Which also seems unfair to me sometimes. I’m quite well endowed in the willpower department, but I watch friends my age struggle with things that seem so freaking simple, like going back to graduate high school, and eventually I realize it’s not because they’re not trying but because they struggle to keep up the willpower to make a continuous effort without immediate returns, and it depresses me. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
Several LWers have spent quite some time finding and investigating the returns of several ways to boost willpower in order to complete tasks(doing more with less, building up willpower in the long term, short term willpower spkies like consuming sugar) and even IQ (nbacking, nootropics). So there are a few things you can do for your friends.
But what your are concerned about dosen’t really seem to be fairness, at least not fairness in the usual sense of the word (note: I am not saying this in a disapproving tone!), but I’m not quite sure where you fit. Could you help me out? If so please read on.
In another comment you noted that trainable skills are an important category for you. Even in a system where everyone had the same starting conditions and same ability to self-modify for more willpower and higher IQs, differences would arise over time. Before answering if you would consider such differences fair, please consider the following.
People have different values, some values are rewarded by our universe more than others. The more generous reward can obviously be used to invest more than others do into enhancement. Would this bother you?
Now lets assume all values are locked in and are thoroughly homogeneous. Differences will still arise. Unavoidably so. Can you guess why this is so? Are you ok with that?
Even in a system where everyone had the same starting conditions and same ability to self-modify for more willpower and higher IQs, differences would arise over time. Before answering if you would consider such differences fair, please consider the following.
Yes. I would consider it fair. Because if I lived in that world, and there was something I wanted to succeed, I would never be in a position where someone else could succeed at it easily while I struggled with transcendent efforts and might ultimately fail anyway. I might live in that world and not choose to self-modify for higher IQ, for example if I preferred to expend my self-modification energy on being more generous or more fun to party with, and I might end up with less money or fame or books published than someone else who chose intelligence, but I could have chosen differently if I’d wanted to.
I would consider it fair. Because if I lived in that world, and there was something I wanted to succeed, I would never be in a position where someone else could succeed at it easily while I struggled with transcendent efforts and might ultimately fail anyway.
Not all goals are created equal. Some are more difficult others less so. Many would still struggle.
Also even among those with the same goals, some will get lucky, and gains are likley to snowball over time into ever greater differentials.
I might live in that world and not choose to self-modify for higher IQ, for example if I preferred to expend my self-modification energy on being more generous or more fun to party with, and I might end up with less money or fame or books published than someone else who chose intelligence, but I could have chosen differently if I’d wanted to.
I sympathize with such a position. I feel I would ideally like it if as many people as possible could acheive what is sometimes called self-actualization and pursue their other (differing) values.
However this leaves us with the many difficult questions of how to keep such a situation in equilibrium with ever greater Malthusian pressures (due to the lightspeed limit) and ever greater power differentials. I have been for the past year or so toying with the ideas of voluntary compacts enforced by self-modification (basically I agree to change myself so I care deeply about not altering the terms of this agreement, which naturally means that in the future I will try my very best to preserve this value and hopefully keep the terms).
Not all goals are created equal. Some are more difficult others less so. Many would still struggle.
But they’d struggle at achieving harder versus easier goals. I don’t think Swimmer is suggesting all goals would be equally-easy to attain (we should rightly be suspicious if someone thinks that in a fair, self-actualized world, becoming an astronaut and becoming a teacher involved the same amount of effort), just that given two people trying to achieve the same goal (say, stability of person and health and shelter and income) by the same means, we would expect to see “luck” and the difficulty of the task determine probability of success.
I agree she wasn’t suggesting this. However what I was pointing out is that this was a source of “unfairness” for people struggling to achieve one’s goals that she hadn’t touched on.
But what your are concerned about dosen’t really seem to be fairness, at least not fairness in the usual sense of the word (note: I am not saying this in a disapproving tone!), but I’m not quite sure where you fit. Could you help me out? If so please read on.
