Action and habit

Not all people are automatically and naturally active. I certainly am not, and my parents in fact did the opposite of what you are saying. That said, "couch-potato-ness" can certainly be habitualized even in "natural" couch potatoes, making it even harder for them to do other things.

There's a simpler explanation then either this, or seatbelts, that I've discovered in my field research as a parent ;). Television, for young kids, is a super-stimulus that completely captures their attention. For parents, this means you don't have to attend to your kid - you can do other things without being interrupted with questions or requests, and because their attention is fully occupied, you don't have to monitor that closely. It's easy to imagine that using TV in this way is a great temptation for some types of parents (or, arguably, most types) - there's always chores around the house to do, and you need a break every so often, etc. After a while, I'm sure both parents and kids forget there's other fun stuff do to, and you now have a TV habit. It's hard to break, too - kids tend to flip out when you turn it off on them.

I've wondered whether carseats and seatbelts end up training some children to accept not moving much.

Agreed in that personality traits have some genetic basis, and so it might be harder for someone who is, say, impulsive, to enact a habit of being thorough and methodical. Or someone who is shy and introverted and/or inflexible to enact a habit of being spontaneous. I still think that the brain is plastic enough that even genetically based traits can be modified or at least circumvented to some degree.

This is at least trivially true - some common human character traits cannot in practice be attained by squirrels or trees, for instance.

Yes. With smoking cigarettes, for instance: "smoking less" didn't work, but "this is my last cigarette EVER" did. I've seen it occur in other areas, too: it seems to be easier to be entirely abstinent than merely moderate - probably for the reason you list; you can't make excuses.

There are a lot more things that people can consider a 'habit' than most people would consider, I would expect. It's easy to think of 'getting up at 5 AM' or 'eating well' or 'exercising' to be a habit. I've witnessed exercise as a habit, to be sure, when I watched my siblings - who were very active in sports - get downright surly if they didn't have time for their morning jog.

But there's a lot of small habits in everything we do, that we don't really notice. Necessary habits. When someone asks you how you are, the habitual answer is 'Fine, thank you,' or something similar. It's what people expect. The entire greeting ritual is habitualness, to the point that if you disrupt the greeting, it throws people off.

The most important habits this can be used to engender and train yourself, relative to this site, are the habits of rationality. For instance, the habit of asking 'why?' Amusingly enough, this is the habit of breaking habits.

I feel bad. Why? I'm not that sort of person. Why? I don't like that. Why? I do like that! Why? I don't believe you. Why?

This can also be the habit of listening. It's so easy to cross something off a list of things that you'll consider - for instance, aliens, or ghosts. Someone claims that they believe in aliens. I see many people who absolutely refuse to even consider that. It's stupid. The arguments are all the same. No one's ever actually seen one, they just know someone who's seen one. The arguments for not listening are many and varied...

But it takes only a couple minutes, when someone tells you that they believe in aliens, to listen and actually appraise their reason. And I mean, really listen. Tell yourself, "Well, it's possible I'm wrong. Let's hear." The thought, in your head, is more vital than the act of listening.

If you act like you're listening, but your thoughts are saying, "There is no possible way they are right, I'm just listening because rationality demands it, and I'll be able to dismiss their arguments in a moment," then you're closing your mind. But if you truly let yourself listen, and tell yourself, in the silence of your mind, that there's a chance they're right, then you open yourself up to amazing things... even if it's not something that supports what they're arguing, you might come across some stray fact, some mental structure, that you hadn't considered before, and it could open up some level of understanding on an otherwise unrelated area of consideration, such as, "Ah, wait... what if this is why people act in this way?"

What I find the most important part of this article is not 'how can we use our thoughts to create habits,' but instead 'be more aware of the thoughts you have - are they the thoughts you want to become word and act?' Just having a thought does not guarantee it will become word or act, but if you find yourself in the habit of evaluating the thoughts running through your mind ... you will be far more able to encourage the good habits and destroy the bad habits.

Only then can you move forward to 'create' habits... for instance, what you were saying about sustainable habits, and coming up with exceptions for 'new habits' - you need an all or nothing approach, or else you think your way around it and make excuses. That suggests that your thought was not controlled, and that you think you're the sort of person who makes excuses. What if, instead of trying to get into the habit of eating less meat ... you instead had a goal of trying to create a habit of not making excuses for yourself?

Not trying to target you specifically, but more thinking about the topic on a much more general level and tossing out some general ideas that might apply to a number of different people.

