gwern comments on Experiential Pica - Less Wrong

80 Post author: Alicorn 16 August 2009 09:23PM

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Comment author: DanArmak 17 August 2009 02:01:29AM 5 points [-]

If you are severely plagued by akrasia, and there is some large class of experiences that you completely leave out of your life, attempt to find a way to incorporate something from that class.

I find this suggestion hard to follow. There are far more experiences I don't have than ones I do have, and I think this is true for almost everyone. How would I know where to start? Should I take up dancing? Baking? Painting? Horse riding? Ant farming? Blogging? :-)

If our brains can have a deficiency of some kind of activity, there must be a relatively small number of such activity types. Unless we can figure out what they are we won't make much progress.

Also, unlike pica (where you say at least some sufferers have a craving for iron-rich food, which helps them), we don't know if "positive" akrasia ever drives people to do the thing they lack (because we don't know what it is they lack). Why should we suppose akrasia ever serves to fix a problem except by coincidence?

Comment author: gwern 30 September 2009 04:16:15PM 1 point [-]

How would I know where to start? Should I take up dancing? Baking? Painting? Horse riding? Ant farming? Blogging?

You say that like trying all of those would be a bad thing or something!

Comment author: DanArmak 30 September 2009 06:12:48PM *  0 points [-]

I was saying there are far too many things I don't do for the suggestion 'do something new' to be effective without a non-random way of choosing what to try next.

Also, I'm sure there are some experiences or combinations of experiences I don't have that would turn out to be bad. The examples I gave weren't intended to evoke that idea, though.