
Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources (2013) - vharish
http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/7/24/your-app-makes-me-fat
======
mrob
"Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources."

This is the Ego Depletion hypothesis. When the article was written in 2013 it
seemed very likely to be true. In 2016 we're now aware of serious problems in
many psychology studies, and while it's not definitely proven false, it's
failed to replicate in enough studies that there's major doubt about it being
a real effect.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_controversy_and_conflicting_meta_analyses)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis)

~~~
DiabloD3
The problem with saying ego depletion isn't a thing may still be false.

I personally have a limited amount of "give a fuck". If I run out of fucks to
give, well, that's the end of the story. I know exactly how many fucks I can
give per day, and I suspect all of this is what they call ego depletion.

So, claiming it doesn't exist simply doesn't align with my own personal
experience. Most likely, it is more subtle than current scientific testing can
account for.

~~~
ajcarpy2005
Will-power is essentially an Interplay between multiple models. If you view
days as test-runs for programs you have optionally installed in your system,
the energetic focalizers are creating energetic "gravity-tag games" out of
synergystic signal processing. Let's say you have a process already needing to
be in motion and then you attach a carrier wave on top of that...it could be
considered a supplemental annex which creates an alternative nexus point for
another energy loop or process table.

Anyway, move marginally beyond the words I'm using and imagine it more as an
attractor where you go down a river on a riverboat and while casting nets also
change your duck call to another one which still attracs ducks but also
happens to attract alligators. Taking advantage of overlapping scenarios to
create a change in what the existing momentum is applied to is the real trick
of conscious agents.

~~~
moultano
I seriously can't tell if this is a parody post or not. It seems like there's
a consistent idea under all of that, but it's such a jumble of metaphors that
I can't figure out a single sentence.

~~~
visarga
It's generated by a LSTM.

------
throwanem
It's true that ego depletion has a question mark over it these days.

It's also true that Sierra's conclusion has value:

> ...I've created interactive marketing games, gamified sites (before it was
> called that), and dozens of other projects carefully, artfully,
> scientifically designed to slurp (gulp) cognitive resources for... very
> little that was "worth it". Did people willingly choose to engage with them?
> Of course. And by "of course" I mean, not really, no. Not according to
> psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics research of the past 50
> years. They were nudged/seduced/tricked. And I was pretty good at it. I am
> so very, very sorry.

> My goal for Serious Pony is to help all of us take better care of our users.
> Not just while they are interacting with our app, site, product, but after.
> Not just because they are our users, but because they are people.

...nah, it'll never catch on. Where's the value prop here?

~~~
sitkack
I can't use Adobe products for any serious amount of time, they induce rage
followed by narcolepsy. I give the theory some credence, but I wouldn't call
it "ego depletion". The mechanism I think consumes glucose in the brain 'the
fucks' and once exhausted can't be replenished without rest.

~~~
nnq
Ha! Same for me. Even hated the news of them buying Fireworks... good insight
as they eventually killed it.

But once you _learn the keyboard shortcuts_ and start to think in terms of _"
what group of things would I want to manipulate / apply the same effect /
transformation, to all at the same time"_ instead of "how things make logical
sense to be grouped together", and also _" what tasks are more common for
real-life professionals using this program"_ instead of "where would that
option make sense to be based on what it actually does".

There are 2 UX/I games to play: (1) improve the UXI for current professional
users that you know will pay for your product, and rely on professional
network effects for growth, and (2) improve the UXI for new users, optimizing
for adoptions, but accept that lots of the new users will never be
"professional" users, will never pay a lot of money for it, and some of their
feature requests will be expensive to develop but will result in no increased
profit.

Hint: Adobe is obviously playing game #1 and they are also slaves to their
past mistakes, and on top of that their current user base includes a huge
number of "artsy, not so logical, and profoundly change-averse" users. Hence
all their products can only induce rage and/or mind-numbness in people like us
:)

~~~
sitkack
There are two horrible flaws with Adobe products

1) the undo buffer only undoes actions against the media. The application UI
has just as much or more state in it. I need undo to also work against
settings and UI placement.

2) they expose way too much. The feature set that is visible isn't tuned to
the needs of most users. Almost everyone needs to constantly dig through
menus. The UI should be task specific and configurable on a per project basis.

------
vinceguidry
I started a new job a few months ago. For the first month or so I was coming
home really tired. I needed a half-hour or so nap before I could leave my
house after I got home. I eventually worked out that I was stressing myself
out.

So I started going into work with the express purpose of _caring less_. If I
couldn't do a thing, I would give myself permission to relax, take a break, or
ask for help.

The problem was instantly solved. Like, a total night and day difference in
how I felt after work. I got better at getting things done, too.

~~~
zeta0134
This is part of why I'm so annoyed by the push for metrics at my service
oriented company. Fortunately our company culture is such that my managers
understand (and encourage) the need for frequent breaks and lightheartedness.
If I had to just focus on the task at hand 100% of my day, I'd burn out within
a few weeks.

