List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of “Willpower”

A curated list of the surprising/counterintuitive passages Scott highlighted in Baumeister & Tierney's 'Willpower', prefaced with a blanket disclaimer ('quotations, not endorsements'; 'I was generally not impressed with the skepticism level displayed in this book'). Passages span the Zeigarnik effect, study-plans clearing the mind, NYC singles pickiness, page-a-day vs binge writing, Chinese/American toddler self-control and the Flynn IQ-threshold point, the marshmallow test and father-presence, diet-cycling rats, the William Hill weight-loss bets, the 'what-the-hell' diet effect, ego-depletion in dogs + glucose, the Finnish glucose-tolerance-predicts-crime study, and the Wheelis/Freud-no-longer-works passage. Scott's one-line annotations supply the value -- repeatedly flagging skepticism ('SO SOOOOO SKEPTICAL', 'pretty skeptical here, given past experience') on exactly the shakiest social-psych claims, several of which later failed to replicate.

Quality 56 · Solid. A reading-notes/excerpt compilation with minimal original synthesis -- it's mostly quotation. Lifted above a mere stub by the genuinely interesting curation and the prescient skeptical asides, but it is not a developed essay. Solid.

Claude’s paradigm shift 30 · Slight. A quotation list contributes essentially no novelty of its own beyond the curation. Slight.

Real-world impact 1 · Negligible. Negligible -- a personal highlights post with no downstream effect.