This whole thing about character flaws and self control reminded me of the following passage from Raymond Smullyan's "This Book Needs No Title":
I know one woman who smokes. She says: “It’s not that I have to smoke; I choose to. I could easily give it up any time I wish to, but I see no reason why I should. But I can assure you, I could if I wanted to.” Her husband says to her: “That's only a rationalization! You couldn’t give up smoking even if you wanted to. You are not strong enough to give it up; you have to smoke. So to make yourself feel better, and to avoid having to confess your own weakness of character, you fool yourself into believing that you choose to. But it’s only a rationalization!” I know another woman who smokes. She says: “It’s not that I want to smoke; I can’t help myself! I have tried several times giving it up, but I have failed! I'm afraid I just don’t have a very strong character. I would love to stop, but I simply can’t.” Her husband says to her: “That's only a rationalization! You certainly could stop immediately, if you really wanted to. No, you choose to smoke (after all, nobody is making you) and you feel ashamed and guilty for doing that which you know to be harmful. So to avoid any moral responsibility for your acts, you fool yourself into believing that you ‘can’t help it. But this is only a rationalization.”
My only question about all this is: “Why are people so incredibly stupid?”
Pity he didn't expand on the last line, but I think deep introspection is required to understand what is really under our control
(1) if someone says "I want to do X" we can take them at face value. We don't have to argue that "they secretly don't and only say it because they can't quit". That's BS.
(2) if someone says "I want to quit X, but can't", we also take them at face value. Sure, they might enjoy X, but there's nothing to make us believe they are lying when they say they want to quit X or only say it because they feel ashamed.
Now, what we want to do as a rational plan (e.g. quit smoking) and what we want to do as an impulse (e.g. smoke another cigarette now) is not the same thing.
And the impulse can be far more powerful than the rational plan.
So, no need to second guess anyone. We can both taking them at face value (when they say they want to quit for example) AND understand that there might be impulses in them beyond what they rationally want.
An impulse is just a "want" over a shorter timescale. When someone says "I want to quite X, but can't", what they usually mean is that most of the time they want to quit, but for short periods of time they want X more than they want to quit.
Self-control is an important part of short-term vs long-term thinking. Perhaps a more important point is whether (during the times when you want to quit X) you change things so that the times when you want X are less frequent.
If you say you want to quit X, but you choose not to do the things that make it easier for you to quit X (for example, for someone wanting to quit eating between meals, not buying and keeping snacks in their house, so that giving in to their impulses is more effort) then it's reasonable to doubt your intention to quit X.
People do lie, especially about their reasons for doing things, and taking them at their word would be negligent if you're a doctor who needs the truth to do your job, or even if they're just someone you want to help.
>An impulse is just a "want" over a shorter timescale.
I don't think so. There's a qualitative difference. The "want over larger timescale" is a conscious decision. The impulse can be felt even at a gut level (and can even be tied to addiction mechanisms).
Compared to "I want to quit cocaine", "I want a hit" is not the same thing in a "shorter timescale" at all.
It's not just that "most of the time they want to quit, but for short periods of time they want X more than they want to quit". The impulse at those "short periods" is of a different kind too.
And even for much less addictive issues, smoking, obesity, procrastination, exercise, etc, the two are different, and even involve different parts of the brain.
I think this intuition generalizes to almost everything in life, and to discussions on the Internet in particular. That is, I don't think I've ever seen anything productive coming from not taking what people say at face value.
I agree with you that there are at least 2 classes of "wants," but I would say the distinction is way more subtle than you think. For one thing, when it comes to my own motivations it's usually completely unreasonable to take myself at face value, so why would I take others at face value? Of course you should take care not to treat people like children, but that doesn't mean they understand themselves.
The best explanation I've seen of this, at least psychologically, is from The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. He says we are in control of our intentions, and nothing else. (Although I would say that language is also misleading, because people are sometimes not very good at distinguishing false intentions that are generated unconsciously.) The right intention, perhaps repeated persistently enough, is what leads not only to action but also to internal expressions of "willpower" or effort. Right intentions are not "good intentions," where you mean for good things to happen. A right intention is directing your focus to the thing that helps you most in whatever you're trying to do.
