> [...] Scott Adams [...] Don't put yourself into situations that are likely to lead to bad outcomes.
This is an unfortunate statement. Ironic that Scott Adams has basically tanked his own reputation outside the alt-right through a set of poor choices recently.
Remember that this is the guy that created sockpuppet accounts on Reddit and Metafilter to pump his own image.
Getting caught defending yourself online with multiple account makes you look bad and is petty, but it's not nuts.
Admitting to something when there's prevailing evidence against you isn't nuts either.
Almost all HNers have no clue what it's like to have people coming together in great numbers to talk bad about you (to say nothing of whether you "deserve" it).
The guy can't even get away with marrying a younger consenting adult woman without being burned at the stake.
Was kinda nuts. Nine years ago. About whether using sockpuppets was remotely acceptable. On that specific forum, on that specific topic. OK, sure.
Sockpuppet accounts for trolling used to be common on several niche forums on the internet (which is how this practice got a name), especially this many years ago. I could certainly see how someone could be confused about how sockpuppeting was or was not acceptable behavior on a specific forum. He might have thought (but I’m speculating here) that he was engaging with (i.e. trolling) the forum within the (semi-)established norm of behavior for that forum.
Is that all the rope with which you would have him hanged? That stump is so short that you couldn’t even tie a knot with it.
If Adams only had kept his observations about Trump to himself, none of this would be an issue. But no, now everybody’s gotta find those crucial six lines somewhere in all the things he’s ever written, and whenever someone mentions anything he’s ever said, especially if it’s not about Trump or about politics in any way, it must be overwhelmed with random lists of accusations, all of which are false, misleading, or ancient and irrelevant, or all three. Merely to thoroughly discredit anyone even remotely associated with Trump.
Looking at Google Groups, my first post to Usenet was in 1993. So yeah, I know something about early consumer Internet culture. Even then sock puppets were frowned upon.
On Usenet, sure. But in LiveJournal comments? On the Something Awful forums? Things were much wilder on the murky corners of the web in the darkness of the eternal september than they were on Usenet, even in the alt.* hierarchy.
My first post to Usenet was in 2019. Its message ID is <1562970678.bystand@zzo38computer.org> in case you want to try to find it. Who else made their first post to Usenet in 2019 or 2020? (I think there was one other, although I cannot find it right now.)
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan
If you want to see what someone who is credibly trying to predict events look at the work of Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb. When you obsess over one prediction by person most known for comedy and questionable personal statements, it's neither difficult nor inappropriate to put them in the clown category.
If Adams himself wants to build his reputation as a prognosticator, he can easily create a publicly-verifiable record of them and any questions of his ability will answer itself in short order. That he has not (to the best of my knowledge) done so makes him look like a huckster.
The thing you should take from Scott Adams isn't his predictions.
It's the fact that he has spent 30 years writing Dilbert, which means he has followed the pulse of general office-culture, coupled with the fact that he is a train hypnotist, so he knows how people think.
Basically, he will often give an interesting take on some current event that gives you a perspective on the situation that you hadn't considered.
Like NN Taleb and Nate Silver, once you've groked their general schtick (long tails, Bayesian probability) there isn't a whole lot new they have to offer. It's worth checking back in on them from time to time, but you're unlikely to be blown away by anything you see.
Mike Cernovich is a lot more interesting to follow on Twitter than Scott Adams. Adams is basically a pundit at this point. Cernovich is more of a journalist, so he follows and retweets breaking news that you're likely to hear about in the upcoming news cycles.
The thing I like to keep in mind is that its important to follow people you don't always agree with, because otherwise you are missing out on a lot of perspectives and don't have as good a view of the current political landscape.
Which is a far more convincing argument when someone can point to a well-documented set of predictions, than when they claim "I'm right a lot" and try to get you to fall for an association fallacy.
In 2016 he said Trump would win in a landslide and there would be rioting. Trump lost the popular vote and won the electoral college by a margin of less than 100k votes in three states. This year he tweeted that Republicans will be hunted, telling his followers that they will be dead in a year. We’re supposed to take him seriously?
Weren't everyone's predictions wrong in 2016? I remember news organizations like the New York Times saying that Clinton had a 91% chance of winning the election.[1] 538's Nate Silver said that Clinton had a 99% chance of winning.[2] Scott Adams has many faults, but his 2016 election prediction fared better than pretty much everyone else. Remember he predicted a "win against Clinton in a tight election" in August of 2015.[3]
Actually if you go look at the NYT polls, Trump had a monumental surge in the later half of October that caused the result to look much closer. Probably no small part of this was the additional FBI investigation into Clinton's emails, which was announced Oct 28 (10 days after the NYT article you posted).
If you go look at the polls from right before the actual election it looks significantly closer:
It's not completely unthinkable for a 20-30% probability event to occur. Further, it is quite a rare occurrence for a candidate to win the election without winning the popular vote: This was only the fifth time in American history it's happened.
Right. My point was that if you use 2016 election predictions as evidence that Adams is delusional, then you should also use major media organizations' 2016 predictions as evidence of greater delusion. Adams called the election a year beforehand. At the same time, Nate Silver was giving Trump a 2% chance of being nominated. The dude is batty in some ways, but he clearly saw something that most of us didn't.
> then you should also use major media organizations' 2016 predictions as evidence of greater delusion
Why? They responded to evolving evidence and sentiment (specifically, the FBI announcement on the 28th). 538 gave Trump a 30% chance to win on election day. 30% isn't a super unlikely event. People regularly take a chance on events with much less likely outcomes.
Here's an analogy: Harvard has a 4.5% acceptance rate. If a mediocre student tells me in June that they're going to apply in September, my prediction is going to be that they will not be accepted. If in August they tell me they've randomly received a letter of recommendation from a US senator after saving them in a car accident, I'm going to change my opinion from "very unlikely to be accepted" to "moderately unlikely to be accepted."
That doesn't mean I was stupid or delusional to think in June that they were very unlikely to be accepted, and that still doesn't mean I'm delusional to think they will still likely be rejected (the mainstream media polls). That also doesn't mean that the person who told the mediocre student in June that they were a shoe-in for Harvard was prophetic by any means (Scott Adams).
> The dude is batty in some ways, but he clearly saw something that most of us didn't.
Ehh, or he just got a lucky guess? A broken clock, etc. etc.?
For an analogous situation, this happens in sports media all the time: Some sports entertainment personality will make a "hot take" that's really just a contrarian opinion based on little evidence. If they're wrong, no one cares. If they're right, they look like a prophetic genius. Either way, they win because they get attention for making a bold prediction.
Whether you want to call it confirmation bias/selection bias/whatever, I implore you to think about all the times Scott Adams has been incredibly wrong and whether you think he actually has some unusual insight or whether he just made a lucky guess based on his personal biases.
It's extremely likely that if the election had been held October 27th, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Think about that for a second.
Before he pegged my personal BS meter and I just started ignoring anything from him that I happened across, I noticed that Adams seemd fond of a lot of "cold-reader" type tricks: vagueness that can be turned into specifics after the fact, ignoring their own failures while hyping their successes, that kind of thing.
If you want to see what actual serious prediction attempts look like, search for Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb.
They've both had their moments where they got a bit too full of themselves as well. Taleb in particular.
I checked back recently and it seems they've both come back down out of the clouds, but I don't hold either of them in as high of regard as I did a few years ago.
Scott Adams has fueled many conspiracies on the alt-right, COVID conspiracies, and recently has show his true colors as a racist, claiming he got his show pulled because he was white. Naval Ravikant appears frequently on his show and also fueled COVID conspiracies.
People can be brilliant in some areas and absolutely batshit in others. I think that is the norm not the exception actually. If you discount their brilliance because of occasional batshittery you’ll miss out on a lot of insightful stuff.
> The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. [1]
Yes, very California bubble to think that women are equal and not like children or mentally handicapped
> But perhaps I can summarize my viewpoint so you can understand why I’m such a misogynist asshole douche bag. Here’s my view in brief:
> You can’t expect to have a rational discussion on any topic that has an emotional charge. Emotion pushes out reason. That is true for all humans, including children, men, women, and people in every range of mental ability. The path of least resistance is to walk away from that sort of fight. Men generally prefer the path of least resistance. The exception is when men irrationally debate with other men. That’s a type of sport. No one expects opinions to be changed as a result.
I would not normally try to summarize a long complex explanation, but I would think that this section would also be crucial to include in any summary:
> First, some background. A few weeks ago I asked readers of this blog to suggest a topic they would like to see me write about. The topic that got the most up votes, by a landslide, was something called Men’s Rights. Obviously the fix was in. Activists had mobilized their minions to trick me into giving their cause some free publicity. In retrospect, the Men’s Rights activists probably should have done some homework on me before hatching this scheme.
> As you can see, I thought it would be funny to embrace the Men’s Rights viewpoint in the beginning of the piece and get those guys all lathered up before dismissing their entire membership as a “bunch of pussies.”
Taken at face value, that argument is nonsense. If you do that, the beginning of the piece serves as propagation of MRA women are inferior viepoint. And is treated as such.
The latter insults "bunch of pussies" does not cancel the beginning. It does not correct what you wrote about women either. It just makes women collateral damage in you strughle for dominance against MRA.