It's about ten times easier to become vegetarian than it is to reduce your consumption of meat. Becoming vegetarian means refusing meat every time no matter what, and you can pretty much manage that from day one. Reducing your meat consumption means somehow judging how much meat you're eating and coming up with an idea of how low you want it to go, and pretty soon you're just fudging all the figures and eating as much as you were anyway.

Likewise, I tried for a long time to "reduce my soda drinking" and could not achieve this. Now I have switched to "sucralose-based sodas only" and I've been able to do it remarkably well.

I have tried to cut down drinking by 'drinking less' or 'only drinking when it's a particularly special occasion', and within weeks this went back to default of 'drinking when I wanted'. Ditto with 'eating less meat', 'eating healthier food' etc.

'Eating healthier food' is not, I don't think, in the same category as 'drinking less'. You can impose it on yourself by, for example, making yourself eat whatever you count as "healthy food" before you go near the "junk food", with the necessary consequence that you'll eat more healthy food, and less junk food because you'll be full. Also, all of those categories can be turned specific. Eating healthy can 'eat at least 3 fruits every day, less than 1 fried thing.'

I thought the whole "nothing fucking works" thing was about physical traits, not character traits.

Agreed. I'm sure it would be harder for Eliezer to acquire the character trait of "being a fit person who exercises an hour every day" simply because his body seems to give less positive reinforcement. He stated in one post that although he tries to walk an hour a day (or something equivalent, I can't remember) he feels exhausted afterwards, rather than euphoric like a lot of people do after exercising. (Then again, the "runner's high", for me anyway, comes at its strongest after very intense exercise. Walking an hour leaves me pretty exhausted too.)

However, I'm sure there are invisible health effects to Eliezer's physical exercise, just in terms of cardiovascular health and aerobic capacity. As far as I can tell, his attitude is "I don't get as much visible benefit from exercise anyway, but I'm going to keep trying anyway." Perserverence is a character trait, too.

Were you able to find the actual article? I was able to access the PDF using my university password, which is why I couldn't post it. What I gathered from reading part, not all, of the article is that behaviours that are automatic, i.e. controlled by habit, tend to take over under stress. Thus, if your decision to exercise is consciously controlled, i.e. it isn't yet a habit, then it becomes much harder to choose to exercise under stress, and you'll tend to revert to actions that are habitual, i.e. going on the Internet and eating junk food if those are your habits.

I did only read part of the article in detail and skimmed the rest. Bad habit.

I make a habit of muttering incoherently and then scornfully rejecting my own opinions to maximize reasonable creativity. Of course, this is a bad course of action in public, but very helpful when I need to make a game engine in two days.

I agree that expressing outrage is normally a bad idea, it generally does not convince the other person and negatively effects my ability to be rational.

I was thinking about that as I was writing this...I thought I'd mentioned it at some point, but I guess not. Thus telling my friends I'm going to go to the gym or the pool later makes it a lot more likely that I'll actually go, even if they can't verify whether I do or not. Useful tactic.

30 minutes a week does something, I'm sure. Not sure if you can get cardio with just lifting weights. I like having good cardio because it allows me to do things like, say, run all the way to the bus stop if I'm late or bike 3 hours in a day if that's what my schedule demands. I'm sure your potential for injuries is lower than mine...I seem to suffer one minor injury after another, and that's with swimming, pretty much the lowest-impact sport ever.

Also I'm pretty sure you can't improve your swimming times with half an hour once a week. Or running, skiing, cycling, etc...

I use this kind of thinking all the time. 'I have done [blank] which was difficult and required willpower, therefore I am the kind of person who can do difficult things that require willpower...therefore I can resist those chips." (Or whatever. Actually I don't usually resist chips if they're free.)

Thanks a million. I was using Scholar's Portal with my university password, but all the clicking in the world couldn't seem to bring me to a page that didn't require a password.

BTW the first link takes you to a page of gibberish. I posted the second link with the references in the article, thank you.

I don't think most people would consider IQ a 'character trait'... However, that's a matter of terminology and doesn't negate your point. I agree that 'fluid intelligence' is probably relatively innate and would be hard to change (although there's some research that training tasks such as the dual n-back can have an effect.) Crystallized intelligence, as basically the sum of your knowledge and ability to apply it, can definitely be increased by practice. IQ in isolation strikes me as something that wouldn't matter as much as IQ and amount of experience and good work habits and openness to criticism and improvement.

As for conscientiousness, I have no idea what kind of research has been done on its stability as a character trait, but I see no reason why someone who was aware enough to make a decision to become more conscientious wouldn't be able to train themselves in habits that would, at the very least, make them able to get more work done and appear harder-working to others.

[Citation needed]

I did check Google.