I repeat my usual plea at this point: please read Breakdown of Will before posting on this.
That book doesn’t actually contain any solutions to anything, AFAICT. The two useful things I’ve gotten from it that enhanced my existing models were:
The idea of conditioned appetites, and
The idea that “reward” and “pleasure” are distinct.
There were other things that I learned, of course, like his provocative reward-interval hypothesis that unifies the mechanism of things like addiction, compulsion, itches and pain on a single, time-based scale. But that’s only really interesting in an intellectual-curiosity sort of way at the moment; I haven’t figured out anything one can DO with it, that I couldn’t already do before.
Even the two useful things I mentioned, are mostly useful in explaining why certain things happen, and why certain of my techniques work on certain things. They don’t really give me anything that can be turned into actual improvements on the state of the art, although they do suggest some directions for stretching what I apply some things to.
Anyway, if you’re already familiar with the basic ideas of discounting and preference reversal, you’re not going to get a lot from this book in practical terms.
OTOH, if you think it’d be cool to know how and why your bargains with yourself fail, you might find it interesting reading. But I’m already quite familiar with how that works on a practical level, and the theory really adds nothing to my existing practical advice of, “don’t do that!”
(Really, the closest the book comes to giving any practical advice is to vaguely suggest that maybe willpower and intertemporal bargaining aren’t such good ideas. Well, not being a scientist, I can state it plainly: they’re terrible ideas. You want coherent volition across time, not continuous conflict and bargaining.)
That book doesn’t actually contain any solutions to anything, AFAICT. The two useful things I’ve gotten from it that enhanced my existing models were:
The idea of conditioned appetites, and
The idea that “reward” and “pleasure” are distinct.
There were other things that I learned, of course, like his provocative reward-interval hypothesis that unifies the mechanism of things like addiction, compulsion, itches and pain on a single, time-based scale. But that’s only really interesting in an intellectual-curiosity sort of way at the moment; I haven’t figured out anything one can DO with it, that I couldn’t already do before.
Even the two useful things I mentioned, are mostly useful in explaining why certain things happen, and why certain of my techniques work on certain things. They don’t really give me anything that can be turned into actual improvements on the state of the art, although they do suggest some directions for stretching what I apply some things to.
Anyway, if you’re already familiar with the basic ideas of discounting and preference reversal, you’re not going to get a lot from this book in practical terms.
OTOH, if you think it’d be cool to know how and why your bargains with yourself fail, you might find it interesting reading. But I’m already quite familiar with how that works on a practical level, and the theory really adds nothing to my existing practical advice of, “don’t do that!”
(Really, the closest the book comes to giving any practical advice is to vaguely suggest that maybe willpower and intertemporal bargaining aren’t such good ideas. Well, not being a scientist, I can state it plainly: they’re terrible ideas. You want coherent volition across time, not continuous conflict and bargaining.)