Belgian Blues, Flex Wheeler, and Muscular Setpoint

What do these two pictures have in common? Find out in a fascinating article by M. Doug McGuff, M.D. that follows. Also be sure to check out the other articles on McGuff's site.

http://www.ultimate-exercise.com/bravenewworld.html






Brave New World

by M. Doug McGuff, M.D.


Recently, Dr. Richard Winett wrote two articles that I consider monumental in the history of strength training and bodybuilding. What makes these articles so amazing is their degree of objectivity and intellectual honesty about a topic that is very easy to delude oneself about. The first article, A Personal Revelation about Set Point Theory can be found in the February, 1998 issue of Dr. Winett's newsletter the Master Trainer. In this article Dr. Winett tells how he was attempting to partially refute the idea of a homeostatic set point. When he actually presented the numbers he had collected over his training career, a different conclusion emerged... "The data strongly point toward some limitations I have in going beyond about 140 pounds of lean body mass. If there is such a thing as a set point as far as producing muscle, my data illustrate that concept." Dr. Winett then goes on to make a startling conclusion... "I'm basically a smaller person and attempts to become bigger have been unsuccessful. These data more strongly confirm that conviction and starkly show that beyond a certain point, I simply seem to gain body fat." Compare these statements of brutal honesty with the usual statement you hear from people in our field such as... "I've gained an inch on my arms, and 2 inches on my chest, and 12 pounds of body weight with only slight decrease in my abdominal definition." What this really means in the light of what Dr. Winett is presenting to us can be translated as... "I've put an inch on my arms and 2 inches on my chest because I've gained 12 pounds of fat." In the April, 1999 issue of Iron Man, Dr. Winett again presents his data with accompanying pictures and asks us Can Accepting Genetic Limitations Be Empowering? In this article Dr. Winett notes... "The unfortunate part is that it took me until I was about 45 to realize, accept and in some ways capitalize on my limitation" and "The irony is that through all my training incarnations I had about the same lean body mass". The greatest testament to Dr. Winett's power of emperic observation is that he made these conclusions about himself before the supporting scientific evidence was known to him. These articles inspired me to keep detailed records of my own progress (recorded workouts, photos and measurements) on a workout by workout basis and they have forced me to similar conclusions. Now there is hard scientific evidence that a muscular set point really does exist.

( read more )

Supermemo

Supermemo seems like a useful learning tool.

Getting Hooked

http://uk.cambridge.org/politicaltheory/catalogue/0521640083/

Getting Hooked
Rationality and Addiction


Edited by Jon Elster, Ole-Jxrgen Skog


Contributors | Description | Contents

Contributors
Jon Elster, Ole-Jørgen Skog, Karl Ove Moene, Olav Gjelsvik, George Ainslie, Eliot Gardner, James David, Helge Waal, George Loewenstein, Thomas Schelling
Description
The essays in this volume offer the most thorough and up-to-date discussion available of the relationship between addiction and rationality. This is the only book-length treatment of the subject and includes contributions from philosophers, psychiatrists, neurobiologists, sociologists, and economists. The volume offers an up-to-date exposition of the neurophysiology of addiction, a critical examination of the Becker theory of rational addiction, an argument for a ‘visceral theory of addiction’, a discussion of compulsive gambling as a form of addiction, several discussions of George Ainslie’s theory of hyperbolic discounting, analyses of social causes and policy implications, and an investigation of the problem of relapse.


Chapter Contents
Preface and acknowledgments; Notes on contributors; Introduction Jon Elster and Ole-Jørgen Skog; Addiction and social interaction Karl Ove Moene; Addiction, weakness of the will, and relapse Olav Gjelsvik; The dangers of willpower George Ainslie; The neurobiology of chemical addiction Eliot Gardner and James David; To legalize or not to legalize: Is that the question? Helge Waal; Rationality, irrationality, and addiction - notes on Becker’s and Murphy’s theory of addiction Ole-Jørgen Skog; Gambling and addiction Jon Elster; A visceral account of addiction George Loewenstein; Epilogue

Picoeconomics

George Ainslie, Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States Within the Person (Cambridge University Press, 1992, Pp. 440)

KENT BACH



There is a simple view of motivation on which desires are like pain-killers: they come in different strengths, and their strength determines their efficacy. That is, the stronger a desire the greater its motivational force and, when two desires conflict, the stronger one “wins out” over the weaker. This view makes it puzzling how anyone could ever exhibit “strength of will” (“weakness of will” is the traditional puzzler) and act on the weaker desire, even when it is a desire for something more highly valued than what is more strongly desired. When the will, as the agent of reason, enters the fray, an explanation of what a person is motivated enough to do must reckon not only with competing desires and their motivational forces, but also with the will’s capacity to be affected by different ones in ways not proportional to their force. However, this complication sheds little light, for if the will must bestow its stamp of approval on a desire before the desire leads to action, then, it would seem, motivational force should be measured by strength of effect on the will. And if that’s the way to measure motivational force, then, since by that measure one always acts on the desire that affects one’s will more, there is no problem of strength of will after all. But the problem seems real, however inapt the label.

George Ainslie does not pit the will against desire but instead adds a whole new dimension to the simple view of desire. He applies this enriched model to a host of fascinating psychological phenomena, including impulsiveness, addiction, compulsion, ambivalence, procrastination, back-sliding, and self-deception. Although he is by profession not a philosopher but a psychiatrist, and although his writing is tinted by behaviorist jargon, his ideas are of great philosophical interest. I would go so far as to say (note its subtitle) that Picoeconomics (micro-microeconomics) is to intrapersonal conflict what Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard 1960) was to interpersonal conflict.

