Last week Professor Neil Levy, a neuroethicist,  gave three lectures on Self-Control at the Oxford Martin School. Roughly, the first lecture targeted philosophical issues, the second empirical issues and the third bridged the two. Neil's summaries and audio are at the bottom. In the next two paragraphs I will briefly summarize the take-home message of the lectures.

Over the three lectures, he offered a new approach to self-control. He argues that will-power is of little relevance to self-control, that the self-control character-trait which correlates with success is not will-power and that relying on will-power alone leads to low levels of self-control. He defends that self-control is mainly the ability of self-management, of managing the environment so that temptations become more costly, less salient or inaccessible - he mentions Facebook nanny, Beeminder, commitment devices and so on. Self-management is the ability of not having to use will-power. Will-power is only relevant insofar as it enables these techniques to be deployed, but once in place the techniques themselves consist in avoiding to use will-power altogether. Will-power is an extremely scarce resource, and we should use the little we have so we don't have to depend on it anymore. He cites numerous evidence in support for his view. To mention a few, people with high self-control character-trait are less able to resist temptations, exert less effortful self-control, but are nonetheless more likely to pick environments with few temptations/distractions and better at developing techniques to ignore temptations (e.g. little children sung, slept, etc.). He contends that glucose role in increasing self-control is exerted by signalling high short-term resource availability, a stable environment, and thus low opportunity costs - but he doesn't expect this effect to hold in the long-term. He predicts that unconscious signals of a stable environment will increase self-control, which helps explains why high social-economic status correlates strongly with self-control. Neil has a blog post discussing how the myth that willpower equals Self-Control prevents the prescription of policies that would use these managerial techniques to increase people's Self-Control. By the end, he hinted his view could perhaps be seen as the extended will view, mirroring the extended mind view.

I believe the first lecture is not especially helpful for LessWrongers as it mainly focuses on contrasting his view with the rationalist view within philosophy, which is not pretty rational and likely false. Those interested in the empirical side will find the second lecture more attractive and should check this blog post summarizing it. I think the take-home message is more extensively spelled out in the third lecture. On the first lecture, there is this post by Professor Julian Savulescu, which particularly addresses the objective stance towards oneself present on Neil's view and opposed by the (philosophical) rationalists. There's some disagreement about to what extend these rationalists would really disagree with this view.

Lecture One: Self-Control: A problem of self-management

In this lecture I argue that self-control problems typical arise from conflicts between smaller sooner and larger later rewards. I suggest that we often fail successfully to navigate these problems because of our commitment to a conception of ourselves as rational agents who answer questions about ourselves by looking to the world. Despite the attractions of this conception, I argue that it undermines efforts at self-control and thereby our capacity to pursue the ends we value. I suggest we think of self-control as a problem of self-management, whereby we manipulate ourselves.

Lecture One Audio.

Blog post by Professor Julian Savulescu on the objectifying view defended in the first Lecture.

Lecture Two: The Science of Self-Control

In this lecture I outline some of the main perspectives on self-control and its loss stemming from recent work in psychology. I focus in particular on the puzzle arising from the role of glucose in successful self-control. Glucose ingestion seems to boost self-control but there is good evidence that it doesn't do this by providing fuel for the relevant mechanisms. I suggest that glucose functions as a cue of resource availability rather than fuel.

Lecture Two Audio.

Blog post by Dr. Joshua Shepherd summarizing the second Lecture.

Lecture Three: Marshmallows and Moderation

There is evidence that self-control is a character trait. This evidence seems inconsistent with the management approach I advocate, since that approach urges that we look to external props for self-control, not to states of the agent. In this lecture I argue, that contrary to appearances, we should hesitate to think that people high in what is known as trait self-control have any such character trait. In fact, properly understood the evidence concerning trait self-control supports the management. 

Lecture Three Audio.

EDIT: Changed the title from willpower's relative irrelevancy to the myth of Willpower. Added a link to another blog post.

