Under Kurzban’s opportunity cost theory, lack of consensus is predicted: willpower/akrasia issues are a signal to move onto something else for a while. Hence, people will find totally different things to all work for each other. It’s like the 2-4-6 game. The pattern isn’t ‘do something else which is a kind of meditation’ or ‘do something else which is a kind of exercise’ - it’s just ‘do something else’. If you try out ‘do (other thing) X’ many times and find it works for you, someone else could easily try out ‘do (other thing) Y’ many times and find it works for them too; and attempts to try out the other person’s thing could fail because you personally do not like that other thing. I might like walks as my other thing, and someone else might prefer meditation but find walks tedious and boring while conversely I find meditation tedious and boring. Producing mutually contradictory results about what works.
You make a good point if we are accepting the premise, but from what I’ve seen it seems like there is still an open question as to whether willpower is a finite resource at all or if we just think it is and therefore act like it is. Certainly when we act like we have some kind of Will Points that we can spend, they seem to self-replenish over time spent doing non-WP-draining activities (to simplify by metaphor: my mana meter refills as long as I refrain from doing magic). But I would expect that to seem true even if the premise was false (I don’t even have a mana meter, just some kind of self-imposed limit).
The fact that “there isn’t much consensus in the field” is a red flag to me.
Under Kurzban’s opportunity cost theory, lack of consensus is predicted: willpower/akrasia issues are a signal to move onto something else for a while. Hence, people will find totally different things to all work for each other. It’s like the 2-4-6 game. The pattern isn’t ‘do something else which is a kind of meditation’ or ‘do something else which is a kind of exercise’ - it’s just ‘do something else’. If you try out ‘do (other thing) X’ many times and find it works for you, someone else could easily try out ‘do (other thing) Y’ many times and find it works for them too; and attempts to try out the other person’s thing could fail because you personally do not like that other thing. I might like walks as my other thing, and someone else might prefer meditation but find walks tedious and boring while conversely I find meditation tedious and boring. Producing mutually contradictory results about what works.
You make a good point if we are accepting the premise, but from what I’ve seen it seems like there is still an open question as to whether willpower is a finite resource at all or if we just think it is and therefore act like it is. Certainly when we act like we have some kind of Will Points that we can spend, they seem to self-replenish over time spent doing non-WP-draining activities (to simplify by metaphor: my mana meter refills as long as I refrain from doing magic). But I would expect that to seem true even if the premise was false (I don’t even have a mana meter, just some kind of self-imposed limit).