determined to have sex, but they cut off the connection between sex and reproduction.
Should we be crying "shame, shame!" at them and at those lay persons who are childless and unmarried today? They don't have the religious precepts stopping them, so why don't they have fourteen children each? 😁
> Should we be crying "shame, shame!" at them
They already have -evolution- overbearing parents for that. Technically, the marriage is secondary.
> My model has several different competing mental processes trying to determine your actions. One is a prior on motionlessness; if you have no reason at all to do anything, stay where you are. A second is a pure reinforcement learner - "do whatever has brought you the most reward in the past". And the third is your high-level conscious calculations about what the right thing to do is.
Hah, this is very Freudian. Freud first posits the "Nirvana Principle": the goal of the nervous system is to reduce stimulus as much as possible. Hence the prior on motionlessness. Then, the split between Death Drive (compulsive repetition, i.e. "follow past rewards") vs Life Drive (do something new, and whether this results from conscious calculations or pure impulse isn't necessarily relevant. Although, if we look at older Freud texts, we see a distinction between "primary" unconscious and "secondary" conscious processes, which also vaguely maps to asimilar position).
> Guyenet describes various brain regions making "bids" to the basal ganglia, using dopamine as the "currency" - whichever brain region makes the highest bid gets to determine the lamprey's next action.
Freud also used this metaphor back in the late 1800s (The Interpretation of Dreams), describing desire as a "little entrepreneur" which is "backed" by the unconscious "capitalist", which we might call predictive confidence. This is commonly known as his "economic model", in contrast to his "dynamic" and "structural" models, and there's a lot of literature on the interplay of these metaphors (of particular note is Paul Ricoeur's "Freud and Philosophy").
Speaking of dopamine too, I'm sure Freud's prior (1880s) work on cocaine helped him come to these conclusions regarding the structure of the psyche.
The use of having a theory like this, which addresses the "psyche" rather than the "brain", is that we can look at the role of *fantasy*, which is to say: we have some capacity to simulate situations and imagine the rewards, and it is the fantasy which ultimately convinces us to try something different (because otherwise, how can we even make judgments about the worth of what will happen if we try something new?).
"Hah, this is very Freudian. Freud first posits the "Nirvana Principle": the goal of the nervous system is to reduce stimulus as much as possible. "
Huh! I didn't realize this. This is very PCT/PC - the idea is to reduce "surprise" - given that your brain is already predicting certain stimuli (like the feeling of wearing clothes) your goal is to reduce the amount of unpredicted new stimuli, ie the only ones that feel like real stimuli and are noticeable.
I will have to look into this.
I recommend his paper "Instincts and their Vicissitudes". Short, readable, and tries to posit a evo-biological grounding for psychoanalytic theory. Nirvana Principle is elaborated in the footnoted and had apparently been floating around since the late 1800s.
Seems like "short term vs long term" might be a factor. The rewards for finishing my paper are long term, while the rewards for playing Civilization are quick. And if you're potential prey a bias toward short term is useful.
I think this might be one of the factors that determines how reinforcing the reinforcement system finds something.
Interestingly, I can much more easily force myself to perceive the lines in the last picture as straight if I close one eye.
> naive attempts to "provide more evidence" that a certain course of action is good will fail; the brain is harder to fool than people expect.
I would disagree with that.
Every time I lose motivation to lift weights, reading bodybuilding forums/subreddits, watching progress videos etc helps a lot.
In general, hanging out with people in the same boat provides a lot of evidence in favor of the correct course of action: if everyone around you is doing it, it must be something worth doing.
My brain sometimes is just too easy to fool. Just make it consume sufficiently many blog/reddit/forum posts and tweets uncritically, and it will believe anything.
Scott Alexander's brain may be harder to fool, and maybe it needs to get sufficiently tired before consuming motivational material? So perhaps reading r/CleaningTips or r/konmari after a long working day will provide enough evidence to do the dishes?
Personally, for me it's more like Hyperbole and a half's "Motivation Game" cartoon: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/18/45/721845fe7a1dd85f213124c51ded504c.jpg
"You have to do the thing!" "Okay"
"Right now, stop sitting there!" "Sure, fine"
"You can't have nice thing until you do the thing!" "Er, I can, though?"
"Well, everything's ruined now" "Oh no, how did that happen?"
The 'trick' about "do the thing or you can't have nice thing" "you're just trying to trick me so I'll do the thing, I can too have nice thing without doing thing" is where the carrot doesn't work for me. And the stick needs to be *really* bad before I get motivated.
How does this relate to people who have a high levels of executive function or workaholics? From what I've been able to gather it's not willpower as they genuinely enjoy working/doing what they need to do. I'm sure we all know people who love crossing things off their todo list.
> The lines here are perfectly straight - feel free to check with a ruler. Can you force yourself to perceive them that way?