You mean, if you take a piece of it out of context, and remove the text following it, it can serve to mean something completely different than what was intended? My point exactly.
Also, from the same original text, Adams writes:
> I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group.
So he’s explicitly and clearly saying that he’s not saying that women are “like children or mentally handicapped”, just so that nobody gets him wrong. But then, of course, everybody takes the first quote, cuts it out of context, removes the clarification, and parades it around the internet like a hideous rallying flag.
> As you can see, I thought it would be funny to embrace the Men’s Rights viewpoint in the beginning of the piece and get those guys all lathered up before dismissing their entire membership as a “bunch of pussies.”
>Yes, very California bubble to think that women are equal and not like children or mentally handicapped
He doesn't say that women are not equal. If you read the particular article the line is from, he makes a totally unrelated argument in that line and in that comparison: that men don't attempt to argue with women because they're emotional/unreasonable in arguments.
And to translate casual talk for those that have to read everything literally, he means that some men, some of the time, don't attempt to argue with women because some women are emotional/unreasonable in some arguments. (That is, a seemingly absolute statement in a casual phrasing - not e.g. in some logical notation - doesn't translate to "absolute everybody/all the time/100%", but usually to some or at worse, most).
Care to give a link? Last time someone actually came through with links to their allegations about Scott Adams, all of them were false, misleading, taken out of context, etc., except one: the old sockpuppet incident from nine years ago.
Hounding him by, whenever his name is mentioned in any context, bringing forward example after supposed example of how he is somehow not competent enough to ever be allowed to have a receptive audience. Even though this very example you brought up is a prediction of just this kind of thing?
I've counted two instances of me bringing examples of his odd behaviour, in a total of two comments. Your assertion of "whenever his name is mentioned in any context" feels like I'm missing some cases considering how many times his name was mentioned in this sub-thread.
You’re not the only one to do this, as you can see elsewhere in this thread. But you were the first person to bring up his current US right-wing popularity and vaguely allude to “poor choices recently” and tweets containing unspecified badness. You did this as an off-topic comment to a comment which compared the topic at hand, self-control, to Adams’ “systems vs. goals” approach.
Your "hounding" accusations of me here are unproductive and your "off-topic" assertion is dishonest. Scott's wild tweets about Republicans being hunted points to someone with some "issues" -- not unspecified badness.
While he may have good points in some cases, his thinking is compromised and you cannot discount that. I don't think this discussion will be productive beyond this point and wish you well.
Again, you are, without elaborating, claiming that he has ‘some “issues”’, makes “wild tweets” and that “his thinking is compromised”, without saying anything specific or elaborating further. If that’s not alluding to unspecified badness, then I don’t know what is.
I mean, you keep pointing to these tweets and not saying what’s wrong with them, as if it should be completely obvious to everyone. Hint: It’s not. It’s probably only obvious if you’re already predisposed to interpret everything he writes in the worst possible way. Then I’m sure it’s obvious. But it’s not obvious to me, for example.
If you had ever explained exactly what you thought was wrong with them, anyone here could have argued with your interpretation, and possibly put forward an alternative, more reasonable, interpretation. You would most certainly not have agreed, but at least the argument would have been made in the open, and every reader could then decide for themselves. But as it is, since you don’t actually make an argument, only vague allusions, anyone objecting to your characterizations would have to guess what you meant, and then argue with this made-up opinion. However, this would be bad form, and you could then always claim not to have that exact opinion and cause any argument made to be irrelevant.
Therefore, please, tell us what’s wrong, don’t just say “look, look, bad thing here: <link>”. That’s not an argument. Don’t do that. Make your case explicitly.
In closing, what is and is not on topic might be a matter of opinion, but I don’t appreciate being accused of dishonesty. If you don’t think that I am arguing in earnest, then I agree that not much productive debate can be had between us.
Might not be hunted in a literal sense, but you can damn sure bet you'll meet the downvote brigade around here and many other places if you say something that puts Trump in a positive light.
I don't know if that's true compared to a lot of other places on the internet. That was one of the reasons I came when I stayed. People, while still subject to their political bias, are much more likely to debate by actual facts rather than allegiance here.
I agree. Things tend to stay above the belt here, which is nice.
There are certain threads / topics that seem to really hit a nerve though. Perhaps it's on me for sometimes poking the bear when I shouldn't.
I have had comments with a literal 30 point swing that oscillated back and forth a couple times from negative (capped at -4, a great thing for people to know since I think it makes people bolder in what they're willing to say) to around 30 points, then back to zero, and finally settling at like +3.
Those comments weren't "flame bait" (which I have been guilty of on a couple occasions), but simply solid points with a conservative tilt to the them that really just drive a certain group of people nuts.
I agree that we should all strive for "facts over allegiance", I think that's a great way of phrasing it.
Why? You can’t just say something is “unbelievable” without further comment. He has explained in other places, in some detail, what happened in all three instances, and his summary is essentially correct (unless you think he’s making it all up, of course).
1. He's one of those people that thinks Trump is playing 4D chess.
2. He 'successfully' predicted Trump would win the election, and has subsequently fooled himself into thinking he has some special insight into social dynamics and interpreting Trump's 4D chess that allows him to continue making accurate predictions. I'm sure the more predictions he makes, the closer he'll get to a 50% success rate (binomial theorem) - as do most 'expert' political prognosticators who aren't using statistical models but going off their intuition. I wonder if he'll figure out what's happening.
When I read his writings, I just see an incredibly naive approach to prediction, ignorant of probability, that is primarily informed by the fact that he's a Republican who therefore is biased towards favorably interpreting Republican odds.
To be fair, he's been predicting for two years now that Kamala Harris would be on the Democratic ticket.
That is maybe nothing special, but I never heard of her, and she was a garbage fire when she campaigned here in Iowa. So I thought that was noteworthy.
I don't think this comment adds anything of value to this conversation. Lots of horrible people have said wise things, and lots of great people have said horrible things. Their reputation and the merit of a given thing that was said is uncorrelated.
I mean, there's a long list of people who said things people find offensive: Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, Barack Obama, William Shockley, Freeman Dyson, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. It takes fairly little maturity to not let that take away from the insightful comments they have made.
The "horrible" or dumb things you said are absolutely relevant toward whether it is reasonable to assume you know what you talk about.
In particular, the offensive things Stallman said or did are absolutely relevant when he would spew quotes about relationships or people.
It is different when he talks about philosophy of open source. But on those particular topics, he is not being insightful as he is dumb as brick o that topic.
Back in 2015 we (Beeminder) wrote a blog post praising Scott Adam's "systems vs goals" insight which I still stand by: https://blog.beeminder.com/systems/
Excerpt (quoting Adams):
If you do something every day, it's a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. […] Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good everytime they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
I guess there's a bit of abstract economy behind this. A good context is worth a lot of efforts. Just like a clean space, a nicely organized workshop, a well tuned chair desk keyboard..
Thing is it's hard to create that context. Maybe copying good ideas or joining forces..
I used to be significantly overweight and the advice in the first box of the flow chart was the most helpful for me. I avoid buying tempting food items in the store to begin with and I have often eaten one or two cookies that have been sent to me as gifts and thrown the rest away so I wouldn't eat them.
Same here. When I was looking for jobs, companies would always tout their snack room. To me that was a huge impediment that I'd have to fight against every day.
Who wants to work for a company that tracks your usage of the snack room. If you're going to tie snacks to money, just put in a coinop snack machine (with credit card support, I suppose)
The critical point -- which applies to packrats at well, is that some things have negative value and are better destroyed than used. We know this for obvious toxins like smoke, but less often know this for sugar and junk gear.
I use a box that I can lock with a timer (called kitchensafe), which means I have no chance (except breaking the whole thing) to get to my cookies (in my case all kinds of sweets) after i set the timer (which i usually set after taking a few things). Really helps with exactly this type of problem. Although I had to buy another one for the office a few weeks ago... (I gained pounds during covid anyway, so it's not the be all end all.. but it helps me)
How did the old children marshmallow test get through to the final draft. It comes right before the author relates a specific thing to his own study. The marshmallow test original results and thoughts have largely been seen as incorrect. Wealth was the main factor. It can relate to the title, but still the incorrect info shouldn’t be there.
The marshmallow test makes no sense to me. You're telling me I get one marshmallow now, or I get one more if I wait 30 minutes and have to sit here bored looking at the one marshmallow I could have already eaten? The reward just isn't there. It seems like it measures kids who want to please the researcher.
The kids do have to sit in the room whether or not they eat the first marshmallow, but I agree that there are quite a few explanations for what it's measuring beyond self-control.
> It seems like it measures kids who want to please the researcher
There are the kids who immediately eat the marshmallow. And then there are those who try not to eat it and fail. The latter is relevant. The former is not.
I don't think the claimed findings of the marshmallow test were relevant here, just the fact that some kids managed to avoid eating the marshmallow while others did not.
But the article just referenced some techniques the children in the test used, not the claims derived about their characteristics, which is the discredited part AFAIK?
To elaborate on that: one interpretation of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is that learning to trust adults is a key predictor for success in life.
