Today's post, Akrasia and Shangri-La was originally published on 10 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The Shangri-La diet works amazingly well for some people, but completely fails for others, for no known reason. Since the diet has a metabolic rationale and is not supposed to require willpower, its failure in my and other cases is unambigiously mysterious. If it required a component of willpower, then I and others might be tempted to blame myself for not having willpower. The art of combating akrasia (willpower failure) has the same sort of mysteries and is in the same primitive state; we don't know the deeper rule that explains why a trick works for one person but not another.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.