Hoarding and sugar
Aug. 27th, 2011 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupI'm sure everyone has seen the NYT article on decision fatigue and how it relates to blood glucose levels. Some people (i.e., my dad) misinterpreted it as "people make bad decisions when they're hungry", but I think the truer statement is "risk taking depletes a pool that can be refilled by food." We don't actually know whether the judges have a reasonably good function for determining whether people will re-offend, and simply require them to meet a higher threshold as they get hungrier, or if they stop being able to accurately judge prisoners, in which case keeping them in prison is the more conservative thing but not necessarily the wrong thing, depending on how we weight the rights of good prison
Around the same time, I'm reading another book on hoarding, which talks about a constellation of related traits that seem correlated with hoarding: perfectionism, indecisiveness, fear of making mistakes, fear of losing information, fear of loss (of stuff), fear of loss (of memory)**, inability to prioritize. All of which seem like they could stem from more rapid decision fatigue, be it because hoarders have fewer reserves or find each decision more taxing.
Apparently I don't have anywhere to go with this, but I still thought it was interesting.
*I would love to see a long term study of the recidivism rate of people paroled at various times during the day, and the prison behavior of people denied over the same distribution.
**This is really interesting. Despite doing no worse than non-hoarders on memory tests, hoarders are disproportionately likely to be afraid they'll forget things, and to leave things out as a physical reminder. That's why some hoarders have piles of stuff out in the open, but empty filing cabinets.
Around the same time, I'm reading another book on hoarding, which talks about a constellation of related traits that seem correlated with hoarding: perfectionism, indecisiveness, fear of making mistakes, fear of losing information, fear of loss (of stuff), fear of loss (of memory)**, inability to prioritize. All of which seem like they could stem from more rapid decision fatigue, be it because hoarders have fewer reserves or find each decision more taxing.
Apparently I don't have anywhere to go with this, but I still thought it was interesting.
*I would love to see a long term study of the recidivism rate of people paroled at various times during the day, and the prison behavior of people denied over the same distribution.
**This is really interesting. Despite doing no worse than non-hoarders on memory tests, hoarders are disproportionately likely to be afraid they'll forget things, and to leave things out as a physical reminder. That's why some hoarders have piles of stuff out in the open, but empty filing cabinets.