Recall the experiment: kids who resisted gobbling the marshmallow in order to earn 2 marshmallows went on to be awesomer adults. The original explanation is that kids with the ability to delay gratification (or who come up with beeminder-y tricks to distract themselves from the tempting marshmallow) will be served well by that skill the rest of their lives.
But another explanation – https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121011090655.h... – is that those seemingly impulsive kids are just the kids who don’t trust the adults who promise the 2nd marshmallow. They’re like “yeah, I’ve heard that before” and gobble while the gobbling’s good. In other words, they’re not failing to delay gratification, they’re responding to the situation perfectly rationally based on their past interactions with adults. To put it overly dramatically: flaking out on your kids ruins their lives!
(I’m not sure how much credence to give that interpretation, and suspect that there’s truth in the original interpretation too. But it kind of feels right to me. Flaking out on anyone is really bad. But kids especially.)
"perhaps you’ll upset your kids if you throw away the cookies" is given as an example of the situation being outside your control. (Thankfully this author is apparently still slaving away in grad school and probably doesn't yet have time for this ruinous approach to raising kids.) Applying the same strategy to that situation is simple: Just don't let the kids know there are cookies in the house! Or better yet, don't buy cookies (i.e. the same answer as for your earlier 20-something solo non-kid-having Netflixing self).
Consistency is key. If the kid ask you something and you say no, don't change your mind later. If it was no, it should still be no. Same thing for yes. If you say yes then change your mind, your kid will probably complain.
Nothing in the article suggests that you should not say no to your kids -- it just says that your kids will be upset about you saying no, which is probably beyond your control and therefore is a factor that will weigh in your decision. Your response seems to me like criticizing the whole article by saying "Even better, learn to have the willpower to just not eat the damn cookies".
Yeah that's intervening at the last step in the chain, analogous to the example where you were choosing between your eating them or not. Hey that's weird, the same rules work for kids as for adults!
Here’s what I mean when I say there’s no such thing as willpower, despite having just defined it. Paraphrasing Laplace, I can explain all behavior simply in terms of responding to incentives. You want this whole pie in your body right now, and also you want to be two sizes smaller by next summer. Conflicting preferences are normally no big deal. You just, y’know, weigh them, make your tradeoffs, and reach a decision. But when the preferences apply at different timescales (pie now, thinner later) humans suffer from a massive irrationality which philosophers call akrasia and economists call dynamic inconsistency and normal people call … being stupidly short-sighted, or in the case of time management: procrastination.
Commitment devices are a way to change your own incentives so that willpower is a non-issue. They make your short-term and long-term incentives line up. There are many less drastic things you can do as well.
PS: Also the whole "willpower is like a muscle" theory, known as Ego Depletion, failed to replicate.
Ah, I don't agree but that's an interesting point that I could see being true for some people.
I think mostly there's plenty of short-term cost to derailing a Beeminder goal and getting the alert "we are now charging you $X". Not as good as handing over cash but still pretty good!
I definitely disagree that surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals is comparable. I mean, it can't hurt and maybe for some people it's enough, but for me personally, for example, things like that just fade into the background for me and lose their effectiveness. A commitment device (monetary or otherwise) doesn't let that happen!
Just looked beeminder up. If anyone else doesn't know it's goal tracking and contracts where you pay them if you fail. I'd feel a lot better about that if they were doing something positive with the money, like donating.
Hi Maneesh! I'm actually opposed to anti-charities because I think they're bad for the world and not necessary -- you can get equal motivation with a neutral (non-evil) 3rd party, as long as you make the amount at risk high enough. More at https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/
PS: As you know I'm a huge fan of Pavlok -- https://pavlok.com/ -- and definitely don't think that my arguments against anti-charities apply to it even though they're both very punishment focused. Pavlok (obviously I'm saying this for others, not Maneesh, founder of Pavlok!) is more about classical conditioning while Beeminder is more operant conditioning.
Oops, yes, I should've mentioned what Beeminder is! Thanks!
We get that a lot ("where does the money go? wait, you do _what_ with it??") but I'm surprised to hear that pushback on Hacker News. Is the existence of Beeminder not "something positive"?
It just feels like giving money to a stranger which I have no desire to do. I'd still not be happy about giving money to a charity or friend but I could stomach it. I think donating some small percentage (3% to 10%) of your profit to a neutral cause (hunger, bee conservation) would solve any friction for me.
Beeminder does have a charity option but it's a premium feature in the most expensive premium plan.
Also when we / Beeminder derail on our own goals we pay our users.
Not sure if either of those things make it feel ok. I guess we're keen for you to feel like we're any other SaaS that you're happy to pay for. Beeminder makes you awesomer and you pay for that, just at random times, or when you most need a kick in the pants, instead of a fixed monthly amount (though that too if you want a premium plan). If Beeminder isn't worth it overall then you'll stop using it; it's not really the perverse "make money when your users fail" that it seems prima facie. There's a myopic sense in which that's true but overall it's quite the opposite! As must be the case for us to have stuck around for 9 years.
That actually would reduce the incentive to accomplish the goal, wouldn't it?
Ideally you want something the person doesn't like to happen, that way you feel like you're doing real good (preventing harm) by accomplishing your goal. Like an alarm clock I saw once that donates a dollar to a political party you hate every time you hit the snooze button.
"Willpower" is just another facet of attention. I claim it's easier to do deep work when not in a cluttered, crowded, overly-warm workspace with unasked for music, a dynamic precluded by the purely-incentive based model you're falling back on.
You actually /can't/ just weigh the tradeoffs of being disctracted and reach a decision of not being distracted.
No -- it's meaningfully and sustainably easier to make good decisions when bad options are removed from the table (sometimes literally.)
Agreed. I wouldn't say any of these astute points argue against commitment devices (as it sounds like you're implying but I could be misreading you).
A commitment device provides an incentive, including the incentive to eliminate distractions by going somewhere quiet or whatever else you need to do to follow through on what you've committed to.
Yeah, it's surprisingly controversial but I agree, your long-term self is usually the rational one. Commitment devices are all about forcing/incentivizing your short-term self to do what your long-term self deems best. Sometimes people are too extreme with that, like intentionally living in near poverty their whole life in order to save as much as humanly possible for retirement, or suffering through a PhD program they hate because they think it will eventually be worth it.
But those are the exceptions. Mostly it's the other way around, as you say. People undermine their own long-term interests with procrastination or impetuousness.
Wanting to eat things that are delicious because you enjoy the flavor sounds perfectly rational to me. I'll enjoy the anticipation while I'm getting it, I'll enjoy the experience when I'm eating it, and a piece of pie is not going to stop me from being healthy by itself.
Sure wanting to eat the whole pie might be irrational, but that's seldom the way people think about it. I can't eat a whole pie at once, but I can definitely eat the bite on my fork, add one more slice to my plate, etc.
This mistakes thinking long-term vs thinking marginally, which is the larger point being made.
It's not rational when at the same time the fact that you're overweight with a heart condition and cholesterol problem that could kill you is a flashing through your brain.
By that definition everything is rational as long as you have reasons for your goal. Logic has to enter it too, and reasons aren't always logical. Having a reason doesn't make it rational.
I’m not sure rational and logical have a 1:1 meaning as you assume. For example, if I look both ways before crossing a one-way street, I think I would call that rational but I’m not sure I would call that logical.
I could certainly be convinced otherwise but it’s interesting to think about.
Surely it depends on how the decision to look both ways was made?
If you do it out of instinct and immediately think "oh yeah, forgot I only need to look one way" then it wasn't logical.
But if you know it's one way, yet think "I've witnessed bikes and even cars going the wrong way before, better check both directions" that seems like it could be a perfectly logical action.
Is short term satisfaction a rational choice over increased chances of death? That was the context here. It's also a fairly well recognized behavioral pattern of irrational decision making.
A reason alone doesn't make something rational. A paranoid thought that aliens are trying to abduct you may be backed up by the reason "because secret weather balloons are tacking me". It's a reason. It's not a rational one. Having a reason is not synonymous with being rational.
Nowadays though, as soon as I finish eating some crap that doesn't digest that well, I'm already regretting it.. since it makes me feel bad. And I still go back to eating it a few days later..
the behavior necessary to lose the weight would have positive results toward a goal that IS rational, but the impulse that actually spurs the behavior necessary to be two sizes smaller by next summer could just as easily be "i want to wear this dress to my sister's wedding next summer and they don't make it in my size."
Doing a mahayasi vipassana helps create a sense for the „thinker“ and other faculties of the mind
Though your argument would honestly just move one dimension up since it takes a certain motivation and condition to go and seek that kind of discipline training.
The ultimate end of the Buddhist meditations is to let go so you’re right but in the beginning there’s a sort of healthy shedding of dealing with delusions and ideas that create Desirees and ice that do not service which is a bit behind incentive incentive itself becomes being free of those desires, A sort of seeking liberation.
I think the reason thinner later is harder to act to bring about, vs pie now is due to uncertainty. Thinner later is uncertain, hence I think our brains naturally discount the future goal, with a preference for the immediate.
what has worked for me is thinking in terms of positive choices, rather than goals or restrictions.