It's certainly possible to never notice any of this, especially if you don't take up activities that make the process more obvious. If you lift weights, for example, it's easy to notice all the effort that a set takes and think "I did that." In reality most of your control over the set was exerted before you even started. I think this explains the utility of many spiritual practices like meditation and prayer.
I really wanted to quit, but I couldnt "chose to quit" - so I went a different route that worked well for me, but with an odd cost:
I convinced myself that "smoking will make you nauseous" -- and then, when I attempted to smoke, I would feel sick to my stomach, and I would gag a lot.
This worked for me - and I was able to quit nearly cold turkey.
The cost, is that now, any time I smell cigarette smoke, I begin to gag and I cant control it. Further, now my gag reflex is so strong that brushing my teeth makes me gag heavily....
Interestingly, I use the same method to stick to my diet. I repeat to myself and others how gross fast food is and just say things like yuck, eww, etc when I think of eating it. It took a short time before I just naturally avoid it and have no desire or cravings anymore. And this is from someone that once consumed at least 1, most times 2, meals a day from fast food places.
My problem with dieting was different, I eat normal food, I just eat a lot of it, even if I'm not hungry. I realized this was because the long-term gain of not eating is just too long-term, so I set up a points system where I reward myself with points any time I eat less than maintenance, and I lose points whenever I eat more. It's been working quite well so far!
I've done something in the same vein, but not so detailed. Say I'm out for dinner and they offer desert. I have a sweet tooth, so I look at the menu. If it sounds absolutely great, I'll give in. But if it appears to be just OK, I say to myself "I'll save those calories for something better another day."
Likewise, if potato chips are served with a meal -- if I ate them I'd get some marginal pleasure from it, but I can think of 20 ways to get more pleasure from the same number of calories.
Mentally, I'm not denying myself pleasure; I'm banking it for future pleasure. The overall effect is I have fewer low-yield calories and fewer calories overall.
Well you basically made up reverse weight watchers. They assign points based on calorie counts (and I think healthiness factors as well but I could be wrong there). You have a set number of points per day.
My system is simpler in that you don't have to count calories or anything, you just ballpark the amount of points you gain/lose based on how you ate. It's not about the points anyway, the points are just there for motivation, so they just need to be accurate enough to keep you from thinking it's a sham.
Conditioning oneself to feel shame when purchasing or being seen eating unhealthy food works too. In fact I'm pretty sure it's a key component of the general food culture of most places that are slimmer than the US—which is almost all the places that there are.
I think this self-programming things work a lot better than people expect.
The best way to avoid the temptation to each junk food is just not to buy it, or the best way to avoid defaulting to something is making it impractical.
That worked really well for me when I was single. But once you have a family with small children, keeping all snacks and junk foods out of the house is a different challenge.
I really had to drastically up my game because my old strategy of not eating what wasn't there didn't cut it anymore.
I don't know if you have kids but I was shocked how much junk food appears in the house EVEN if you don't buy any, especially as they get older.
It would be helpful if my spouse was as strict as I am but that's not always possible. Not to mention step parents and grandparents who are purposely sabotaging to the healthy food plan.
It took about 4 years of "discipline lag" but if you keep trying eventually you can serve the kids cake and pizza at a birthday party, without being distressed you aren't having any.
I don't have a good specific strategy but if you keep focused eventually willpower gets stronger.
Or the other way around. Something that helps a long way picking up a good habit is to make it easy to do, by removing all possible obstacles/annoyances to just doing it.
There is a known method for stopping people from drinking that involves the patient taking a drug which prevents any pleasure-able feelings from alcohol and then letting the person drink as much as they want. After the third or fourth time, the person naturally avoids it.
That's how I stopped drinking liquor! When I was around 20, I drank way, way too much and was in bed for more than 3 days. It's been 30 years since and I still can't smell or drink anything stronger than wine without getting repulsed.
