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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

"Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources."

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

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The problem with saying ego depletion isn't a thing may still be false.

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.

And if I push myself to give more fucks per day I find it easier to maintain that level over time... I think of it as building momentum, others think of it as exercising the willpower muscle.

Ego depletion could be a "just so" story but I still think it's an interesting/useful model.

Another interesting and possibly germane question is: what happens when you find yourself giving fucks you didn't mean to?

And another: what happens when you find your fucks getting stolen?

Burnout.

Legit answer. Source: personal experience

Not sure why you're being downvoted, I can attest to this. There's only a certain amount of care you can give at a steady state (though, this does _seem_ to be able to increase, like a muscle at least for me personally). That said, if I work it too hard for too long with too much stress I experience burnout. Burnout, as mentioned many many times by people far more eloquent than I, has different levels. Can be mild, can be major malfunction.

Stay frosty, folks. Make your attention count.

Paul Krugman would likely suggest that we practice Quantitative Fuck Easing and print more Fucks.

There you go again, giving a fuck when it aint your turn to give a fuck.

-- Bunk, The Wire

Will-power is essentially an Interplay between multiple models. If you view days as test-runs for programs you have optionally installed in your system, the energetic focalizers are creating energetic "gravity-tag games" out of synergystic signal processing. Let's say you have a process already needing to be in motion and then you attach a carrier wave on top of that...it could be considered a supplemental annex which creates an alternative nexus point for another energy loop or process table.

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.

I seriously can't tell if this is a parody post or not. It seems like there's a consistent idea under all of that, but it's such a jumble of metaphors that I can't figure out a single sentence.

It's generated by a LSTM.

Ego depletion is real. After trying to understand this post my will power got depleted.

"Ego depletion" is such a misleading/tricky name. It's merely attention depletion. And I do believe that's the underlying mechanism that both will and cognition use.

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 seems ego depletion exists only for those who already believe in ego depletion: "when people believe their willpower is limitless, it turns out to be true." http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/03/psychologys-favorite-th...

> When the article was written in 2013 it seemed very likely to be true.

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…

Good point. It is also technically correct to say "that it seemed likely not to be true"

There was an NPR article I heard on this years ago:

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/18/140516974/resistance-training-...

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