Though Ego Depletion doesn't seem to be a thing as you pointed out, "willpower is like a muscle" can still hold up if you take the depletion part out of the equation (muscle endurance vs. muscle strength). At least for the underlying neurological mechanisms, there seems to be a connection between connectivity of parts of the prefrontal cortex and the ability to self-regulate, and those parts also appear to be trainable.
Can you cite some studies which have been replicated successfully and show this effect? I have been looking for them off and on, and have been able to find any which seem robust.
As for a higher level psychological effect, I'm not aware of any studies (as that is also farther away from my field of study), and I'd also like to know of any.
As for the underlying neurobiology, I think [0] is a decent study for identifying the relevant regions involved in procrastination in particular, and [1] is a good review about PFC plasticity. Of course that individually doesn't indicate a higher level effect, but dismissing it altogether in the same breath as ego depletion also doesn't seem right.
I use beeminder to do pushups, drink water, cut my hair, wash my clothes, run and do my work. Is not perfect but is the best tool I have found to beat my terrible procrastination. It has changed my life
If it's not clear to people, dreeves runs (or at least works for) Beeminder.
I used it some years ago. You have to figure out how to use it and for what things it will work for you. As an example, for me having any daily task tracked with Beeminder was a huge hassle. I don't want to have to open an app and update several items I'm tracking every day. Others are fine with this. For me, goals with a longer cadence ("once a week") work better on Beeminder.
Also, initially you'll not know what you really want to track in Beeminder and what you don't. I did find myself cheating on occasion. If that happens to you, consider whether you should even be tracking this at all via Beeminder.
Beeminder can give you a bit of hyperfocus. That task that will cause you to lose money today if you don't do it? Becomes top priority for you that day. I found the items I was Beeminding were getting done, but perhaps other more important items I was not putting into Beeminder weren't. In a sense, after a few months of use, you could say that Beeminder will give you an idea on the importance (or lack of) of the things you are Beeminding.
For these reasons, I did stop using it. I'll probably return to it one day when I figure out my priorities. I heartily recommend it to others, though.
Dang, this is extremely valuable feedback and a beautifully balanced review. Thank you!
As for the friction of adding data, we have smartphone apps and an email and SMS bot to try to help with that. But ideally you automate it. There are dozens of apps and gadgets we integrate with (RescueTime, Fitbit, Trello, Garmin, GitHub, etc etc) and we have an API, or you can make an IFTTT or Zapier recipe/applet/zap/whatever.
Finally, good point about being careful what you beemind. We try to minimize the danger of that with our one-week "akrasia horizon". You're never on the hook for more a week into the future, i.e., you can stop or change a goal at any time, with a one-week delay. So you haven't lost much if you realize you're beeminding the wrong things.
Or if it's just that more important things are getting crowded out, our self-serving advice is to just beemind those things as well!
Yes - the number of integrations is very impressive. I haven't checked, but I doubt any of the competition has this many.
In my case, though, these were not automatable. As an example, I would have a Beeminder for decluttering 10 items in the house per day. Nothing can detect I've done it. I still have to somehow enter this daily.
On that note, another (dubious?) positive of my using Beeminder briefly: Although I rigorously stuck to the "decluttering 10 items per day", I was not happy with the outcomes. It still seemed a chore. Eventually I realized that this just wasn't a great way to keep my room/house decluttered, and focused on finding other ways - and my house now has much less clutter (without using Beeminder).
The "positive" is that Beeminder helped me try an approach that I thought would work. It turned out it didn't, but I would not have realized this without the service. Had I not used Beeminder, I would have not been so religious in decluttering daily, and would blame my lack of discipline as the cause. Beeminder made me disciplined, and I then learned that discipline was not the solution to this particular problem.
Do you guys still stick to "one user-visible improvement per day"? For those who don't know, the Beeminder team themselves used it to improve Beeminder - and one of their goals was to have at least one user visible improvement per day. I think when I last checked, the cost of missing that goal was close to a $1000.
Who uses the trick to divert impulses into other ones ? your brain seems to seek stimuli.. hunger is just one source, you can clean, jog, challenge yourself somewhere else.
Few times I did that I was surprisingly effective (and the original impulse disappeared in an instant)
The article is about removing temptation being a better strategy than exercising self-control in the face of temptation (This is then "cultural/religious conservative morality" theory for protecting against immoral behavior).
Judaism calls it "building a fence around the boundary of the law".
I don’t think we’ve begun to appreciate the bottleneck that our short term memory places on our ability not just to accomplish things but to Reason.
Being preoccupied with one distraction is like having a bucket in your foot. Every additional handicap - being tired, irritable, distracted by the environment, piles on top with a multiplier. It makes us rash, or stupid, or both,
I suspect we know this subconsciously, and it’s cheaper to just entertain the preoccupation and get it out of your head.
Building up patterns, habits that keep such things off of your radar is costly in the short term but cheaper in the long term. That problem rarely ends up hanging out in working memory.
I think one barrier to applying this advice is we tend to look down upon the idea of avoiding temptation, but we praise the idea of resisting it.
Resisting temptation requires strength. So it is viewed as a virtue in and of itself. There is a heroic struggle. Avoiding temptation is sometimes seen as a sign of weakness. The implication is you're only avoiding it because you can't resist it. Almost like running away from a fight instead of facing your enemy.
Ultimately, I think it's more constructive to employ both strategies. You need to develop the ability to resist temptation because there are times when you cannot avoid it. But there is no sense in sabotaging your success by dealing with temptation when you don't need to.
It makes for a boring story when the married man decides to go home instead of hang out with the cute office girl after work, but it sure is the most effective way to resist temptation. But yes, we must also be able to resist when we find ourselves in a situation that we cannot avoid.
People absolutely praise others who never tried smoking but mostly when they have a person smoking in the family, read something about bad effect of smoking or other similar context.
The reach of culture. I hadn't thought of this, but it makes sense.
And yes once it's pointed out to you, it becomes quite obvious that actively resisting temptation is not worth the effort when you can simply avoid the conflict.
> Look on the bright side, at least it was fat-free milk.
This seems like a bad presumption. I suspect skim milk may have lead our hypothetical binger to drink more of it and eat more cookies.
Whole milk is known to be more filling. [1] And I believe it's the healthier option:
> In the past, whole milk was considered to be unhealthy because of its saturated fat content, but recent research does not support this recommendation. [2]
Speaking of a commitment device -> HN’s own noprocast feature. I’ll turn it on when I know I need to be doing something useful for an extended period of time or I just need to take a break. I can still read stories on my RSS feed and if I really want to see the comments I can open a private browsing window. But, I can’t respond.
Perhaps I'm the only one who thought the article was going to suggest eating the entire dozen cookies in one go until I'm disgusted with myself, then I'll stop.
I've found two approaches that seem to work quite well, especially when both are exercised.
1. Brainwash yourself. Taking the cookie example this would mean brainwashing yourself about the evils of sugar to the point that you really don't want the cookies anymore. This has to be consistent though, we're very good at forgetting uncomfortable things.
2. Building beneficial habits. If there's something that takes willpower to do, try building a habit of doing it. Takes around 40 days to achieve, and there are plenty of apps that can help. Once a habit is set though, the activity takes no willpower whatsoever. It's just something you do.
With regards to 2. that has never worked for me by itself, unfortunately. What I do instead is to find a way to be intrinsically motivated. For example, with exercise I notice that the gain in alertness feels like drinking coffee. So I now tell myself to drink coffee (and by that I mean exercise), that really works well in my particular case and makes me intrinsically motivated to exercise as the alertness gained by exercise is its own reward. Though, I do need the right setup for this, I'm currently house sitting and I'm not exercising because I don't have my weights. So how habit formation for me does help is that the more I practice a routine, the easier it is to execute. Which is why I'm not exercizing right now as I'd need to do body weight exercises and I'm used to weight exercises.
How do you avoid side-effects of brainwashing yourself? Like being more vulnerable to believing other things that aren’t true? Or increased tendency to see issues as black and white?
> In 2007, the American psychologist Roy Baumeister put forward what has become the most influential psychological model of self-control. His strength model likens willpower to a muscle.
Ego depletion, the premise this article is based upon, has had a lot of issues with reproducibility:
Those who are married (and want to stay that way) follow this advice. If you don't want to cheat, don't put yourself in a situation where you will encounter temptation. Temptation is best beaten by not giving it a chance to tempt you.
This kind of approach has generally worked for me but I take it a little further. I’ve gone by this adage that “a little bit each day” is better than doing a lot in a single day with a few days off. For instance with exercise (Running) instead of saying no to doing it I say ok maybe half the distance. And as a result it turns into a habit which I think is the single most important tool we have to improve ourselves. It’s kind of taking this situational approach and applying it every day. Another example from my life is soda. I read a lot about the negative effects sugar has on my body and as a result I feel guilty when I buy it, this is another way to motivate myself into a habit of “not buying soda” I started to buy less and now when it isn’t even available my laziness prevents me from leaving the house to go get it :) this is really similar to another comment that said “create systems” where the inevitable outcome is your goal, and I find parallels between this “system” idea and culture in general. Culture is what can drive large groups of people to desirable outcomes. This is as if we apply having a good “culture” within ourselves.
A thing I read a long time ago that really encapsulates this recently came up in my mind again.
