Comment by alexpetralia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexpetralia | Hacker News Reader

The science behind "ego depletion" is at very least controversial, namely because the effect has not been reproduced in subsequent experiments.

* Wikipedia provides a good summary of replication attempts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...

* Slate covered the topic here: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...

* And here is a recent, large replication study: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/174569161665287...

As a result, I would hesitate before using "ego depletion" as an excuse for rationalizing a lack of self-control (eg. giving into "cheat foods" or being irritable/impulsive). Whether or not "ego depletion" is real, science has not yet adequately validated the theory.

Moreover, there is a risk to accepting the theory as true: because one believes in "ego depletion," one can rationalize a lower degree of self-control, which may have been higher otherwise. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think it is fair to assume that, given the current research, "ego depletion" is no more than a reasonable hypothesis. It is possible that willpower may not fit the "finite resource" model at all.

I completely agree and I've taken issue with this as well. This is something that is hugely susceptible to confirmation bias for the exact reason you stated: mere exposure to the concept will allow people to rationalize performing the behavior even if they wouldn't before.

Not only that, but think of all the cultures/jobs where it is normal for people to work much more than the typical 40 hour work week we are accustomed to. Do 18 year old Vietnamese fishermen working 80 hour weeks suffer from "ego depletion" the same way 18 year old college students do in the US? Probably not. It may be an element of our culture / upbringing that we put more emphasis on leisure, and not some psychological or neurological "need".

I think you bring up a good example. I think a typical contract web developer in a western country is much more at risk for ego depletion then the Vietnamese fisherman example.

One of the factors of ego depletion is decision fatigue. If the fisherman does not fish that day, he and his offspring go hungry, and if that decision is repeated they will starve to death. So not really a decision, not one that a rational being would make. If the web developer goofs off on reddit today, instead of looking for new contracting work he won't go hungy.. He can probably coast for a little bit.. Actually, he could potentially just go on welfare, but then he'd have to live in a worse part of town. If he moved in with friends he could work less hours a week and have more leisure time, etc. Lots of choices to make.

Novelty is another ego depleter. The fisherman has done it day-in-day-out for years, probably his father and grandfather as well. It's muscle memory and he's on autopilot. The web developer is constantly novelty fatigued, learning new clients' environments and the latest web framework fads which change month by month. His day has no routine.

As a contractor it is much more difficult for me, and probably I'm the most lazy and restless after coming off a project, with a decent balance in the bank. I am much more focused and mentally sure when the bank balance is low and I'm chasing down business because if I don't find something it'll get uncomfortable quick.

Contrast that to when I was in the gulf of Papagayo, miles from shore, on a small sailboat in the middle of a storm. There was no ego depletion. I never thought 'well, should I continue battling the sea to keep this boat afloat and going to my destination?' There's no ego there, only survival.

Does the Vietnamese fisherman have the harder life by most metrics? Absolutely. However there are downsides to the modern western world.

The fisherman doesn't sit in a chair all day either. the body being the interface to how we feel psychologically, he has a much easier time staying fit, Not squishing and collapsing down on his organs after a 2hr coding flow session, reducing blood flow and helping bring to fruition the effects all those 'sitting for prolonged periods at a desk will lead to cancer' studies. I also wonder how being outside on the water/nature effects the psyche to feel relaxed and in tune. Vietnamese are way ahead in terms of health hacks too. Almost no one in the west knows that you shouldn't be drinking ice cold beverages with your meal as it inhibits proper digestion , but any common folk in Hanoi etc will stop and seriously inquire to why the hell you just downed that glass of water WHILe your eating your beef/rice fermented cabbage roll lunch ? Why not before the meal , (cause it increases hcl production priming stomach for digesting upcoming meal etc ) And yeahbdownsides are definitely there , most people in Hanoi have a small persistent cough because of air pollution

People look at me weird when I ask for no ice in my drink when out to eat. I never understood what people like about freezing their insides when they eat.

ice water is an american thing, room temp water european. stems from the history of ice production, if you're interested the book 'imbibe!' by david wondrich talks about it

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/do-cold-drinks-...

I don't think cold water is actually bad for digestion.

interesting! Maybe not cold water, but drinking __before__ meals is supported by this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24179891

Despite low pay and poor working conditions, workers in fishing, agriculture and forestry report exceptionally high levels of job satisfaction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

it seems to me that for people in modernised industries, the disconnect is related to the fact that we work in non-natural environments. We evolved to live in nature and now we sit in artificially lit offices pressing plastic buttons to make electronic circuits fire the way we want them to. We have to be missing quite a few innate requirements that we get from wandering through fields and forests.