The ‘unfair’ part comes in when someone wants to be different, and I can’t help them change even though I’ve already achieved what they want, seemingly without a lot of effort. For example, a friend of mine knows that she has poor willpower and self-control, and she commits to do things which are a good idea and will help her in the long run, but she finds the short-term pain overwhelming...and she has told me repeatedly that she wishes she could be more like me and be able to stick to precommitments. I would have an easier time with this if it was hard for me to make plans and follow them, because then at least I could detail the steps I followed, and if she failed to follow the same steps, it would be a matter of her not having tried as hard. But tasks involving willpower have always been easy for me, and I can’t describe any steps I follow aside from “making a plan to do something productive, and then doing it even if I’m tempted to do other unproductive-but-fun things later.”
[Attempting to analyze this thought pattern...] I think a lot of this comes from the fear that someday I’ll encounter some task that I’ll desperately want to accomplish, and no matter how hard I try I won’t be able to keep up with someone who is talented in a particular area and does it without trying. I haven’t encountered this before, because ultimately I am very stubborn and there’s nothing I’ve really failed at. But watching my friend reminds me that “but for the grace of God, there go I.”
Willpower is the ability to force yourself to do something even if you “don’t feel like doing it”, as you put it, because the action in question has consequences you want.
Do you also not understand how it is possible for the hare to catch the tortoise, for arrows to move, to learn anything one did not already know, or to do good of one’s own volition? One can prove, with impeccable logic, that all of these things are impossible. Yet they happen. The logic is wrong, and the wrongness is not in the deductive system but in the ontology, the verbal categories that embody assumptions one does not know one is making.
You can prove with impeccable logic that there is no such thing as will power. Either you want to do something or you do not; you do what you want and not what you don’t. Yet everyday experience tells us all (except those who have philosophised themselves into ignoring what they have proved cannot exist) that it is not as simple. We do, in fact, experience conflicts. That our verbal formulations of what is going on may fail us does not make the reality go away.
BTW, in your comment that Eugine_Nier linked, you say:
My father warns me that not working now will greatly reduce my future employment prospects, and that I’ll eventually have to find work or starve after they retire and can no longer support me. (So I guess I’ll starve, then?)
That’s some rather steep temporal discounting. Does that happen in the short term as well? E.g. do you leave something undone because you don’t feel like it, and later the very same day, wish your earlier self had done it?
The logic is wrong, and the wrongness is not in the deductive system but in the ontology, the verbal categories that embody assumptions one does not know one is making.
Yes, I’ve seen it happen. I just don’t understand it.
That’s some rather steep temporal discounting. Does that happen in the short term as well? E.g. do you leave something undone because you don’t feel like it, and later the very same day, wish your earlier self had done it?
Well, sort of. I do have a tendency to let stuff go undone and be inconvenienced by the fact that it’s not done (for example, I might run out of clean laundry, or put off getting a haircut for several months) but I rarely think of not doing them as mistakes to be regretted. I’ve learned all kinds of “bad” lessons that seem to amount to “putting things off never has consequences”. For example, I once skipped a midterm exam in college so I could play Final Fantasy X, and in hindsight it turned out to be the right decision. (I hadn’t studied—too much playing Final Fantasy X—so I would have done terribly. As it turned out, the professor accepted my excuse, I ended up passing the course.) Also, there’s all that time spent playing JRPGs, in which you want to explore every side path before reaching the main goal and nothing ever happens until you, the player, take an action to cause it to happen.
Oh, for sure! “It’s −20º C outside and I’ve been out of the house for 16 hours and I really don’t want to go jump into a cold pool and swim laps for an hour, and I’ll be exhausted after, but I haven’t exercised in 2 days and I really should.” This is kind of a worst-case scenario. Most of the time, for me anyway, the parts of me that do want to do something and the parts that don’t are equally lined up. (For example: I don’t want to swim because I could go home and play on the computer and go to bed early instead, but I do want to swim because I’ll get crabby if I don’t and I’ll feel better afterwards if I do.)
To me, simplifying it down to ‘feeling like it’ collapses the difference between someone who consistently will choose to swim in the aforementioned example, and someone who consistently won’t. You could call the difference ‘being better at delayed gratification’ but I think the usual definition of willpower covers it quite well.