If you want to get better, work on your B-game, not your A-game. The goal is not to excel even harder on days that are good. The goal is to move up the baseline performance. This will probably lift up your A-game as well. But more importantly it gives you a base to build on.
It stops me from over-reaching. It stops me from being disappointment most of the time because I don't reach my lofty goal. Instead, it gives meaningful improvement, and many small successes.
If you narrowly define willpower as impulse control the article and many comments here are spot on, but that’s not what willpower is.
Willpower is better defined as presence. More specifically it is a knowledge of self in the present. For example high willpower in the cerebellum allows awareness without a separate cognitive effort of where are your hands and feet are right now and what they are doing.
Impulse control in the cognitive sense of desire regulation suggested by the article is a limited example of cognitive self-awareness and possibly thought of as deliberation. In that sense impulse control is just one of many benefits of increased willpower.
Increased willpower has many benefits from increased motor-coordination, increased effectiveness of interpersonal engagement, career management, and even data/trend analysis. Willpower is perhaps the defining characteristic of perceived intelligence bias in the absence of a formal intelligence measure.
>Research in my own lab and others suggests that, if you want to improve your self-control, what you should do instead is focus on proactively reducing, rather than reactively overpowering temptation. Fortunately, there are several ways and opportunities to do this.
Am I the only one who has, many times, encountered people who say "I don't buy junk food because if I do I'll end up eating it?"
This is one of my gripes with psychology articles/self help books. So so many topics are simple 'revelations' that many of us have figured out by the time we are 20. Can't eat a cookie if you don't have any cookies.
I've read some good psychology books ("Thinking fast and slow" was great), but most of the others I've read I could have have read the one page summary and realized I don't need to read it.
This is definitely true of the "self help" genre. A concept that has a real kernel of wisdom and can be expressed in a few pages often gets blown out of proportion into an entire "framework".
> This is one of my gripes with psychology articles/self help books. So so many topics are simple 'revelations' that many of us have figured out by the time we are 20. Can't eat a cookie if you don't have any cookies.
I recall Scott Alexander talking about this on one of the SSC posts -- can't remember which -- about the fact that people miss developmental milestones for reasons. And you can ask the question: What developmental milestones am I missing? Or: which cognitive tools do I need for my toolbox?
It's good to teach things that "you should already know", because maybe you're one of today's lucky 10000.
Wow, great article. This completely explains why travel (not the tourist kind, the serious kind) tends to make one more tolerant: you encounter people who clearly have very different values and beliefs, but who are nevertheless amazing human beings. It’s a powerful force for developing a more complete theory of mind.
I really liked the article, but I wonder how many people can read it and think: "hmm, indeed, I don't seem to have that capacity" rather than "hmm, indeed, I've seen others not be able to do this"? I know I certainly felt more of the latter, with the possible exception of indeed sometimes still ascribing nefarious intentions rather than a different world view to people I disagree with - but even then, I only do so with the caveat of "well, at least I'm aware of and trying to combat those thoughts".
But not all. What is condescending to one is a necessary insight to another. Personally, I am very grateful to people who are willing to say obvious things.
I also occasionally re-listen to the audio of self-help books in order to remember things I learned which are simple yet hard.
I like this comment. It seems to me that we do forget some of our learnt wisdom and to be reminded of things we 'know' that we may have forgotten is a very human and therefore valuable thing. Maybe the purpose of the whole oral tradition - but I'm out of my depth here. The lyrics of a song (from the seventies?) summarize this for me - once you exclude the sentimental aspect: "I have a friend who's going blind, but he sees much better than I".
We do forget! Recently there have been too many times where I “realized” something important or profound, only to go back and see it in my writing from years ago.
So, like the sibling comment about prayers, I’m trying to build a system that collapses those insights into a small enough space that I can review them regularly. Kind of like regression tests for mind function.
Thinking Fast and Slow is actually pretty flawed as well. See https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und... and e.g. The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics paper by Gigerenzer. It turns out quite a lot of these "biases" are actually quite useful and effective in the real world.
There is a difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence. There is also the issue of what is true for an individual might not actually be true for most people.
I totally agree, but I think you should be more explicit in pointing out that this is an experimental validation of folk knowledge, which is an important step. There are plenty of instances of folk knowledge being completely wrong (at least for the mean/median/common case), despite "nearly everyone" knowing it.
There are a million "simple facts" so knowing all of them in some sense doesn't mean you are accessing the one you need when you need it.
I think this is a fairly general explanation of why smart people do dumb things.
Also of why reading self-help writing can seem like it's revealing important stuff to one person, seem obvious from a different perspective, and not really help anyway.
People can do a very wide variety of things at any given moment, but temperaments or tendencies cannot be changed so easily. Large problems come from a persistent but small or even tiny bias, such as consuming slightly more calories than you burn. A ten pound weight gain in a year is less than 5% over 2000 calories maintenance. 20 years of that and you might be close to 400 lbs. Saying "why can't that person just not eat that..." is denying the problem of balancing something over a lifetime when the homeostatic feedback mechanism people rely on is out of whack.
I don't mean to suggest that weight control is unique, lots of things in life are about the accumulated benefits or harms over time. In management of an organization, not just individual problems, too.
My problem is that my GF buys a lot of snacks and cookies and chocolates and... which completely broke my tactic of not having any snacks/sweets at home
I am not saying that this happened to me ;) But if I was facing a choice between (eventually) getting Metabolic syndrome and a having to find a new GF, I would definitely not choose to get metabolic syndrome :)
Yeah and frankly it's a bit of a red flag to me now whenever I see one partner sabotage (whether intention or not) the achievements of their significant other. That's not to say that their girlfriend is lacking moral high ground, but rather it may not be an optimal coupling. A good partner will naturally encourage you to be your best self and you will encourage them similarly.
This. The definition of a partner over time shifted from someone who does stuff with me and eats dinner with me and watches movies to someone who understands my goals and dreams and supports and pushes me to get there and vice-versa.
A locked cabinet has been working wonders for me. It's hard to restrict everyone in the house to my dietary needs, but it's also hard to live in a house where unhealthy temptation is in every corner.
Give her the key and ask her to lock all her junk food up. It works.
TBH it was a revelation to me. I did stumble upon it but somehow "be virtuous, exercise self-control" trope keeps reasserting itself. I find myself straining against something then realzing, wait, just throw this thing out and poof, done.
I have seen people shaming others for strategies like that. Usually by calling them weak and generally treating it as admission of character flaw.
Also, typical how to loose weight advice does not talk about reducing temptations ar all. Instead, it focuses on strong will and self control - blaming people for failure to follow instructions but never giving advice on how to make following easier.
So, even if some know that, a lot of people do not act on it.
The problem is that people will express classic hindsight bias no matter which way the result turns out. Let's say you're studying relationships and researching whether having similar interests is better or worse than having dissimilar interests. If you spend a million dollars on a comprehensive longitudinal study and find the former, the public will lambast you for rediscovering the obvious result that "two of a feather flock together". But if you find the latter, you'll be mocked for rediscovering the simple fact that "opposites attract".
On the topic of self-control, I'm actually surprised that the results turned out the way they did. I would have expected the opposite result; that "exercising" your discipline solves the problem once and for all, while reducing temptation is just asking for a relapse when temptation inevitably presents itself again.
This is actually brilliant in the sense that the key to resisting temptation might be to put as many potential obstacles in the way as possible.
If you can't resist purchasing junk food off the shelves, then put a limit on your credit card, or leave your credit card at home and only bring enough money to the store for essentials. And if that's not enough, then limit yourself to only shopping at health food stores where the options are less tempting, and so on.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadBuild systems into your life that lead to desired outcomes naturally. Don't put yourself into situations that are likely to lead to bad outcomes.
The easiest way to get results is to live a life that gives you the desired results by default.
This is an unfortunate statement. Ironic that Scott Adams has basically tanked his own reputation outside the alt-right through a set of poor choices recently.
Remember that this is the guy that created sockpuppet accounts on Reddit and Metafilter to pump his own image.
And his following is bigger than you might expect.
Admitting to something when there's prevailing evidence against you isn't nuts either.
Almost all HNers have no clue what it's like to have people coming together in great numbers to talk bad about you (to say nothing of whether you "deserve" it).
The guy can't even get away with marrying a younger consenting adult woman without being burned at the stake.
Sockpuppet accounts for trolling used to be common on several niche forums on the internet (which is how this practice got a name), especially this many years ago. I could certainly see how someone could be confused about how sockpuppeting was or was not acceptable behavior on a specific forum. He might have thought (but I’m speculating here) that he was engaging with (i.e. trolling) the forum within the (semi-)established norm of behavior for that forum.
Is that all the rope with which you would have him hanged? That stump is so short that you couldn’t even tie a knot with it.
If Adams only had kept his observations about Trump to himself, none of this would be an issue. But no, now everybody’s gotta find those crucial six lines somewhere in all the things he’s ever written, and whenever someone mentions anything he’s ever said, especially if it’s not about Trump or about politics in any way, it must be overwhelmed with random lists of accusations, all of which are false, misleading, or ancient and irrelevant, or all three. Merely to thoroughly discredit anyone even remotely associated with Trump.
