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How is the guy analyzing his drinking, finding the problem (too much stress) and then reducing that not an example of using willpower? The author creates a sele

by almonj 10y ago

How is the guy analyzing his drinking, finding the problem (too much stress) and then reducing that not an example of using willpower? The author creates a selective definition of the word that does not make any sense. Telling people that "willpower is bad" seems like an extremely dumb idea.

rdmsr 10y ago
It's not that 'having' willpower is bad, it's that the concept is misleading. Pretty much any story where someone changes themselves (or tries to) can be coerced into an anecdote about willpower. The point here is that the thing which decides whether or not someone succeeds at changing themselves is not the having/not having of willpower, it's everything else. And willpower as a concept is just one more distraction.
- bittercynic 10y ago
  Maybe OT, but this helped me understand the concept of coercing an idea.
derefr 10y ago
"Willpower" is the thing people supposedly have when there is something that is "very hard" to want to do in the moment (or very hard to resist doing), but they still manage to make the "better" choice in the moment anyway. "Willpower" isn't usually used to refer to ways to plan the context of your decision outside of the "very hard", tempted-to-give-in timescale, so that the temptation to give in is lessened (i.e. the decision is no longer "very hard.") Of course, you're still correct in a sense: it requires willpower to even take the steps to work on your life to fix problems. This is the point of prescribing antidepressants to depressed people: usually the drugs themselves aren't enough to fix someone's life, but they give them the boost they need to start fixing their life (by attending therapy sessions, getting out of bad relationships/jobs, etc.)
barrkel 10y ago
It's not that willpower is bad; it's that willpower is a word that's being used for something that doesn't exist, that is a symptom of the interaction between different systems. So rather than figuring out what is the cause of something, people point at the symptom, and say that willpower is lacking. With that in mind, it's better to forget about the imaginary concept of willpower altogether, and look at reframing things so that different decision making systems come to the fore; or altering factors that are gumming up the decision making process. The point at the end about stigmatizing people for lacking this imaginary attribute is particularly important. It's political, too; if you curtail people's freedom even in their best interests, it's easy to become corrupted from that position of power. Maintaining a belief in an invented character defect is a convenient way of deflecting the responsibility, but it's not necessarily any less evil.
- placebo 10y ago
  I once conveyed this belief to someone who had been through a path that is equivalent in difficulty to what the US nave SEALs have to go through. I told him that perhaps willpower is an illusion and it's basically has to do whether the net total of motivation is above or below zero given a set of circumstances. He answered that from his experience, motivation takes you up to a certain point but beyond it something else comes into play which he called willpower. I don't take the personal experience and interpretation of a single person to be much evidence for the existence of this vaguely defined concept called willpower, but just thought this anecdote would be of interest
  - barrkel 10y ago
    And my message in this thread was an exercise in adopting a viewpoint, to see how it feels. I've found it sometimes useful to go to the far end of something to shift my default position. I think there is some effortful thing in the mind that sometimes needs to be engaged to accomplish something, but perhaps that effort is expended at a different level. Maybe it's constantly bringing a goal to mind, to support one decision making process. Maybe it's breaking a habit by avoiding what triggers it, or creating a new habit. Generally, expending conscious effort to change the tracks of the unconscious train, not by steering it. It's too facile to call it willpower though; I think it needs to be more strategic than that, and I think the baggage of the word is unhelpful.
snarf21 10y ago
I agree. Basically what I read was that removing all the stress from your life, makes it easy to make the decisions you desire. That seems a lot like willpower to me but apparently the author considers willpower to be X not Y, but that also begs the question: who is he to say? I think it is something different and so does everyone else in their own unique way. What ever it is called, we face decisions in life. Do I get up with the alarm to go to work and earn a living or do I stay in bed (continually) and get fired? What's for breakfast? What to wear? Which way to travel? ....... Now, a lot of these decisions are pretty easy to make but that changes day to day. It largely comes down to this: When we have the mental energy and aren't stressed, we tend to think through our decisions, weighing pros and cons. When we are stressed or upset or depleted, we tend to react and just choose something and ignore consequences. Saying "just remove the stress" is just as hard and unreasonable as "just choose to stop drinking". Anyone who is interested in this subject should also read Thinking: Fast and Slow. It goes fairly deep into the kinds of studies and implications of choice referenced in this article.

