Discipline

Why is discipline (of all kinds) so difficult for people to adhere to?

Well, it is my belief that people's minds are not built to natively enforce discipline. Human cognition is more like a regression model than a flow model - that is, factors are weighted for "best fit", not added or subtracted in order to mimic functional need. In order to be a flow model, evolution would need sufficient time to work and sufficient latitude for proper selection (in other words, rationality would have to equate to higher reproduction rates).

When we have to make a decision, first, a situation compels us to utilize conscious thought to identify relevant inputs and generate a new output (action). We will retain a gestalt sense of the decision, along with a more vague sense of the factors we considered. One thing we will not retain well is the actual process by which the factors are weighted to come to a decision. If we try to remember why we made a decision, we will overwhelmingly confabulate the reason based on our memories of the inputs and output (this based on studies of patients with separated brain hemispheres).

Our output for a given decision will be of varying quality, based on our rationality, experience, and the decision subject matter, but ultimately, it is not the quality of the decision that matters in the long run. What matters is how well we are able to select pertinent inputs in a manner that is consistent across decision cycles. This is to say, how disciplined our mental processes are.

Pertinence is important for fairly obvious reasons - if we allow cognitive distortion to destroy our ability to normalize brain process to true rationality, we will not achieve sufficiently successful outcomes to optimize our learning.

Consistency is important because if we make a similar decision in a different way each time, we will never improve the quality of that decision-making process. This is because we will never accurately identify correlations between our decisions' quality and our decision-making factors.

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