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jmed comments on Willpower and diet: advice? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Would you claim that drug addicts who proclaim they do not wish to die young / lose their jobs / lose their spouses (etc.) are wrong about what they want? Would you like to taboo "want", because there would seem to be nothing signified by "want" that is not better captured by "do" (as in what someone does, despite what they say)?
If the OP doesn't currently want to lose weight, as you suggest (because "You do what you want to do", therefore she does what she wants, and she hasn't lost weight yet, so she must not want it), how do you frame her motivation for taking your advice (to examine her beliefs and calibrate better), if not that she takes your advice because --she wants to lose weight-- (which would contradict your claim)?
They're not wrong about what they want unless they say that they want to keep their jobs more than they want to take drugs.
"Want" is useful because often people can't do what they want, or haven't yet done what they want; and we need to be able to talk about want as a causative factor for doing.
The drug addict who says she wants to keep her job is just like the voter who says he wants lower taxes. It's true, but irrelevant.
You use "want" this way here, but then seem to deny this very usage to addicts (or to anyone who does not have organizational and motivational capacity to get what they "want").
Okay. A claim of irrelevancy is very different from a claim about truth, and truth is what you seemed to imply in the original comment:
That said, I disagree that it is irrelevant, and you do, too, or else you wouldn't give her tips on how to make her second-order wants into first-order wants.