12 Comments

"Is there a failure mode from having too much willpower?" Apparently so, the failure modes are discussed in Ainslie's 'Breakdown of Will' (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/breakdown-of-will/BEB02F8A220A92CB34F1802783ADB267 see Part 3) and other work on temporal discounting.

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Would love to read your essays on Utilitarianism.

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Every time you write something about procrastinating I really enjoy it and find it really insightful. And I think "In the future, I'm going to rely on this to help me with my writer's block [or some other thing I'm struggling with]." And then I find myself still procrastinating.

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Thank you. This won the internet for me tonight.

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Enjoyed it! The Jim you are talking about, I learned to recognise that as resistance. There is book called of 'Art of War', which talks about when we try to do anything creative or productive how a resistance inside us stops us from doing that, by various means.

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Interesting move to give a name to resistance to doing things. I don't know if that is unusual, but I am more or less at peace with my inner Jim. I do a lot of practical work like digging holes and through the years I have found out that Jim is an excellently rational force. When Jim says no, things have not been enough thought through. Then I should actually be doing something else instead.

I think having children makes Jim a lot easier to deal with. Probably a lot of distracting things people do is based on unmet social needs. Having children merges the social and the practical. Digging a hole because one's children need a bigger house is a cause I think most Jims would approve of.

Probably different people have Jims of different sensitivity in different areas. If I get the idea to dig a hole, Jim will probably approve, few questions asked. If I get the idea to read a book, or an internet page, Jim will be very altert to the smallest sign of boredom. If the text is the least boring, Jim will pester me with questions whether this is really the most interesting thing I could read. Which forces me to spend a lot of time searching for interesting things to read.

Jim sometimes is a nuisance. But I also think he is a great force behind human development. People with stronger than usual Jims in certain areas probably made important technical inventions.

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May 25, 2023·edited May 25, 2023

Enjoyed the article!

Curious on your thoughts--what if one doesn't know what one wants? Is that Jim being resistant?

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