This is a post in the context of Less Wrong and rationality. I will assume you have already crossed the inferential distance addressed there.
Back in 2009 I was convinced of the existence of akrasia. I wrote a few things about it and devoted a lot of thought to the problem. At the time it seemed natural: there were things I believed I wanted but was not doing anything to get them. Now, some years later, I find akrasia to not be a useful concept as commonly conceived.
As a quick reminder, 'akrasia' is an ancient Greek word used to mean lack of will (in modern Greek it's the word for 'insobriety') and is used to describe situations where you feel like you are doing things you don't want to be doing, or conversely you feel that you are failing to do the things you want to do.
I want to approach akrasia from the outside as an observable phenomenon. You might say this is unfair because akrasia is all about 'weakness of will', but even if that is true, we still expect akrasia to have outward effects since otherwise it is literally all in your head.
So how do we notice akrasia from the outside? The same way you notice it from the inside: you do things other than what you want. Translating that into outside-your-head terminology, we can say that your stated preferences (the things you say or think you want) disagree with your revealed preferences (the things you actually do). For example, you say you want to eat a fruit more than a cookie, but, when presented with an apple and a cookie, you eat the cookie. Then your stated preference is for the fruit and your revealed preference is for the cookie.
And basically that's all there is to akrasia, with the rest of the details falling out as you dig into the reasons for the preference disagreement, though surprisingly often you'll find what you thought was preference disagreement was actually just a failure to understand the definitions of stated and revealed preference.
Well, glad we could clear that up!
If you believe in the existence of akrasia as describing some mental phenomenon, you probably have a lot of objections. I tried to write something that addressed those objections, but I got exhausted and almost gave up writing this post. My only excuse is that I'm trained as a mathematician, and so since I've provided you an outline of a proof, I'm going to leave you to fill in the details because you won't really understand it if you don't do that for yourself.
But it's dangerous to go alone, so take these:
We also have some ideas about why you may suffer from stated/revealed preference disagreement. A woefully incomplete list would include
- construal level theory
- dual process theory
- degraded attention and distraction
- willpower depletion (if you believe in it)
- lots of other things I've neglected to mention
And this is really why akrasia disappears if you look at it too closely: beyond the level of stated/revealed preference disagreement, what looked to be a single thing we could call 'akrasia' explodes into a hundred different processes with different explanations that don't lump together well in a category. So the feeling of akrasia really does appear to be all in your head, because it's actually a bunch of other stuff you just don't understand.
"Fine", you say, "you've explained what akrasia is and at least told me it's not really about weakness of will but instead about stated/revealed preference disagreement and hundreds of ultimate causes, but I still don't know what to do about it!". That's a fair point, so let's address that now.
Much has been written on how to get your stated and revealed preferences to agree. This is essentially what the entire self-help book genre is about. But now I'm going to put all those guys out of business in just a couple paragraphs.
If your stated and revealed preferences disagree, do something about it. If you want them to agree, you need to change one of them. Most likely you are just lying to yourself about your preferences and your revealed preference is what you really want, so just give up believing the false stated preference. Reasons for the self deception are usually provided by construal level theory or dual process theory, but various forms of distraction also play an important role.
But if you're really, really, really sure the stated preference is the one you want, then the disagreement is a problem of convincing. You haven't convinced yourself sufficiently that the stated preference is actually the thing you want, so get on that. You may have to use tricks or "mind hacks" at first, but it ultimately comes down to making a case to yourself that you can understand. Once you are convinced, your revealed preference will magically start matching the stated preference because you actually want the thing you think you want now.
I hope you've enjoyed this breezy tour of akrasia. I realize that, especially if you dealing with what you label akrasia, none of this probably seems all that helpful just now, nor should it. I've not really explained anything, only shown you the outlines of the territory. You'll have to fill in the details of the map, but hopefully I've saved you a lot of time by showing you where the details should be.
I'll close with this warning: it may not always be a good idea for your stated and revealed preferences to agree. Your thought processes are the result of billions of years of evolution that have lead to creatures successful enough to stand a real shot of surviving at least until the heat death of the universe by rapidly adapting to changing conditions. Somewhere along the way stated/revealed preference disagreement became part of that mental process, and it is likely serving some useful function now, even if it turns out to be a secondary characteristic.
So be careful out there. Don't lose sight of the things that truly matter to you.