Had a very similar experience unintentionally. A coworker was making mixed drinks with Everclear, which was 190 proof (95% alcohol). I badly misjudged how much I was drinking, and it was one of three times in my life I threw up from drinking (probably saved me from alcohol poisoning). Took me a few days to recover fully. Before that incident, my preferred drink was whiskey neat and I could drink it like water. Ever since, any hard spirits make me nauseous immediately if they aren't mixed and diluted heavily. I figure it's my body's defense mechanism telling me not to drink poison anymore.
That kind of self-teaching worked for me for junk food (for which I have told myself since childhood would make me nauseous) but not coffee (for which I have mostly been telling myself it would make me warm and happy, which it does). Now I have been low-key trying to, if not quit coffee, at least make myself able to stop after a while.
I've tried telling myself coffee would make my heart hurt/race uncomfortably (as an added bonus, it actually does after a while). But mostly thinking about coffee makes me want more coffee, even if it's negative.
I've tried redirecting my good feelings to something else by telling myself exercise would make me feel warm, good and alert. It works. Now I exercise AND drink too much coffee. OTOH I've never had problems motivating myself to exercise (which I do daily) so I guess... partial win?
I "stopped" frequently, sometimes for months at a time, and planned to quit "someday". Finally, the first time I tried to actually "quit" I started again in less than 24 hours.
I was so disgusted with myself that I quit in disgust...successfully. Not sure how I tricked my brain this way, and the previous successful "stop but not quit" experience surely helped, but essentially successfully quit within 36 hours of my first attempt.
I wonder how much of the complexity is "semantic." Ie, our language concepts just break down when trying to describe willpower addiction and their interaction... addiction is wanting something even though you really don't want to want it.
I'd go one step further. There are two models vying against each other here; Free Will and Materialist Determinism. We often try to believe in both at the same time, and it causes all sorts of dissonance in comprehension and expression.
You don't have to be a materialist to be a determinist. Nor do you have to be a determinist if you're a materialist. The beliefs are completely orthogonal.
Indeed not, hence why I named them separately. I'm alluding specifically to the combination here, where the mind is a purely mechanical thing that is a function of its inputs. Which makes a concept like "self-control", as a moral construct, difficult to model, at least in any meaningful way.
Too theoretical imo, to see if something is within your locus of control try to stop doing it for a month - you'll see whether you are smoking cigarettes or if the cigarettes are smoking you.
The same is true of quitting, of course. Aside from rare situations such as a beheading it is hard to lose consciousness while being reasonably sure that you won't regain it, if only briefly, and even the guillotined could wake up post-singularity and start smoking again!
I have a challenge to anyone here: stop reacting to notifications on your phone for a week. You hear the sound, ignore it. Just ignore it. Get to it when you need to.
Notifications are the reason we are addicted to our phones. Checking whether something that arrived is important is like a slot machine. Notice that there is no way to put a different sound for "urgent" notifications. That's because apps and companies are all competing for a limited resource - your attention. It's the tragedy of the commons!
I’m a step ahead of your experiment: I just use my phone in Do Not Disturb mode 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Problem solved. While the screen is off I get no notifications. No texts popping up. All calls silenced. I control when I use my phone, not other people, not app developers, not some “growth hacker’s” machine learning algorithm. It’s been a total game changer and improved my quality of life immensely—almost more than when I quit Facebook years ago. I can’t imagine ever going back to my phone lighting up and dinging like a casino every 10 seconds.
I have a similar setup to ryandrake (GP) where I just keep my phone on silent 24/7 (not DND, not sure what the difference is, maybe DND also stops some notifs from coming through at all).
I like this better than turning off all notifications. The difference is that like GP said, I control when to look at my phone (which admittedly I still do often), but also I don't lose track of the occasional actually-important notif (granted this is rare outside of messaging).
It's also nice for messaging apps -- I can see who messaged me without even unlocking my phone and then I can decide whether to unlock my phone to respond if it's something/someone more urgent or important.
