I believe that certain kinds of “willpower” is “a thing that a person can have too much of”.
Like I think there is a sense that someone can say “I believe X, Y, Z in a theoretical way that has a lot to say about What I Should Be Doing” and then they say “I will now do those behaviors Using My Willpower!”
And then… for some people… using some mental practices that actually just works!
But then, for those people, they sometimes later on look back at what they did and maybe say something like “Oh no! The theory was poorly conceived! Money was lost! People were harmed! I now regret those actions… that I did on purpose… using willpower. Why didn’t I notice the signs that I should have stopped?! :-(”
“Tentativity” is, I think, often correlated with prudence.
And I think there is a kind of person who gets their verbal goals from other people, and whose verbal goals are kinda silly, who are actually behaviorally protected from regretful outcomes by their inability to “act on what they verbally endorse doing”.
And I think the kind of people who are getting their verbal endorsements from unsafe sources are some of the precise people who should consider that maybe they don’t have “weak willpower”… maybe they just have “self protecting tentativity”? <3
The problems you would predict seeing with “too much willpower” are similar, in my mind, to the problems you’d predict from the valley of bad rationality.
I think one technique for “getting yourself to do something” involves linking it to some half-controllable emotion so that accomplishment and action and confidence all sorta “go together”. If that is the particular mental praxis that someone uses to “do the things they theoretically endorse doing” to “have more willpower” and it went out of control, and it ended up badly, the results might look something like “hubris”. (There are also other ways to coach yourself into doing the things you think you should do, but at least one of the big obvious ones has a failure mode that looks like hubris, I think.)
In a way that is kind of related, this caught my eye for being among the NON productive things:
Sitting on the couch doing nothing
If that works for you the way it does for me, then I predict that in many of those moments your brain’s default mode network is activated.
This network is actually probably super important. It seems to help people think about memories, actions, possibilities, other people, and so on… It might help process emotions and regrets and hopes, to build up a better narrative self? Watching movies turns it on, but movies might be superstimulus for “the true purpose” of this mental mode, which is sort of maybe to figure out “your own story”, and how your own story could go better?
I have experimented some with meditation specifically with the goal of embracing the DMN (with few definite results) but also I think that a lot of meditative practices (even without having neuroimaging studies to prompt them) already aim to meditators to be “aware of the DMN even though it tries to hide itself from active focus” (and maybe in some meditative schemes they aim to turn it off)?
Anyway. I would caution you against quickly throwing “sitting around seeming to do nothing” right out the window without thinking much about that act (if you ever do get the ability to delete things like that from your life’s repertoire).
This closely parallels the situation with the immune system.
One might think “I want a strong immune system. I want to be able to fight every dangerous pathogen I might encounter.”
You go to your local friendly genie and ask for a strong immune system.
The genie fulfills your wish. No more seasonal flu. You don’t need to bother with vaccines. You even considered stopping to wash your hands but then you realized that other people are still not immune to whatever bugs might there be on your skin.
Then, a few weeks in, you get an anaphylactic shot when eating your favorite peanut butter sandwich. An ambulance takes you to the hospital where they also tell you that you got Hashimoto.
You go to your genie to ask “WTF?” and the genie replies “You asked for a strong immune system, not a smart one. It was not my task to ensure that it knows that peanut protein is not the protein of some obscure worm even though they might look alike, or that the thyroid is a part of your own body.”.
I believe that certain kinds of “willpower” is “a thing that a person can have too much of”.
Like I think there is a sense that someone can say “I believe X, Y, Z in a theoretical way that has a lot to say about What I Should Be Doing” and then they say “I will now do those behaviors Using My Willpower!”
And then… for some people… using some mental practices that actually just works!
But then, for those people, they sometimes later on look back at what they did and maybe say something like “Oh no! The theory was poorly conceived! Money was lost! People were harmed! I now regret those actions… that I did on purpose… using willpower. Why didn’t I notice the signs that I should have stopped?! :-(”
“Tentativity” is, I think, often correlated with prudence.
And I think there is a kind of person who gets their verbal goals from other people, and whose verbal goals are kinda silly, who are actually behaviorally protected from regretful outcomes by their inability to “act on what they verbally endorse doing”.
And I think the kind of people who are getting their verbal endorsements from unsafe sources are some of the precise people who should consider that maybe they don’t have “weak willpower”… maybe they just have “self protecting tentativity”? <3
The problems you would predict seeing with “too much willpower” are similar, in my mind, to the problems you’d predict from the valley of bad rationality.
I think one technique for “getting yourself to do something” involves linking it to some half-controllable emotion so that accomplishment and action and confidence all sorta “go together”. If that is the particular mental praxis that someone uses to “do the things they theoretically endorse doing” to “have more willpower” and it went out of control, and it ended up badly, the results might look something like “hubris”. (There are also other ways to coach yourself into doing the things you think you should do, but at least one of the big obvious ones has a failure mode that looks like hubris, I think.)
In a way that is kind of related, this caught my eye for being among the NON productive things:
If that works for you the way it does for me, then I predict that in many of those moments your brain’s default mode network is activated.
This network is actually probably super important. It seems to help people think about memories, actions, possibilities, other people, and so on… It might help process emotions and regrets and hopes, to build up a better narrative self? Watching movies turns it on, but movies might be superstimulus for “the true purpose” of this mental mode, which is sort of maybe to figure out “your own story”, and how your own story could go better?
I have experimented some with meditation specifically with the goal of embracing the DMN (with few definite results) but also I think that a lot of meditative practices (even without having neuroimaging studies to prompt them) already aim to meditators to be “aware of the DMN even though it tries to hide itself from active focus” (and maybe in some meditative schemes they aim to turn it off)?
Anyway. I would caution you against quickly throwing “sitting around seeming to do nothing” right out the window without thinking much about that act (if you ever do get the ability to delete things like that from your life’s repertoire).
This closely parallels the situation with the immune system.
One might think “I want a strong immune system. I want to be able to fight every dangerous pathogen I might encounter.”
I’d be curious to hear more details on what you’ve tried.
Replied by DM :-)