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Comment by tylerhou | Hacker News Reader

> This is quite similar to the cognitive and decision fatigue principle which indicates that each of us only has a limited pool of cognitive resources and so we must be very selective in choosing what activities we engage in.

Watch out — many of the studies which displayed “cognitive fatigue” (I assume you actually mean ego depletion) have not been replicated successfully.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...

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The general idea even in a loose, more metaphorical sense, holds however. 'Mental fatigue' is well established, and your volition along with mental faculties generally become harder to exercise the longer they are used without break.

The specifics are disputed, but we needn't be so specific for the advise to hold.

I don't have a citation for this, but I read something recently about a study where people who had been introduced to the concept of decision-making fatigue experienced it, while people who weren't aware of it didn't.

The mind is a wacky thing, I think we know a lot less about it than we believe. One idea I like which seems to have some real world support is that your mental models make all the difference -- if you believe that something's hard and unpleasant, your belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and you'll experience distress when you do it. If you're able to somehow reshape your beliefs, that distress may diminish. Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on this model and has a strong clinical track record.

I certainly experience mental fatigue. I have a hard time believing that if I didn't know about it, I wouldn't experience it.

We're very good at convincing ourselves of something. Can you be sure it's not just fatigue? (different from willpower fatigue)

I had recently read that too, but it was more specifically about the idea of willpower rather than decision-making fatigue per se. Here is the article where I had seen this, though going back to it, I don't see citations to the studies it's mentioning:

> If ego depletion does turn out to be wrong, it’s striking how seemingly well-established it became before more rigorous investigations dispelled the assumptions it rests on. The story of its rise and fall also shows how faulty assumptions about willpower are not just misleading, but can be harmful. Related studies have shown that beliefs about willpower strongly influence self-control: Research subjects who believe in ego depletion (that willpower is a limited resource) show diminishing self-control over the course of an experiment, while people who don’t believe in ego depletion are steady throughout. What’s more, when subjects are manipulated into believing in ego depletion through subtly biased questionnaires at the outset of a study, their performance suffers as well.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/against-willpower

EDIT: It appears the studies are cited at the bottom of the article.

That's very interesting. I'd love to see an experiment where people were taught THE OPPOSITE of ego depletion.

If a group of teenagers were taught that every time they exercise their willpower it becomes stronger, in a very immediate sense, would we see their self control actual improve over the course of day.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...

> But that story is about to change. A paper now in press, and due to publish next month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, describes a massive effort to reproduce the main effect that underlies this work. Comprising more than 2,000 subjects tested at two-dozen different labs on several continents, the study found exactly nothing. A zero-effect for ego depletion: No sign that the human will works as it’s been described, or that these hundreds of studies amount to very much at all.

Ego depletion is one hypothesized aspect of metal fatigue -- no one is doubting mental fatigue.

Could you please clarify this for me? I assume that I did not understand the concept of ego depletion before but how is this related to the banal observation of real-life things... like when I do not have the willpower to follow my exercise routine after a really hard day at work or feel unable to focus when I am tired... this would not be "ego depletion" or "cognitive fatigue"? To be honest, those things seemed so obvious and "common knowledge" to me that I did not understand why even invent special terms - what am I missing?

Just speculating, but could it be that your mind is grasping for an explanation, came up with the ego depletion idea, subjected it to a reasonable amount of questioning to ensure that it wasn't completely flimsy, and then you went with it? Kind of a "thinker thinks and prover proves" type mechanism?

Endurance is not disputed. We understand the bottlenecks of physical endurance, but mental bottlenecks are is still poorly understood. That study rejected the ego depletion hypothesis for mental fatigue.

I have chosen a poor example and formulated my question in a misleading way. I do not work physically and I am more likely to lack willpower when I am mentally tired even when it is related to other things than physical exercise - for example I am trying to reduce my sugar intake and I am more likely to just give up eat some chocolate after a tiring (mentally) day. That is what I thought was the kind of obvious thing - that when people are mentally tired they tend to just watch a movie instead of originally planned language learning. This is what's disputed?

I am asking because either I do not understand the ego depletion concept or something that seemed really obvious to me is disputed, which would surprise me.

How about we simply agree that people do in fact get "tired" and have limited energy and thus must prioritize what to do.

But that argument is no more effective than stating that people have a limited amount of time and thus must prioritize what they do. We all know prioritizing is key to being effective. The question should be about whether one effectively prioritizes to generate positive momentum toward their long-term goals. With that in mind, I better get off Reddit and get to work.

Really? Dammit. Everything really is a lie.

Maybe not everything but pretty low replication rates for most psychological experiments.

IMO that matter is extremely fluid and dependent on many factors. Just consider the fact that lots of the experiments are done with available volunteers which at Harvard or Stanford or Yale are white uber rich privileged young adults. And that’s only one of the many factors.

Another one is the pressure to constantly publish research in order to move forward or be anybody in academia.

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