after that minimal amount of willpower it takes to deploy self-management techniques.
Is that your experience in life? It’s not mine. It’s not what I observe in other people’s lives either.
It would be incorrect to assume he is defending a view where willpower is as central as in any of the other views
From your summary, it looks to me like he is an academic selling an old idea with a new label, and insisting it is shiny and new, never before seen. That’s what academics do.
I just finished reading Willpower by Baumeister (which I think has been referenced by a few people here previously). A point there, as well, was that willpower is a finite resource, and success comes from adopting strategies which conserve it’s usage.
Not that it’s unique to him either.
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. …I suggest we think of self-control as a problem of self-management, whereby we manipulate ourselves.
Isn’t this the whole “man riding an elephant” business?
the myth that willpower equals Self-Control prevents the prescription of policies that would use these managerial techniques to increase people’s Self-Control.
People have been suggesting “managerial techniques to increase people’s Self-Control” since at least Benjamin Franklin.
EDIT: I’m trying to see the value here. The one point that looked interesting is the “resource availability”. Also, stability (which really isn’t the same thing as being high status). Are there specific techniques of self management that his “new” way of looking at the problem imply?
Neil’s theory has different empirical predictions than Baumeister’s, for example, it predicts high Self-Control correlates with low direct resistance to temptations. On the second Lecture he mentions several experiments that would tell them apart. They are different theoretically, there’s a difference in the importance they give to willpower. Saying you should save water on the Sahara is different from saying you shouldn’t lose your canteen’s cover.
It is surely my experience in life that people highly overestimate their causal effectiveness in the world, and Neil’s lectures convinced me willpower is another of those instances.
Evolutionary signals of environmental stability in childhood (that set the levels of future discounting, mating strategy and so on later in life) are more frequent in wealthier families. For instance, there’s research on cortisol levels in earlier childhood, frequency of parent’s fighting, wealth and adult life criminality, mating strategy and so on. In evolutionary terms, the correlation between status and stability is pretty high.
Is that your experience in life? It’s not mine. It’s not what I observe in other people’s lives either.
From your summary, it looks to me like he is an academic selling an old idea with a new label, and insisting it is shiny and new, never before seen. That’s what academics do.
I just finished reading Willpower by Baumeister (which I think has been referenced by a few people here previously). A point there, as well, was that willpower is a finite resource, and success comes from adopting strategies which conserve it’s usage.
Not that it’s unique to him either.
Isn’t this the whole “man riding an elephant” business?
People have been suggesting “managerial techniques to increase people’s Self-Control” since at least Benjamin Franklin.
EDIT: I’m trying to see the value here. The one point that looked interesting is the “resource availability”. Also, stability (which really isn’t the same thing as being high status). Are there specific techniques of self management that his “new” way of looking at the problem imply?
Neil’s theory has different empirical predictions than Baumeister’s, for example, it predicts high Self-Control correlates with low direct resistance to temptations. On the second Lecture he mentions several experiments that would tell them apart. They are different theoretically, there’s a difference in the importance they give to willpower. Saying you should save water on the Sahara is different from saying you shouldn’t lose your canteen’s cover.
It is surely my experience in life that people highly overestimate their causal effectiveness in the world, and Neil’s lectures convinced me willpower is another of those instances.
Evolutionary signals of environmental stability in childhood (that set the levels of future discounting, mating strategy and so on later in life) are more frequent in wealthier families. For instance, there’s research on cortisol levels in earlier childhood, frequency of parent’s fighting, wealth and adult life criminality, mating strategy and so on. In evolutionary terms, the correlation between status and stability is pretty high.