So maybe great insights would be achieved by moving from “ego depletion” to “fatigue”? I’m of the opinion that a far greater change in perspective will be required. I consider us all driven by the desire to feel good rather than bad each moment, with positive feelings of hope and negative feelings of worry determining how our investments will be allocated. Yes fatigue can break us, but don’t confuse that for a still missing full model of what drives us, and perhaps one as simple as this. https://eborg760.substack.com/p/post-1-the-instantaneous-nature-of
I like this shift - but my deeper question is what separates the remaining demarcation of ego depletion from being unprincipled, for lack of a better word. I can determine to do something, despite how much it physically costs me, and that determination will not be impacted by any physical or psychological state of weakness. I just take my beliefs, convictions or stance so seriously that I maintain self-control. I guess this makes self-control less like a muscle (which can fail when the pressure gets too high), and more like a perspective, grounding or an orientation.
A diamond of insight always glorious to behold again: "As Walter Mischel noted, theories suffer from the toothbrush problem: everyone wants their own because nobody wants to use someone else's." This feature of knowledge worker or what @wozahmed calls symbolic capitalist mental maps explains so much of what we see and leads to a lack of consilience in intellectual exploration and discovery
Sounds like somebody tried to make the general adaptation syndrome the vehicle for a big money making career move and lots of people (like the APA) went along with it. Sooo 21st Century!
Tell me if I am reading this correctly. Is it that "ego depletion" clings to an overly abstracted narrative (away from general fatigelue), but also that new research provides evidence of a type of depletion or fatigue that is not quite general? If so, it seems to me that still calling this effect "ego depletion" will be misleading given the intuitive appeal that neglects historic baggage.
I suspect something akin to the relation of LLM performance to a given context window, but as a function of a saliency system and an agentic override system that can be brought into tension. For this to be a productive tension, rather than an internal war of attrition, it may require more resources to maintain a kind of recursive context. The ego depletion camp would then be making the oversimplifying error that the resource being depleted is best left in simple and familiar terms, like discussing LLMs in terms of prompts, contexts, and the words that compose them. Claiming it's all just fatigue would be an error akin to saying LLMs are NOTHING BUT token predictors, with both narratives demanding the dominance of a particular kind of analysis over a synthesis with possibly messy mediator effects.
This is kinder than they deserve
So maybe great insights would be achieved by moving from “ego depletion” to “fatigue”? I’m of the opinion that a far greater change in perspective will be required. I consider us all driven by the desire to feel good rather than bad each moment, with positive feelings of hope and negative feelings of worry determining how our investments will be allocated. Yes fatigue can break us, but don’t confuse that for a still missing full model of what drives us, and perhaps one as simple as this. https://eborg760.substack.com/p/post-1-the-instantaneous-nature-of
I like this shift - but my deeper question is what separates the remaining demarcation of ego depletion from being unprincipled, for lack of a better word. I can determine to do something, despite how much it physically costs me, and that determination will not be impacted by any physical or psychological state of weakness. I just take my beliefs, convictions or stance so seriously that I maintain self-control. I guess this makes self-control less like a muscle (which can fail when the pressure gets too high), and more like a perspective, grounding or an orientation.
A diamond of insight always glorious to behold again: "As Walter Mischel noted, theories suffer from the toothbrush problem: everyone wants their own because nobody wants to use someone else's." This feature of knowledge worker or what @wozahmed calls symbolic capitalist mental maps explains so much of what we see and leads to a lack of consilience in intellectual exploration and discovery
Sounds like somebody tried to make the general adaptation syndrome the vehicle for a big money making career move and lots of people (like the APA) went along with it. Sooo 21st Century!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2038162/
Now do EMDR….
Tell me if I am reading this correctly. Is it that "ego depletion" clings to an overly abstracted narrative (away from general fatigelue), but also that new research provides evidence of a type of depletion or fatigue that is not quite general? If so, it seems to me that still calling this effect "ego depletion" will be misleading given the intuitive appeal that neglects historic baggage.
I suspect something akin to the relation of LLM performance to a given context window, but as a function of a saliency system and an agentic override system that can be brought into tension. For this to be a productive tension, rather than an internal war of attrition, it may require more resources to maintain a kind of recursive context. The ego depletion camp would then be making the oversimplifying error that the resource being depleted is best left in simple and familiar terms, like discussing LLMs in terms of prompts, contexts, and the words that compose them. Claiming it's all just fatigue would be an error akin to saying LLMs are NOTHING BUT token predictors, with both narratives demanding the dominance of a particular kind of analysis over a synthesis with possibly messy mediator effects.