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jimrandomh comments on When Willpower Attacks - Less Wrong
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Both cases of sleep and hunger are demonstrably untrue, for we can turn off those systems (with modafinil for sleep, and ECA stack for hunger), and there are few ill effects. These systems are horribly misregulated, and cause more problems than they save from.
We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn't cause any serious problems in healthy adults. Modafinil completely turns off sleepiness, and modafinil users do not die in droves, or even get sick from that.
Sleepiness on the other hand forces you to sleep even when it's not necessary at all, by reducing your alertness, making it painful to keep awake etc. Sleepiness often kills people, for example by making them insufficiently alert while driving, far more often than it saves them from death due to sleep deprivation.
With appetite suppressants it's similar story. How many people die due to diets, and how many people die due to obesity?
These systems are completely broken.
The fact that we can alter our psychology with drugs does not change what that psychology is. We can also eliminate or cause many emotions and perceptions, and will probably learn to do so with for a larger variety of cases and with less side effects as time goes on. These drugs are properly considered as an extension of willpower, not a counterexample to it.
It only seems that way because of availability bias; we only know these systems when they go awry.
Oh no, we can take marginal view. If sleepiness was slightly more severe, it would kill more people due to diminished attention. If it was slightly less severe, nobody would die due to sleep deprivation, and plenty of lives would be saved.
By this marginal argument, it's misregulated. It doesn't mean it would be useless at some different point.
Or we could apply Nick Bostrom's evolutionary heuristics and say that the systems were regulated fine for older environments, but not modern ones.
This is obviously true for food in 1st World countries, and plausibly true for sleep. (If calories are nearly free & electrical lighting universal, then the safe-place/low-energy rationale holds much less water.)
These drugs don't extend willpower, they alter the system 1 defaults so that willpower is no longer needed, for there is nothing to be overcome.