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/Replication_crisis
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.
Ego depletion could be a "just so" story but I still think it's an interesting/useful model.
And yes, if one looks at its own experience then it will probably find that there is a tank of cognitive resources.
Everything that requires attention consumes from this tank.
So yes, if we could start to design our world to eliminate the nuisances, that may translate into a qualitative leap driven by a virtuous circle..
Thumbs up for a user centric world.
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.
I want to be pedantic about this and point out that this is a kind of a mistake. The issues that were present in the original studies were already "known", even if people didn't pay attention to that. It appears that even in 1967 it was already a thing: http://andrewgelman.com/2016/05/06/needed-an-intellectual-hi... (discussing this article of Paul Meehl: http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...) Since people didn't pay attention to the criticism, it's technically correct that the consensus was that it seemed likely to be true, but still…
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/18/140516974/resistance-training-...
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?
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 :)
1: http://pss.sagepub.com/lookup/doi/10.1177/0956797610384745
2: Slate article, but mentions some key studies, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
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.
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.
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".
damn, I was hoping that Kathy Sierra was back.
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.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/07/31/en...
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?
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.
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.
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.
