When Willpower Attacks

This is interesting, but I think it could essentially be summarized in two sentences:

"Willpower is good if used to fulfill a healthful or desirable goal, and bad if used to fulfill an unhealthful or undesirable one. In other words, willpower, in a strict sense, is like any basic tool - however sharp or strong it is, its value is determined by the tasks to which it is applied, and the context in which those tasks are completed."

Both cases of sleep and hunger are demonstrably untrue, for we can turn off those systems (with modafinil for sleep, and ECA stack for hunger), and there are few ill effects. These systems are horribly misregulated, and cause more problems than they save from.

We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn't cause any serious problems in healthy adults. Modafinil completely turns off sleepiness, and modafinil users do not die in droves, or even get sick from that.

Sleepiness on the other hand forces you to sleep even when it's not necessary at all, by reducing your alertness, making it painful to keep awake etc. Sleepiness often kills people, for example by making them insufficiently alert while driving, far more often than it saves them from death due to sleep deprivation.

With appetite suppressants it's similar story. How many people die due to diets, and how many people die due to obesity?

These systems are completely broken.

1. Zeal conquers all!

2. Sometimes zeal conquers even understanding.

-- Kozma Prutkov

And it's impossible to sleep too much more than normal; the better rested we are, the harder it is to fall asleep.

This isn't true, as far as I can see. I know several people who have fallen into the habit of sleeping much more than is normal for months or years, with no apparent physiological reason. Also, I notice that when I sleep in, I typically get up because I don't want to waste more of the day, and never seem to have trouble going back to sleep if I choose to do that. For someone sufficiently unmotivated to do anything, I think sleeping for most of each 24 hours would be possible.

I think there's a fundamental flaw in this post.

You're assuming that if we have unlimited willpower, we are actually going to use all of it. Willpower is the ability to do what you think is the most correct thing to do. If what you think is the correct thing to do is actually the correct thing to do, then doing it will, by the definition of correctness, be good. So if you do some "high level reasoning" and conclude that not sleeping for a week is the best thing for you to do and then you use your willpower to do it, it will be the best thing to do, just because you've done the correct analysis and have taken all costs into consideration (including the cost of bad health because of sleep deprivation).

It's always good to be able to do the thing that's the best thing for you to do. What's bad is to not be able to decide what's best for you. So we shouldn't blame willpower. We should blame the inability to take correct decisions.

According to Aaron Haspel, "it is the incorruptible politician who is especially dangerous."

I didn't immediately see what he was getting at, but today a parallel occurred to me: a powerful, incorruptible politician is like a person with great willpower. Directing great resources to the wrong project can do a lot of harm, at individual and society-wide levels.

My first draft of this article included a formal definition of willpower, which I cut out because it didn't really fit.

Since willpower is a purely mental construct, we have to define it relative to some psychological model. Unfortunately, we have many imprecise and conflicting models of how minds are structured, and they're probably all at least somewhat wrong. Rather than define willpower in terms of a model that will probably be disproven, we should define it in a way that can be applied to any psychological models - even models of animals, aliens or AIs. We also need to be careful to separate the definition from empirical observations, such as the observation that willpower tends to act like a fungible resource, tends to fail all at once rather than gradually, because these observations might not always hold.

For the sleep-willpower example, our model needs at least two parts: one which provides defaults, and one which overrides them. We'll call the defaults system 1, and we'll call the override system 2. Now consider a complete model of minds, with many parts that have various degrees of influence over each other. Use some centrality measure to designate one of these parts as the center. Most reasonable measures should put the center somewhere inside what we call "higher reasoning", since that's the one part of the human mind that can most directly influence every other part. Now take any pair of elements in the model which act in opposition to each other. Whichever is farther from the center, is system 1; whichever is closer to the center, is system 2; and whatever influence system 2 has over system 1, we call willpower. In general, we use "system 1" to mean "things that are far from the center", and "system 2" to mean "things that are close to the center". Because different models may place things differently, whenever we use the terms system 1 and system 2 we assert that all reasonable models should agree on which is which.

One could also imagine an individual who aspires, through sheer dint of willpower, to become homo economicus. Whenever he senses the beginnings of a bout of empathy, guilt, shame, or love, he exercises top-down cognitive control to extinguish his emotional reactions and stay on course to maximizing his utility. It won't be long before his social life becomes impoverished. Akrasia in his case would be quite adaptive.

There are more failure modes of willpower than just acquiring the power to resist urges bequeathed us for good reasons by evolution.

Obsessive-compulsive disorders sound like a good example to study; possibly of willpower taken too far. Most of us have to be reminded to wash our hands before eating, or (in the current period of paranoid fears of swine flu contagion) after sneezing. OCD sufferers don't need reminding, they must wash their hands several times a day, or check, double-check and triple-check that they have locked their doors before leaving home, and so on.

Ainslie's analysis of "personal rules" as one of the components of willpower might be relevant here; he mentions "fussiness" as one downside of willpower, and OCD is an extreme of fussiness.

when humans use stimulants to stay awake too long, they die

Source?

IIRC, problems caused by sleep deprivation - hallucination, paranoia etc - are entirely cleared up when the subject is allowed to sleep. They spend a longer-than-usual time asleep, then wake up fine. Wikipedia claims those rats were forced to walk whenever they began falling asleep, which seems like it could could have adverse effects.