Hacker News Reader

Comment by antwerp1 | Hacker News Reader

It’s just like decision fatigue: your capacity for it diminishes the more you use it (within a given time range).

Instead, carefully curate your identity . This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”

View on HN

The way I like to think of it is that it's possible to have willpower when I'm feeling strong and only have to make a big decision once - what's really hard is having to use that willpower over and over.

Thus, I've always felt it's better to change your environment than trying to improve your willpower. For example, I got a ton of exercise when I lived in a city when the most convenient thing to do was walk everywhere or take public transportation. When I moved out to the suburbs, I tried to force myself to walk more, but it never really worked. Driving was just by far the easier "default" way of getting places in the 'burbs.

The way I think of it is to try to set things up so you don't have to use willpower in the first place.

Environment change >>> willpower

Environment change takes willpower, but is a force multiplier.

Buying groceries when you’re feeling good, and changing your route through the store to groom yourself for success instead of failure, are common, effective bits of advice for weight loss and healthy eating. Most of the garbage really is in the middle of the store, and I imagine myself diving into deep water to grab ketchup, soup, flour. Get in, get out, no sightseeing.

My shopping list is sequential by aisle, so I don't go down the aisle if it's not on my list.

I wonder if shopping online for delivery helps curb impulse buying

Try shopping just the exterior.

The head of UI at Homegrocer was a friend of a friend when they were at their peak, and I was in the middle of my second affair with UX, so we occasionally talked.

He told me he was getting pressure to incorporate dark patterns (though that phrase hadn’t made the rounds at the time) into the site design to get people to do more impulse buying.

Sadly if he had they might still be around.

Online delivery unfortunately makes it almost impossible to ‘pick an aisle’, as you’re going to get exposed to dark patterns and ads constantly while interacting with the site.

You also can’t actually see what you’re buying (or feel/touch the actual box), which greatly increases the odds of catching shenanigans.

Is “dark patterns” basically behavioral economics or a technical term?

Behavioral economics is ‘white hat’. Influencing (in the actual definition). Figuring out how to get them something that actually does benefit them, and modifying the environment or ‘nudging’ the target to encourage it.

Dark patterns is when the actual long (or short) term benefit of the ‘target’ is not a meaningful part of the goal, and the only consideration given is just a given result for the person with the power. Aka manipulation.

Helping someone looking for an off-road vehicle (because they actually need it), your off-road vehicle which is a pretty good one, is behavioral economics.

Using the same tactics to get the exact same someone to buy your luxury car is dark patterns.

Notably, a con artist/fraud is the criminal face of it - since they never even give the target a car at all, but take their money.

The difference between influence and manipulation is the consideration of the actual well being of the target, and the degree of autonomy allowed the target.

Needless to say, this is also the first thing miscreants start deluding themselves and others on when they start getting predatory.

So it’s a very dangerous area to be in for anyone who actually values ethics/morals.

Thank you. Is it a technical term used in marketing?

Plenty of people also criticize behavioral economics for being manipulative, especially if they don’t agree with the behavior to be “corrected”

Which one?

Hard to disagree with them at some level, but putting toothpaste next to the sweets (or advertising how great your toothpaste in general is) feels pretty different from random online ads calling people’s dicks small to sell enlargement pills or making fun of someone’s makeup to sell a glow up (yes, very much a thing).

Whether decision fatigue is a real thing has been called in to question: https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_stor...

Doesn’t matter. Changing via willpower and context cues is quite difficult.

Identity change is the best, most lasting way.

What am I going to do with all my identical shirts now!

Anyone can make a decision without much thought, which most humans do at every moment of their existence.

Making informed decisions takes conscious thought, much less keeping the decisions equally informed. There's only so much of that you can do and humans are particularly bad at recognizing the subtle decline in quality of thought.

There's no question at all.

According to the article "hundreds" of experiments showed an effect. Then it goes on to talk about the reproducibility crisis, but in this case it has been reproduced, no? At least, that's what the article itself says.

