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MendelSchmiedekamp comments on The ideas you're not ready to post - Less Wrong
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Willpower building as a fundamental art. And some of the less obvious pit falls. Including the dangers of akrasia circumvention techniques which simply shunt willpower from one place to another and overstraining damaging your willpower reserves.
I need to hunt back down some of the cognitive science research on this before I feel comfortable posting it.
Easy answer: don't use willpower. Ever.
I quit it cold turkey in late 2007, and can count on one hand the number of times I've been tempted to use it since.
(Edit to add: I quit it in order to force myself to learn to understand the things that blocked me, and to learn more effective ways to accomplish things than by pushing through resistance. It worked.)
Could you do a post on that?
Consider cognitive behavioral therapy. You don't get someone to change their behavior by telling them to try really hard. You get them to convince themselves that they will get what they want if they change their behavior.
People do what they want to do. We've gone over this in the dieting threads.
My idea that I'm not ready to post is now: find a way to force pjeby to write regular posts.
By all means do post. Clarification would be welcome, since we're almost certainly not using the term willpower in the same way.
I'm using it to mean relying on conscious choice in the moment, to overcome preference reversal. Forcing yourself to do something that, at that moment, you'd prefer not to, or to not do something, that you'd prefer to.
What I do instead, is find out why my preference has changed, and either:
Remove that factor from the equation, either by changing something in my head, or in the outside world, or
Choose to agree with my changed preference, for the moment. (Not all preference reversals are problematic, after all!)
From that usage your claim makes much more sense.
Willpower in my usage is more general, when impulses are overridden or circumvented. In your example, it includes the conspicuous consumption of which you describe, but also more subtle costs like the cognitive computation of determining the "why" and forestalling the impulse to remove internal or external factors.
My main point is that willpower is a limited resource that ebbs and flows during cognitive computation, often due to changing costs. But it can be trained up, conserved, and refreshed effectively, if certain hazards can be avoided.
I don't see how that's any different from what I said. How is an "impulse" different from a preference reversal? (i.e., if it's not a preference reversal, why would you need to override or circumvent it?)
I repeat my usual plea at this point: please read Breakdown of Will before posting on this.
That book doesn't actually contain any solutions to anything, AFAICT. The two useful things I've gotten from it that enhanced my existing models were:
The idea of conditioned appetites, and
The idea that "reward" and "pleasure" are distinct.
There were other things that I learned, of course, like his provocative reward-interval hypothesis that unifies the mechanism of things like addiction, compulsion, itches and pain on a single, time-based scale. But that's only really interesting in an intellectual-curiosity sort of way at the moment; I haven't figured out anything one can DO with it, that I couldn't already do before.
Even the two useful things I mentioned, are mostly useful in explaining why certain things happen, and why certain of my techniques work on certain things. They don't really give me anything that can be turned into actual improvements on the state of the art, although they do suggest some directions for stretching what I apply some things to.
Anyway, if you're already familiar with the basic ideas of discounting and preference reversal, you're not going to get a lot from this book in practical terms.
OTOH, if you think it'd be cool to know how and why your bargains with yourself fail, you might find it interesting reading. But I'm already quite familiar with how that works on a practical level, and the theory really adds nothing to my existing practical advice of, "don't do that!"
(Really, the closest the book comes to giving any practical advice is to vaguely suggest that maybe willpower and intertemporal bargaining aren't such good ideas. Well, not being a scientist, I can state it plainly: they're terrible ideas. You want coherent volition across time, not continuous conflict and bargaining.)
I'll take a closer look at it.
relevant: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/03/practicing_selfcontrol_consume.php