The relaxed attitude also helps me get a sense for how urgent a particular day
actually is. There's 150 tasks in the queue? Ehh, I probably shouldn't have
YouTube going today, but I don't need to panic. Oh, now there's 1,500 tasks in
the queue? Suddenly we had an emergency; sit up straight, focus, and figure
out what needs to be done _right now._

And you know? That's awesome. The 100% focus time can come and go in bursts;
I've had to work entire days in focus time when we were having a really tough
time about things, but then we get the problem solved, everyone breathes a
sigh of relief, and we can all step back a bit and reorganize, and think about
how better to handle that situation, and what we can do to avoid it. We aren't
ever drowned out by a constantly busy schedule.

~~~
rdtsc
> I'm so annoyed by the push for metrics at my service oriented company.

I saw it here on HN, from someone else and I remembered these quotes:

1) Just because it can be turned into a number, doesn't it mean that it should
be.

2) Just because something has already been turned into o a number it doesn't
mean it is important.

Usually managers will want to turn everything into a number. Number of tickets
closed per iteration cycles, numbe of issues opened, number of lines written,
number of comments per number of lines and so on.

Because they think those give them a deep insight into the team dynamics, and
it makes their job more justifiable because they can use those "statistics"
and present them to their manager instead of say wave their hands and say "yap
it's fine, we shipped this feature, found some bugs, fixed them".

~~~
mikekchar
I have a very controversial opinion on this subject. Do not measure anything
unless you know exactly what you are going to do with the measurement. To be
fair to me, I stole this opinion from Tom DeMarco's books, but I'm often
surprised at the kind of negative reaction I get when I bring it up.

Measuring things has a kind of Heisenberg principle. It is almost impossible
to measure something without affecting how people operate on the thing your
are measuring. So while you may get some benefit from your measurement, you
are throwing something else completely out of control.

Just the act of measuring something can freak people out. Sometimes measuring
something will cause people to unintentionally game the measurement. Sometimes
the mechanics of measuring interfere with the operation that you are
measuring. Sometimes your measurements are used to justify actions that are
completely unjustified.

You must measure to control something, but you must measure the absolute
minimum that you need to control it. If you find a way to control something
with less measurement, you should usually switch to that method. Once you have
achieved the goal of the measurement, you should discontinue the measurement.

~~~
rdtsc
I agree

> but I'm often surprised at the kind of negative reaction I get when I bring
> it up.

Because they assume you are trying to hide or obscure something. "Why wouldn't
you want more 'visibility'?" kind of stuff.

Then if you explain, unless they completely trust your reasoning, they think
"Oh this is just a rationalization".

Moreover, over time metrics, and processes, and rules just accumulate. Every
time anything bad happens -- new rule and some new metrics get added. Sure
after a while they are ignored, but they are still there. Then nobody wants to
be the person to say, let's clear the table of these unused rules and metrics
let's have less.

~~~
mikekchar
One of the biggest issues I've run into is that people honestly don't believe
that measuring will change behaviour. They feel that "Let's measure this just
in case we can use it some time" is a good strategy. I can't tell you the
number of times I've had the following sort of conversation with a developer:

"This story is not finished. It doesn't work at all".

"I know, but my estimate was 2 days and I've already worked 3 on it. Can't we
just add another story to do the things that aren't finished? We're already
taking a lot of criticism for being slow. I don't want to let the team down."

Then you have a finished story called "Add login to system" and an unstarted
story called "Fix problems with login". The stake holder sees the list and
says, "We can live with a few problems with the login system as long as the
core functionality is there. Let's ship!"

But... nobody wants to admit that login doesn't work at all so they look the
other way...

Absolute craziness that would be avoided if completion times were not
measured.

------
astrange
This article is about ego depletion theory, which is a little less popular
these days:

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/07/31/en...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/07/31/end-
of-ego-depletion/)

Even if it is true, it's also using the original claims about glucose
depletion, which would probably mean you were already addicted to sugar. Try
getting a water drinking habit instead?

------
InternetPerson
Is "ego depletion" the only explanation for the experiment? How do the
researchers rule out other explanations?

Maybe people choose the cake because they think, "Phew! I did something
difficult! I deserve some cake!" And the people who only memorized two numbers
think, "Well, I didn't do anything that warrants cake. I'll just take the
salad."

I don't mean to propose this as an alternate explanation -- it just seems like
there could be a million explanations for why people are more likely to choose
the cake. (But maybe the researchers found ways to rule them out?)

Another random question -- have people replicated this experiment? Just
curious.

