Thanks! Interesting read. I have one question though, so let me know if I’m following you properly: the moment you go “credibility broke”, how could you study which things are / aren’t bottom up motivating? Wouldn’t the task of self-examining require spare “willpower” on its own?
I suspect the mechanisms that allow you to do these things (self reflection) are the same that require this living willpower. If you’ve used that, you can only do the basic stuff that your visceral process decides: watching netflix and eating junk food, for example.
A way out of my argument could be that there are different willpower-consuming processes and each one has their own “bank account”. Getting burnt out from work doesn’t make you burn out from playing tennis, and getting burnt out from playing tennis, doesn’t get you burnt out from playing music. This makes the model more complex, though.
Yes, this is a good point, relates to why I claimed at top that this is an oversimplified model. I appreciate you using logic from my stated premises; helps things be falsifiable.
It seems to me:
Somehow people who are in good physical health wake up each day with a certain amount of restored willpower. (This is inconsistent with the toy model in the OP, but is still my real / more-complicated model.)
Noticing spontaneously-interesting things can be done without willpower; but carefully noticing superficially-boring details and taking notes in hopes of later payoff indeed requires willpower, on my model. (Though, for me, less than e.g. going jogging requires.)
If you’ve just been defeated by a force you weren’t tracking, that force often becomes spontaneously-interesting. Thus people who are burnt out can sometimes take a spontaneous interest in how willpower/burnout/visceral motivation works, and can enjoy “learning humbly” from these things.
There’s a way burnout can help cut through ~dumb/dissociated/overconfident ideological frameworks (e.g. “only AI risk is interesting/relevant to anything”), and make space for other information to have attention again, and make it possible to learn things not in one’s model. Sort of like removing a monopoly business from a given sector, so that other thingies have a shot again.
Somehow people who are in good physical health wake up each day with a certain amount of restored willpower. (This is inconsistent with the toy model in the OP, but is still my real / more-complicated model.)
This fits in with opportunity cost-centered and exploration-exploitation -based views of willpower. Excessive focus on any one task implies that you are probably hitting diminishing returns while accumulating opportunity costs for not doing anything else. It also implies that you are probably strongly in “exploit” mode and not doing much exploring. Under those models, accumulating mental fatigue acts to force some of your focus to go to tasks that feel more intrinsically enjoyable rather than duty-based, which tends to correlate with things like exploration and e.g. social resource-building. And your willpower gets reset during the night so that you could then go back to working on those high-opportunity cost exploit tasks again.
Thanks! Interesting read. I have one question though, so let me know if I’m following you properly: the moment you go “credibility broke”, how could you study which things are / aren’t bottom up motivating? Wouldn’t the task of self-examining require spare “willpower” on its own?
I suspect the mechanisms that allow you to do these things (self reflection) are the same that require this living willpower. If you’ve used that, you can only do the basic stuff that your visceral process decides: watching netflix and eating junk food, for example.
A way out of my argument could be that there are different willpower-consuming processes and each one has their own “bank account”. Getting burnt out from work doesn’t make you burn out from playing tennis, and getting burnt out from playing tennis, doesn’t get you burnt out from playing music. This makes the model more complex, though.
Yes, this is a good point, relates to why I claimed at top that this is an oversimplified model. I appreciate you using logic from my stated premises; helps things be falsifiable.
It seems to me:
Somehow people who are in good physical health wake up each day with a certain amount of restored willpower. (This is inconsistent with the toy model in the OP, but is still my real / more-complicated model.)
Noticing spontaneously-interesting things can be done without willpower; but carefully noticing superficially-boring details and taking notes in hopes of later payoff indeed requires willpower, on my model. (Though, for me, less than e.g. going jogging requires.)
If you’ve just been defeated by a force you weren’t tracking, that force often becomes spontaneously-interesting. Thus people who are burnt out can sometimes take a spontaneous interest in how willpower/burnout/visceral motivation works, and can enjoy “learning humbly” from these things.
There’s a way burnout can help cut through ~dumb/dissociated/overconfident ideological frameworks (e.g. “only AI risk is interesting/relevant to anything”), and make space for other information to have attention again, and make it possible to learn things not in one’s model. Sort of like removing a monopoly business from a given sector, so that other thingies have a shot again.
I wish the above was more coherent/model-y.
This fits in with opportunity cost-centered and exploration-exploitation -based views of willpower. Excessive focus on any one task implies that you are probably hitting diminishing returns while accumulating opportunity costs for not doing anything else. It also implies that you are probably strongly in “exploit” mode and not doing much exploring. Under those models, accumulating mental fatigue acts to force some of your focus to go to tasks that feel more intrinsically enjoyable rather than duty-based, which tends to correlate with things like exploration and e.g. social resource-building. And your willpower gets reset during the night so that you could then go back to working on those high-opportunity cost exploit tasks again.
I think those models fit together with yours.