I disagree with the conjecture. I don't think to be rational one needs to perform an unusual amount of conscious calculation per unit of time. To be rational, one must simply change one's default settings in a specific way. This could be done bit by bit over the course of many years.
It certainly takes an unusual sum total of introspection and conscious awareness and whatever to discover just how broken and unreliable our default settings are for the modern environment, but once changed it takes no further conscious intervention to keep those settings in their new position.
For example, it might have taken a long time and a lot of conscious intervention for me to identify and stop eating junk food (or what I consider such), but it certainly no longer takes any conscious thought to reject a piece of candy. I don't think through everything bad it could do to me or anything and weigh that against how good it would taste; I simply feel a few painful bodily sensations and think, "Ew! Can't have that!"
So I think this comment by Jonathan_Graehl is spot on. It seems that your conjecture would only apply to people currently making an unusually large amount of changes to their thinking and behavior. Perhaps that's the case with a lot of people on LW though.
it might have taken a long time and a lot of conscious intervention for me to identify and stop eating junk food (or what I consider such), but it certainly no longer takes any conscious thought to reject a piece of candy. I don't think through everything bad it could do to me or anything and weigh that against how good it would taste; I simply feel a few painful bodily sensations and think, "Ew! Can't have that!"
When I began cooking and grocery shopping on my own, I've thought things through and decided that it would probably be better to mo...
I was reading the NY Times article on Decision Fatigue, when I came upon a hypothesis I would like everyone's feedback on.
I take as a premise that there seems to be a high prevalence of akrasia in the lesswrong community.
I also take as a premise that the sequences give us a more-than-usual detailed model of the world, one that presents us with more possible trade-offs we could be making in every day life.
So the conjecture that by trying to reduce bias and perform a lot of cognitive calculation, we effectively spend large parts of our days in a decision fatigued state, leading to akrasia problems.
Does this sound (un)reasonable? Why? How would you go about turning this into a testable proposition?
UPDATE: Anna Salamon has put up a detailed poll here that may shed some light on the situation. Please take some time to fill it in.