Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources (2013)
seriouspony.com
seriouspony.com
This is the Ego Depletion hypothesis. When the article was written in 2013 it seemed very likely to be true. In 2016 we're now aware of serious problems in many psychology studies, and while it's not definitely proven false, it's failed to replicate in enough studies that there's major doubt about it being a real effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
I want to be pedantic about this and point out that this is a kind of a mistake. The issues that were present in the original studies were already "known", even if people didn't pay attention to that. It appears that even in 1967 it was already a thing: http://andrewgelman.com/2016/05/06/needed-an-intellectual-hi... (discussing this article of Paul Meehl: http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...) Since people didn't pay attention to the criticism, it's technically correct that the consensus was that it seemed likely to be true, but still…
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/18/140516974/resistance-training-...
I personally have a limited amount of "give a fuck". If I run out of fucks to give, well, that's the end of the story. I know exactly how many fucks I can give per day, and I suspect all of this is what they call ego depletion.
So, claiming it doesn't exist simply doesn't align with my own personal experience. Most likely, it is more subtle than current scientific testing can account for.
Ego depletion could be a "just so" story but I still think it's an interesting/useful model.
And another: what happens when you find your fucks getting stolen?
Stay frosty, folks. Make your attention count.
-- Bunk, The Wire
Anyway, move marginally beyond the words I'm using and imagine it more as an attractor where you go down a river on a riverboat and while casting nets also change your duck call to another one which still attracs ducks but also happens to attract alligators. Taking advantage of overlapping scenarios to create a change in what the existing momentum is applied to is the real trick of conscious agents.
And yes, if one looks at its own experience then it will probably find that there is a tank of cognitive resources.
Everything that requires attention consumes from this tank.
So yes, if we could start to design our world to eliminate the nuisances, that may translate into a qualitative leap driven by a virtuous circle..
Thumbs up for a user centric world.
It's also true that Sierra's conclusion has value:
> ...I've created interactive marketing games, gamified sites (before it was called that), and dozens of other projects carefully, artfully, scientifically designed to slurp (gulp) cognitive resources for... very little that was "worth it". Did people willingly choose to engage with them? Of course. And by "of course" I mean, not really, no. Not according to psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics research of the past 50 years. They were nudged/seduced/tricked. And I was pretty good at it. I am so very, very sorry.
> My goal for Serious Pony is to help all of us take better care of our users. Not just while they are interacting with our app, site, product, but after. Not just because they are our users, but because they are people.
...nah, it'll never catch on. Where's the value prop here?
But once you learn the keyboard shortcuts and start to think in terms of "what group of things would I want to manipulate / apply the same effect / transformation, to all at the same time" instead of "how things make logical sense to be grouped together", and also "what tasks are more common for real-life professionals using this program" instead of "where would that option make sense to be based on what it actually does".
There are 2 UX/I games to play: (1) improve the UXI for current professional users that you know will pay for your product, and rely on professional network effects for growth, and (2) improve the UXI for new users, optimizing for adoptions, but accept that lots of the new users will never be "professional" users, will never pay a lot of money for it, and some of their feature requests will be expensive to develop but will result in no increased profit.
Hint: Adobe is obviously playing game #1 and they are also slaves to their past mistakes, and on top of that their current user base includes a huge number of "artsy, not so logical, and profoundly change-averse" users. Hence all their products can only induce rage and/or mind-numbness in people like us :)
1) the undo buffer only undoes actions against the media. The application UI has just as much or more state in it. I need undo to also work against settings and UI placement.
2) they expose way too much. The feature set that is visible isn't tuned to the needs of most users. Almost everyone needs to constantly dig through menus. The UI should be task specific and configurable on a per project basis.
1: http://pss.sagepub.com/lookup/doi/10.1177/0956797610384745
2: Slate article, but mentions some key studies, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
So I started going into work with the express purpose of caring less. If I couldn't do a thing, I would give myself permission to relax, take a break, or ask for help.
The problem was instantly solved. Like, a total night and day difference in how I felt after work. I got better at getting things done, too.
The relaxed attitude also helps me get a sense for how urgent a particular day actually is. There's 150 tasks in the queue? Ehh, I probably shouldn't have YouTube going today, but I don't need to panic. Oh, now there's 1,500 tasks in the queue? Suddenly we had an emergency; sit up straight, focus, and figure out what needs to be done right now.
And you know? That's awesome. The 100% focus time can come and go in bursts; I've had to work entire days in focus time when we were having a really tough time about things, but then we get the problem solved, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and we can all step back a bit and reorganize, and think about how better to handle that situation, and what we can do to avoid it. We aren't ever drowned out by a constantly busy schedule.
I saw it here on HN, from someone else and I remembered these quotes:
1) Just because it can be turned into a number, doesn't it mean that it should be.
2) Just because something has already been turned into o a number it doesn't mean it is important.
Usually managers will want to turn everything into a number. Number of tickets closed per iteration cycles, numbe of issues opened, number of lines written, number of comments per number of lines and so on.
