Little Known Ways to Think about Discipline | Hacker News Reader

Little Known Ways to Think about Discipline

7goldfish.com

54 pointsvisakanv13 comments

Part of the quote from Wikipedia says discipline "is usually understood to be synonymous with self control".

I usually think of self-discipline and self-control as being different sides of the same coin.

I think of self-discipline as "doing the things you should"; like studying, working hard, doing things to accomplish personal goals.

I think of self-control as "not doing things you shouldn't"; like overeating, eating junk food, smoking, indulging in dangerous substances.

Both of them are important to having a productive life.

Hypothesis: Habits are the highest-yield form of discipline.

We humans seem to have a sort of behavioral inertia, whether it's showing up at a job, maintaining an MMO addiction, or brushing our teeth. The ideal state is to develop positive habits (writing for an hour every morning, cooking a healthy meal every day after work, practicing the bass every Saturday afternoon), that reflect one's deepest desires. Deviating from existing habits, good or bad, is expensive in terms of willpower (brain glucose); but once a new habit is established, maintaining it becomes the default, and suddenly it requires very little energy.

You have an interesting take on the issue. The question then becomes how do you form and stick to habits?

Someone should mention the Marshmallow Experiment [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

I've been reading the recently released book on this (www.amazon.com/Marshmallow-Test-Mastering-Self-Control/dp/0316230871/) and it has been interesting & good. I recommend it to anyone interested in discipline/self-control.

Interesting that you should bring that up. I'm the author, and I talk about the Marshmallow experiment a great deal in the next article http://7goldfish.com/in_defence_of_cognitive_bais

It is certainly true that increasing bias/approximation error can lead to decreased variance/estimation error, or even to an efficiently solvable problem rather than an inefficiently solvable problem. But somehow I don't think that's what's usually meant.

Feh. It's easy to talk about discipline when you've already decided on a (nominally) terminal goal from which the utility of all subgoals can flow. But what the people who speak of "motivation" say is: why should I act for negative expected utility?

Discipline is easy for the motivated.

Sharing this to followup to the "screw motivation, you need discipline" post. Here's a quick summary:

* The writer makes a distinction I wouldn't- that discipline is only discipline when it's applied to things you don't enjoy.

* "Discipline is about willpower over base desires". I agree. Could also be framed as short-term vs long-term thinking and planning.

* "Discipline is, in some sense, enslaving ourselves to an ideal or goal. A critical component of this definition is that the setting of the goals, the choosing of our ideals is not part of discipline. " Fairrr enough. Important point that discipline without good goal-setting isn't worth much.

* "If discipline is a reduction of freedom, an intentional choosing of suffering, then why on earth would anyone want to have it? The obvious answer is because it lets you achieve goals. That is to say, it increases the number of possible things you can do. Paradoxically, increasing the number of goals you can achieve is pretty much the definition of increasing optionality, or freedom." Yup.

* "Intentional optionality reduction need not be an act of self-discipline. One person may exercise discipline to not smoke the cigarette, another might throw away the cigarettes. A classical example is “Odysseus tied to the mast”." Classic commitment devices.

* "People who are ruled by their passions and appetites can be ruled just as efficiently by any political system willing to pander to those things, while those who control themselves can’t reliably be controlled by anyone else. Thus the Roman government regularly sent Rome’s philosophers into exile, failing Chinese dynasties praised Confucius to the skies while doing away with anybody who took his teachings too seriously, and modern America uses every trick in the media’s book to marginalize those who remind us that the life of a channel-surfing couch potato might not express the highest potentials of our humanity." thatsdeepman.jpg

* Timescales: "I generally separate discipline & willpower, primarily on the time-axis. Much of what I have read on the subject seems to agree with this approach, describing willpower as a short term thing, deployed over a duration of minutes, or for the hardiest of souls hours, while self-discipline extends over days, or possibly indefinitely. Many disciplines are intended to last indefinitely."

