When it comes to detecting bullshit there’s more than just looking at the statistics. It’s very worthwhile to ask yourself whether the thesis actually makes sense based on what you know to be true based on how you live your life.
If you look at willpower-as-a-resource-that’s-glucose, it’s quite easy to see problems with that thesis. The paleo folks that try to minimize their blood glucose levels don’t tend to suffer from low willpower. The brain doesn’t consume more glucose when it’s “mentally active” than when it doesn’t.
It doesn’t really fit the experience I have with how willpower works in myself.
Willpower also has the problem that it’s like Chi. Having it in the ontology can be useful for some task but there are no willpower particles or atoms just like there are no Chi particles or atoms. Baumeister et al seem to forget that willpower is just an abstraction.
Before the replication crisis, I was talking with a psychology Ph.D. about the thesis you believed on it while I didn’t. A few years later I meet him at an LW event and he told me that I was right all along. I wasn’t right because I was better at understanding the underlying statistics but because I thought about how the finding relates to other things that are true.
It might be worthwhile to read Baumeister’s book to get a feeling of how it looks like when an eminent psychologist defends a wrong thesis in the 21st century.
When it comes to detecting bullshit there’s more than just looking at the statistics. It’s very worthwhile to ask yourself whether the thesis actually makes sense based on what you know to be true based on how you live your life.
If you look at willpower-as-a-resource-that’s-glucose, it’s quite easy to see problems with that thesis. The paleo folks that try to minimize their blood glucose levels don’t tend to suffer from low willpower. The brain doesn’t consume more glucose when it’s “mentally active” than when it doesn’t. It doesn’t really fit the experience I have with how willpower works in myself.
Willpower also has the problem that it’s like Chi. Having it in the ontology can be useful for some task but there are no willpower particles or atoms just like there are no Chi particles or atoms. Baumeister et al seem to forget that willpower is just an abstraction.
Before the replication crisis, I was talking with a psychology Ph.D. about the thesis you believed on it while I didn’t. A few years later I meet him at an LW event and he told me that I was right all along. I wasn’t right because I was better at understanding the underlying statistics but because I thought about how the finding relates to other things that are true.
It might be worthwhile to read Baumeister’s book to get a feeling of how it looks like when an eminent psychologist defends a wrong thesis in the 21st century.
I find this hard to believe.