Commitment contracts

I have been using commitment contracts (eg. Via Stickk and Beeminder) for a while now with quite a high degree of success. The basic idea is that you precommit to reward or punish yourself for anything that you know you should do. Example: You want to lose weight. You define a certain amount of weight that you want to lose over a certain time period (like a pound a week). If you fail to do this, you lose a certain amount of money - pay it to a charity, pay it to a commitment contract company etc.. If you do lose the weight, you gain a predefined reward - eg. You buy yourself a nice hat or something. Fairly simple.

Howfar should/ can commitment contracts be taken?

It seems that for everything that anyone wants to do, but lacks the motivation, there is always something that would motivate you to do it. Everything has a price right? And by making use of commitment contracts you can force yourself to choose between paying a huge price (financial or otherwise) or doing whatever you know you should do but don't really want to do, you can ultimately make yourself do that thing that you don't want to do. Whatever it is. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but it seems like from that perspective, akrasia is a pretty solved problem?

Personal Example

My situation is this. I could do with a little bit more social confidence. I don't think I'm underconfident really, but more confidence would be good, which I think is probably the same for most people. So I figured, it would probably be a lot better to solve this problem soon. The sooner the better.

I also figured there is a process I could go through to make this happen. Lets say I make a list of all the things that cause me the most social anxiety, and also that wouldn't be too damaging for my social life afterwards (for example, starting fights with random strangers or walking round my local city naked would be pretty high on the list, but I don't want to be arrested or be known as "that crazy streaker" for the rest of my life. Of the top of my head, some ideas would be: going to a city far away from my home and walking up to people and pretending to be crazy (knocking on people's doors and asking "have you seen my pet fish?" until I get the door shut in my face), going to clubs and sitting in the middle of the dance floor, or anything else which would be very socially painful to do.

Contract

So I could set up a commitment contract stating I must do each of these activities until my anxiety has decreased to half of its initial level by the end of a certain date. If I don't do this then I pay x pound to y person. I'm pretty confident that after doing stuff like that for say, a whole week, I would have enough social confidence for almost all normal purposes, and social confidence would no longer be a problem in my life.

Of course, these things make me feel a little bit nervous just when I think of myself doing them, so I'd need a hell of a lot of motivation to do them. I'd say a commitment contract worth a couple of thousand pounds would do the trick. But of course, I don't want to lose the contract. If I do, it would be a disaster, I would end up with a huge financial loss, and no increase in social confidence. It seems to me then, that to increase the expectancy of success, I should just increase the amount of money that I place on the bet. Lets say £10,000. I'd say for that amount of money, I'd almost certainly go through with the project. Still if I complete it, it would be an almost unbearable loss, but because of this, I reckon that my chances of success are high enough to mean that if I do the expected utility calculations of probability of failure vs. success and value of gains vs. losses, it is probably a good bet to make.

Also, to make sure I don't have the option of backing out and cancelling the contract, I could just set up some sort of legal contract, and have someone else be the referee for whether I have succeeded with the project.

Problem

When thinking about this, I got quite anxious just by thinking about making myself do this. I realised, that this state of anxiety would not be fun, and that having the threat of a huge loss like will probably make you pretty miserable in the long-term. This is why I don't think this would be a great idea for something like losing weight. It is a long term goal, and during that time you'd probably be constantly scared shitless of losing all your money (you might end up losing the weight from stress). So overall, it seems that this form of merciless commitment contract would be best for the short term projects - like a week long - which would minimise the amount of stress/ anxiety of being faced with two extremely painful options in the short term (losing a shit load of money or doing something incredibly painful). As I was experiencing a bit of anxiety by thinking about all of this, I also figured that the best option would be to spend as little time thinking about making the contract as possible, and just make the contract, because dithering over it also causes stress/ anxiety.

At this point I got really stressed and anxious because I realised that what seemed to me to be the most rational option was to make a huge commitment contract right then in the moment to do activities that would cause me a great deal of social anxiety over the next week. At this point I got too stressed, and realised that I couldn't motivate myself to make myself make the contract and decided not to think about any of this stuff for a while because I'd managed to immerse myself into a state of sweaty paralysis at the thought of making commitment contracts. I wish I could say that I didn't do that, and that I actually made these contracts, and came out after a very stressful week feeling socially invincible. But I didn't.

