Excellent post! I think the positive direction of boiling the crab deserves more emphasis. A lot of habits have slow, accumulating returns that are below our sensory threshold but still worth sticking to, and just as people are unreasonably hesitant to abandon slowly deteriorating things, we are unreasonably willing to give up slowly improving things. I sense that a primary difficulty with diets is that their effects take several months and the changes are too gradual for people to notice.
Hmmm, that may be the case on diets. Positive changes below the sensory threshold. Maybe you can write a post on it :).
There is a heuristic I have heard about PhD studies. A capable mathematics professor once told me: a graduate student should feel like s/he is making progress every day. Even if no new resullts are forthcoming. Experimentally, this is possible, and leads to improved happinness and better results. I am part of the academic system, so my anecdotes are biased in that direction.
I wonder if diets where you can feel improvement every day, work better. Some friends partake in keto, vegetarian, low-carbohydrate, soylent, and/or paleo. A subset of these dieters tell me, through enthusiastic blog post or private message, how amazing their new diet makes them feel, and how much more daily energy and diligence they have. I have not done a systematic study of whether this makes them stick to the diet for longer. For the critically dehydrated, half of China for instance, I have anecdotally heard that drinking 3-5 glasses of water a day has the same effect.
(There is another common probem I have observed with diets, that has nothing to do with slow-boiling. Some people get results fast, and then ditch their diet to eat ice cream.)
Excellent post! I think the positive direction of boiling the crab deserves more emphasis. A lot of habits have slow, accumulating returns that are below our sensory threshold but still worth sticking to, and just as people are unreasonably hesitant to abandon slowly deteriorating things, we are unreasonably willing to give up slowly improving things. I sense that a primary difficulty with diets is that their effects take several months and the changes are too gradual for people to notice.
Hmmm, that may be the case on diets. Positive changes below the sensory threshold. Maybe you can write a post on it :).
There is a heuristic I have heard about PhD studies. A capable mathematics professor once told me: a graduate student should feel like s/he is making progress every day. Even if no new resullts are forthcoming. Experimentally, this is possible, and leads to improved happinness and better results. I am part of the academic system, so my anecdotes are biased in that direction.
I wonder if diets where you can feel improvement every day, work better. Some friends partake in keto, vegetarian, low-carbohydrate, soylent, and/or paleo. A subset of these dieters tell me, through enthusiastic blog post or private message, how amazing their new diet makes them feel, and how much more daily energy and diligence they have. I have not done a systematic study of whether this makes them stick to the diet for longer. For the critically dehydrated, half of China for instance, I have anecdotally heard that drinking 3-5 glasses of water a day has the same effect.
(There is another common probem I have observed with diets, that has nothing to do with slow-boiling. Some people get results fast, and then ditch their diet to eat ice cream.)