I _used to be_ able to force myself to do that by pure force of will, for basically any optical illusion. (The inverted face was the one exception I remember.) I'm not sure when I lost that ability but the change was probably packaged with a decrease in depression.
Were you able to force yourself to notice your blind spot?
Breakdown of Will by Ainslee. He covers self prediction
Just wondering where Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop smoking fits into this schema. People who have used it know that he claims you don’t need to use willpower to stop smoking. In the UK the ASA banned his ads as a result. Of course you need willpower. But people like me who used the book report that well, no, you don’t need willpower provided you follow his method. Which is basically to persuade you (intellectually) that you don’t enjoy smoking.
A weak self hypnosis in disguise?
Pretty sure that is part of it. But I did hypnosis properly and stopped for 6 months after which . . . With the Allen Carr thing a light went on in my head and that was the end of it.
When I find I "don't need willpower" for something, it usually means one of two things:
a) the instinctual/reinforcement system is on board with it. For example, I find that planning even complicated dates with someone I'm attracted to is easy, because my instinctual/reinforcement system expects a big payoff.
b) the logical argument for doing something is overwhelming, eg someone is threatening to shoot me if I don't, or offering a million dollar reward if I do. I guess this could also be a subtype of a, since my instinctual system is on board with not getting shot.
I think the feeling of needing willpower is what it feels like from the inside when the two systems are very nearly balanced and one either just barely succeeds at or just barely fails to overcome the other.
Simplistic IFS answer to dishes: Musician part does not want to do dishes, Doctor thinks you should do dishes but making you do it is definitely not his top priority. With strong enough inner conflict Doctor barely has enough inner power to make you study for a test. So there is no one to do dishes: Musician just doesn't want, for Doctor this means trade-off he doesn't want to make.
I just noticed I can significantly diminish the optical illusion by squinting my eyes almost closed, so my eyelashes obscure much of my vision but still leave a blurred image. That blurred image seems like a simple, straight grid.
Do you think it's fair to say that at that point my sensory input is diminished and some prior of a grid is taking over? Or is it just that I'm obscuring the part of the sensory input that makes the lines seem to be bent (all the little details) and what's left just looks like a grid?
Your last sentence is right. When you squint like that, you are no longer seeing the fine details that cause the illusion.
I often find that a lot of optical illusions don't work as well on me as on other people - I have some of the hallmarks of schizophrenia and gender issues, both of which interact with optical illusions weirdly - but that last optical illusion is the strongest version of that effect I've seen by a WIDE margin. A lot of the horizontal-bar images seem more or less horizontal to me, less so if seen quickly, but this one is brain-hurty in a good way.
I'm curious how this fits with Kahneman's system 1/2 stuff (which is more descriptive, not mechanistic like the discussion here, so it probably isn't really a question of agree/disagree). He talks about how using system 2 is effortful/tiring, and your description of the intellectual/logical system trying to fight the intuitive system certainly sounds like system 2 fighting system 1.
I think willpower depletion would be something that these two frames view differently, so whether it's real (I have no clue) is probably useful. I don't immediately see why, in your model, the bayesian calculus falling one way would influence how it falls 10 minutes later, whereas in Kahneman's framing that phenomenon jumps out. Does anyone know how real willpower depletion is?
Sorry should've read comments first, looks like other people brought depletion up and it might not be real
Credit to AC Harper for mentioning the notion of a person holding their leg out and then keeping it out to contrast deciding to do something with continuing to do something.
What I think is getting missed there is not continuing to do something doesn't necessarily happen because of insufficient willpower. Muscle failure is a real thing. Presumably, there is some analog with purely mental effort. All of these activities you mention as being "reinforcing" aren't necessarily reinforcing so much as passive. Doom scrolling requires no effort. You can do it forever well past the point of having no mental energy left. Clearly, eating falls into a category like this. Unless you're eating something extremely low in calorie density, it is inherently an energy giving activity.
Notably, the ability to make your muscles last longer is about more than just grabbing more calories and accumulating ATP. Muscles can be trained. They can learn to move more efficiently. The absolute capacity to generate force can be increased. I see no reason to think brains can't do the same. Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to express this without contrasting mental strength with mental weakness, which seem taboo thanks to moral judgments in the larger culture that obtain about those notion in a way they don't about physical strength and weakness. For whatever reason, we don't (mostly) assign moral value to physical strength, but we do mental strength, which makes it hard to talk about because it inevitably sounds like you're implying some people are worse than others because their brains are less naturally strong or less trained.
Remember that book you reviewed about the guy who thought people in the classical period didn't think they had their own thoughts, but instead thought Gods were talking to them? I was thinking about that in the context of AA and their insistence on accepting a higher power the other day. Maybe accepting a higher power moves the thoughts about not drinking back into the God realm. So before AA you'd think to yourself "aww Gee I really shouldn't have a drink", but you're not going to take advice from some drunk. But when you go to drink after accepting the higher power you hear Gods voice in your head telling you not to drink, and him you listen to.
