Hello,
I’m a 26 year old guy from the UK. I’ve finished writing my Ph.D. thesis in “Quantification of risk in large scale wind power integration” and I’m now working as a phone-app framework developer. I spent the last year on a round the world travel where I have spent a lot of my time writing practical philosophy. After coming back I found this site and read the core sequences. I loved them, they echoed a lot of my previous thoughts then took them much further. I felt like they would be easier to understand if they were one article so I have been re-writing bits of them for my own benefit. I am in two minds whether to post them here but I would appreciate the feedback to see if I have understood what was written.
I wanted to pick on on the point about heritability.
I’ve been struggling to explain to others that despite self-control having a high genetic component (you say a heritability of about 60%) it’s still possible and valuable to improve it significantly. You analogy with strength training was a really useful framing. The heritability of BMI/strength is about the same [1] as for self-control.
I guess the difference is that people don’t join clubs specifically to train their self-control for 1h three times a week, with experts to guide them along the way and make sure the difficulty level and progression is right for them. It would be great if this existed though. I’ve played with the idea with a friend 11 years ago, we would have a list of mostly pointless skills that we would train, for the sake of training our self control, every day. It probably wasn’t the best format, and I have no idea if it was causal but what followed was the most productive period of my life. We also ran a much watered down version at some of the LessWrong London meetups a long while ago with less (but still some) success.
It makes me want to try something similar again. Because I think the benefits of improving self-control are huge, Even if ‘all’ you end up with is a solid model of your own motivation for a task and how it will changes with situational changes (e.g. relative motivation of studying at home vs. the library), then it would still be hugely valuable.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/gepi.20308 “Additive genetic factors explained 81% of variation in height, 59% in body mass index and 50–60% in the strength measures … a study of one million Swedish men”