Is this not just a (mildly oversimplified) framing of what psychologists call ego depletion [1]? This appears to be a well-replicated finding. I don’t see any reason to call it “wildly incorrect”.
[1] The strength model of self-control. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-18261-013
Edit: After some more research, it looks like the science is inconclusive on ego depletion. So I would not call it “well-replicated”, but also not “wildly incorrect”.
This blog post summarizes the science nicely: https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2023/10/30/a-conversation-about-the-science-of-willpower/ TL;DR: You can train your willpower. It does act like a limited resource [Edit: Science is inconclusive on this claim]. But most importantly, it is strongly affected by your sleep, nutrition and stress level.
I found that mindfulness meditation was helpful for me. Practically, you can achieve an effect that is similar to having strengthened willpower by organizing your life in such a way that you don’t encounter many temptations in the first place.
Definitely no. In addition to the downsides you mentioned, I feel like the redditor’s desire for karma is what causes these hiveminds/echo chambers and cliché comments that are so typical of many subreddits.
Edit: Thank you so much for the gold kind stranger!
I’m kind of dissatisfied with the answers here. As soon as you talk about actually drawing a line in the real world, the distinction between rational and irrational numbers stops making sense. In other words, the distinction between rational and irrational numbers is a concept that describes numbers to an accuracy that is impossible to achieve in real life. So you cannot draw a line with a clearly irrational length, but neither can you draw a line with a clearly rational length. You can only define theoretical mathematical constructs which can then be classified as rational or irrational, if applicable.
More mathematically phrased: in real life, your line to which you assign the length L will always have an inaccuracy of size x>0. But for any real L, the interval (L-x;L+x) contains both an infinite number of rational and an infinite number of irrational numbers. Note that this is independent of how small the value of x is. This is why I said that the accuracy, at which the concept of rational and irrational numbers make sense, is impossible to achieve in real life.
So I think your confusion stems from mixing the lengths we assign to objects in the real world with the lengths we can accurately compute for mathematical objects that we have created in our minds using axioms and definitions.