My basal ganglia doesn't seem to believe in independence of irrelevant alternatives. If I'm given the choice of doing nothing in particular or repetitive level grinding in a game, I find it hard to summon up enthusiasm for level grinding. But if I have the choice between doing nothing, level grinding, and doing unplesant but very important homework, I suddenly have a great deal of enthusiasm for level grinding.
"a quick experiment: wiggle your index finger for one second. Now wave your whole arm in the air for one second. Now jump up and down for one second......"
1 minute after reading this I watched the 5 year old I'm staying with go down into a crab crawl and dance/run/shimmy his way down the hall to his parents bedroom. Why does this not seem to apply to kids?
I think it's because they have a lower weight for the motionlessness prior/component, so the other components don't need to fire as strongly in order to overcome it.
I mean you would have to explain why though for the theory to make any sense right? Why would adults have such a strong prior against moving but children not?
Adults are heavy relative to their strength, by square-cube law.
Trying out all the things your body can do is exciting, rewarding, full of surprises. Ah, that sense of agency! The sensory input!
Using Scott's model we would say kids have a low propensity for doing nothing, a low propensity for talking ourselves out of things or top down inhibition and a high propensity for motor action as pleasure/play
Interesting. Spencer Greenberg also just wrote about self-control/willpower, and his solution between the conflict of "willpower is used up"-studies not replicating and the strong anecdotal evidence of willpower being used up was the following: split it up into a few subcategories (classical self-control, helpful preferences, pain tolerance), some of which could be subject to being used up and others not.
You can read the post here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JgBBuDf5uZHmpEMDs
I think it is a good thing that attention is coming to the topic, because it is one of the bigger mysteries in cognition, and a little more graspable than, let's say, consciousness or free will.
There’s nothing Bayesian about this account - it’s just argmaxing over inputs from different areas of the brain. Unless there’s some specific evidence the Basal Ganglia does marginalisation (even then, this would result in v. different behaviour to picking the recommendation with the strongest signal, it’d be some weird blend or maybe the MAP). It just seems like more fetishisation of Bayes rule where people want to believe this simple probability theorem is the silver bullet to everything
So the idea here is that willpower is an illusion? We want and do stuff, and sometimes we may have an intellectual notion that we should be doing something other than what we're doing, but it's not like we can "will" ourselves into doing something that we wouldn't otherwise be doing already?
I mean, this is fine - free will is also an illusion. Error theory about the mind is completely legitimate.
I do wonder why playing Civilization is such an easy option, though - it's not as though it does much to help either survival or reproductive success.
Maybe:
When in play mode, we want to do stuff: there are no real risks and it counts as training for the real thing. It can even be fun to find all our failure modes and laugh about them, absorb the lessons, get better.
When in serious mode, only do it if we have to. If we poke the bear just for kicks, we won't end up well.
But now, we take training seriously, so we don't want to do most stuff, and we don't *really* have to so we usually don't. And when we do, it's not as good for learning.
But yeah, playing civilization would be play-mode for what? Maybe we didn't need to evolve a very nuanced filter about what's useful play-training and what's not. Or at the very least, in evolutionary times, we didn't have much pressure to make a special case out of these games. Or, you know, games of the sort actually train us somewhat (it is said that we evolved our big brains because of the evolutionary pressure of politics, human dynamics, strategy...). Now they look like games about contexts we don't find in real life, but probably throughout evolutionary history the strategy games were more similar to possibly real situations.
How would the H in ADHD fit in this?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17907872/
> My model has several different competing mental processes...These all submit "evidence" to your basal ganglia
> Guyenet describes various brain regions making "bids" to the basal ganglia, using dopamine as the "currency"
> the predictive coding community uses a different one: they describe it as representing the "confidence" or "level of evidence" for a specific calculation.
> My theory of willpower asserts that [dopamine] affects decision-making [by] representing the amount of evidence for a hypothesis.
Why do you think that? It's ironic to suggest without evidence that a "Bayesian evidence" theory is better than a simpler "brain regions making bids" theory — assuming the latter is governed not by something Bayesian but just ordinary physics produced by evolution, which might resemble something bayesian but not really well.
Also, while I have read a lot of Scott Alexander, Yudkowsky and other rationalists (and much enjoyed it), none of these authors have addressed basic questions like where priors (should) come from, or like "if Bob tells me X, and then Cathy tells me X, and then Dan tells me X, is that three pieces of evidence for X or just one?"
How can we claim something is "Bayesian" when we don't have any criteria to distinguish Bayesian reasoning from "I heard something that sounded subjectively plausible from someone I subjectively felt was credible, so I 'updated'"?