Sometimes you distract or fool yourself into starting, and then it’s not so bad after that. Like, you don’t want to write a paper, so you start a video on youtube, and while you’re distracted with that, tell yourself you’re just going to open MS Word, and then maybe write something or maybe not; then you tell yourself you’re just going to write 100 words, and so on. Do it a few times in a row, and the process becomes habit, and then you might not even have to lie to yourself about why you’re opening MS Word, because it’s not a conscious decision anymore.
You don’t have to be unhappier not doing the thing than you are doing it, necessarily. You just have to be unhappy enough not doing the thing to keep trying to try.
That works for you? For me, the best way is to plan, preferably a day in advance, that ‘I will write my essay on Friday night’ or something. There is definitely a part of myself that resents having another part of myself ‘trick’ it into anything, productive or not.
People are different, I guess. “Deciding” to do something on Friday night has little correlation with whether I will actually do it on Friday night, or at all. It mainly just makes me feel bad when I haven’t written the essay as of Saturday morning.
See, there’s a part of me that really doesn’t like writing essays—actually, not writing essays in particular, as I’ve mostly fixed that problem, but just being productive, doing effortful things. If I try to power through it, that part of me complains so loud that I’m very motivated to rationalize doing whatever it is later. Giving it advance warning just makes it complain louder, if anything. But it’s easily distracted.
I can’t identify with what you say about resenting being “tricked”. I actually feel pretty good when I successfully circumvent the part of me that doesn’t care what happens tomorrow. Now, ideally, I’d like to train the complaining part of me to just shut up when I do productive things, but that’s not easy, and I suspect I’ll need to experience many successes first so that I can associate trying with good things.
That’s a very interesting difference. I find that being psychologically prepared to do something productive makes it way easier. If I trick myself into going for a swim by telling the lazy part of myself that I’ll just go for 20 minutes, you can bet that if 20 minutes is up and I try to motivate myself to keep going, there will be several sub-components of my mind screaming ‘but you promised!’ This is even more true for things that aren’t habits for me. (Exercise is something I do pretty easily by pure habit.)
I tend to decide what to do by imagining my options and choosing the one that I feel the best about. To me, “feeling like doing something” and “deciding to do something” feel like they’re the exact same thing. Maybe that’s why I get confused when people talk about doing things they don’t feel like or don’t want to do? They have some kind of “override” in their brains that kicks in between feeling like doing something and actually doing it—which they call “willpower”—and which I’m not aware of having?
I think in order to understand what willpower is and what it is useful for, it is important to understand that people want more than one thing. For example, I want to read Internet news. I also want to improve my math abilities, increase my programming skills, read novels, learn more physics, improve at my job, draw more pictures, bicycle more, spend more time in nature, and bake more delicious strawberry-rhubarb pies of which I will place one scoop of vanilla ice cream on each slice I eat. That’s not even close to an exhaustive list of all the things I want.
Multiple wants will often come into conflict with one another. All of the things I’ve mentioned take time. My time is limited. So I have to put some kind of priority ordering on them. Sometimes I should do something where I will only accomplish what I want in the long term. Sometimes I should do things that can be quickly or easily accomplished with little mental effort in the short term. Mostly people talk about willpower when they’re having trouble doing the long term or high effort things they want to do, not the short term or low effort things they want to do.
So the need for willpower mostly arises when people are trying to maximize attainment of various wants which compete for their time and energy. Since the longer term wants don’t maximize short term rewards, they take more mental effort to accomplish since you don’t feel automatic and immediate positive reinforcement from them (you want to do them in the abstract, but there are other things that would make you happier right now if you did them instead).
So when someone does something requiring willpower, they want to do it in an intellectual sense, and they have some emotional stake in whether it gets done, but they don’t want to do it in the sense that they are getting a large positive reinforcement from anticipating the task. Possibly they feel bad when they anticipate not doing it, or it just doesn’t generate as much excitement at the moment as the other task. So they want to do it, but it requires willpower for them to do so. I think willpower is really just a way to talk about the mental effort required to do something a person wants to do, which differs for different wants. If you want to know more about what might actually affect how willpower works, understanding more about motivation will probably help.
