The linked article on scurvy also describes how the magic bullet for scurvy was lost for a while. The problem was that people didn’t know how the magic bullet worked or exactly what it was, so when faster ships reduced the risk of scurvy, they lost feedback on how effective their precautions were.
Even when the magic bullet works reliably and repeatably, you still need to understand why.
Understanding why and how is all great, but we don’t understand why half of the things work the way they work—we usually only have good phenomenological descriptions and severely wrong theory.
If we waited for full laws of thermodynamics before starting to use fire, we’d still be gathering roots on African savanna.
If small sugary drinks at right times work, we need to figure out what’s the right amount of drink at which circumstances, what would be side effects, which problems can be solved by it and which cannot. If they don’t, we should figure that out too. Fine details of why it works can wait.
You haven’t yet sufficiently defined what “work” means. Scientists have had trouble replicating some ego depletion experiments in humans, and there appear to be confounding factors introduced by the fact that it’s the experimenters choosing the tasks, and the fact that the subjects are already motivated to co-operate.
This is almost nothing like the environment for individuals’ personal/private akrasia.
That being said, I would be happy to be proven wrong. Feel free to go try it for a month, then come back and add it to the anti-akrasia techniques survey results.
The linked article on scurvy also describes how the magic bullet for scurvy was lost for a while. The problem was that people didn’t know how the magic bullet worked or exactly what it was, so when faster ships reduced the risk of scurvy, they lost feedback on how effective their precautions were.
Even when the magic bullet works reliably and repeatably, you still need to understand why.
Understanding why and how is all great, but we don’t understand why half of the things work the way they work—we usually only have good phenomenological descriptions and severely wrong theory.
If we waited for full laws of thermodynamics before starting to use fire, we’d still be gathering roots on African savanna.
If small sugary drinks at right times work, we need to figure out what’s the right amount of drink at which circumstances, what would be side effects, which problems can be solved by it and which cannot. If they don’t, we should figure that out too. Fine details of why it works can wait.
You haven’t yet sufficiently defined what “work” means. Scientists have had trouble replicating some ego depletion experiments in humans, and there appear to be confounding factors introduced by the fact that it’s the experimenters choosing the tasks, and the fact that the subjects are already motivated to co-operate.
This is almost nothing like the environment for individuals’ personal/private akrasia.
That being said, I would be happy to be proven wrong. Feel free to go try it for a month, then come back and add it to the anti-akrasia techniques survey results.