A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “willpower”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott argues that taking the Giving What We Can Pledge to donate a fixed percentage of income is the single most impactful decision most people can make, eliminating donation stress while maximizing charitable impact.
Scott Alexander explores parallels between human willpower and potential AI development, suggesting future AIs might experience weakness of will similar to humans.
Scott Alexander proposes a Bayesian theory of willpower as a process of weighing evidence from different mental processes to determine actions.
Scott Alexander explores the motivational system as described in 'The Hungry Brain', connecting it to dopamine, willpower, and predictive processing theory.
Scott Alexander shares intriguing excerpts from 'Willpower', a book on self-control, while cautioning readers about the claims' reliability and expressing skepticism about some assertions.
Scott Alexander reviews 'Willpower' by Baumeister and Tierney, finding it disappointing for its pop science approach and failure to address controversies in willpower research.
Scott Alexander examines different theories of weight gain, focusing on the roles of metabolism and appetite/exercise drive, and concludes that individual metabolic differences likely play a significant role in weight management.
Scott Alexander compares his inability to allocate time for work tasks despite blogging regularly to heroin addicts' inability to allocate money for medication despite buying drugs.
Scott presents a framework of 'liking,' 'wanting,' and 'approving' to explain behavior, then shows how people use low-effort approving-influenced actions (like making public commitments) to influence harder behaviors through strategic self-manipulation.
Scott explains how the brain presents socially acceptable desires as genuine values (ego syntonic) and unacceptable ones as external compulsions (ego dystonic) to improve social signaling, with willpower representing the balance between these forces.
Scott tests picoeconomics theory by creating a formal written oath to study two hours daily, which successfully works by creating the same psychological pressure as serious deadlines, and he provides practical advice for others to try this technique.
Scott argues that "extreme rationality" (x-rationality) - the formal study of rationality beyond normal intelligent thinking - provides much less practical benefit than the rationalist community believes, estimating a correlation of only 0.1 with success.