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Brillyant comments on Open thread, Aug. 17 - Aug. 23, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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What do the following have in common?
Answer: they would all be quite successful if followed, but they are all difficult enough to follow that people who actually care about results will do better to set different goals that take more account of how human decision-making actually works.
If you eat less and exercise more then, indeed, you will lose weight. (I do not know how reliably you will lose weight by losing fat, which of course is usually the actual goal.) But you don't exactly get to choose to eat less and exercise more; you get to choose to aim to do those things, but willpower is limited and akrasia is real and aiming to eat less and exercise more may be markedly less effective than (e.g.) aiming to reduce consumption of carbohydrates, or aiming to keep a careful tally of everything you eat, or aiming to stop eating things with sugar in, or whatever.
People with plenty of willpower, or unusually fast metabolism, or brains less-than-averagely inclined to make them eat everything tasty they see around them, may have excellent success by just aiming to eat less and exercise more. In the same way, for many people "just cheer up!" may be sufficient to avoid depression; for many people "just don't have sex if you don't want to have babies!" may be sufficient to avoid unwanted pregnancy; etc.
But there are plenty of people for whom that doesn't work so well, and this is true even among very smart people, very successful people, or almost any category of people not gerrymandered to force it to be false. And for those people, the "just do X" advice simply will not work, and sneering at them because they are casting around for methods other than "just do X" is simply a sign of callousness or incomprehension.
Creating a calorie deficit will cause weight loss. Just like abstinence will prevent pregnancy.
Depression is not like this. You can't necessarily will yourself free of depression. You could will yourself to "act happy" until the grave, but it wouldn't necessarily change your neurons.
The point is that you can't necessarily will yourself to eat less or not have sex or stop wasting time, either. It looks as if you can, but appearances can be misleading.
I agree that depression is a more extreme case, though; a depressed person may be unable to "cheer up" on any single occasion, whereas I think most people can resist temptations to food, sex and timewasting once if they really need to.
(Also, depression isn't just persistent unhappiness, but that's usually part of it and is what would be fixed by Just Cheering Up, were that possible for the sufferer.)
Do you think you can necessarily will yourself to drink less (alcohol)?
The debate about "personal responsibility" vs "can't help him/herself" is very old.
No. More precisely: I'm pretty sure I can. I'm pretty sure most alcoholics can't. But they may be able to will themselves to drink no alcohol at all, just as it may be easier to follow a diet like "nothing containing sugar" than one like "no more than 2000 kcal/day".)
I suggest that we should actually care less about whether in some abstract sense we can do these things (exactly what we "can" do will probably depend strongly on the definition of "can"), and more about whether we will. And on that, I think the empirical evidence is pretty good: for many people, just deciding to eat less will probably not result in actually losing weight and keeping it off.
These are somewhat different concerns in the sense that "can" is not sufficient for "will", but it is necessary for "will". Since I cannot fly by flapping my arms, the question of whether I will fly this way doesn't have much meaning.
I suggest that, instead, we stop pretending that there are solutions suitable to absolutely everyone. People are different and are sufficiently different to require quite different approaches. If we take weight as the example, some people (commonly called "that bitch/bastard" :-D) can eat whatever they want and maintain weight; some people can control their weight purely by willing themselves to eat less; some people can control their weight by setting up a system of tricks and misdirections for themselves which works; some people cannot control their weight by themselves and need external help; some people can't do it even with external help and need something like a gastric bypass; and some people have a sufficiently screwed up metabolism so that pretty much nothing will make them slim.
There is no general solution -- it depends.
I was under the impression that that was pretty much exactly what I'd been saying :-).