Good point! Somehow I didn’t notice that :)
spencerg
Karma: 828
How You Can Gain Self Control Without “Self-Control”
That’s helpful feedback, thanks Alex!
Good catch, thanks for pointing that out!
Hi Austin, I’m glad you found the article useful! :)
Interesting, thanks for letting me know—could you say a bit more about what feels negatively framed about it, and what it would be like to make it positly framed?
Hi Vladimir, thanks for your comments. Could you elaborate on what you would like to see more justification for when you say (“insufficient readily available justification”)? I’d also be interested to know what framing seemed “somewhat arbitrary.”
In the section “Nine Traits of Self-Controlled Behavior” my claim is that those pretty self-evidently are traits that (i) differ non-negligibly between people and (ii) can manifest as “self-controlled behavior.” Are there items in that list that you think don’t differ between people, or that you don’t think can manifest in self-controlled behavior? I view that list as the sort of thing that someone can check for themselves by simply seeing whether they agree with each item. Maybe you’re wondering where this list comes from? It is a list of all of the traits I know of that I believe manifest as self-controlled behavior. So I don’t view it as arbitrary—surely there are ones I didn’t think of, but I was attempting to be comprehensive.
In the section “Twelve Simple Strategies for Gaining More Control” many of those strategies have a whole research literature on them. Others are common-sense strategies. I certainly can’t claim this is a comprehensive list of strategies, as hundreds of strategies exist. So maybe this list seemed arbitrary?
On the ego depletion stuff, I go into a lot of detail on my thinking, that I think gives the reader plenty of information to decide whether they agree with what I’m saying or not. If you disagree I’d be interested to know.
Thanks again for your comments!
Ty IS a real person! (used with permission, but Ty is not their name)
Hi Kaj, thanks for your comments, I find them really interesting! I was not intending the article to be about how to become Ty (internally). I think Ty has a bunch of traits that are difficult to replicate (note: Ty is a real person, but Ty is not their real name—they agreed with everything I said about them in the article and I used their details with permission). I do, however, think it is feasible to behave in ways that are more like Ty, through other means (e.g., by applying specific strategies). So I agree that the strategies aren’t about making one “be like” Ty by I do think they can help you behave like Ty if that is a goal.
You suggest almost all of the 12 strategies I list are “counteractive” and say that “Counteractive strategies tend to be of limited effectiveness and easily subject to relapse.” I disagree with this way of lumping them together, and I also disagree with the claim that these strategies are not effective. Obviously different strategies are effective for different people, and it’s hard to talk about what works “on average” but I think most of these strategies are very helpful for at least some people (and also, that any individual should try a bunch to figure out which work best for them).
On a personal level, I use the majority of the strategies I listed and find them very helpful (especially “Sidestepping temptation” for healthier eating, “Making goals more desirable” for exercise, “Associations and farming” for eating behaviors, “Temptation bundling” also for exercise, “Habits” for a healthy morning routine, “Plunging ahead” for stressful work tasks, and “Accountability” for important but non-urgent tasks). Of course you might not believe these help me (even though I am quite convinced they do) or you might say that even if they help me that doesn’t mean they help others (to which I’d say” fair enough, but I also think they help a lot of others too.”).
It would be really cool if a person could use memory consolidation approaches like focussing, internal double crux and internal family systems to gain more of Ty’s traits (if they wanted to do that) - I think that might be possible, though I haven’t personally seen examples of that occurring. It sounds like in your personal experience these techniques are more effective than the strategies I listed for the kind of in behavior questions. I certainly think methods like the ones you describe can be helpful to people (I have experimented with them to a degree myself and found them slightly useful—I’d like to experiment with them more). In my personal experience, the strategies I listed have been more effective for me. I don’t know of direct evidence that has pitted the methods against each other (I sort of doubt it exists).
I would be interested in expanding the strategy list to include techniques like the ones you’ve mentioned. If you have time, I’d be curious to hear you describe how to use one or two such strategies in a paragraph (i.e., in a format similar to what I included for the other strategies in my article). I’ve read focussing and have spent 3-4 hours learning about and experimenting with using IFS but I don’t think I could boil either down to a simple and useful strategy that can be described in a paragraph (maybe the answer is that that’s not something worth attempting).
That’s interesting. One thing I’ll note about “energy” is that I suspect it can be subdivided further. For instance, I think that mental fatigue (e.g., after doing hard math problems for an hour) differs from physical fatigue (e.g., after lifting weights hard for an hour) which differs from sleepiness (e.g., when you haven’t slept for a long time), and I also suspect that mental slowness (e.g., like some people get upon waking or when drunk) is a fourth thing. It sometimes seems pep/enthusiasm are yet another thing that it’s meaningful to distinguish from the others (you can feel a lack of fatigue without having pep).
Agreed that people’s internal mental states can be wildly different even while their external behavior is about the same. Yet there is a temptation to assume that similar external behavior implies similar mental states.
Good point! I actually had that as a footnote in the original post, but accidentally didn’t port it over when I constructed the article here. Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks for this very thoughtful reply Kaj, I really appreciate the time you took to break down your thoughts on each strategy! :)
Haha, I hope you managed to get it done :)
Interesting question—to what extent is ego depletion (insofar as it occurs) related to rising marginal cost of effort? It feels to me that is part of what’s going on, but maybe not all of it. For instance, some forms of effort feel like their marginal cost only goes up gradually, and others more steeply. Motivation also seems relevant (it can go down over time) and that seems to have less to do with marginal cost from what I can tell.
Sorry to hear you didn’t like it. What we’re the aspects that turned you off? Do you mean the flash cards and exercises or something else?
Thanks for the feedback Mary!
Nice, I like the way you broke it up!
Thank you for pointing that out, it would have been better if I had spoken more carefully. I definitely don’t think that uncertainty is in the territory. Please interpret “there is great uncertainty in X” as “our models of X produce very uncertain predictions.”