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.
Advice divergence can as easily reflect our lack of knowledge as actual complexity of the problem.
Certainly. It’s something you’d expect to appear either way.
However, if the relationship between akrasia and glucose were the same as the relationship between scurvy and vitamin C, you would expect that the divergent-but-successful self-help advice would all involve ways of (directly or indirectly) modifying glucose availability or depletion, in the same way that all the divergent-but-successful scurvy cures affected vitamin C consumption or depletion. (e.g. fresh meat, short trips, not using copper pots, etc.)
Most of advice on scurvy did not address scurvy in any way—they were just wrong. The kind which worked—like short trips—were extremely far removed from the real solution.
Likewise with cholera advice. It was just ridiculously wrong.
Scurvy advice was also vast and divergent before it turned out it was all wrong and the problem was solved by a magic bullet. And so was our cholera advice. And advice about every single issue about which we were wrong. Advice divergence can as easily reflect our lack of knowledge as actual complexity of the problem.
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.
Certainly. It’s something you’d expect to appear either way.
However, if the relationship between akrasia and glucose were the same as the relationship between scurvy and vitamin C, you would expect that the divergent-but-successful self-help advice would all involve ways of (directly or indirectly) modifying glucose availability or depletion, in the same way that all the divergent-but-successful scurvy cures affected vitamin C consumption or depletion. (e.g. fresh meat, short trips, not using copper pots, etc.)
Most of advice on scurvy did not address scurvy in any way—they were just wrong. The kind which worked—like short trips—were extremely far removed from the real solution.
Likewise with cholera advice. It was just ridiculously wrong.