> You could give an evolutionary explanation - in the past, animals were much less smart, and their instincts were much better suited to their environment, so the intellectual/logical processes were less accurate, relative to the reinforcement/instinctual processes, than they are today. Whenever that system last evolved, it was right to weight them however much it weighted them.
This isn't a bad approach, except that final sentence. No, it wasn't "right to weight them however much it weighted them". Evolutions are stupid (but work anyway - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway); evolutionary results aren't "right" except relative to the animals that died young or went extinct. As you said, even today, logical/intellectual processes can be pretty dumb.
> Even today, logical/intellectual processes can be pretty dumb. Millions of people throughout history have failed to reproduce because they became monks for false religions; if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem.
How did you conclude that religious beliefs are a consequence of "intellectual/logical reasoning" rather than "reinforcement/instinctual processes"? I just checked: it's not April 1, it's just a strange thing for an atheist to say.
> Any convincing sophist can launch an attack through the intellectual/logical processes; when they do, the reinforcement/instinctual processes are there to save us
The intellectual/logical processes are what save people from intellectual/logical attacks.
The reinforcement/instinctual processes are there to say "gee, those statements sure *feel* true and I can't help but be impressed with the confident manner with which that sophist speaks." But wait, how does this even relate to your thesis?
On the whole, I think your theory muddies the waters. When I am deciding whether to procrastinate an important task to play a video game, I my intellect can dig up genuine "evidence", like "you procrastinated before and you were unhappy with the consequences", and still lose the debate against Mr. "video games are SO fun!!!" — I mean, how is that "evidence"? It's evidence I will temporarily feel high, okay, but not evidence that it's a good idea from any practical standpoint such as replicating my genes in offspring. But still it wins.
> Why do you think that?
I agree in this post he doesn't give any arguments for why he'd prefer the inference engine view rather than the auction/economy, and I agree too that the economy analogy feels more natural here. But, there's context from other posts about predictive coding and the arguments for a computational view of the brain in general as an engine trying to minimize prediction errors (of sensory input for example) and in that sense, an economy analogy seems more forced. Given that, it makes sense to prefer a unified analogy of the brain.
> No, it wasn't "right to weight them however much it weighted them". Evolutions are stupid
This seems more like a gotcha than a clarification to a possible confusion of Scott or any reader (like, as if I now wrote back that evolutions aren't "stupid" either because etc... true but I know what you mean.)
> where priors (should) come from, or like "if Bob tells me X, and then Cathy tells me X, and then Dan tells me X, is that three pieces of evidence for X or just one?"
That's a hard question, and it's outside anything "bayes". But I think all the stuff about making predictions hints in this direction, in practical terms -- like, no matter where your priors come from, train to get them calibrated and then it doesn't matter much. And the stuff Yudkowski wrote about Occam's razor and Solomonoff induction triiiiies to put some theory on where to ground the recursive bayes loop.
That one was about where priors should come from.
> "if Bob tells me X, and then Cathy tells me X, and then Dan tells me X, is that three pieces of evidence for X or just one?"
This one is interesting. It shouldn't make any difference as long as the data points are independent given your hypothesis. (so, e.g. if in the world where X is true, the chances of Cathy telling you X don't change regardless of whether Dan told you X or not, and viceversa.).
But in general (e.g. if Cathy also talks with Dan and tends to repeat what he tells her) it's more precise (though more complex) to treat them as a single piece of combined evidence.
I mean, you can do it in 2 steps too, but then the first step becomes part of your hypothetical worlds, which I find more complicated (you'd have to ask yourself about the relative chances of Cathy telling you X in worlds where Dan told you X already.)
> How can we claim something is "Bayesian" when we don't have any criteria to distinguish Bayesian reasoning from "I heard something that sounded subjectively plausible from someone I subjectively felt was credible, so I 'updated'"?
If you are thinking in terms of probabilities (and not just yes/no nor yes/no/dunno), then you are 1/3 there to bayesian thinking in the sense people use it around here (iiuc). If additionally you are viewing the thinking as the process of updating priors and not just of reaching conclusions, then you are 2/3 there. Both are there in your example.
The remaining 1/3, I'd say, would be that, when you heard that thing, you stopped to ask yourself: "if the world was not as I think it is, what are the chances I would have heard a similar thing?" and then tried to update based on your (surely subjective sense of their) relative likelihoods. I'd say that people don't mean anything stronger than that around here when they talk about bayesian reasoning. Subjectivity allowed.
> How did you conclude that religious beliefs are a consequence of "intellectual/logical reasoning" rather than "reinforcement/instinctual processes"?