Im not sure what your point is but if we follow your line of thought then we live in artificial environments as well. We use toilets too, and we dont gather food by ourselves for 95 % of us at least. Humans certainly did not evolve to live in nature but to model it to their liking.

we certainly didn't evolve to model nature to our liking - that seems to have been an emergent property of a number of traits that we evolved such as tool use, opposable thumbs, higher level reasoning and so on. Our evolutionary baggage goes back throughout Earth's history and is mostly animal. We don't live in the environment we evolved for, like a dolphin living in an aquarium. Now that's fine, we obviously have the capacity to live in modern environments, but a certain amount of exposure to nature does us a lot of good.

Yeah, if my job sucked I'd probably try to rationalize it three ways to Sunday too.

Thanks a lot for this comment. It made a lot of connections form in my brain.

The kind of subsistence level jobs done all day every day in third world countries tend to be very mechanistic and/or low intensity. Those fishermen throw out a net and pull it back in after a while. The store keeper working 14 hour days spends most of that time sitting around reading a book. It's more that the lines between work and leisure are blurred than that they have a crazy high work ethic.

I wouldn't call "not working" "leisure". I work 80+ hours a week myself. But I recognize that there are more important things in this world and in this life than just working.

There's also all different types of work. Work on the body, the mind, etc

It's helped me immensely to move from a moralistic "I'm procrastinating because I have a weak constitution" belief to an "I'm procrastinating because I set up the environment wrong" mindset.

It turns out that I get more done, run faster, and find both intellectual and physical work much easier when I've taken excellent (rather than merely okay) care of baseline needs like sleep, nutrition, exercise, and household chores.

Willpower as a finite but manageable resource is a much more useful belief than willpower as a character trait.

Reading the article it also seems the author has a rather sensationalist approach to interpreting research. Some of the studies he refers to do not seem to make the claims that he extracts from them, nor have a sample which resembles the general public.

The idea that you should intertwine focused thinking with unfocused thinking (and/or relaxation) was the subject of Daniel Kahneman's excellent book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Similarly you can argue that being aware of ego depletion will allow people to work with it better - after e.g. mentally exhausting work it's better to avoid going to grocery store because it will be more difficult than usual to resist buying sweets / junk food etc. Instead postpone it to tomorrow when you are "fully charged" again. By being aware of ego depletion (assuming it's true), you can actually optimize your life better.

Wow, this is a real thing?

It makes about as much sense as believing that your leg muscles are at risk of being depleted, and deciding to avoid exercise for that reason.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump...

People very much have beliefs akin to this. "Wear and tear" of joints, for example, is just not that simple. And avoidance of exercise or any movement in persistent back pain is common.

What I should have included is the idea that just like with physical exercise, moderation is necessary. You don't see doctors recommending sitting all day to avoid wear and tear, because then you'll get blood clots and all sorts of other problems.

It's up to you to decide whether each situation is closer to "training for a marathon", or "too tired to do stuff".

Which is entirely correct... on short time scales. You don't run a marathon cold, and you don't think someone is morally weak for failing to run a marathon cold. You train. You build capacity over time. You moderate your progress using rest days to mitigate the risk of an injury that knocks you out of the game entirely for months.

If anything, ego depletion proposes that intellectual work is more like exercise than we might otherwise think.

I take the point about the non-replication of experiments, but I cannot see how will-power could not be limited.

Our brains have evolved to minimize energy use and all the faculties they manifest: attention, will-power, imagination, creativity, critical-thinking, decision-making etc are parts of a finite budget of energy (glucose), and other resources like metal ions, enzymes & RNAs.

Thinking of will-power as an unlimited resource is a vestige of spiritual-thinking which denies the mechanistic nature of the brain.

There's another way in which will-power is constrained though: the inherited set of parameters that control the rates of production of neurotransmitters. Some people simply cannot ever achieve the levels of focus that others can, no matter how hard they try.

The physical things that you note - well, depleting them would mean death or unconsciousness and collapse, so that is a definite limit on will-power. On the other hand there are many cases of individuals dying while crawling home or resisting torture until death.

In terms of parameter inheritance - is there science on this? Are some humans predisposed to have less will power than others?

alcoholism, bipolar, ADHD, autism, and schizophrenia are all partially genetic, and we are all on the spectrum of those

In the cases you outline, doesn't it simply mean that for those persons one critical life system failed before the willpower one did? (whatever the latter's form may be)

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