The enemy within

Following PJ Eby's idea of the brain as a lot of PID feedback controller circuits

Ahem. Bill Powers' idea, which I introduced to LW.

This article starts by introducing and developing an interesting hypothesis, but then gives a highly unrepresentative anecdote and concludes with a suggestion to take psychiatric medication that failed to get regulatory approval.

The first part would be much better off without the second.

ETA: The updated version is much better, thank you.

All animals except for humans had no explicit notion of maximizing the number of children they had, or looking after their own long-term health. In humans, it seems evolution got close to building a consequentialist agent...

Clarification: evolution did not build human brains from scratch. Humans, like all known life on earth, are adaptation executers. The key difference is that thanks to highly developed frontal lobes, humans can predict the future more powerfully than other animals. Those predictions are handled by adaptation-executing parts of the brain in the same way as immediate sense input.

For example, consider the act of eating bacon. A human can extrapolate from the bacon to a pattern of bacon-eating to a future of obesity, health risks, and reduced social status (including greater difficulty finding a mate). This explains why humans can dither over whether to eat bacon, while a dog just scarfs it down--dogs can't predict the future that way. (The frontal lobes also distinguish between bad/good/better/best actions--hence the vegetarian's decision to abstain from bacon on moral grounds.)

Eliezer's body of writing on evolutionary psychology and P.J. Eby's writing on PCT and personal effectiveness seem to be regarded as incompatible by some commenters here (and I don't want to hijack this thread into yet another PCT debate), but they both support the proposition that akrasia and other "sub-optimal" mental states result from a brain processing future-predictions with systems that evolved to handle data from proximate environmental inputs and memory.

The Wikipedia article about amineptine to which Roko linked doesn't seem to support the claim he's quoting; it says that its regulatory troubles were because of an immediate stimulant effect -- which is not the same thing as its antidepressant effect, or at least so says the article and it seems plausible to me. (Depression is not the same thing as unhappiness; stimulants are not the same thing as antidepressants.)

Mmm, am I the only one not thinking right, or does the article debunk its own suggestion?

Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.

I'm not sure how they define "mild depressive symptoms", but it looks like depression in the sense of the word I expect--the serious illness that is among the top 10 causes of disability worldwide--is not necessarily linked to the mechanism of low mood => give up unattainable goals. The article also suggests that this giving up motivation is adaptive because it allows one to focus on new goals--or at least to rationally appraise the situation and see if you want to keep going or if there's a better alternative.

Additionally, in what looks to me suspiciously like an example of bad science reporting, the article devotes a considerable part of itself to this:

The importance of giving up inappropriate goals has already been demonstrated by Dr Wrosch. Two years ago he and his colleagues published a study in which they showed that those teenagers who were better at doing so had a lower concentration of C-reactive protein, a substance made in response to inflammation and associated with an elevated risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Dr Wrosch thus concludes that it is healthy to give up overly ambitious goals. Persistence, though necessary for success and considered a virtue by many, can also have a negative impact on health.

Okay, first, no mention of how they measured ability to give up "inappropriate goals". That seems methodologically difficult to me. Second, they used a proxy measure (C-reactive protein) for total health, which puts one more link in the cause-effect chain to potentially be a weak link. Third, correlation does not prove causation, even if it seems plausible. Fourth, higher concentrations of C-reactive protein do not equal overall health, so a lot more study would have to be done to tell whether the measured variable has an overall effect on health or not, so the conclusion seems premature.

So I can see why you might discount the article's main argument that the low mood => give up goal mechanism is adaptive even today, but why not accept its challenge? Perhaps your persistence in pursuing the task of heightened motivation is maladaptive--putting yourself at greater risk for psychological problems as you continually fail yourself, taking up more energy than is worthwhile, and keeping you from noticing other opportunities that work more in harmony with your abilities rather than against. I don't see that there's anything in this line of speculation to point in one direction or another--and I do know from experience that if you're working on working on your goals, you're not working.

Eby's theory is that many of us have circuits that try to prevent us from doing the things we want to do.

I don't think the anthropomorphic frame is helpful, though. It's like saying that a thermostat is "trying" to prevent the sun from warming up the room as it "wants" to.

It'd be a bit more accurate to simply say that we can have control circuits that require mutually incompatible states or actions.

It seems that evolution combined an explicit goal-driven propositional system with a dumb pattern recognition algorithm for identifying the pattern of "pursuing an unreachable goal".

PCT has a more general form of this idea that doesn't require a specialized notion of an unreachable goal: it proposes a reorganization system that responds to chronic or intrinsic error signals by reorganizing the control circuits involved until the error goes away. An unreachable goal would just be one example of what could trigger this system.

PCT considers this "reorganziation" system to be the basis of trial-and-error learning as well, that is, continued failure to reach a goal prompts a series of variations in behavior until the error signal goes away. In the case of an unreachable goal, the reorganization will simply continue until the organism "gives up" - that is, reorganizes the control system so that the current condition is no longer considered an error, and thus experiences no motivation to pursue it.

This isn't to say that we don't have any ability to handle unreachable goals specially, just that the PCT model doesn't need one.

These long-term plans do not immediately return a reward signal, so they trip the "unreachable goal" sensor inside most people's heads, causing them to completely lose motivation.

This isn't true. I can get immediate reward signals thinking about my goals over the next year or two. The real issues have more to do with whether your thoughts also trigger any error signals due to predictions of difficulty, stress, having to give up other things, etc. When those things are present, any positive reward is going to get drowned out by shorter-term negatives.

One might ask why on earth evolution designed the power-balance parameter to vary with your mood;

It didn't, because the model you're describing here is unnecessarily complicated. Ego depletion is simply a function of conflict between controllers -- PCT predicts that two systems in conflict will trigger maximal activation of the neural pathways involved in the conflict, like two competing thermostats simultaneously running the heat and A/C at maximum. And this would naturally expected to result in overuse of brain fuel (e.g. glucose).

Conversely, if someone does badly and then gets criticism for that bad performance, their "unreachable goal" sensor will trip out and remove their will to continue, creating a downward spiral of ever diminishing motivation.

This isn't really how it works, either. The difference between success and struggling is in one's interpretation of events, not the events themselves. A successful person responds to negative events with, "Ah! I love a challenge!", or at worst, "Well, I guess I learned one more way that doesn't work."

Conversely, a natural struggler's interpretation of good things is that they won't last, aren't "real", or "don't count".

Dweck's research into mindsets also shows that it's ridiculously easy to get people to think in this mindset, even without exposing them to any actual adversity whatsoever! So, it's not a matter of exposure to adveristy or success; a person who has nothing but success in their early years may spend the rest of their life handicapped by it. (The downward spiral of many child stars being an all-too-obvious example.)

But we should definitely think about developing much more effective ways to defeat that enemy within

You can't defeat it, and you don't need to. What you need is to resolve your actual priorities. I'm still integrating the results of PCT into my own work, but the effects have been mindblowing at times.

This weekend, for example, I realized that every time I ever tried to "define my priorities" in the past (as requested by virtually every self-help book in existence), I was actually trying to make a list of what I thought my priorities should be... rather than what they truly were. And just realizing that tiny difference in perspective has completely changed my outlook on planning, and what I'll be doing in the next few weeks.

The point? While I was trying to do what I thought I "should", I was essentially ensuring that I would always be in conflict, always fighting this so-called "enemy" within. But by instead doing what I really want in the first place...

There's no longer any "enemy" to "fight".