Haha. Good point. I think the problem you just found is mainly a problem with Scott's description of that competing mental process as "logical/intellectual reasoning". Earlier he had called it "high level conscious calculations". He hasn't nailed the wording, but I imagine a priest all self disciplined, trained in self sacrifice, with clear ideas of what he "should" be doing, and following them at the expense of "temptation". I agree our tendency to that might not be well described as intellectual/logical, but it clearly falls in the same bucket of "stuff you consciously believe/feel you should do", whatever you name it.
> On the whole, I think your theory muddies the waters.
> I mean, how is that "evidence"?
Yeah, I totally agree here. I think he's trying too hard to fit all in the predictive coding framework, which is cool, but at least by itself, it feels shoehorned in while pretending its not. Or, I'd appreciate further posts with more examples of what that this framing explains and simpler ones don't.
I can force those lines straight. Now can I be unsympathetic?
Scott, I'm curious how you would integrate your ideas with what is known about the tonic and phasic release of dopamine. The difference between them doesn't obviously grant a bayesian process at play for motivation. But perhaps that could be flushed out.
Can you train your willpower like a muscle?
Any recommendations for an actual exercise? The ones I can come up with seem physically demanding or time-consuming. How bad of an idea is it to take high levels of antipsychotics and practice getting out of bed? Could that translate to anything useful in real-life (even just making it easier to get out of bed on a normal day)?
It's a pretty bad idea. I get where you're going with this, but practically it's really not a good idea. Antipsychotics are not benign sandbags, they have lots of side effects and can really alter the whole dopamine system. Receptor levels and sensitivity change, which could lead to adverse outcomes when you stop them. This happens clinically quite frequently, albeit for patients who are have psychiatric conditions (as opposed to a 'healthy control' who would be using the drug as analogous to weight lifting).
I can make my eyes perceive the lines straight by squinting :)
I've been confused about willpower for a long time, and this explanation makes more sense than anything I've read before.
However, in my experience, the whole sub agent thing, defiantly works, and I know many other people who have successful used this method. So I'm not going to accept a framework that completely disregard this experience. But the sub agent model is not trying to be accurate, it's just trying to be useful. I actually expect it to work worse if you take it to literally, instead of just a framework to play around with.
So assuming that Scott Alexander is correct, why does the sub agent method work?
Both the Bayesian model and the sub agent model says that the experience of willpower failure happens because some other part of you make a stronger bid or present stronger evidence.
The sub agent method is saying that you can query those other bids, and consciously look at the evidence for each bid. If you can accept and incorporate all evidence into your conscious reasoning, you will less often find yourself in an internal struggle over what action to take.
But shouldn't this just make your concision reasoning more inline with your other drives, and not the other way around, which will result in more playing computer games and less productive work? In my experience the answer is "no", and I have some speculation why this is.
As my conscious reasoning get better at listening to and incorporate *all* the evidence and argument, (including arguments like "computer games are fun") this system will start to output better suggestions. Going along with my conscious choice of action will become reinforced. This sort-of also explain the experience of running out of willpower. If my conscious reasoning is suggesting too many non rewarding actions, it will loose in trust and influence.
I'd be curious to hear more about your model of these other agents/hypotheses. You talk about three of them - the motionlessness prior, the reinforcement learner, and the logical planner. Do you think there's actually a small discrete number of them? Maybe there's a small discrete number of top level kinds, but the reinforcement learner and planner are composed of sub-agents with similar dynamics among each other?
For me having more willpower is all about reducing any sources of discomfort or annoyance (I'm guessing this is true for most). So willpower suffers if I'm sleep deprived, feel fat, need haircut, knee hurts, hungry/too full...etc. The tricky part is I need to have some willpower to achieve these states of lowered annoyance, but it is definitely a reinforcing cycle in either direction. Transforming the intellectual/logical inputs into instincts by making them regular habits is key.
Relaxation, or mental detachment from false beliefs or needs, is willpower. Imprinting habits works, but not if it conflicts with the aforementioned principle.
Yes of course. Humans are perfectly logical beings rationally weighing evidence. "reinforcement/instinctual processes" get a mention at the end, expressed in a negative light, yet this is the greatest source of motivation/willpower in existence.
I had to look at the optical illusion a couple of times to see them as other than straight and parallel. They automatically look straight to me. I've done a lot of art training, which seems to be affecting this more than some other optical illusions.
Looking closely is like other things -- we probably *can* use alternative systems to overrule instinctual ones, but not immediately. In the case of seeing in a way that's useful for things like drawing complex patterns, it usually involves several months of intentional practice. The first several dozen times I had to do visual exercises like live figure drawing, blind contour drawing, or perspective from life, it was unpleasant and I felt sort of angry about it. It took a lot of -- not exactly willpower, but actually going to live classes where someone was telling me what to do, and timing it. But afterwards it was fine and even enjoyable. It felt like visual muscle building, very analogous to other forms of exercise. I still don't draw or paint for my own amusement, though; I only ever do it for other people, even though I don't mind it once I've started.
