10 ms·

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 wom

• macromaniac 8y ago
  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.
  • hyperpape 8y ago
    That only tells you if you can quit for a month. What you need to do is quit forever.
    • jcutrell 8y ago
      Smoking long enough ensures that you will quit forever, you just won’t be alive to know it.
      • blotter_paper 8y ago
        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!
    • conanbatt 8y ago
      Seeing one side of a sheep only reveals half a sheep. There might be nothing on the other side.
• narag 8y ago
  That set of subtle contradictions and paradoxes was extremely clever. I didn't know about the author, although the face in the photo rings a bell.
• samstave 8y ago
  I used to smoke until I was about 26 or so. 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....
  • rmwaite 8y ago
    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.
    • StavrosK 8y ago
      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!
      • debaserab2 8y ago
        Did you follow an established program or just make one up?
        • StavrosK 8y ago
          I made one up, as I wasn't aware of any like that. I'll write it up at some point though.
• dalbasal 8y ago
  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.
  • dmreedy 8y ago
    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.
    • rjbwork 8y ago
      I've noticed that quite a lot of our behavior boils down to this conflict.
    • pmoriarty 8y ago
      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.
      • dmreedy 8y ago
        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.
• praptak 8y ago
  These distinctions just show we don't have a good model for self or free will, even if you assume both exist.
• peterwwillis 8y ago
  > Why are people so incredibly stupid? 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.
  • mikekchar 8y ago
    > 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...
• EGreg 8y ago
  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!
  • tome 8y ago
    > 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.
    • tome 8y ago
      That was surprisingly difficult! I don't get many notifications so it' very tempting to check what each one is.
  • egypturnash 8y ago
    Does "turning off most, if not all, notifications" qualify for that?
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    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.
    • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
• egypturnash 8y ago
  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.
• bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  I would like to know if he knew any woman who smoked but did try to give it up and what their husbands said about that.
• snowwrestler 8y ago
  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."
  • pmoriarty 8y ago
    "I think a lot of people underappreciate that they are a chemical computer and that therefore their feelings and decisions are chemical reactions." That "we are a chemical computer" is one of many possible ways of understanding what we are, and not any kind of certainty. There are plenty of people who fully understand and appreciate this reductionist view of humanity, but just don't agree with it.
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      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.
      • FakeComments 8y ago
        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.
        • gowld 8y ago
          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.
• coldtea 8y ago
  Let's put it this way: (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.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    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.
  • Diggsey 8y ago
    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.
    • coldtea 8y ago
• martin1975 8y ago
  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.
• lliamander 8y ago
  I'm inclined to think that both husbands from this story are correct. We fool ourselves if we think that either we are completely in control or that we are completely powerless. The wind and the waves are powerful forces indeed, but we still have a rudder and sails.
  • 616c 8y ago
    Definitely cribbing the rudder and sails line often from now on. Your words or I just don't know the popular source?
    • lliamander 8y ago
      My own. Thanks!