A couple of years ago I would worry about missing calls, but the nice thing about the text-era is that all my friends message me now and no one actually calls, and when services and stuff actually calls you, they leave a voice mail. So this is a natural way to solve spam calls for me -- I just don't hear them at all and they become missed calls.
By turning off most notifications I've put another step between looking at my phone and viewing notifications. Namely: I have to open each app to check notifications inside the app.
I've found this reduces the incidents of me opening any particular app.
At work I already have people stopping by my cube. There is the phone. There is email. Recently they also made it mandatory that we have slack installed. I'm in my mid-50s and I don't like text, I don't tweet, and I hate slack. It seems to be younger people who would rather send 10 single line messages than one well-composed email.
My productivity takes a hit every time I get a slack message because that insistent clacking notification noise and the little red visual indication of pending messages distract me from my immediate task. Worse yet, the message often starts "Hey". So I reply, "I'm here". Then I set there for 40 seconds with "<other person> is typing" while I wait for their real question to arrive, as there is no way I can go back to my flow for 40 seconds and get anything done.
>Worse yet, the message often starts "Hey". So I reply, "I'm here". Then I set there for 40 seconds with "<other person> is typing" while I wait for their real question to arrive, as there is no way I can go back to my flow for 40 seconds and get anything done.
Even people who prefer text communication are annoyed by this.
Also in my 50s. I can relate :-). The first thing I do with messaging clients is turn off the notifications. On the web client in slack there is an indicator in the browser tab when messages have been sent and when there are messages directly for you (I haven't actually tried the desktop client...)
Next, I have a set routine where I check the visual notification. Generally speaking, when I am running my tests, I'll glance at the notifier. I TDD most of the time, so usually that means glancing at the notifier every 2-5 minutes. If I need to put my head down, I start a pomodoro timer (25 minutes) and I'll check the notifier when that goes off.
I don't always check the message when my notification goes. I keep it as a choice. If I need to keep my head down, then I just mentally make a note that I should check the notification when I get the chance. I don't know if it makes sense, but I use the same part of my mental process that I use for making notes of anything -- oh, I should fix that test, I should refactor that function, etc, etc. It's the stuff in the back of my mind that I've chosen to do later. If I get overloaded (as I tend to do now that I'm older) I put it in my TODO list (check slack). Then I can forget about it.
Basically that gives me a response time 2-3 minutes on average if I'm just cranking out code TDD style or on average about 15 minutes if I'm doing something more deep. Since I work remotely, having that "presence" is really important. Not disappearing for hours on end makes people feel more comfortable that you are actually there.
However, the last thing I do is if I really need time to myself, I'll send a quick message on slack saying, "I need to wrestle with X. I'll be away from slack for about 1-2 hours. Is there anything anybody needs before I do that?"
I guess one last thing. At one point in my career, I quit my programming job, moved to Japan and taught English for 5 years. Then I went back to programming. During the 5 years I taught English, I still did my own side projects, however at that time I didn't have any free time to really devote to programming. It had to be 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there. I worked hard at developing a technique where I could get in and out of the zone very quickly.
The 2 main pieces of advice I can give is, if you have tests, to always leave yourself a failing test when you switch contexts. If you have good test coverage, this is relatively easily done by simply sketching in some functionality and leaving the tests broken. When you come back, you can see all the broken tests and it will show you what your sketch was doing. Normally it takes me about 2-3 minutes to get back into the flow.
Second, make TODO lists. I use org mode in emacs (and actually moved from vim to emacs with evil mode simply to have a better org mode client!) However, you can use anything, really (markdown is fine too). Just get into the habit of dumping your though process into an editing buffer (I need to do X and then Y and then Z). I tend to try to break up my programming where I'll do 5-10 minutes of coding followed by 1-2 minutes of reflection -- so I force myself to stop and take stock of what I'm doing. This is where I tend to write my TODOs. If I'm doing pomodoros, then usually I'll write TODOs during the 5 minute "rest" period. Not only does it help me get into the flow faster, but I've found that the enforced reflection period helps me jump out of local maxima and save time (i.e. if you get going in one direction and miss a better opportunity). Since I'm 9 timezones away from my colleagues if I'm working while they are sleeping, I can often hand over my work to my colleague and they can finish it off while I sleep. It takes some practice communicating, but if you have a willing partner it's pretty fun tag team like that.
