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jhuffman comments on What would you do with infinite willpower? - Less Wrong
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Isn't distraction sometimes simply a lack of resolve about what it is that one ought to be doing? Does having willpower mean that I am 100% confident in judgments I made at some previous time about what I ought to be doing now, even if I've had new inputs since then (such as an RSS reader helpfully popping up in my tray) ?
No. Provided my interpretation matches D_Malik's, it means you'll never be unhappy about a time-management decision you've made in the past given the state of your knowledge at the time; that doesn't, however, prevent you from responding to priority interrupts.
Right. So it seems the problem I may have with distraction is not that I re-evaluate my priorities on interruption, but that I later think I made the wrong decision about priorities. So I go respond on LW again, despite that I really have to finish this paper by the end of the day. Then at the end of the day, I regret this.
Does willpower help me evaluate priorities more sensibly?
There's a bit of a gray area in that optimizing time and attention management itself takes time and attention, and so your happiness and accomplishment aren't necessarily optimal in absolute terms after taking the time to work out optimal allocations. But that's a quibble; people very frequently engage in behavior they know at the time to be long-term suboptimal, and when we talk about things like willpower and akrasia we're primarily concerned with minimizing that sort of behavior.
With this in mind, I'd describe willpower as the component of your priority-evaluation algorithm that counteracts present-biased preferences. Hypothetically perfect willpower would mean no temporal discounting, although discounting future possibilities in proportion to probability of occurrence doesn't seem like a failure of willpower to me.