I prefer to minimize the need for willpower in long term goals, however. If I can find a way to give myself short term positive reinforcement for doing something that achieves a long term goal, I will. Anyway, I hope that helps explain it.
Willpower seems to be about trading off short-term gains for long term ones. In the short term, doing a particular action may not be very pleasant, but in the long term, you do want to have completed that activity. People’s preferences aren’t generally stable, and what we “want” in the short term is not always the same thing we will “want” in the long term. We use the same word for both, but it doesn’t mean that it is the same thing, or that it is impossible for a short term and a long term desire to conflict.
Which also seems unfair to me sometimes. I’m quite well endowed in the willpower department, but I watch friends my age struggle with things that seem so freaking simple, like going back to graduate high school, and eventually I realize it’s not because they’re not trying but because they struggle to keep up the willpower to make a continuous effort without immediate returns, and it depresses me. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
I can understand why you feel that way.
Several LWers have spent quite some time finding and investigating the returns of several ways to boost willpower in order to complete tasks(doing more with less, building up willpower in the long term, short term willpower spkies like consuming sugar) and even IQ (nbacking, nootropics). So there are a few things you can do for your friends.
But what your are concerned about dosen’t really seem to be fairness, at least not fairness in the usual sense of the word (note: I am not saying this in a disapproving tone!), but I’m not quite sure where you fit. Could you help me out? If so please read on.
In another comment you noted that trainable skills are an important category for you. Even in a system where everyone had the same starting conditions and same ability to self-modify for more willpower and higher IQs, differences would arise over time. Before answering if you would consider such differences fair, please consider the following.
People have different values, some values are rewarded by our universe more than others. The more generous reward can obviously be used to invest more than others do into enhancement. Would this bother you?
Now lets assume all values are locked in and are thoroughly homogeneous. Differences will still arise. Unavoidably so. Can you guess why this is so? Are you ok with that?
To answer the other half of your question:
Yes. I would consider it fair. Because if I lived in that world, and there was something I wanted to succeed, I would never be in a position where someone else could succeed at it easily while I struggled with transcendent efforts and might ultimately fail anyway. I might live in that world and not choose to self-modify for higher IQ, for example if I preferred to expend my self-modification energy on being more generous or more fun to party with, and I might end up with less money or fame or books published than someone else who chose intelligence, but I could have chosen differently if I’d wanted to.
Not all goals are created equal. Some are more difficult others less so. Many would still struggle.
Also even among those with the same goals, some will get lucky, and gains are likley to snowball over time into ever greater differentials.
I sympathize with such a position. I feel I would ideally like it if as many people as possible could acheive what is sometimes called self-actualization and pursue their other (differing) values.
However this leaves us with the many difficult questions of how to keep such a situation in equilibrium with ever greater Malthusian pressures (due to the lightspeed limit) and ever greater power differentials. I have been for the past year or so toying with the ideas of voluntary compacts enforced by self-modification (basically I agree to change myself so I care deeply about not altering the terms of this agreement, which naturally means that in the future I will try my very best to preserve this value and hopefully keep the terms).
But they’d struggle at achieving harder versus easier goals. I don’t think Swimmer is suggesting all goals would be equally-easy to attain (we should rightly be suspicious if someone thinks that in a fair, self-actualized world, becoming an astronaut and becoming a teacher involved the same amount of effort), just that given two people trying to achieve the same goal (say, stability of person and health and shelter and income) by the same means, we would expect to see “luck” and the difficulty of the task determine probability of success.
I agree she wasn’t suggesting this. However what I was pointing out is that this was a source of “unfairness” for people struggling to achieve one’s goals that she hadn’t touched on.
The ‘unfair’ part comes in when someone wants to be different, and I can’t help them change even though I’ve already achieved what they want, seemingly without a lot of effort. For example, a friend of mine knows that she has poor willpower and self-control, and she commits to do things which are a good idea and will help her in the long run, but she finds the short-term pain overwhelming...and she has told me repeatedly that she wishes she could be more like me and be able to stick to precommitments. I would have an easier time with this if it was hard for me to make plans and follow them, because then at least I could detail the steps I followed, and if she failed to follow the same steps, it would be a matter of her not having tried as hard. But tasks involving willpower have always been easy for me, and I can’t describe any steps I follow aside from “making a plan to do something productive, and then doing it even if I’m tempted to do other unproductive-but-fun things later.”