As to why I'm posting here instead of painting, even though I know I'd feel better about myself after painting, and would get social approval for that... I think it has more to do with some tasks being much easier to switch in and out of than others. I'm married with a toddler, and know that writing an essay requires a four hour uninterrupted block of time, during a part of the day when I'm not tired, or at night when I won't have to get up the next morning. So I haven't written an essay in years, even though I like writing and feel accomplished afterwards. I also haven't read a challenging novel in years for similar reasons. To make a painting, I know I need something like a three hour uninterrupted block of time in a well ventilated area. This can be at night, so every once in a while I do make a painting when my daughter goes to bed, and could do so more if I bought a window fan for proper ventilation.
Reading blogs and message boards, on the other hand, can be done very easily with background noise on in three minute chunks of time (though I don't usually comment -- I have a bit more uninterrupted time at present than usually).
I've found that many of my willpower problems are actually environmental, and I can do the tasks perfectly well if I change contexts. That was also true when I was single, so it's probably not other people's fault, but simply that I'm constantly underestimating how important setting up the physical space is to achieving "willpower," and have the space set up to encouraging sitting on the couch on my laptop.
That's also true of dishes -- I have much less problem doing dishes if there's a drainer near the sink, and a plastic tub in the sink, and a clean dishrag, and a place to put the clean dishes. However, I have gone months in some houses without setting any of that up, and had dirty dishes sitting around all the time as a result.
For my money, "willpower" in the classic sense of your "intellectual agent" overpowering your "reinforcement learner" is a suckers game. The "intellectual agent" has to put in increasingly loud and desperate bids to temporarily overcome the resistance of the "reinforcement learner". Sounds like an unpleasant brain to be in! And exhausting.
How much better it would be for your "reinforcement learner" to experience doing your homework as rewarding. But the more your "intellectual agent" tries to exert pressure, the less likely the "reinforcement learner" is to think of homework as a fulfilling and worthwhile pursuit.
Incidentally, I disagree on your assessment of an alcoholic hitting rock bottom. To me, for the most part, hitting rock bottom doesn't work because your intellectual agent finally receives enough ammunition for his fight with the reinforcement learner - rock bottom is powerful because the negative effects finally have become so obvious that they were felt by the "reinforcement learner". I'm a bit uncomfortable keeping the binary distinction between brain functions here. In essence, rock bottom in my opinion is not about thoughts, it is about *feeling* the impact in a way that causes a significant Bayesian update by the brain.
"- rock bottom is powerful because the negative effects finally have become so obvious that they were felt by the "reinforcement learner"- 👍
100%
Not sure how your theory differs materially from the "subagent" model, aside from terminology relabeling. Also, your model seems to have some trouble addressing the concept of willpower fatigue. Why would the balance between the processes change merely because of the length of time they have been in conflict -- if their respective power is entirely based on the quality of their evidence? The quality of the evidence doesn't change with time (or duration of the struggle).
Are you suggesting willpower *doesn't* fade, that this is an illusion? I have certainly personally experienced a fading of willpower -- you are able to do X or Y because of a determination to do so, but after a certain length of success it *does* appear more difficult not to fall off the wagon, so to speak. Have you not?
So how would your model explain why the balance of power between the processes can shift based on nothing more than the passage of time? (One possibility: that the intellectual process always tends to overestimate the rewards attendant on "doing your homework" -- a version of the Planning Fallacy -- and that therefore after the intellectual process succeeds for a while, and more concrete evidence is gathered for its actual rewards, the evidence of its superiority begins to weaken.)
If this decision making willpower process runs on dopamine, could general increase in dopamine (like by antidepressants) make it better in some people?
The alcoholism example is illustrative of the non-triviality of willpower deficits (as Scott suggests), since, biologically, after the disease has progressed past a certain point, alcohol itself becomes the medicine that treats the acute illness that rises to the surface whenever alcohol is absent.
Critics with deficiencies of empathy enjoyed mocking disease theories of addiction, preferring to celebrate willpower as something, well, simply ordered up by the will. But this example illustrates the conflict isn't purely a standoff between the intellect and instinct -- and I would guess this phenomenon bleeds over into more pedestrian examples of employing will (like, say, doing homework), whereby some people, for varying reasons, struggle against brain-chemical imbalances that utterly muddle the ways in which the mind uses its tools.
Maybe it's his consequentialist leanings throwing me off course, but I can't really make sense of Scott's conclusion -- that what he finds most valuable about theorizing on willpower is that it provides evidence that willpower actually exists. I thought Scott effectively ripped apart Caplan's gun-to-the-head "test" (which ludicrously insists that if you can do something with a gun to the head you should be able to do it anytime, anywhere), so why so insistent about defending such a loaded and archaic term?