------
ramblenode
FYI, this is based on the "ego depletion" theory, which has been criticized.
An excellent lay overview of this debate:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in_psychology_may_have_just_been_debunked.html)

------
pbhjpbhj
>”You know where this goes: the dogs that had to sit — exercising self-control
— gave up on the puzzle much earlier than the dogs that were just hanging out
in their crate.The dogs that were NOT burning cognitive resources being
obedient had more determination and mental/emotional energy for solving the
puzzle. Think about that next time you ask Sparky to be patient. His cognitive
resources are easily-depleted too." //

I'd have thought a better hypothesis was that the dog that it's free has other
options for how to spend their time. The incarcerated dog doesn't have
anything else to do. So whilst in both cases they maybe realise they can't get
the treat - evil humans - the dog in the cage only has alternatives asking the
lines of 'lick scrotum'.

If you lock me in a cage and give me a Rubic cube then I'm not going to be
able to go down the pub instead.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources.

Or, the people who were randomly assigned to the two-digit memorisation group
just happened to prefer fruit over cake.

Drawing any kind of conclusion about "willpower" (whatever that is) from the
fact that some people chose cake and some chose fruit is so far fetched that
it makes the headline sound comical.

------
orky56
I believe passion/purpose/etc. is what allows us to forgo the limited
resources of cognition/executive function. If we can convince ourselves that
we actually want to do something, the fatigue of decision making becomes
drastically reduced and we can do things we don't even want to.

------
technobabble
Wouldn't this study show that we as humans are not multitaskers? To go with
the example, what would happen if the people were given a longer break in
between the memorization task and choosing the reward?

~~~
divbit
I like to think that if I can do a task semi-competently (say competence level
N_task) with a full coffee of focus, then I can do two tasks (task_1, and
task_2) with the same amount of coffee at a competence level of A * N_task_1,
(1-A) * N_task_2. where A is a number between 0 and 1 representing the
percentage of focus on task_1. (Disclaimer: not even close to a psychologist
or someone who knows anything about this stuff)

~~~
jerf
You may like to think it, but the evidence is strongly in the direction of you
taking a very significant penalty. Even computers don't get perfect
utilization in a multitasking environment and they're way better at task
switching than we are.

~~~
divbit
got any links? I did just google this, as efficiency is a topic I find
interesting

~~~
jerf
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=human+multitasking+efficiency](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=human+multitasking+efficiency)

This is NOT just a "let me google that for you" reply; I selected the search
term carefully. (LMGTFY is for when the search is trivially obvious.)

I'd also suggest that the common experience of many professionals in the field
matches what the studies show. Note that in theory, the formulation that "A *
N_task_1, (1-A) * N_task_2. where A is a number between 0 and 1 representing
the percentage of focus on task_1" implies that you must be _100% efficient_
in task switches, which you can easily disprove simply by trying to switch
back and forth every second, or exactly precisely splitting your attention
continuously. Again, even computers can "thrash" and spend all their time
changing tasks in certain bad cases.

See also "queuing theory", which can put some math on this, and is useful for
almost any HN denizen anyhow.

~~~
divbit
Haven't used duckduckgo much, so thanks for the search term (too busy trying
to get bing rewards points haha). In any case, I found the following
interesting tidbit from
[http://apa.org/monitor/oct01/multitask.aspx](http://apa.org/monitor/oct01/multitask.aspx)

While the JEP study seems to indicate that multitasking isn't very efficient,
its findings aren't definitive, according to another study in Psychological
Science (Vol. 12, No. 2) by Eric H. Shumacher, PhD, of the University of
California, Berkeley, and colleagues. That study found that, under special
circumstances, people can do two different tasks at once without much
interference--particularly if the tasks are well-practiced and do not
physically conflict with each other. "These latter results raise a further
question--what causes you to get interference between tasks in some cases but
not others?" asks Meyer, a co-author on both studies. "This is a challenging
question and one that needs to be answered carefully in order to tell the full
story about multitasking and executive control."

Another point is, how fast do you have to switch the tasks to consider it
"multitasking." E.g. do you have to switch on a 1-second interval? I would
guess that would be much less efficient than something like, grading some
papers while waiting for code to compile, which may take a minute to compile/
run some test, and then go back to coding, repeat- I would call that multi-
tasking, and would almost guess that would be "more" efficient than actually
just doing the coding task or the grading task separately, since it takes
advantage of removing useless time.

------
rrecuero
If you want to read more about it, David Kahneman talks about the cake
experiment in 'Thinking fast and slow'. His findings can be summarized as Ego
depletion.

~~~
n1000
_Daniel_ Kahneman. Great book.

~~~
rrecuero
Thanks :) Don't know how I got the name switched.

------
aaronbrethorst
(2013)

damn, I was hoping that Kathy Sierra was back.

~~~
throwanem
If I were her, I'd want to spend my time with horses too.

~~~
throwanem
...and in case my prior is insufficiently clear, what I mean by it is that, if
people had come after me the way they went after her, I'd get the hell out of
the industry, too. That she did so is a grave loss to our field. That she had
reason to do so is an indictment.

Besides, horses are great. Huge and kind of inherently a little bonkers and
occasionally mean as dirt, but they're also powerful, beautiful creatures. I
can imagine finding a lot of solace there.