If you want to see what someone who is credibly trying to predict events look at the work of Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb. When you obsess over one prediction by person most known for comedy and questionable personal statements, it's neither difficult nor inappropriate to put them in the clown category.
If Adams himself wants to build his reputation as a prognosticator, he can easily create a publicly-verifiable record of them and any questions of his ability will answer itself in short order. That he has not (to the best of my knowledge) done so makes him look like a huckster.
It's the fact that he has spent 30 years writing Dilbert, which means he has followed the pulse of general office-culture, coupled with the fact that he is a train hypnotist, so he knows how people think.
Basically, he will often give an interesting take on some current event that gives you a perspective on the situation that you hadn't considered.
Like NN Taleb and Nate Silver, once you've groked their general schtick (long tails, Bayesian probability) there isn't a whole lot new they have to offer. It's worth checking back in on them from time to time, but you're unlikely to be blown away by anything you see.
Mike Cernovich is a lot more interesting to follow on Twitter than Scott Adams. Adams is basically a pundit at this point. Cernovich is more of a journalist, so he follows and retweets breaking news that you're likely to hear about in the upcoming news cycles.
The thing I like to keep in mind is that its important to follow people you don't always agree with, because otherwise you are missing out on a lot of perspectives and don't have as good a view of the current political landscape.
To paraphrase something Scott Adams said about Mike Cernovich, another "alt-right lunatic":
"You might not like his style, but he sure is right a lot"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
I don't agree with everything I hear on NPR. I don't agree with everything I hear in the alt-right twittersphere.
But the two do seem to pair nicely in terms of getting a feel of the current national pulse.
[outside the alt-right]
[Remember that this is the guy] etc.
People really need to start considering alternative view points. Like perhaps maybe he is right on a number of topics.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/10/18/presidential-...
2. Silver also noted that such a probability was too high considering the margin for error in polls, calling into question his model: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/06/nate_silv...
3. https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/08/13/clown-genius/
If the standard is 100% accuracy on all predictions. Well that is problematic.
Even still. He predicted a trump victory and riots. Took awhile, but the core was correct. Lot of rioting going on now.
Actually if you go look at the NYT polls, Trump had a monumental surge in the later half of October that caused the result to look much closer. Probably no small part of this was the additional FBI investigation into Clinton's emails, which was announced Oct 28 (10 days after the NYT article you posted).
If you go look at the polls from right before the actual election it looks significantly closer:
NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/polls....
538: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
It's not completely unthinkable for a 20-30% probability event to occur. Further, it is quite a rare occurrence for a candidate to win the election without winning the popular vote: This was only the fifth time in American history it's happened.
Why? They responded to evolving evidence and sentiment (specifically, the FBI announcement on the 28th). 538 gave Trump a 30% chance to win on election day. 30% isn't a super unlikely event. People regularly take a chance on events with much less likely outcomes.
Here's an analogy: Harvard has a 4.5% acceptance rate. If a mediocre student tells me in June that they're going to apply in September, my prediction is going to be that they will not be accepted. If in August they tell me they've randomly received a letter of recommendation from a US senator after saving them in a car accident, I'm going to change my opinion from "very unlikely to be accepted" to "moderately unlikely to be accepted."
That doesn't mean I was stupid or delusional to think in June that they were very unlikely to be accepted, and that still doesn't mean I'm delusional to think they will still likely be rejected (the mainstream media polls). That also doesn't mean that the person who told the mediocre student in June that they were a shoe-in for Harvard was prophetic by any means (Scott Adams).
> The dude is batty in some ways, but he clearly saw something that most of us didn't.
Ehh, or he just got a lucky guess? A broken clock, etc. etc.?
For an analogous situation, this happens in sports media all the time: Some sports entertainment personality will make a "hot take" that's really just a contrarian opinion based on little evidence. If they're wrong, no one cares. If they're right, they look like a prophetic genius. Either way, they win because they get attention for making a bold prediction.
Whether you want to call it confirmation bias/selection bias/whatever, I implore you to think about all the times Scott Adams has been incredibly wrong and whether you think he actually has some unusual insight or whether he just made a lucky guess based on his personal biases.
It's extremely likely that if the election had been held October 27th, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Think about that for a second.
Your reference is saying the exact opposite. Nate criticized polls saying she had a 98-99% chance of winning. It's clear even from the title!
Before he pegged my personal BS meter and I just started ignoring anything from him that I happened across, I noticed that Adams seemd fond of a lot of "cold-reader" type tricks: vagueness that can be turned into specifics after the fact, ignoring their own failures while hyping their successes, that kind of thing.
If you want to see what actual serious prediction attempts look like, search for Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb.
They've both had their moments where they got a bit too full of themselves as well. Taleb in particular.
I checked back recently and it seems they've both come back down out of the clouds, but I don't hold either of them in as high of regard as I did a few years ago.
You can claim/believe that without being a racist.
It's enough that those calling the shots (which show to pull) are racist or too pre-occupied about race...
I don't remember that. Could you link some supporting evidence to remind me?
(Link courtesy of Pxtl¹)
This was nine years ago, though. If he hasn’t done anything comparable since, I think he ought to get some slack by now.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667728
Or in other words, stated opinions that disagree with yours / polite Californian dinner talk.
> The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. [1]
Yes, very California bubble to think that women are equal and not like children or mentally handicapped
[1] https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adam-sexist-mens-rights/
https://www.scottadamssays.com/2011/03/27/im-a-what/
> But perhaps I can summarize my viewpoint so you can understand why I’m such a misogynist asshole douche bag. Here’s my view in brief:
> You can’t expect to have a rational discussion on any topic that has an emotional charge. Emotion pushes out reason. That is true for all humans, including children, men, women, and people in every range of mental ability. The path of least resistance is to walk away from that sort of fight. Men generally prefer the path of least resistance. The exception is when men irrationally debate with other men. That’s a type of sport. No one expects opinions to be changed as a result.
> First, some background. A few weeks ago I asked readers of this blog to suggest a topic they would like to see me write about. The topic that got the most up votes, by a landslide, was something called Men’s Rights. Obviously the fix was in. Activists had mobilized their minions to trick me into giving their cause some free publicity. In retrospect, the Men’s Rights activists probably should have done some homework on me before hatching this scheme.
> As you can see, I thought it would be funny to embrace the Men’s Rights viewpoint in the beginning of the piece and get those guys all lathered up before dismissing their entire membership as a “bunch of pussies.”
The latter insults "bunch of pussies" does not cancel the beginning. It does not correct what you wrote about women either. It just makes women collateral damage in you strughle for dominance against MRA.
You mean, if you take a piece of it out of context, and remove the text following it, it can serve to mean something completely different than what was intended? My point exactly.
Also, from the same original text, Adams writes:
> I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group.
So he’s explicitly and clearly saying that he’s not saying that women are “like children or mentally handicapped”, just so that nobody gets him wrong. But then, of course, everybody takes the first quote, cuts it out of context, removes the clarification, and parades it around the internet like a hideous rallying flag.
> As you can see, I thought it would be funny to embrace the Men’s Rights viewpoint in the beginning of the piece and get those guys all lathered up before dismissing their entire membership as a “bunch of pussies.”
He doesn't say that women are not equal. If you read the particular article the line is from, he makes a totally unrelated argument in that line and in that comparison: that men don't attempt to argue with women because they're emotional/unreasonable in arguments.
And to translate casual talk for those that have to read everything literally, he means that some men, some of the time, don't attempt to argue with women because some women are emotional/unreasonable in some arguments. (That is, a seemingly absolute statement in a casual phrasing - not e.g. in some logical notation - doesn't translate to "absolute everybody/all the time/100%", but usually to some or at worse, most).
Care to give a link? Last time someone actually came through with links to their allegations about Scott Adams, all of them were false, misleading, taken out of context, etc., except one: the old sockpuppet incident from nine years ago.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/12774119444...
https://twitter.com/scottadamssays/status/127830983545328435...
While he may have good points in some cases, his thinking is compromised and you cannot discount that. I don't think this discussion will be productive beyond this point and wish you well.
I mean, you keep pointing to these tweets and not saying what’s wrong with them, as if it should be completely obvious to everyone. Hint: It’s not. It’s probably only obvious if you’re already predisposed to interpret everything he writes in the worst possible way. Then I’m sure it’s obvious. But it’s not obvious to me, for example.
If you had ever explained exactly what you thought was wrong with them, anyone here could have argued with your interpretation, and possibly put forward an alternative, more reasonable, interpretation. You would most certainly not have agreed, but at least the argument would have been made in the open, and every reader could then decide for themselves. But as it is, since you don’t actually make an argument, only vague allusions, anyone objecting to your characterizations would have to guess what you meant, and then argue with this made-up opinion. However, this would be bad form, and you could then always claim not to have that exact opinion and cause any argument made to be irrelevant.
Therefore, please, tell us what’s wrong, don’t just say “look, look, bad thing here: <link>”. That’s not an argument. Don’t do that. Make your case explicitly.
In closing, what is and is not on topic might be a matter of opinion, but I don’t appreciate being accused of dishonesty. If you don’t think that I am arguing in earnest, then I agree that not much productive debate can be had between us.