Once again I find myself reading along pretty much in synch, but then baffled by the conclusions and memes Scott manages to extract from the exploration process. It's probably all tangled up with the great difficulty I have comprehending how any empathetic determinist could settle on libertarianism as the most rational response to the lottery that is life. I'm just a boring old liberal, but the more I learn about how much is just chemistry, the more I prioritize taking care of one another, whereas the consequentialist libertarian impulse always seems to default to motionlessness when it comes to politics.
Perhaps paternalistic consequentialism is useful in a therapeutic setting, but I think the most reasonable political conclusions for an increasingly rational society will sooner or later (hopefully sooner) be perfectly aligned with the universal basic income (for example).
I don't think that particular sequence of requests demonstrates the point, although I don't know how you could have done it better.
I've had blogs ask me to get up, reach for the sky, take a couple deep breaths, touch my toes, and come back to the blog. And I did it. For yours, I did the first one, but I was reading ahead to the second, and the third, and the fourth, and it just seemed like a lot of stuff to do. If you had asked me immediately to just stand up and jump, I probably would have: I wouldn't have rolled around on the floor in any case, that just isn't the sort of thing that I do.
There is an inhibitory force that pushes against going down a chain of arbitrary instructions. I'm ADD, so it's stronger for me, but I'm fairly confident everyone experiences this.
I have no valid comment on willpower, having none myself. However, I do understand that the opportunity cost for putting away dishes is 5 seconds less of Civ time, then the dishes have to wait.
I like posts like this a lot, but at the same time it often seems too convenient to completely subscribe to the views presented. It seems a little *too* simple, elegant, and fortunate, that we often end up analyzing important critical systems (e.g. willpower) and conclude that they operate on a well-known, mathematically elegant system, which we all happen to know and love quite a bit.
I still think they're useful systems and models for analyzing and reasoning about the underlying substrates, but I do wonder how accurate such models really will end up being.
If your conception of the will generates the problem of akrasia, and thus the necessity of a concept of willpower to explain deficiencies in will then maybe it's your conception of the will that's deficient. Aristotle framed the problem wrong and we won't get on the right track again until we question our greek inherited conceptions of the problem.
This paper gives a brief introduction to an alternative, for the problem of moral akrasia specifically, that I'm partial to.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2012.665587
One of the problems with this theorising is the lack of empirical basis. I come from a linguistics background, and what was interesting about what Chomsky did early on was that he very explicitly divorced his theory from the underlying brain mechanisms. He sought a formal theory of language, and only decades later did he attempt to map it to any kind of neurological process. He was able to do that because language corpora are massive and easily available, and come in discrete chunks of easily-evaluated data.
Willpower theorising doesn't have that empirical base to work off, and so it seems stuck in a theoretic-empirical mush.
What would be useful would be to have some - pretty much any - operational definition of willpower that can be easily empirically assessed. The problem at the moment is that anything that someone does can be evaluated as either (a) an example of willpower (because they did something they willed themselves to do) or (b) an example of failure of willpower (because they did something they were willing themselves not to do); and there doesn't seem to be any good formal model that allows us to distinguish between the two.
I object to the claim about hitting bottom. We have no evidence anything is going on here other than things tending to get worse once they get out of control until the person finally decides to stop.
Are you familiar with Robert Pirsig's thoughts on electroconvulsive therapy? Here is a passage from Lila that seems relevant to your model:
"The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. Its value is that it destroys all patterns, both cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporally in a Dynamic state. All the shock does is duplicate the effect of hitting the patient over the head with a baseball bat. It simply knocks the patient senseless. . . . But what goes unrecognised in a subject-object theoretical structure is the fact that this senseless unpatterned state is a valuable state of existence. Once the patient is in this state the psychiatrists of course don't know what to do with it, and so the patient often slips back into lunacy and has to be knocked senseless again and again. But sometimes the patient, in a moment of Zen wisdom, sees the superficiality of both his own contrary patterns and the cultural patterns, sees that one gets electrically clubbed day after day and the other sets him free from the institution, and thereupon makes a wise mystic decision to get the hell out of there by whatever avenue is available."
Of course Pirsig was largely focused on his particular East-West philosophical fusion, and his attitudes toward ECT were very much a product of his time. But your Bayesian take on rock-bottom alcoholism reminded me of this "moment of Zen wisdom" Pirsig describes from his own experience with ECT.
This theory sounds similar-ish to the book "proscrination equation". look it up?
This theory seems similar to the book "proscrination equation". Check it out maybe?
I find that things that I don't think of as productive or don't contain valuable experiences become less attractive to me over time, such that I often don't feel like finishing side objectives in games, and am not attracted at all to mobile "time waster" games. But I'll still play the tales gacha game because it's my favourite series so I attach value to experiencing it.