Link to actual debunk study is dead, but "it now appears that ego depletion could be completely bogus" seems too strong. Certainly in my own experience something like ego depletion is very real – maybe not exactly as described, but you do run out of bandwidth at some point, so to speak. One of the reasons this is hard to verify experimentally is that, in my personal experience, everything is fine up to a point, after which it all breaks down. You can't easily re-create that in an experiment.

In my experience, it seems very real as well.

The Wikipedia page has a pretty good rundown on the criticism and existing studies. From my understanding, it isn’t clear that the studies that have been done indicate any depletion effect at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...

> Instead, carefully curate your identity . This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”

Interesting but orthogonal to the article.

The article: "I am the kind of person who has changed my environment such that doing x is inconvenient enough that I can avoid it most of the time without having to use much willpower."

It’s not always possible to change your environment. In the most difficult scenarios, you will actually have very little control over your environment. But it’s still possible to overcome a challenge, without simply trying to willpower your way through it.

Or perhaps (and by extension?) help to curate a society where these sorts of bad things don't happen.

> Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”

We are rarely who we really want to be. Yet, here we are. I’ve been trained, literally since infancy, to obey bedtime, but I’m writing this response an hour past my bedtime.

I think there's slight a difference there. Compare these two:

You: I’ve been trained to obey bedtime

Proposed: I'm a person that obeys bedtime

What I'm getting at here is that while you seem to think you _should do_ it, you don't actually think about yourself as someone that does do it. Which makes sense because it's true, but I think the suggestion is to lie to yourself, just a little.

> This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”

Is this just basically willpower?

Or perhaps I should read the book to find out.

No. Changing your identity is much more powerful and sort of operates in a background process whereas willpower is more of a conscious foreground one and very difficult to sustain long term.

Read the book. It goes into some detail.

I’ve worked with thousands of people personally over the years to help them with supposedly difficult to treat addictions for instance. Willpower is fine to start, but completely fails in the long term. Identity change is the only thing I’ve found that works long term.

I'll look into it. I think I acquired frugality from reading a few books that made me frugal.

I'd like other traits too.

First time I’m reading about a character trait walking straight off the page into the reader’s life..

This might be a stupid question, but what is "identity" in this context?

I ask because when this subject has come up I realize I don't seem to be able to think up theories about myself so easily

Run a few test theories and see what resonates. Are you the kind of person who goes to the gym every day? Are you the kind of person who works on their hobbies at night? Are you the kind of person who binges Netflix between dinner and bed? Are you the person who cooks dinner from scratch, or orders takeout at every chance? etc. I think of them a bit like stereotypes but applied to myself, and see if I think I fit.

It’s not supposed to be descriptive in this case, unless it’s a reflection or self-assessment. For goals, it’s supposed to be aspirational, like a vision you cultivate for yourself. You can meditate on that self-image, or identify other people with that trait and associate yourself with them, etc. The idea is that you will violate your sense of self by acting against how you expect yourself to be.

People who consider themselves "gym rats" go to the gym because it is what they do.

People who are mountain bikers don't ride to keep in shape, they look forward to getting on their bike.

Those are easy to see, but there are few people who clean their dishes for fun/leisure.

I clean my dishes because I like having a clean / neat household, "I am the kind of person who keeps my space in order". I find that helps!

No but there are people who pride themselves on always keeping a clean kitchen etc

I have met some of them. And I can say for certain I find using a dishwasher more fun than washing by hands. Even if it's family time etc. etc.

True, but I take loading a dishwasher as a puzzle to do it in the most compact/efficient way, which helps with adding enjoyment to the process.

For years, I was "a person who liked to ride my bike 300+ miles in a day". Then one day I realized that was a lie, or at least only a half-truth. Then I realized that most of why I did it was that I liked to keep in shape, and to eat a lot.

Somehow you've made a step in the exact opposite direction of what seems to be encouraged here. Does it still work out for you?

It's more like discipline. You don't do something because you decide to become a person who just doesn't do that thing. It becomes part of your identity, rather than a decision you have to continuously make.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com