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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
because it is not paid for and has no benefits like retirement contributions and sick days attached to it only, a job otherwise...
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.
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?
Self help
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)
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?
You can type them the old-fashioned way :D
👌 yes, I figured it out!!! 😊
Communism needs them even less, once the revolution is over anyway. Whatever the party says goes, or to the gulag with you.
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.
In Marxist systems (or at least systems that pay homage to Marx), strong-willed people become Commissars.
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.
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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.
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 assessmen