There are certain threads / topics that seem to really hit a nerve though. Perhaps it's on me for sometimes poking the bear when I shouldn't.
I have had comments with a literal 30 point swing that oscillated back and forth a couple times from negative (capped at -4, a great thing for people to know since I think it makes people bolder in what they're willing to say) to around 30 points, then back to zero, and finally settling at like +3.
Those comments weren't "flame bait" (which I have been guilty of on a couple occasions), but simply solid points with a conservative tilt to the them that really just drive a certain group of people nuts.
I agree that we should all strive for "facts over allegiance", I think that's a great way of phrasing it.
1. He's one of those people that thinks Trump is playing 4D chess.
2. He 'successfully' predicted Trump would win the election, and has subsequently fooled himself into thinking he has some special insight into social dynamics and interpreting Trump's 4D chess that allows him to continue making accurate predictions. I'm sure the more predictions he makes, the closer he'll get to a 50% success rate (binomial theorem) - as do most 'expert' political prognosticators who aren't using statistical models but going off their intuition. I wonder if he'll figure out what's happening.
When I read his writings, I just see an incredibly naive approach to prediction, ignorant of probability, that is primarily informed by the fact that he's a Republican who therefore is biased towards favorably interpreting Republican odds.
That is maybe nothing special, but I never heard of her, and she was a garbage fire when she campaigned here in Iowa. So I thought that was noteworthy.
I mean, there's a long list of people who said things people find offensive: Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, Barack Obama, William Shockley, Freeman Dyson, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. It takes fairly little maturity to not let that take away from the insightful comments they have made.
In particular, the offensive things Stallman said or did are absolutely relevant when he would spew quotes about relationships or people.
It is different when he talks about philosophy of open source. But on those particular topics, he is not being insightful as he is dumb as brick o that topic.
Excerpt (quoting Adams):
If you do something every day, it's a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. […] Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good everytime they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
Also related: SMART goals.
https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/
Alternatively, as a ~5-minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcKTYvupJw
Thing is it's hard to create that context. Maybe copying good ideas or joining forces..
There are the kids who immediately eat the marshmallow. And then there are those who try not to eat it and fail. The latter is relevant. The former is not.
Recall the experiment: kids who resisted gobbling the marshmallow in order to earn 2 marshmallows went on to be awesomer adults. The original explanation is that kids with the ability to delay gratification (or who come up with beeminder-y tricks to distract themselves from the tempting marshmallow) will be served well by that skill the rest of their lives.
But another explanation – https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121011090655.h... – is that those seemingly impulsive kids are just the kids who don’t trust the adults who promise the 2nd marshmallow. They’re like “yeah, I’ve heard that before” and gobble while the gobbling’s good. In other words, they’re not failing to delay gratification, they’re responding to the situation perfectly rationally based on their past interactions with adults. To put it overly dramatically: flaking out on your kids ruins their lives!
(I’m not sure how much credence to give that interpretation, and suspect that there’s truth in the original interpretation too. But it kind of feels right to me. Flaking out on anyone is really bad. But kids especially.)
PS: More recent partial replication of the Marshmallow Test: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618761661
Excerpt:
Here’s what I mean when I say there’s no such thing as willpower, despite having just defined it. Paraphrasing Laplace, I can explain all behavior simply in terms of responding to incentives. You want this whole pie in your body right now, and also you want to be two sizes smaller by next summer. Conflicting preferences are normally no big deal. You just, y’know, weigh them, make your tradeoffs, and reach a decision. But when the preferences apply at different timescales (pie now, thinner later) humans suffer from a massive irrationality which philosophers call akrasia and economists call dynamic inconsistency and normal people call … being stupidly short-sighted, or in the case of time management: procrastination.
Commitment devices are a way to change your own incentives so that willpower is a non-issue. They make your short-term and long-term incentives line up. There are many less drastic things you can do as well.
PS: Also the whole "willpower is like a muscle" theory, known as Ego Depletion, failed to replicate.
A simpler way to get the same result is to make the future present by surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals.
I think mostly there's plenty of short-term cost to derailing a Beeminder goal and getting the alert "we are now charging you $X". Not as good as handing over cash but still pretty good!
I definitely disagree that surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals is comparable. I mean, it can't hurt and maybe for some people it's enough, but for me personally, for example, things like that just fade into the background for me and lose their effectiveness. A commitment device (monetary or otherwise) doesn't let that happen!
But as I said to Maneesh above, I think anti-charities are anti-good. https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/
when I made my bets to places I don’t approve of—-well I would never lose a bet where I had money to the KKK on the line, I’ll tell you that
PS: As you know I'm a huge fan of Pavlok -- https://pavlok.com/ -- and definitely don't think that my arguments against anti-charities apply to it even though they're both very punishment focused. Pavlok (obviously I'm saying this for others, not Maneesh, founder of Pavlok!) is more about classical conditioning while Beeminder is more operant conditioning.
We get that a lot ("where does the money go? wait, you do _what_ with it??") but I'm surprised to hear that pushback on Hacker News. Is the existence of Beeminder not "something positive"?
More at https://blog.beeminder.com/defail/
Also when we / Beeminder derail on our own goals we pay our users.
Not sure if either of those things make it feel ok. I guess we're keen for you to feel like we're any other SaaS that you're happy to pay for. Beeminder makes you awesomer and you pay for that, just at random times, or when you most need a kick in the pants, instead of a fixed monthly amount (though that too if you want a premium plan). If Beeminder isn't worth it overall then you'll stop using it; it's not really the perverse "make money when your users fail" that it seems prima facie. There's a myopic sense in which that's true but overall it's quite the opposite! As must be the case for us to have stuck around for 9 years.
Ideally you want something the person doesn't like to happen, that way you feel like you're doing real good (preventing harm) by accomplishing your goal. Like an alarm clock I saw once that donates a dollar to a political party you hate every time you hit the snooze button.
You actually /can't/ just weigh the tradeoffs of being disctracted and reach a decision of not being distracted.
No -- it's meaningfully and sustainably easier to make good decisions when bad options are removed from the table (sometimes literally.)
A commitment device provides an incentive, including the incentive to eliminate distractions by going somewhere quiet or whatever else you need to do to follow through on what you've committed to.
Isn't this more like a fight between instinct and rationality?
Wanting the pie is rarely a rational decision, while on the other hand wanting to be healthy so you can live longer is absolutely rational.
Hence willpower is one's ability to rationally control their own anamalistic instincts and emotions.
But those are the exceptions. Mostly it's the other way around, as you say. People undermine their own long-term interests with procrastination or impetuousness.
Sure wanting to eat the whole pie might be irrational, but that's seldom the way people think about it. I can't eat a whole pie at once, but I can definitely eat the bite on my fork, add one more slice to my plate, etc.
This mistakes thinking long-term vs thinking marginally, which is the larger point being made.
I could certainly be convinced otherwise but it’s interesting to think about.
If you do it out of instinct and immediately think "oh yeah, forgot I only need to look one way" then it wasn't logical.
But if you know it's one way, yet think "I've witnessed bikes and even cars going the wrong way before, better check both directions" that seems like it could be a perfectly logical action.
A reason alone doesn't make something rational. A paranoid thought that aliens are trying to abduct you may be backed up by the reason "because secret weather balloons are tacking me". It's a reason. It's not a rational one. Having a reason is not synonymous with being rational.
is not necessarily
> wanting to be healthy so you can live longer
the behavior necessary to lose the weight would have positive results toward a goal that IS rational, but the impulse that actually spurs the behavior necessary to be two sizes smaller by next summer could just as easily be "i want to wear this dress to my sister's wedding next summer and they don't make it in my size."
Though your argument would honestly just move one dimension up since it takes a certain motivation and condition to go and seek that kind of discipline training.
The ultimate end of the Buddhist meditations is to let go so you’re right but in the beginning there’s a sort of healthy shedding of dealing with delusions and ideas that create Desirees and ice that do not service which is a bit behind incentive incentive itself becomes being free of those desires, A sort of seeking liberation.
what has worked for me is thinking in terms of positive choices, rather than goals or restrictions.
It’s not “I am not going to eat that cookie”
Rather it’s
“I am choosing to lead a healthier life..”
As for the underlying neurobiology, I think [0] is a decent study for identifying the relevant regions involved in procrastination in particular, and [1] is a good review about PFC plasticity. Of course that individually doesn't indicate a higher level effect, but dismissing it altogether in the same breath as ego depletion also doesn't seem right.
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33203
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.06.028
I used it some years ago. You have to figure out how to use it and for what things it will work for you. As an example, for me having any daily task tracked with Beeminder was a huge hassle. I don't want to have to open an app and update several items I'm tracking every day. Others are fine with this. For me, goals with a longer cadence ("once a week") work better on Beeminder.
Also, initially you'll not know what you really want to track in Beeminder and what you don't. I did find myself cheating on occasion. If that happens to you, consider whether you should even be tracking this at all via Beeminder.
Beeminder can give you a bit of hyperfocus. That task that will cause you to lose money today if you don't do it? Becomes top priority for you that day. I found the items I was Beeminding were getting done, but perhaps other more important items I was not putting into Beeminder weren't. In a sense, after a few months of use, you could say that Beeminder will give you an idea on the importance (or lack of) of the things you are Beeminding.