Fictional Example

Then I realised that if I wish that I did do that, then I still think I have made the wrong choice. In the film Fight Club there is a scene where Tyler Durden goes to an off licence late at night, pulls the shopkeeper out into the car park, and puts a gun to his head. He then asks the poor guy what did you used to want to be when you grew up. The guy says a vet and he didn't do it because it was too hard. Tyler takes his wallet, with information about his address etc. and says that if the guy isn't on the way to becoming a vet in 6 weeks, he will kill him. (I think this is what happened, I haven't seen the film in a year or two). So in a way, I'm kind of envious of that shopkeeper.

I'm not actually too sure about what Existentialism is, but it seems like this is a bit of an existential crisis.

Note

You may think that a) doing these things wouldn't actually improve social confidence enough b) that as the loss is too high, even a small risk wouldn't be worth it c) that the stress you put yourself under wouldn't make it worth it d) some other objection. You may be right… My point is, that for most people, if they think about it, there is some sort of commitment contract like this which would be worth them making.

So… erm… Any thoughts?

I know from personal experience how hard it is to actually go through the final process to sign up for cryonics - no matter how theoretically in favour one is. For me, it was Robin Hanson's offer of an hour of chat that sealed the deal - it seemed much easier to focus on getting to that interview, than on potentially saving the whole of my future :-)

Anyway, I'm offering my services to help out others who might want to get that final push over the line. What am I offering? Well, the opportunity to send me money! Simply pledge something like "if I don't get signed up for cryonics by such and such a date, I will send Stuart Armstrong $X".

This sounds incredibly mercenary - I'm offering you the possibility of sending me money? This seems to be a misunderstanding of the whole meaning of the word "offering". Well, for a start, I'm certain that I will never receive that money - if someone pledges "in a year's time, I will have signed up for cryonics, or I will send Stuart Armstrong $200", then I read that as "in a year's time, I will have signed up for cryonics". Because no-one likes losing money they could keep by doing something they want to (want to) do. So what I'm offering is the possibility to make yourself sign up for cryonics.

In fact, I'll do it this way: if I ever get any money from such a pledge, I'll redistribute that money to other people who took the pledge and did sign up. If it's not too many people, I can probably offer one hour chats as well, for those interested.

Of course, this works just as well if you pledge to give money to someone else, not just me, so I encourage you to pledge to whoever you like! Just make sure that:

1. You don't pledge the money to a charity you approve of - you should have no justification for avoiding signing up. Failure is a failure, not an act of generosity.
2. You pledge the money to someone who will take the money from you if you fail - or else the whole thing doesn't work at all. I promise to do so!
3. You bear in mind that these things take longer than you expect (planning fallacy and all that). Pledge a year, aim to have it done in six months.

I already have one person pledged for £100 in a year's time, and I'm fully confident they'll be signed up before that. If I have their permission, I'll let you know as soon as it happens.

How can you precommit to something where the commitment is carried out only after you know your commitment strategy has failed?

It would seem to make it impossible to commit to blackmail when the action of blackmail has negative utility. How can you possibly convince your rational future self to carry out a commitment they know will not work?

You could attempt to adopt a strategy of always following your commitments. From your current perspective this is useful but once you have learned your strategy has failed, what's to prevent you from just disregarding the strategy?

If a commitment strategy will fail you don't want to make the commitment but if you will not follow the commitment even when the strategy fails then you never made the commitment in the first place.

For example, in nuclear war why would you ever retaliate? Once you know your strategy of nuclear deterrence has failed, shooting back will only cause more civilian casualties.

I'm not saying commitments aren't useful, I'm just not sure how you can make them. How do you prevent your future self from reasoning their way out of them?

I apologize if reading this makes it harder for any of you to make precommitments. I'm hoping someone has a better solution than simply tricking your future self.