> I have a challenge to anyone here: stop reacting to notifications on your phone for a week. You hear the sound, ignore it. Just ignore it. Get to it when you need to.
Deal! I will report back in a week. This will be an interesting experiment.
I think a lot of people underappreciate that they are a chemical computer and that therefore their feelings and decisions are chemical reactions.
So if a behavior changes the chemicals, it can change what you want, and now both these statements become equivalent: "I could quit if I wanted to, but I don't want to" = "I can't quit smoking."
A more accurate description of addiction is probably something like "I can't want to quit smoking."
Let's put it this way: we know for a fact that what you feel and think can be influenced through electrical, chemical and mechanical interventions to the brain. Given the extent of the "circuit bending" capability that medical science has observed, it's hard to think of a mind as something other than just the runtime state of the brain that hosts it.
There’s a deep flaw in your reasoning, in that it implicitly relies on its own conclusion. To see why, consider an analogy:
Tampering with a radio produces artifacts in the music playing, and can even cause it to change between a number of different signals, but the source of the music signal, the composition of it, is largely remote to the radio.
Your analogy is missing the fact that a brain is a bidirectional device. It has both outputs and inputs, and the two are visibly correlated.
To fix the analogy, consider circuit-bending a handheld transceiver. Assuming the "thinking" / "free will" part represents the conversational partner on the other side of the radio link, modifying my transceiver can alter not just how I hear my partner's transmission, but what my partner receives from me as well. Being able to modify the input, I can influence what my partner will say next.
The brain has a lot of inputs (a very important sense group is the so-called "interoception" - the sense of your internal body state), all of which send telemetry completely under the radar of the conscious mind. Only few of those signals surface explicitly for a mind to introspect, but the rest still influences how the mind thinks. For instance, it may take many minutes before you realize your suddenly irrational behaviour is just a sign of hunger.
My conclusion is this: even if you believe (against Occam's razor) in the mind being a separate, remote phenomenon, and the brain being just a transceiver of some information carrier we have no first clue how to detect - the brain still seems to be the single point that collects the inputs and outputs of that communication. Essentially, it could be seen as an electrochemical I/O module, connected to the mind via Magic waves. There is zero functional difference between this model and (simplified, Occam-friendly) the model in which there is no remote mind, and the brain is just the whole computer.
(And, unless you can show that "remote mind" vs. "brain mind" have different testable predictions, there's zero basis to believe in the "remote mind" version, no matter how much more philosophically comfortable it seems.)
The equivalence between those two statements seems to fall apart in the case of a remote “you”, because we can meaningfully distinguish between your abstract intent and various physical impulses I’m not sure we can in the locally physical model — eg, mixing of your “true” signal with a secondary one because the addiction structure adjusts your tuning; addiction would then be your body no longer accurately carrying out your will, which is distinct from you wanting them.
This isn't a disproof. Just as the radio is an instrument that plays music from the outside environment, a brain is an instrument that behaves in response to the outside environment.
The existence of radios shows that being able to interfere with a signal locally via one mechanism (interfering with the radio electronics) doesn’t entail it’s generated locally by that process — the local process can merely be translating between media, eg light and sound.
Unfortunately, this pokes a hole into the logic that thinking is necessarily local, because it was depending on clinicians interfering locally to show that brains are a local phenomena — but that reasoning doesn’t apply generally, eg, in the case of radios.
You’re correct that we know the brain is going to be doing some kind of transducing, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing the thinking — it could merely be a relaying device between whatever generates thought and the body, like a radio translating between EM and sound.
