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Comment by rmbryan | Hacker News Reader

I found this helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

Me too. When I started reading, I realized that my cluelessness is what computer illiterate people probably feel when reading about IT stuff.

But on the whole, I felt that the article was rather trying to state that effect sizes matter, using the ego depletion theory as an example for that. The implications at the end of the article are particularly interesting, or at least, if I were to be more brazen, don't really deny commonly held prejudices on soft sciences...

It seems to me that if a psychological effect is so small that you can meta-analyse hundreds of studies and still not be sure whether it exists or not, then it doesn’t matter if it does or not.

This isn’t physics, where the existence of a tiny effect such as time dilation might nonetheless have significance beyond the observable regime. If a psychological effect is barely measurable then it’s of no use to anybody. In particular you don’t need to go around taking it into effect in your everyday life.

Compare to the original analogy of a muscle. An actual muscle, if you work it close to its limit, will be weaker one minute later... but if you work it to its limit three times a week for a month it will get stronger. These effect sizes are large, they’re consistently observed in ~100% of healthy adults, and you can actually apply them in your life.

I am so sick and tired of the muscle analogy (not criticizing you, but the general usage)! Almost always when I see it used, it is to describe a situation where we know almost _nothing_ about the fundamental phenomena! So any so-called similarity is 100 % speculative.

I'd consider "it is like a muscle" a red flag when reading news/science.

It's doubly funny, because we actually have not enough of an idea how muscles do what they do... Even so far as immune system may be involved in their growth and strength adaptation.

So it's an apt analogy after all.

I don't think so, no. Here is why: the basic behavior of muscles are decently well understood. For example why and how they contract and relax, and why they tire. We know of several reasons why muscles might malfunction. What is not well established is how and why muscles become stronger over time.

Compare this to for example ego depletion, and I would say that the analogy is not apt.

Yes, true.

If one pumps iron, then one gets big and strong. What is the if-then for ego depletion? This entire fuzzy informal idea of common-sense causality is what is being wagered by these flimsy psychological concepts.

If one exercises his willpower a lot†, then one has a progressively harder time doing so again shortly after‡. This is so because willpower is a finite, expendable resource which has to be renewed (through not exercising it).

† - for instance, by denying himself bad, tempting things

‡ - gives in to temptation

It's not flimsy at all, it just appears to be wrong.

The ego depletion effect story is interesting to me for numerous reasons, some of which are statistical/inferential, some of which are more theoretical, and some of which are kind of personal or anecdotal (I know the author of the blog post in question and our research overlaps in important ways, although not with regard to the ego depletion effect in particular; I don't research it).

I kind of think Brent could have gone further with some of the implications of the ED effect size being so small. To me, it's interesting that it is basically zero (I don't think it's even .08, based on Bayesian prior choice effects, which is another interesting angle on this story). Why? Because I think it's a fairly intuitive idea that gets applied by people in everyday life over and over again, and has broader implications.

For example, you are in a situation where you're tempted by something, have to resist temptation, and experience it as exhausting. You go home from work and are tired and need to relax, ostensibly because you're tired by being on your best behavior all day. There's recent very cogently argued public health literature arguing that diets don't work largely because it's too hard (read: too fatiguing, too effortful) to resist our favorite foods, either in the short term or over the long term.

In short, I think there are a lot of people who would be surprised that the ego depletion effect is so close to zero. Maybe not everyone, but a lot of people. It also raises the question of why it's difficult to resist temptations over a sustained period, and how to model that process more accurately (my reading of the ego depletion literature is that a lot of the effect can be explained by sustained negative emotional state or heightened attention, rather than resource depletion, but that's a different issue; another explanation is with reward prediction models, but I think those are predicting a different aspect of behavior).

I guess I'm agreeing with you, but I think the magnitude of the effect size being zero or close to it is important for a lot of reasons aside from meta-scientific issues pertaining to replicability and trustworthiness of results.

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