by almonj 10y ago

rdmsr 10y ago

It's not that 'having' willpower is bad, it's that the concept is misleading. Pretty much any story where someone changes themselves (or tries to) can be coerced into an anecdote about willpower. The point here is that the thing which decides whether or not someone succeeds at changing themselves is not the having/not having of willpower, it's everything else. And willpower as a concept is just one more distraction.

bittercynic 10y ago
Maybe OT, but this helped me understand the concept of coercing an idea.

derefr 10y ago

"Willpower" is the thing people supposedly have when there is something that is "very hard" to want to do in the moment (or very hard to resist doing), but they still manage to make the "better" choice in the moment anyway. "Willpower" isn't usually used to refer to ways to plan the context of your decision outside of the "very hard", tempted-to-give-in timescale, so that the temptation to give in is lessened (i.e. the decision is no longer "very hard.") Of course, you're still correct in a sense: it requires willpower to even take the steps to work on your life to fix problems. This is the point of prescribing antidepressants to depressed people: usually the drugs themselves aren't enough to fix someone's life, but they give them the boost they need to start fixing their life (by attending therapy sessions, getting out of bad relationships/jobs, etc.)

barrkel 10y ago

It's not that willpower is bad; it's that willpower is a word that's being used for something that doesn't exist, that is a symptom of the interaction between different systems. So rather than figuring out what is the cause of something, people point at the symptom, and say that willpower is lacking. With that in mind, it's better to forget about the imaginary concept of willpower altogether, and look at reframing things so that different decision making systems come to the fore; or altering factors that are gumming up the decision making process. The point at the end about stigmatizing people for lacking this imaginary attribute is particularly important. It's political, too; if you curtail people's freedom even in their best interests, it's easy to become corrupted from that position of power. Maintaining a belief in an invented character defect is a convenient way of deflecting the responsibility, but it's not necessarily any less evil.

placebo 10y ago
I once conveyed this belief to someone who had been through a path that is equivalent in difficulty to what the US nave SEALs have to go through. I told him that perhaps willpower is an illusion and it's basically has to do whether the net total of motivation is above or below zero given a set of circumstances. He answered that from his experience, motivation takes you up to a certain point but beyond it something else comes into play which he called willpower. I don't take the personal experience and interpretation of a single person to be much evidence for the existence of this vaguely defined concept called willpower, but just thought this anecdote would be of interest
- barrkel 10y ago
  And my message in this thread was an exercise in adopting a viewpoint, to see how it feels. I've found it sometimes useful to go to the far end of something to shift my default position. I think there is some effortful thing in the mind that sometimes needs to be engaged to accomplish something, but perhaps that effort is expended at a different level. Maybe it's constantly bringing a goal to mind, to support one decision making process. Maybe it's breaking a habit by avoiding what triggers it, or creating a new habit. Generally, expending conscious effort to change the tracks of the unconscious train, not by steering it. It's too facile to call it willpower though; I think it needs to be more strategic than that, and I think the baggage of the word is unhelpful.

snarf21 10y ago

I agree. Basically what I read was that removing all the stress from your life, makes it easy to make the decisions you desire. That seems a lot like willpower to me but apparently the author considers willpower to be X not Y, but that also begs the question: who is he to say? I think it is something different and so does everyone else in their own unique way. What ever it is called, we face decisions in life. Do I get up with the alarm to go to work and earn a living or do I stay in bed (continually) and get fired? What's for breakfast? What to wear? Which way to travel? ....... Now, a lot of these decisions are pretty easy to make but that changes day to day. It largely comes down to this: When we have the mental energy and aren't stressed, we tend to think through our decisions, weighing pros and cons. When we are stressed or upset or depleted, we tend to react and just choose something and ignore consequences. Saying "just remove the stress" is just as hard and unreasonable as "just choose to stop drinking". Anyone who is interested in this subject should also read Thinking: Fast and Slow. It goes fairly deep into the kinds of studies and implications of choice referenced in this article.