Akrasia is the state of acting against one’s better judgment. A canonical example is procrastination.
Increasing willpower is seen by some as a solution to akrasia. On the other hand, many favor using tools such as Internal Double Crux to resolve internal mental conflicts until one wants to perform the reflectively endorsed task. The “resolve internal conflicts” approach is often related to viewing the mind in terms of parts that disagree with each other.
See also
External links
Akrasia at Psychology Wiki
Weakness of Will, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Beeminder, community-member developed tool for commitment via self-imposed financial penalties
From the old Wiki discussion page
Talk:Akrasia
I was looking for that LW post that talked about akrasia as a deliberately evolved defense mechanism, preventing you from, for example, killing yourself by using willpower to not eat, in an attempt to lose weight. Or by working yourself to death. I spent a few minutes searching, but didn’t find this article yet. I was hoping that that article would be linked from this wikipage, but it currently isn’t. If anyone reading this happens to have a link to the article, could you please add it to the wiki page? Or maybe just post the link here please? Thanks. --PeerInfinity 18:23, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
When Willpower Attacks? —Adam Atlas 23:25, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
That’s the article I was looking for, thanks! --PeerInfinity 16:29, 12 April 2010 (UTC)