I wanted to pick on on the point about heritability.
I’ve been struggling to explain to others that despite self-control having a high genetic component (you say a heritability of about 60%) it’s still possible and valuable to improve it significantly. You analogy with strength training was a really useful framing. The heritability of BMI/strength is about the same [1] as for self-control.
I guess the difference is that people don’t join clubs specifically to train their self-control for 1h three times a week, with experts to guide them along the way and make sure the difficulty level and progression is right for them. It would be great if this existed though. I’ve played with the idea with a friend 11 years ago, we would have a list of mostly pointless skills that we would train, for the sake of training our self control, every day. It probably wasn’t the best format, and I have no idea if it was causal but what followed was the most productive period of my life. We also ran a much watered down version at some of the LessWrong London meetups a long while ago with less (but still some) success.
It makes me want to try something similar again. Because I think the benefits of improving self-control are huge, Even if ‘all’ you end up with is a solid model of your own motivation for a task and how it will changes with situational changes (e.g. relative motivation of studying at home vs. the library), then it would still be hugely valuable.
Even just pairing up and running through these items for the 1-2 most important goals of the month might be quite a big boost. I would be up for trying that / organising something around that (UK time-zone).
Interesting… Can you tell more about how your self-control training looked like? Like when in the day, how long, how hard, what tasks, etc? Was the most productive period in your life during or after this training? Why did you stop?
To carry on with the strength training comparison, we’re usually trying to achieve a maximum deployed strength over our lifetime. Perhaps we’re already deploying as much strength as we can every day for useful tasks, so that adding strength training on pointless tasks would remove strength from the other tasks?
It started with practice handstands for 10mins without any real plan other than that, It then built into a similar set of small things. Short duration but required focus. Brushing teeth with my other hand, small bits of CoZE exercises—silly things really. But it have both of us the real feeling that we could get better at anything.
It was when I was travelling and I kept up a version for a month or so. Stopped because I was working on more valuable goals when I got home.
I wanted to pick on on the point about heritability.
I’ve been struggling to explain to others that despite self-control having a high genetic component (you say a heritability of about 60%) it’s still possible and valuable to improve it significantly. You analogy with strength training was a really useful framing. The heritability of BMI/strength is about the same [1] as for self-control.
I guess the difference is that people don’t join clubs specifically to train their self-control for 1h three times a week, with experts to guide them along the way and make sure the difficulty level and progression is right for them. It would be great if this existed though. I’ve played with the idea with a friend 11 years ago, we would have a list of mostly pointless skills that we would train, for the sake of training our self control, every day. It probably wasn’t the best format, and I have no idea if it was causal but what followed was the most productive period of my life. We also ran a much watered down version at some of the LessWrong London meetups a long while ago with less (but still some) success.
It makes me want to try something similar again. Because I think the benefits of improving self-control are huge, Even if ‘all’ you end up with is a solid model of your own motivation for a task and how it will changes with situational changes (e.g. relative motivation of studying at home vs. the library), then it would still be hugely valuable.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/gepi.20308 “Additive genetic factors explained 81% of variation in height, 59% in body mass index and 50–60% in the strength measures … a study of one million Swedish men”
Even just pairing up and running through these items for the 1-2 most important goals of the month might be quite a big boost. I would be up for trying that / organising something around that (UK time-zone).
Interesting… Can you tell more about how your self-control training looked like? Like when in the day, how long, how hard, what tasks, etc? Was the most productive period in your life during or after this training? Why did you stop?
To carry on with the strength training comparison, we’re usually trying to achieve a maximum deployed strength over our lifetime. Perhaps we’re already deploying as much strength as we can every day for useful tasks, so that adding strength training on pointless tasks would remove strength from the other tasks?
It started with practice handstands for 10mins without any real plan other than that, It then built into a similar set of small things. Short duration but required focus. Brushing teeth with my other hand, small bits of CoZE exercises—silly things really. But it have both of us the real feeling that we could get better at anything.
It was when I was travelling and I kept up a version for a month or so. Stopped because I was working on more valuable goals when I got home.