* Interesting thoughts on discipline and empathy: "Working in the “all-is-now” perspective, I come to a very different answer, which is, “They would choose to suffer for the benefit of someone else”. In the most frequently described cases, “someone else” is either their own past or future selves, but one can easily imagine acts of self-discipline that are for the benefit of others. One example might be a hungry mother giving food to her child. Another example might be Pheidippides running himself to exhaustion in order to recruit the aid of Sparta for the Battle of Marathon. In this way, discipline and generosity begin to look confusingly similar."

I particularly agree with your first point. The idea that discipline is separate from motivation is not biologically plausible. Rather, discipline is a form of motivation. No one does anything that they don't receive gratification for doing. That one can imagine circumstances where they would receive even more gratification (ie, 'if that gun weren't being held to my head, I would prefer sitting on the couch to carrying this rock') is irrelevant. People with discipline receive gratification in their brains when they exercise that discipline. It's a learned response and you can train yourself or others to exhibit it with either a carrot or a stick, until the gratification is internalized.

In the physical crafts there is another aspect of "enslaving ourselves to an ideal or goal" mostly revolving around safety.

How many decades ago was I taught to never power up a lathe without immediately touching the chuck key in its holder (aka not in the chuck...) or never touch a table saw blade (while changing it or screwing around with adjusting it) without immediately prior touching the metal of its power cable (aka not plugged in)

None of those are taught as in book learning but taught as in a discipline. And look, all these years later, still got all my eyes and fingers!

Both this article and the article about discipline and motivation posted yesterday distinguishes discipline from motivation, and then say something about how discipline is about controlling base-emotions, or ignoring them. Both of these articles are wrong, or at least, only come to a superficial understanding of motivation and discipline.

Exerting will power over your base emotions like that is a losing game over the long run. While it is a skill worth learning how to do, it is only a small tool within a larger spectrum of tools when dealing with aspects of your consciousness, mind, and life.

First of all, it's not about controlling your base emotions. Emotions are already there pervasively lurking everywhere, they come and go. They constitute a large portion of your consciousness, and the attempt try to "control" it is something socially conditioned in us, and the conventional way of "controlling" emotions robs us of what emotions brings to the human experience. In an effort to control emotions, you start judging them as good or bad, and react to suppress ro amplify them when they arise. Over time, this kind of self-directed judgmental attitude will ossify your mind, and you become less and less adaptable to changing circumstances and the unexpected.

So the first insight is this: it's not about trying to control emotions, it's about not allowing emotions to control you. You don't allow the feeling of elation and excitement (motivation) control when you actually work on things, and you don't allow the feeling of anxiety (aversions) and ill-will (nerd rage) control when you _don't_ work. When you've stripped away all the reactions to impulses and external factors, all they "I am doing this because X", what you are left with is the pure choice of whether you do something or not.

This might sound like it is nitpicking, since it superficially takes you to the same place as "controlling emotions". The key part is that, by acknowledging your emotions while at the same time, not necessarily allowing them to control you will eventually gain you greater space, and greater freedom of action. Your world will get bigger. Whereas, attempting to control emotions will eventually narrow the options you have (or think you have). Your world will get smaller.

Lastly, by coming from the perspective that you are not controlled by motivations or aversions, then having worked with it, eventually you'll come to be able to use motivations and aversions. When you can discern the difference between wants and needs, that is, something shiny or "cool", and something that feels deeply fulfilling and rewarding, you would be capable of inspiring others to follow your vision. You don't need to throw motivation completely out, you simply don't allow yourself to be controlled by it. Further, by being able to acknowledge your aversions, being in equanimity with them, and still set out to accomplish your goals, you would be able to persist even when time gets rough.

I am inclined to believe that discipline has mostly to do with distractions in life. The older generation of people were the most disciplined, and they had less distractions.

Just a quick thought on reading only the headline.

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