For these reasons, I did stop using it. I'll probably return to it one day when I figure out my priorities. I heartily recommend it to others, though.
As for the friction of adding data, we have smartphone apps and an email and SMS bot to try to help with that. But ideally you automate it. There are dozens of apps and gadgets we integrate with (RescueTime, Fitbit, Trello, Garmin, GitHub, etc etc) and we have an API, or you can make an IFTTT or Zapier recipe/applet/zap/whatever.
Oh yeah, and I should point out https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating
Finally, good point about being careful what you beemind. We try to minimize the danger of that with our one-week "akrasia horizon". You're never on the hook for more a week into the future, i.e., you can stop or change a goal at any time, with a one-week delay. So you haven't lost much if you realize you're beeminding the wrong things.
Or if it's just that more important things are getting crowded out, our self-serving advice is to just beemind those things as well!
Thanks again for this comment!
In my case, though, these were not automatable. As an example, I would have a Beeminder for decluttering 10 items in the house per day. Nothing can detect I've done it. I still have to somehow enter this daily.
On that note, another (dubious?) positive of my using Beeminder briefly: Although I rigorously stuck to the "decluttering 10 items per day", I was not happy with the outcomes. It still seemed a chore. Eventually I realized that this just wasn't a great way to keep my room/house decluttered, and focused on finding other ways - and my house now has much less clutter (without using Beeminder).
The "positive" is that Beeminder helped me try an approach that I thought would work. It turned out it didn't, but I would not have realized this without the service. Had I not used Beeminder, I would have not been so religious in decluttering daily, and would blame my lack of discipline as the cause. Beeminder made me disciplined, and I then learned that discipline was not the solution to this particular problem.
Do you guys still stick to "one user-visible improvement per day"? For those who don't know, the Beeminder team themselves used it to improve Beeminder - and one of their goals was to have at least one user visible improvement per day. I think when I last checked, the cost of missing that goal was close to a $1000.
We do! http://beeminder.com/changelog -- 3485 UVIs and counting...
Frankly, the whole edifice of psych research is built on top of a statistical lie that only 1 in 20 experiments will fail to replicate, when it's more like 1 in 3: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/08/27/this-is-what-happened-w...
Few times I did that I was surprisingly effective (and the original impulse disappeared in an instant)
The article is about removing temptation being a better strategy than exercising self-control in the face of temptation (This is then "cultural/religious conservative morality" theory for protecting against immoral behavior).
Judaism calls it "building a fence around the boundary of the law".
Being preoccupied with one distraction is like having a bucket in your foot. Every additional handicap - being tired, irritable, distracted by the environment, piles on top with a multiplier. It makes us rash, or stupid, or both,
I suspect we know this subconsciously, and it’s cheaper to just entertain the preoccupation and get it out of your head.
Building up patterns, habits that keep such things off of your radar is costly in the short term but cheaper in the long term. That problem rarely ends up hanging out in working memory.
Resisting temptation requires strength. So it is viewed as a virtue in and of itself. There is a heroic struggle. Avoiding temptation is sometimes seen as a sign of weakness. The implication is you're only avoiding it because you can't resist it. Almost like running away from a fight instead of facing your enemy.
Ultimately, I think it's more constructive to employ both strategies. You need to develop the ability to resist temptation because there are times when you cannot avoid it. But there is no sense in sabotaging your success by dealing with temptation when you don't need to.
I wonder if it will ever change.
And yes once it's pointed out to you, it becomes quite obvious that actively resisting temptation is not worth the effort when you can simply avoid the conflict.
This seems like a bad presumption. I suspect skim milk may have lead our hypothetical binger to drink more of it and eat more cookies.
Whole milk is known to be more filling. [1] And I believe it's the healthier option:
> In the past, whole milk was considered to be unhealthy because of its saturated fat content, but recent research does not support this recommendation. [2]
[1] https://www.eatthis.com/skim-milk-vs-whole-milk/
[2] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/whole-vs-skim-milk#sect...
1. Brainwash yourself. Taking the cookie example this would mean brainwashing yourself about the evils of sugar to the point that you really don't want the cookies anymore. This has to be consistent though, we're very good at forgetting uncomfortable things.
2. Building beneficial habits. If there's something that takes willpower to do, try building a habit of doing it. Takes around 40 days to achieve, and there are plenty of apps that can help. Once a habit is set though, the activity takes no willpower whatsoever. It's just something you do.
With regards to 2. that has never worked for me by itself, unfortunately. What I do instead is to find a way to be intrinsically motivated. For example, with exercise I notice that the gain in alertness feels like drinking coffee. So I now tell myself to drink coffee (and by that I mean exercise), that really works well in my particular case and makes me intrinsically motivated to exercise as the alertness gained by exercise is its own reward. Though, I do need the right setup for this, I'm currently house sitting and I'm not exercising because I don't have my weights. So how habit formation for me does help is that the more I practice a routine, the easier it is to execute. Which is why I'm not exercizing right now as I'd need to do body weight exercises and I'm used to weight exercises.
Ego depletion, the premise this article is based upon, has had a lot of issues with reproducibility:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...
If you want to get better, work on your B-game, not your A-game. The goal is not to excel even harder on days that are good. The goal is to move up the baseline performance. This will probably lift up your A-game as well. But more importantly it gives you a base to build on.
It stops me from over-reaching. It stops me from being disappointment most of the time because I don't reach my lofty goal. Instead, it gives meaningful improvement, and many small successes.
Willpower is better defined as presence. More specifically it is a knowledge of self in the present. For example high willpower in the cerebellum allows awareness without a separate cognitive effort of where are your hands and feet are right now and what they are doing.
Impulse control in the cognitive sense of desire regulation suggested by the article is a limited example of cognitive self-awareness and possibly thought of as deliberation. In that sense impulse control is just one of many benefits of increased willpower.
Increased willpower has many benefits from increased motor-coordination, increased effectiveness of interpersonal engagement, career management, and even data/trend analysis. Willpower is perhaps the defining characteristic of perceived intelligence bias in the absence of a formal intelligence measure.
See volition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volition_(psychology)
- Asanga, from Abhidharmasamuccaya
Am I the only one who has, many times, encountered people who say "I don't buy junk food because if I do I'll end up eating it?"
This is one of my gripes with psychology articles/self help books. So so many topics are simple 'revelations' that many of us have figured out by the time we are 20. Can't eat a cookie if you don't have any cookies.
I've read some good psychology books ("Thinking fast and slow" was great), but most of the others I've read I could have have read the one page summary and realized I don't need to read it.
I recall Scott Alexander talking about this on one of the SSC posts -- can't remember which -- about the fact that people miss developmental milestones for reasons. And you can ask the question: What developmental milestones am I missing? Or: which cognitive tools do I need for my toolbox?
It's good to teach things that "you should already know", because maybe you're one of today's lucky 10000.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-mil...
https://xkcd.com/1053/
But not all. What is condescending to one is a necessary insight to another. Personally, I am very grateful to people who are willing to say obvious things.
I also occasionally re-listen to the audio of self-help books in order to remember things I learned which are simple yet hard.
> Maybe the purpose of the whole oral tradition
A poem is a text which has been hand-optimized to fit in human memory.
So, like the sibling comment about prayers, I’m trying to build a system that collapses those insights into a small enough space that I can review them regularly. Kind of like regression tests for mind function.
[1] https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/RBE-0092
I think this is a fairly general explanation of why smart people do dumb things.
Also of why reading self-help writing can seem like it's revealing important stuff to one person, seem obvious from a different perspective, and not really help anyway.
People can do a very wide variety of things at any given moment, but temperaments or tendencies cannot be changed so easily. Large problems come from a persistent but small or even tiny bias, such as consuming slightly more calories than you burn. A ten pound weight gain in a year is less than 5% over 2000 calories maintenance. 20 years of that and you might be close to 400 lbs. Saying "why can't that person just not eat that..." is denying the problem of balancing something over a lifetime when the homeostatic feedback mechanism people rely on is out of whack.
I don't mean to suggest that weight control is unique, lots of things in life are about the accumulated benefits or harms over time. In management of an organization, not just individual problems, too.
Life is too short.
Give her the key and ask her to lock all her junk food up. It works.
TBH it was a revelation to me. I did stumble upon it but somehow "be virtuous, exercise self-control" trope keeps reasserting itself. I find myself straining against something then realzing, wait, just throw this thing out and poof, done.
Also, typical how to loose weight advice does not talk about reducing temptations ar all. Instead, it focuses on strong will and self control - blaming people for failure to follow instructions but never giving advice on how to make following easier.
So, even if some know that, a lot of people do not act on it.
On the topic of self-control, I'm actually surprised that the results turned out the way they did. I would have expected the opposite result; that "exercising" your discipline solves the problem once and for all, while reducing temptation is just asking for a relapse when temptation inevitably presents itself again.
If you can't resist purchasing junk food off the shelves, then put a limit on your credit card, or leave your credit card at home and only bring enough money to the store for essentials. And if that's not enough, then limit yourself to only shopping at health food stores where the options are less tempting, and so on.