Ainslie starts with the platitude, which appears in Plato’s Protagoras (356), that people, when tempted, tend to favor the immediate and discount the distant. But he gives this platitude a new twist and applies it in a variety of surprising ways. The basic idea is that this tendency to discount temporally distant rewards (negative “rewards” included) is built into our psychology, and is not based not merely on specific factors like uncertainty about the future, distraction from long-term goals, conditioned responses to immediate stimuli, and gratification of biological needs. Ainslie’s idea of temporal discounting of personal rewards is the intrapersonal counterpart of Hume’s conception of sympathy for others (the more distant people are, in space, time, or kind, the less our sympathy for them). The added twist is that when we quantify this temporal drop-off, we find that its rate is anything but linear--it is hyperbolic. Ainslie’s graphical representations illustrate situations in which one desire is generally preferred over the other but there is a region of time during which the preferences are reversed. For example, on Sunday afternoon one might prefer being rested and alert on Monday to watching a certain late movie; that night, as show time approaches, watching the movie becomes more and more attractive; Monday morning, being rested and alert is again valued more highly. Relying on the idea of conflicting temporal perspectives, Ainslie proceeds to make intelligible the puzzling phenomena enumerated above (unfortunately, his graphs and often his discussion do not take retrospective attitudes like regret and guilt or satisfaction and relief into account). He suggests ways in which people’s inchoate appreciation of their changing temporal preferences leads them to adopt various strategies of impulse-control and self-reward. He cleverly applies certain game-theoretic concepts to conflicts of intrapersonal interest and identifies intrapersonal versions (involving competing interests rather than persons) of such predicaments as Newcomb’s problem, the paradox of deterrence, the backwards induction paradox, and the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.

Ainslie’s insightful and often virtuosic discussion of assorted examples of psychological conflict and irrationality sometimes seems to go beyond the conceptual resources of his model. This raises the question of just how much of the explanatory work is actually accomplished by the model itself. Take the concept of second-order attitudes, on which philosophers rely in addressing the fact, e.g., that people often realize that their values are disproportional to the strengths of their desires and may attempt to act on or else knowingly resist that realization. Ainslie uses that concept (in effect, if not explicitly) in his discussion of such phenomena as procrastination, vacillation, backsliding, precommitment, personal rules, and control of attention. However, it is not obvious that his model is equipped to capture second-order attitudes, inasmuch as hyperbolic discount curves reckon only with moment-by-moment preferences. Intersecting discount curves can represent changing preferences over time (never mind the unrealistically precise numerical quantification presupposed in plotting these curves), but it is not clear how this model is supposed to incorporate not only the play of conflicting interests at each of various times but the effect, at any given time, of assessments of those interests over time. In Ainslie’s model, though not always in his discussions, the agent is situated only at some particular point in time and able then only to weight future rewards relative to that time. So how can it matter to him now how something will matter to him later? In other words, how can the model explain why should strategic considerations ever prevail over tactical ones?

The worry here is that despite the sophistication of Ainslie’s psychological hedonism, with its marketplace of motivations, it may not fully succeed in accounting for the rationality of bargaining with one’s future selves. For example, despite his emphasis on the strategem of precommitment, as when one adopts a “personal rule,” for reducing the motivational effect of impulses, he does not make clear how, on his model, it is rational to obey the rule one adopts for resisting recurrent temptations. Why not one last fling or one more bite? Even if the personal rule does have motivational force, why should it? Related to this is the problem of integrating temporal perspectives and determining to what extent each is authoritative. There is the prospective outlook (when the tempting attraction is not yet available), the immediate perspective (when the reward is imminent), and the retrospective point of view (where some combination of satisfaction or relief and guilt or regret may be expected). A related problem is that Ainslie attempts to turn his descriptive model of the interplay of motivations into a normative model of how to manage that interplay. He gestures towards a kind of biological account of how hyperbolic discounting should have been selected for (his arguments seem inspired by evolutionary game theory), but there is a threat here of recreating the naturalistic fallacy.

The worries registered above do not undermine the liberating effect of Ainslie’s model. His book may be rambling and sprawling, but it offers a whole new take on a wide variety of psychologically fascinating and philosophically perplexing phenomena. One hopes that in the near future the author will heed some of his own strategic guidelines and produce a clearer and more concise edition of Picoeconomics, preferably with a more straightforward title, like The Strategy of Inner Conflict

The Economics of Immediate Gratification

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/1426/http:zSzzSzelsa.berkeley.eduzSz~rabinzSzjbdm.pdf/t-h-e-e.pdf


THE ECONOMICS OF IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION


Ted O'Donoghue
Department of Economics
Cornell University

and

Matthew Rabin
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley


Abstract: People have self-control problems: We pursue immediate gratification in a way that we ourselves do not appreciate in the long run. Only recently have economists begun to focus on the behavioral and welfare implications of such time-inconsistent preferences. This paper outlines a simple formal model of self-control problems, applies this model to some specific economic applications, and discusses some general lessons and open questions in the economic analysis of immediate gratification. We emphasize the importance of the timing of the rewards and costs of an activity, as well as a person's awareness of future self-control problems. We identify situations where knowing about self-control problems helps a person and situations where it hurts her, and also identify situations where even mild self-control problems can severely damage a person. In the process, we describe specific implications of self-control problems for addiction, incentive theory, and consumer choice and marketing.

Keywords: Hyperbolic Discounting, Immediate Gratification, Procrastination, Self Control, Time Inconsistency.

JEL Classifications: A12, B49, C70, D11, D60, D74, D91, E21