

There are no good habits. - sahillavingia
http://sahillavingia.com/blog/2010/11/25/there-are-no-good-habits/

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rcfox
Does anyone actually do things for the sake of having always done them?

Brushing my teeth is annoying. I would gladly stop doing it if there were no
consequences. Tooth brushing is actually a terrible example of choosing the
action with the highest utility because there is no such thing as brushing to
gain. You're only preventing a loss.

Compare this to running. If you never run, you will slowly lose your capacity
to run. So running sometimes prevents the loss. But if you run beyond that
you, you actually gain capacity to run. (Asymptotically, of course.) It's hard
to empirically place the baseline for running capacity, but it should be
obvious from watching Olympic sprinters and old, fat people that there is
positive and negative swing to it.

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vacri
Meh. Not surprising he's a freshman.

"It's not a habit, I just do it all the time because it's healthy/good for
me". The arrogance of this is astounding. Does he truly consciously think
about everything he does before he performs the task? The overhead is
mindboggling.

When he puts his shoes on in the morning, does he consciously think about the
comfort difference between putting the right shoe on the right foot versus
swapping them?

At some point, you have to 'automate' what you do, it is no longer conscious.
At this point, it is a 'habit', no matter how much you want to pretend
otherwise.