[Attempting to analyze this thought pattern...] I think a lot of this comes from the fear that someday I’ll encounter some task that I’ll desperately want to accomplish, and no matter how hard I try I won’t be able to keep up with someone who is talented in a particular area and does it without trying. I haven’t encountered this before, because ultimately I am very stubborn and there’s nothing I’ve really failed at. But watching my friend reminds me that “but for the grace of God, there go I.”
I never understood willpower. If you don’t want to do something, you could always, well, not do it.
Willpower is the ability to force yourself to do something even if you “don’t feel like doing it”, as you put it, because the action in question has consequences you want.
I don’t understand how is it even possible to do something without feeling like doing it.
Do you also not understand how it is possible for the hare to catch the tortoise, for arrows to move, to learn anything one did not already know, or to do good of one’s own volition? One can prove, with impeccable logic, that all of these things are impossible. Yet they happen. The logic is wrong, and the wrongness is not in the deductive system but in the ontology, the verbal categories that embody assumptions one does not know one is making.
You can prove with impeccable logic that there is no such thing as will power. Either you want to do something or you do not; you do what you want and not what you don’t. Yet everyday experience tells us all (except those who have philosophised themselves into ignoring what they have proved cannot exist) that it is not as simple. We do, in fact, experience conflicts. That our verbal formulations of what is going on may fail us does not make the reality go away.
BTW, in your comment that Eugine_Nier linked, you say:
That’s some rather steep temporal discounting. Does that happen in the short term as well? E.g. do you leave something undone because you don’t feel like it, and later the very same day, wish your earlier self had done it?
Yes, I’ve seen it happen. I just don’t understand it.
Well, sort of. I do have a tendency to let stuff go undone and be inconvenienced by the fact that it’s not done (for example, I might run out of clean laundry, or put off getting a haircut for several months) but I rarely think of not doing them as mistakes to be regretted. I’ve learned all kinds of “bad” lessons that seem to amount to “putting things off never has consequences”. For example, I once skipped a midterm exam in college so I could play Final Fantasy X, and in hindsight it turned out to be the right decision. (I hadn’t studied—too much playing Final Fantasy X—so I would have done terribly. As it turned out, the professor accepted my excuse, I ended up passing the course.) Also, there’s all that time spent playing JRPGs, in which you want to explore every side path before reaching the main goal and nothing ever happens until you, the player, take an action to cause it to happen.
Oh, for sure! “It’s −20º C outside and I’ve been out of the house for 16 hours and I really don’t want to go jump into a cold pool and swim laps for an hour, and I’ll be exhausted after, but I haven’t exercised in 2 days and I really should.” This is kind of a worst-case scenario. Most of the time, for me anyway, the parts of me that do want to do something and the parts that don’t are equally lined up. (For example: I don’t want to swim because I could go home and play on the computer and go to bed early instead, but I do want to swim because I’ll get crabby if I don’t and I’ll feel better afterwards if I do.)
To me, that reads as a more complicated form of “feeling like it”...
To me, simplifying it down to ‘feeling like it’ collapses the difference between someone who consistently will choose to swim in the aforementioned example, and someone who consistently won’t. You could call the difference ‘being better at delayed gratification’ but I think the usual definition of willpower covers it quite well.
Sometimes you distract or fool yourself into starting, and then it’s not so bad after that. Like, you don’t want to write a paper, so you start a video on youtube, and while you’re distracted with that, tell yourself you’re just going to open MS Word, and then maybe write something or maybe not; then you tell yourself you’re just going to write 100 words, and so on. Do it a few times in a row, and the process becomes habit, and then you might not even have to lie to yourself about why you’re opening MS Word, because it’s not a conscious decision anymore.
You don’t have to be unhappier not doing the thing than you are doing it, necessarily. You just have to be unhappy enough not doing the thing to keep trying to try.
That works for you? For me, the best way is to plan, preferably a day in advance, that ‘I will write my essay on Friday night’ or something. There is definitely a part of myself that resents having another part of myself ‘trick’ it into anything, productive or not.