I do have trouble resisting sweets especially if they're nearby, but once I researched micro and macro nutrients and low fodmap foods etc, it became much easier to eat them (eg now I'm quite fond of spinach). And once I set an imaginary "max weight" on the scale it became much easier for me to stay under it... once I determine the benefits of a specific exercise it becomes much easier to keep doing it consistently.
I don't know if this anecdote is helpful at all I just felt motivated to share it.
laziness, hedonism and common sense walk into a bar and the basal ganglia asks them: what do you want? ...
"Failed to replicate" + Kurtzban glucose arguments.
Those are very distinct issues.
1. The glucose explanation isn't critical to echo depletion theory. It is a possible explanation, that even Baumeister himself wasn't sure about as early as 2010. And he never bothered that much to sustain it
2. Replication trials have failed miserably in the eyes of the strong replication crowd - not always the most reputable crowd, as any replication - however badly summer - is always a decisive refutation in their eyes.
There was a RRR multi lab study, which tried to get the full procedure pre-approved by Baumeister himself, and it failed to replicate. But there were interesting cover arguments but Baumeister himself.
Generally, there is no consensus that it is a refuted effect. With even some replication fans refusing to have a revised view
To me, the most striking thing about the darker blue bands is not that they are straight, but that they are parallel.
Me: Are the light blue bands parallel?
Wife: (after 1 sec): Yes.
Me: Are the darker blue bands parallel?
Wife (After 1 sec): Yes. They didn’t *look* parallel at first, but I could tell from the distances at the ends that they must be. Then I squinted my eyes and they *looked* parallel, too.
I think there's a way to test this...sorta. If you have someone who regularly takes Adderall and is productive on Adderall, what happens when you replace the Adderall with a bottle that's 50% Adderall and 50% placebo? Does the effect of the Adderall get weaker even on the days where's he's taking real Adderall? Is the placebo impressively effective? Does the placebo get stronger if they're given a bottle with 75% Adderall and told as much?
What prevents these competing mental processes from cheating and misrepresenting how much evidence there is for a certain action?
New Beeminder blog post reacting to this! https://blog.beeminder.com/bayes/
Also possibly useful is this excerpt summarizing Scott's theory:
His theory says that your brain collects and weights evidence from different mental subprocesses to determine every action you take. The three subprocesses are:
1. Do nothing
2. Do what’s most immediately rewarding
3. Do what you consciously deem best
These all submit evidence via dopamine to your basal ganglia and the winner determines what action you take. There’s a high prior probability on “do nothing” being best, which can be overridden by high enough anticipation of reward, which can be overridden by high enough evidence from your conscious mind.
In this theory, akrasia — Scott Alexander says “lack of willpower” — is an imbalance in these subprocesses. Physiologically maybe that means insufficient dopamine in your frontal cortex such that the evidence from your conscious brain is underweighted. (Dopaminergic drugs seem to increase willpower so I guess that argues in favor of the theory? I’m so out of my depth here.) Hacking your motivation would mean increasing the evidence supplied by your intellectual/logical brain.
Among the godfathers of A.I. research, Geoff Hinton has proposed neural network models in recent years ("Capsule Networks" and "GLOM") which operate as you describe. Yet, it seems critical to remember, also, that many impulses are paradoxical *on purpose*. For example, you have a drive for stability and comfort, while also having a drive toward curiosity and surprise - the result is often a subtle compromise, *sensitive* to the environment. When two *springs* oppose each other this way, neither extreme is meant to win - they are a spring-gauge, measuring with sensitivity. I'd gone into this concept in more detail in "Inertia of Loss", Anthony Repetto.
Two things to possibly add to the model:
1. The tendency to do conscious planning is an assembly of stimulus/response behaviors just like doing what worked in the past is a stimulus/response behavior. So it makes some difference how you do your conscious planning - a scheme that succeeds will be easier to do than a scheme that doesn't. Willpower is the extent to which the assembly of stimulus/response behaviors that constitute conscious planning is functioning.
2. If you have a false model of how the world works, then conscious planning that presupposes the false belief won't give good results. That detrains the stimulus/response chains that are conscious planning, so it decreases the ability to do conscious planning. So beliefs matter and false beliefs are harmful to willpower.
I would like feedback on whether these additions are plausible and useful.
This predicts that, other things being equal, succeeding at an intentional act gives you more willpower and failing gives you less. I don't remember this claim being stated in the willpower research, so either it is new, it is already disproven, or I haven't read and retained as much of the existing willpower research as I would have liked.
WIllpower seems to decrease over the course of the day. Eg, most people break diets at night. Yet, the 'evidence' does not seem to fluctuate as much within a day. How is your theory of willpower consistent with this empirical fact?