Follow-up to:  Fighting Akrasia:  Finding the Source

In the last post in this series I posted a link to a Google Docs survey to try to gather some data on what techniques, if any, work for people in conquering akrasia, but we haven't gotten very much information so far:  the response pool is fairly homogeneous in terms of age, sex, and personality type.  In part this is because we need to get more responses outside of the LW readership, but probably also because I'm not asking the right questions.  So, my challenge this weekend is to come up with some good revisions for the survey.

In order to maximize comment usefulness, please suggest one revision per top level comment and then any discussion of that revision can take place in the replies.

In the interest of keeping the comments on topic, I request a moratorium on discussions of whether or not akrasia exists and whether or not we can or should do something about it in the comments on this article.  It's not that I want to exclude or silence opinions contrary to what I'm trying to accomplish:  it's just that I would like to keep this article on the topic of revising the akrasia fighting survey.  By all means, if my posting about akrasia really bothers you, write up an article explaining why I'm wrong and we'll discuss the issue more there.

Thanks!

Followup to:  Fighting Akrasia:  Incentivising Action

Influenced by:  Generalizing From One Example

Previously I looked at how we might fight akrasia by creating incentives for actions.  Based on the comments to the previous article and Yvain's now classic post Generalizing From One Example, I want to take a deeper look at the source of akrasia and the techniques used to fight it.

I feel foolish for not looking at this closer first, but let's begin by asking what akrasia is and what causes it.  As commonly used, akrasia is the weakness-of-will we feel when we desire to do something but find ourselves doing something else.  So why do we experience akrasia?  Or, more to the point, why to we feel a desire to take actions contrary the actions we desire most, as indicated by our actions?  Or, if it helps, flip that question and ask why are the actions we take not always the ones we feel the greatest desire for?

First, we don't know the fine details of how the human brain makes decisions.  We know what it feels like to come to a decision about an action (or anything else), but how the algorithm feels from the inside is not a reliable way to figure out how the decision was actually made.  But because most people can relate to a feeling of akrasia, this suggests that there is some disconnect between how the brain decides what actions are most desirable and what actions we believe are most desirable.  The hypothesis that I consider most likely is that the ability to form beliefs about desirable actions evolved well after the ability to make decisions about what actions are most desirable, and the decision-making part of the brain only bothers to consult the belief-about-desirability-of-actions part of the brain when there is a reason to do so from evolution's point of view.¹  As a result we end up with a brain that only does what we think we really want when evolutionarily prudent, hence we experience akrasia whenever our brain doesn't consider it appropriate to consult what we experience as desirable.

This suggests two main ways of overcoming akrasia assuming my hypothesis (or something close to it) is correct:  make the actions we believe to be desirable also desirable to the decision-making part of the brain or make the decision-making part of the brain consult the belief-about-desirability-of-actions part of the brain when we want it to.  Most techniques fall into the former category since this is by far the easier strategy, but however a technique works, an overriding theme of the akrasia-related articles and comments on Less Wrong is that no technique yet found seems to work for all people.