What would you do if blood glucose theory of willpower was true?

Really, does it actually matter that something isn't a magic bullet? Either the cost/benefit balance is good enough to warrant doing something, or it isn't. Perhaps taw is overstating the case, and certainly there are other causes of akrasia, but someone giving disproportionate attention to a plausible hypothesis isn't really evidence against that hypothesis, especially one supported by multiple scientific studies.

From what I can see, there's more than sufficient evidence to warrant serious consideration for something like the following propositions:

• Application of short-term willpower measurably expends some short-term biological resource
• Willpower "weakens" as the resource is depleted, recovering over a longer time span
• Resource expenditure correlates with reduced blood sugar concentration
• Increasing blood sugar (temporarily?) restores resource availability

So, my questions are: If this is correct, what practical use could we make of the idea? What could we do as individuals or as a group to decide whether it's useful enough to bother thinking about? Particularly in cases where willpower is needed mostly to start a task rather than continue it, if there's a simple way to get a quick, short-term boost that might make the difference between several hours of productivity vs. akratic frustration, that's significant!

As an aside, I recall seeing some studies indicating that there may be more general principles in play here, regarding the mind's executive functions as a whole, but I don't have citations on hand at the moment.

I do remember these cool juice pouches I'd poke with a straw as a kid. I'd walk around with a bandolier full of them. Or maybe I'd snack on bananas throughout the day.

Actually, before taking steps to saturate myself at whatever level brings me no measurable willpower-deficiency, I'd investigate whether there's a possible training effect to enduring subjectively harder rigors while under the low-glucose condition. Plenty of people regularly don't eat at all until the evening and don't report feeling horrible after adjusting.

In other words, will I become dependent on my glucose-drip (constant snacking) so that I'm worse off if it's interrupted than if I'd never heard of this theory?

Even if I would become dependent with regular use, I'd still employ it at key moments in my life.

if this theory was true - and by manipulating blood glucose levels you could achieve far greater willpower whenever you wanted, what would you do?

I would wait for someone to provide cheap and easy implementation methods (a wristwatch that doubles as a body-monitor and expert system?), so I wouldn't have to do all kinds of primary research using very poor methods like self-experimentation, and wouldn't have to spend money on imprecise testing kits.

And the second issue - if this theory was true - and by manipulating blood glucose levels you could achieve far greater willpower whenever you wanted

Logical error: (diminished X correlated with diminished Y) does not imply (increased X causes increased Y).

Among other things, there could be some other variable Z that causes both X and Y to diminish.

There can also be more than one resource bottleneck in the process - if other resources normally take longer to exhaust than glucose, all this does is make you run into problems later.

There may also be non-resource bottlenecks, like how much "executive" wiring you have. See the meditation-grows-your-brain studies, that seem to indicate willpower is like a muscle in terms of being able to be grown and made more efficient. So, removing the glucose bottleneck without increasing executive control, could be like having a fed runner who hasn't run a marathon before. You can give them all the glucose you want, but that won't necessarily get them to the finish line.

Following the logic of constraints, one can generate an almost unlimited number of plausible scenarios under which glucose will not produce any substantial improvements, even if glucose were a bottleneck resource in akrasia most of the time.... which it probably isn't.

Related:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/10x/the_physiology_of_willpower/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/af/missed_distinctions/

Some of the comments on Superstimuli and the collapse of western civilization

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1sb/med_patient_social_networks_are_better_scientific/1nf3

Anecdotally, I know that a mid-day soda seems to keep my prodcutivity higher - though if I drink too much, there's always risk of a crash. I had assumed it was the caffeine, though maybe the glucose plays a role as well. Anyone else have a similar experience?

ETA: I'll add that I've also long noticed that eating regular meals, especially relatively balanced and nutritious meals (relative to, say, an entire bag of potato chips), also seems to keep my productivity up.

It's good to study this sort of factor, but one of the points that pjeby makes in Improving The Akrasia Hypothesis is that there are multiple causes of akrasia. Dropping blood glucose may be one, and making blood glucose levels luminous may be a powerful technique, but it's not going to be a magic bullet.

While local shortages of blood glucose in particular brain regions can cause willpower failures, you can't fix it by hacking your biochemistry because sustained global excess blood sugar has the opposite effect: crippling lethargy. Some possible workarounds do come to mind, but they all involve either nanotechnology or dangerous brain surgery.