Comment by IdAugmentation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IdAugmentation | Hacker News Reader

Two things:

The main assumption in this article is that "ego depletion" is real. It may not be, see Wikipedia [1]. Psychology is in a big replication crisis, and the ego depletion stuff is all tangled up in it. There's a real possibility that this "theft" only exists by virtue of you believing in it. I'm aware there's a lot of hedging to be done here (experiences of people with ADHD, etc.).

I don't like calling this kind of experience "theft". I much prefer the framing around community service work: boring tasks that are essential for the community's well-being. If someone is not doing their part, they are being an asshole and should be made to (or get kicked out of the community). Emphasizing the communal aspect means you stand up for everybody, not just yourself. It promotes fairness for everybody, not just for yourself. It empowers everybody in the group because you are collectively taking care of this work. And it'll be more effective in practice because the "offender" is getting shamed by everybody, instead of you just whining about your own injustice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

When I hear a correlation expressed as causation, I try to turn it around to check whether it makes more sense that way.

"If you believe that ego depletion is real, you experience it." -- wow, sounds spooky, fascinating if true

"If you experience ego depletion, you believe that it is real." -- yes thank you, Captain Obvious

To me it seems like different people have different capacity for making decisions (that's kinda what ADHD is about). If you can make 10 different decisions a day, but you are required to make 20, you experience "ego depletion". If you can make 30 different decisions a day, but you are required to make 20, you laugh at the idea of "ego depletion", and you can even help to debunk it experimentally by increasing the required decisions to 25 which you can still do easily.

An analogy would be if you talked to people who have broken legs and found out that they are unable to run. So you come with a hypothesis "all people are unable to run". Then someone else tests the hypothesis using both people who have broken legs and people who are okay, and then conclude "actually, the only people unable to run are those who believe that they are unable to run", which is technically true, but misses the part where the people believing that they cannot run are the ones with broken legs.

Fair point, but I don't think it's quite clear what I'm getting at. I think most people sometimes have the sensation that they want to turn off their brain and just do nothing.

The picture ego depletion paints is that a) this is caused by making decisions and b) there is nothing to be done about it. I don't think either of those is true. Some decisions might be stressful and they could certainly contribute, but choosing what's for dinner is not in that category. And even if I'm tired and just chilling with some video games, I might be making decisions around builds, where to go next, etc.

I agree that it is not the number of decisions, but how stressful they are. And if you have control of the environment, you could e.g. make some processes less stressful.

> Some decisions might be stressful and they could certainly contribute, but choosing what's for dinner is not in that category.

Ah, depends on whether one has an autistic child that has a tantrum whenever the dinner does not fit their unclearly communicated criteria. Then it can easily be the most stressful task of the day. :D

Generally, I'd like to push back against that "most people sometimes have the sensation" part, because that's basically true for everything. (Depression? Most people sometimes feel sad. Dyslexia? Most people sometimes make a mistake when reading.) That's the point of some mental problems that yes, most people experience it sometimes in an extreme situation, but unfortunately you experience it every day. And the people who experience it only once in a while are happy to provide you advice about what works for them, assuming that it must automatically work the same for you, or you are just lazy and not trying hard enough.

I think the questionable assumption is that people have some sort of fixed, intrinsic capacity for decision-making that is somehow distinct from other stable personality traits.

I think if you treat the numbers as a deliberate oversimplification for expository purposes the underlying point still makes sense.

Similarly, spoon theory can still be a helpful frame of reference even though "spoons per day" is not in reality a fixed or discrete quantity.

It's a hypothesis, but just because it intuitively makes more sense for you if you flip the causation in the correlation around doesn't mean that the causation actually goes in that direction. You would still need to actually back this up by experiment.

It never made sense to me how this theory treats all decisions as fungible.

Go for a short walk through the woods and you've made hundreds of decisions including where to step, what scenery to look at, how to respond to a noise you heard, etc. but that experience is generally considered refreshing.

Meanwhile, your whole day might be dampered if you have just one really important decision looming over you, or which you just made and are unsure about.

If I'm writing a fun personal code project then none of the decisions faze me, but if I'm fixing a bug in some awful code I might need a break.

Diagnosed with ADHD myself. The prescribed stimulants definitely make it easier to deal with annoying decisions.

I noticed mental fatigue around a task is just an illusion I might have picked up from observing others? If I just don't think about it, I can start on a big daunting thing and just keep going, like I always tended to do in the past. If I let others' descriptions of task paralysis or whatever seep into my head then it gets harder.

I am seeing a variation of this play out slowly at work, which I definitely would call theft. For context, we have a bonus structure in place that awards bonuses for performance. The actual measurement of work done is actually pretty alright, as it's left to human judgement and not just numbers. However, it creates a severe moral hazard - I am incentivised to spend as little time as possible on each task, so that I can finish more tasks and appear more productive at the end of the quarter.

I often run into code where it seems the author left a lot of tech debt for the sake of fixing the one task they were given. We have processes in place that are meant to prevent bad code from getting into master, and they do work - you can't just sneak absolute garbage past code review, but still everyone involved is incentivised to only let through the minimum acceptable version of the code that will hold together until bonuses are calculated next quarter. The part where this becomes theft is when next quarter your mess impedes my progress, my velocity goes down, which means my bonus goes down, which means you have literally stolen money from me.

I often think about this when interacting with commercial software that has bugs and rough edges. Am I in pain right now because somebody maximised their performance bonus three years ago? Are these issues the results not of incompetence, but of simple min-maxing? At the end, we all reap what we sow, and I can but hope that my mortgage gets paid before the reaper comes to harvest.

> The main assumption in this article is that "ego depletion" is real. It may not be, see Wikipedia [1].

I think your focus is slightly off the mark here. The problem is that people are being given mentally intensive tasks that are treated as mentally trivial, so their cognitive capacity gets drained invisibly. Your brain can absolutely get tired, and when it does, it's very hard to perform cognitive tasks.

It's not ego depletion, it's exhaustion from mental work.

I think a more accurate word might be "enslavement".

A person, a group of people, or an explicit social system, has decided to override my goals without replacing my behavior. Without fighting them directly, I am left to execute behaviors that meet their goals. The very context of my executive functioning has been replaced with arbitrary constraints.

Who determines the goals of "everybody"? No one can!

> Ego depletion is the controversial idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up

Whoa really? I mean it certainly doesn’t work that way for me, but then again I am a stubborn sonovabitch.

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