Because they think those give them a deep insight into the team dynamics, and it makes their job more justifiable because they can use those "statistics" and present them to their manager instead of say wave their hands and say "yap it's fine, we shipped this feature, found some bugs, fixed them".
Measuring things has a kind of Heisenberg principle. It is almost impossible to measure something without affecting how people operate on the thing your are measuring. So while you may get some benefit from your measurement, you are throwing something else completely out of control.
Just the act of measuring something can freak people out. Sometimes measuring something will cause people to unintentionally game the measurement. Sometimes the mechanics of measuring interfere with the operation that you are measuring. Sometimes your measurements are used to justify actions that are completely unjustified.
You must measure to control something, but you must measure the absolute minimum that you need to control it. If you find a way to control something with less measurement, you should usually switch to that method. Once you have achieved the goal of the measurement, you should discontinue the measurement.
> but I'm often surprised at the kind of negative reaction I get when I bring it up.
Because they assume you are trying to hide or obscure something. "Why wouldn't you want more 'visibility'?" kind of stuff.
Then if you explain, unless they completely trust your reasoning, they think "Oh this is just a rationalization".
Moreover, over time metrics, and processes, and rules just accumulate. Every time anything bad happens -- new rule and some new metrics get added. Sure after a while they are ignored, but they are still there. Then nobody wants to be the person to say, let's clear the table of these unused rules and metrics let's have less.
"This story is not finished. It doesn't work at all".
"I know, but my estimate was 2 days and I've already worked 3 on it. Can't we just add another story to do the things that aren't finished? We're already taking a lot of criticism for being slow. I don't want to let the team down."
Then you have a finished story called "Add login to system" and an unstarted story called "Fix problems with login". The stake holder sees the list and says, "We can live with a few problems with the login system as long as the core functionality is there. Let's ship!"
But... nobody wants to admit that login doesn't work at all so they look the other way...
Absolute craziness that would be avoided if completion times were not measured.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/07/31/en...
Even if it is true, it's also using the original claims about glucose depletion, which would probably mean you were already addicted to sugar. Try getting a water drinking habit instead?
Maybe people choose the cake because they think, "Phew! I did something difficult! I deserve some cake!" And the people who only memorized two numbers think, "Well, I didn't do anything that warrants cake. I'll just take the salad."
I don't mean to propose this as an alternate explanation -- it just seems like there could be a million explanations for why people are more likely to choose the cake. (But maybe the researchers found ways to rule them out?)
Another random question -- have people replicated this experiment? Just curious.
I'd have thought a better hypothesis was that the dog that it's free has other options for how to spend their time. The incarcerated dog doesn't have anything else to do. So whilst in both cases they maybe realise they can't get the treat - evil humans - the dog in the cage only has alternatives asking the lines of 'lick scrotum'.
If you lock me in a cage and give me a Rubic cube then I'm not going to be able to go down the pub instead.
Or, the people who were randomly assigned to the two-digit memorisation group just happened to prefer fruit over cake.
Drawing any kind of conclusion about "willpower" (whatever that is) from the fact that some people chose cake and some chose fruit is so far fetched that it makes the headline sound comical.
This is NOT just a "let me google that for you" reply; I selected the search term carefully. (LMGTFY is for when the search is trivially obvious.)
I'd also suggest that the common experience of many professionals in the field matches what the studies show. Note that in theory, the formulation that "A * N_task_1, (1-A) * N_task_2. where A is a number between 0 and 1 representing the percentage of focus on task_1" implies that you must be 100% efficient in task switches, which you can easily disprove simply by trying to switch back and forth every second, or exactly precisely splitting your attention continuously. Again, even computers can "thrash" and spend all their time changing tasks in certain bad cases.
See also "queuing theory", which can put some math on this, and is useful for almost any HN denizen anyhow.
While the JEP study seems to indicate that multitasking isn't very efficient, its findings aren't definitive, according to another study in Psychological Science (Vol. 12, No. 2) by Eric H. Shumacher, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues. That study found that, under special circumstances, people can do two different tasks at once without much interference--particularly if the tasks are well-practiced and do not physically conflict with each other. "These latter results raise a further question--what causes you to get interference between tasks in some cases but not others?" asks Meyer, a co-author on both studies. "This is a challenging question and one that needs to be answered carefully in order to tell the full story about multitasking and executive control."
Another point is, how fast do you have to switch the tasks to consider it "multitasking." E.g. do you have to switch on a 1-second interval? I would guess that would be much less efficient than something like, grading some papers while waiting for code to compile, which may take a minute to compile/ run some test, and then go back to coding, repeat- I would call that multi-tasking, and would almost guess that would be "more" efficient than actually just doing the coding task or the grading task separately, since it takes advantage of removing useless time.
damn, I was hoping that Kathy Sierra was back.
Besides, horses are great. Huge and kind of inherently a little bonkers and occasionally mean as dirt, but they're also powerful, beautiful creatures. I can imagine finding a lot of solace there.