I’ve read the first chapter! Here was my favorite quote:
Before you saw the outrageous price, you would have needed some serious prefrontal cortex intervention to shut down the spending impulse. But what if your brain registers an instinctive pain response to the price? Studies show that this actually happens—the brain can treat a hefty price tag like a physical punch to the gut. That instinctive shock is going to make the job easy for your prefrontal cortex, and you’ll barely need to exert any “I won’t” power.
That’s some good Beeminder apologetics! Here’s me in “Ego Depletion Depletion” saying something similar:
With the right inducement (say, continued employment) you can exert superhuman willpower, like waking up early and going to work every day for years or decades. Which is to say that with the right incentives, willpower doesn’t even need to be invoked. You can route around it and find creative ways to induce yourself to do what you really want to do.
Note that this book was written before Ego Depletion (“willpower is like a muscle”) was debunked (in fact it was published 2 months after Beeminder launched), so that’s something to keep in mind in later chapters probably. See also my followup to “Ego Depletion Depletion”, “What Is Willpower?”.
Willpower Trichotomy
Back to chapter 1, I like McGonigal’s willpower trichotomy, which I’d translate into Beeminderese as:
- “I will” power = what you’d use a Do More goal for
- “I won’t” power = what you’d use a Do Less goal for
- “I want” power = keeping your long-term goals in focus so you make the right tradeoffs in the moment
Maybe “I want” power is like meta-willpower that, if mastered, makes Beeminder superfluous? Something to think about as I read further…
Contra Meditation
Also I have some extremely half-baked (epsilon-baked?) thoughts on meditation:
Remember Dual N-Back? My tentative conclusion on that was that you can practice that game and it makes you better at the game but it doesn’t transfer very well to other domains and so it’s probably not worth the time if your goal is to be smarter or have better short-term memory or whatever skills that game reinforces. Might as well get the practice following intellectual pursuits that have intrinsic value.
So my (highly tentative) theory is that meditation is similar. Practice will make you better at using your prefrontal cortex to redirect your attention back to your breath as it wanders (this was an excellent explanation of the value of meditation) but I don’t expect it to transfer especially well. Or not enough to offset the opportunity cost of meditating. I feel like there are things you can do that kill two birds with one stone. What about exercising and practicing redirecting your attention to the skating / pedaling / whatever motion?
Or what about targeting willpower even more directly? Put a bowl of jellybeans or whatever on your desk all day and find some way to not eat them (presumably with a commitment device, or maybe it would work better if you gradually trained yourself to ignore the jellybeans despite no immediate negative consequences for eating them). I’m interested to hear why meditation proponents think meditation beats those less time-consuming alternatives.
(I might argue that it needs to beat them by a lot, given the time cost.)
PS: Enlightenment, Nebuminding, and SuperBetter Twin Power
Slate Star Codex’s review of “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha” makes for fascinating reading (as always) and may address @zedmango’s worry about meditation.
What @bee’s calling nebuminding is this:
How weird is this: McGonigal has an identical twin sister who also does seemingly very Beeminder-relevant work on improving humans via games. She’s the creator of SuperBetter, which I don’t understand but seems Habitica-like.