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Now the takeaway related to akrasia [...] Viewing your brain as a complete computer that you ought to modify from inside is an unnecessarily hard approach. Your brain plus your surroundings is the computer. A one-time act of changing your surroundings, physically going somewhere or rearranging stuff, does influence your behavior a lot - even if it shouldn't.

I agree.

I noted in a recent comment here To do my PhD writing I take my laptop down to a local coffeeshop and sit there for one to two hours of solid writing. It's become habit. I go to the coffeeshop, I write. My body/brain knows that's what I do there, so there's nothing to fight.

I think this notion that external things can shape how we perceive, think and do things is quite general and applies to all aspects of our psychology. On the one hand that's fairly obvious, but I don't think it's properly acknowledged in most people's outlook -- it's still far too common to think that our behavior is simply a matter of our choices, and that when the environment influences you, it's only in a superficial manner.

Here's some examples from other areas. Donald Norman, in his The Design of Everyday Things, about affordances - how the design of things like door handles and chairs -- can shape how you use them.

Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) and Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) in their own ways talk about how the structure of the city environment can shape people's behavior. Paul Graham has talked about this as well.

(and of course there's stuff like interior design, architecture, using music to affect mood, grocery shops laying out aisles in ways that exploit our psychology, etc)

I also think that Richard Dawkin's The Extended Phenotype is an example of this general viewpoint - the viewpoint that these bounds bewteen what's inside of us and what's outside of us isn't as simple as is assumed. He argues that the phenotypic effect of genes can properly extend beyond the bounds of creatures' bodies -- Beavers' dams being one simple example.

I've written a bit more about some of these topics on my blog.