People are different, I guess. “Deciding” to do something on Friday night has little correlation with whether I will actually do it on Friday night, or at all. It mainly just makes me feel bad when I haven’t written the essay as of Saturday morning.
See, there’s a part of me that really doesn’t like writing essays—actually, not writing essays in particular, as I’ve mostly fixed that problem, but just being productive, doing effortful things. If I try to power through it, that part of me complains so loud that I’m very motivated to rationalize doing whatever it is later. Giving it advance warning just makes it complain louder, if anything. But it’s easily distracted.
I can’t identify with what you say about resenting being “tricked”. I actually feel pretty good when I successfully circumvent the part of me that doesn’t care what happens tomorrow. Now, ideally, I’d like to train the complaining part of me to just shut up when I do productive things, but that’s not easy, and I suspect I’ll need to experience many successes first so that I can associate trying with good things.
That’s a very interesting difference. I find that being psychologically prepared to do something productive makes it way easier. If I trick myself into going for a swim by telling the lazy part of myself that I’ll just go for 20 minutes, you can bet that if 20 minutes is up and I try to motivate myself to keep going, there will be several sub-components of my mind screaming ‘but you promised!’ This is even more true for things that aren’t habits for me. (Exercise is something I do pretty easily by pure habit.)
Can you give an example of it, since the one Swimmer963 offered doesn’t qualify?
I tend to decide what to do by imagining my options and choosing the one that I feel the best about. To me, “feeling like doing something” and “deciding to do something” feel like they’re the exact same thing. Maybe that’s why I get confused when people talk about doing things they don’t feel like or don’t want to do? They have some kind of “override” in their brains that kicks in between feeling like doing something and actually doing it—which they call “willpower”—and which I’m not aware of having?
Maybe it does? Willpower is something that confuses me, after all.
I think in order to understand what willpower is and what it is useful for, it is important to understand that people want more than one thing. For example, I want to read Internet news. I also want to improve my math abilities, increase my programming skills, read novels, learn more physics, improve at my job, draw more pictures, bicycle more, spend more time in nature, and bake more delicious strawberry-rhubarb pies of which I will place one scoop of vanilla ice cream on each slice I eat. That’s not even close to an exhaustive list of all the things I want.
Multiple wants will often come into conflict with one another. All of the things I’ve mentioned take time. My time is limited. So I have to put some kind of priority ordering on them. Sometimes I should do something where I will only accomplish what I want in the long term. Sometimes I should do things that can be quickly or easily accomplished with little mental effort in the short term. Mostly people talk about willpower when they’re having trouble doing the long term or high effort things they want to do, not the short term or low effort things they want to do.
So the need for willpower mostly arises when people are trying to maximize attainment of various wants which compete for their time and energy. Since the longer term wants don’t maximize short term rewards, they take more mental effort to accomplish since you don’t feel automatic and immediate positive reinforcement from them (you want to do them in the abstract, but there are other things that would make you happier right now if you did them instead).
So when someone does something requiring willpower, they want to do it in an intellectual sense, and they have some emotional stake in whether it gets done, but they don’t want to do it in the sense that they are getting a large positive reinforcement from anticipating the task. Possibly they feel bad when they anticipate not doing it, or it just doesn’t generate as much excitement at the moment as the other task. So they want to do it, but it requires willpower for them to do so. I think willpower is really just a way to talk about the mental effort required to do something a person wants to do, which differs for different wants. If you want to know more about what might actually affect how willpower works, understanding more about motivation will probably help.
I prefer to minimize the need for willpower in long term goals, however. If I can find a way to give myself short term positive reinforcement for doing something that achieves a long term goal, I will. Anyway, I hope that helps explain it.
Willpower seems to be about trading off short-term gains for long term ones. In the short term, doing a particular action may not be very pleasant, but in the long term, you do want to have completed that activity. People’s preferences aren’t generally stable, and what we “want” in the short term is not always the same thing we will “want” in the long term. We use the same word for both, but it doesn’t mean that it is the same thing, or that it is impossible for a short term and a long term desire to conflict.