People underestimate the rigidity of how the human system operates. We imagine alternative futures and believe we have the power to create them, without considering that we have to operate our emotional, mental and physical systems differently to achieve what we desire.
People are like 20-year-old ERP software. We try to use it to do Extreme Programming in a modern language to ship new product updates in less than a week, and when we can't do that we wonder why our ERP system is so stupid.
We're not stupid, we're just an incredibly complicated legacy system, so doing things we weren't designed for is painful.
> We try to use it to do Extreme Programming in a modern language to ship new product updates in less than a week
I always find these kinds of comments interesting (and I realise that you were not suggesting trying to do this is a good idea). XP has sprints. I have never found a way to make sprints less than 2 weeks and actually have them work well. Whenever anyone has wandered onto my team and assured me that they can do 1 week sprints, I've found that they don't actually do everything that is required for XP to be successful (like planning game, prioritisation meetings, understanding the acceptance criteria for a story before you put it in a sprint, etc, etc, etc). For me 1 week XP sprints are the holy grail: something you covet, but which is unattainable and leads you on a bloody journey of despair if you try to get it ;-)
My own personal opinion is that XP and continuous deployment don't even work particularly well because you can't do true continuous integration (i.e. trunk based development where you are integrating everybody's changes every 5-20 minutes) and maintain a completely sound development structure. That's one of the reasons for sprints: to allow yourself to break stuff for a while and then ensure that it's all working by the end of the sprint.
It's not just XP where I find this. Most of the time, I find that the most popular variant of anything just doesn't work at all: because the "30 minute meal" is full of compromise. It doesn't matter how many times Jamie Oliver says that it's "lovely" and "rustic" -- it's soggy lettuce with completely random salad dressing that you whirred up in your blender.
Ha ha... so many nonsequitors. I hope that made some sense... Time for coffee...
It's been a good while since I read any of Smullyan's work, but I kinda want to say that the entirety of This Book Needs No Title, along with at least one of his other philosophy books (and maybe some parts of his logic puzzle books) does a pretty good job of expanding on that last line.
The only things that appear to be under our control is what we say and do (or perhaps choose, as 'saying' is a form of 'doing', e.g. in a courtroom) in any given circumstance. Since that too can be reliably predicted for most people, e.g. I know how my daughter will act if I leave her alone with candy in the room... or how an ethical officer of the law would act if he discovered a million in cash buried in an offender's backyard under the dog house.... which are voluntary acts, but almost always predictable, then the question isn't really what is under "our" control, but more like, who is really running the show? Is cause/effect real, is libertarian free will real? I'd say so. What I have trouble believing is that free will is absolute, meaning, that one does not necessarily do X just because he can do X, and almost always does Y instead (e.g. what is right versus what is perceived as a possible choice, which may or may not be 'right' in the given context), Y being the almost always predictable choice of how a person would react in a given set of circumstances.
I know one woman who smokes. She says: “It’s not that I have to smoke; I choose to. I could easily give it up any time I wish to, but I see no reason why I should. But I can assure you, I could if I wanted to.” Her husband says to her: “That's only a rationalization! You couldn’t give up smoking even if you wanted to. You are not strong enough to give it up; you have to smoke. So to make yourself feel better, and to avoid having to confess your own weakness of character, you fool yourself into believing that you choose to. But it’s only a rationalization!” I know another woman who smokes. She says: “It’s not that I want to smoke; I can’t help myself! I have tried several times giving it up, but I have failed! I'm afraid I just don’t have a very strong character. I would love to stop, but I simply can’t.” Her husband says to her: “That's only a rationalization! You certainly could stop immediately, if you really wanted to. No, you choose to smoke (after all, nobody is making you) and you feel ashamed and guilty for doing that which you know to be harmful. So to avoid any moral responsibility for your acts, you fool yourself into believing that you ‘can’t help it. But this is only a rationalization.” My only question about all this is: “Why are people so incredibly stupid?”
Pity he didn't expand on the last line, but I think deep introspection is required to understand what is really under our control