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If you want to think like that, then a logical conclusion is that our fate was determined at the beginning of time when the state of the world was pre-seeded from the divine RNG. This is the religious concept of predestination that featured prominently in Luther's Protestant Revolution. It's quite possible our consciousness is just a passenger on the ride and we only think we are making decisions when our actions have been determined before we even think.

If the previous statements were true, then a question is "why bother trying?". The ones that believe they can effect change are also the ones that do. Whether this is a consequence of free will or the divine RNG is up for religious and philosophical debate.

How do we deal with trying and results? The Bhagavad Gita has some good lines on this that several other religious traditions surely share. Detach yourself from the outcome and fulfill your duty. In this way you will find greater liberation and peace.

You may want to brush up on nature vs nurture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture.

For those who are rightly skeptical of religion and have written it off entirely, I present you a quote:

"All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness."

- Dune

Bhagavad Gita !Hinduism is the religion of systematic opression through caste to control everone(who should marry whom, what name one should have e.t.c. by the way this continues till today even by almost all educated non-educated everyone) by brahmins. So quoting gita here definately out of context because gita is written by the brahmins.

> You don't will yourself to be taller. It's written in your genes.

Partially genes and partially other factors:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150513-will-humans-keep-ge...

You don't have direct control over this.

> Why would "willpower" be any different?

Because I can willpower myself out of bed tomorrow early in the morning to go to the gym despite me physically not wanting it. I can make decisions that go against what my natural urges want. My genes don't want me to go to the gym, I would feel more comfortable going to the office an hour and a half later, yet I make the call going against most of my body.

You could argue that maybe there are some good parts in my brain that have been there since I was born that help me make these uncomfortable decisions, however I wasn't always like this, during my university years I was making different kinds of choices. If this trait would be genetic, surely it would have been consistent all my life.

> But my personal belief is that we have far less agency than we like to believe.

What if you have exactly as much agency as you believe that you have? What if the whole thing is in hour head?

> however my total ability is bounded by my genes.

The great thing about it is that you don't know where does boundaries are, however you can imagine that you know and put limits on yourself, however that will only harm you from reaching your true potential.

The fact that you can push yourself harder in some areas more than other does not mean that willpower does not exist, it means that if it exists it's most likely not one dimensional.

And yet millions of people — including my father and uncle — have successfully quit smoking cold turkey (no nicotine gum or patches) after being addicted for years. So willpower obviously counts for something.

That's not really what I was getting at. My point was that those that do quit <vice> deserve the roughly the same amount of praise as a tall person deserves for being tall.

Why did they have the motivation to give up? Not through some personal moral superiority, but rather it was encoded in their genes. How much control did they have over this encoding? None.

I feel like both you and the person you responded to failed to read the article.

And you seem to be completely ignoring the environmental factors involved in behavior, which are much more significant than those involved in height (e.g., avoiding malnourishment during the first 20 years of your life). The article mentioned a few of them.

I'm actually fully in agreement with the article. I just thought I'd chime in with personal view as this idea of will power and moral judgement is extremely pervasive in society. We have, for the most part, only vague control over our actions, wants desires etc.

from the article:

"The best way forward may be to let go of “willpower” altogether.

Doing so would rid us of some considerable moral baggage. Notions of willpower are easily stigmatizing: ... An extreme example is the punitive approach of our endless drug war, which dismisses substance use problems as primarily the result of individual choices."

I don't see substance abuse as an issue of moral weakness. It's simply a pre-encoded genetic predisposition. From this it directly follows that those that avoid vices and lead healthy lives also don't deserve any special credit. They are doing it because their genes dictate it. You are, for the most part, along for the ride, good or bad.

Right, but that's still ignoring the environmental component which throws a wrench into your reasoning.

Particularly relevant from the article is the part of reframing the problem as a means of kicking addiction. Obviously, this isn't a silver bullet, but it's also part of the evidence against this notion of genetic determinism as predominant factor.

(We're in agreement regarding the whole moralizing aspect of this.)

How about you read HN rules first before accusing people of not reading the article.

I made sure to qualify my comment in case I was mistaken.

A person cannot change his height but can build miscles or will power through practice. It is not a genetic constant.

I tried quitting several times, but only really managed it when I was doing it for no reason, kind of as a joke.

That argument only makes sense if you assume your uncle and father have more willpower than the average person who attempts to quit smoking.