I think there's a clear differentiation between how we behave towards individuals vs. how we view a large-scale phenomenon.
For an individual, the attempt to improve yourself is usually admirable.
But I am cynical about New Year's resolutions, and I think my priors are something like "the decision to make a change on New Years is more likely to fail than the same decision made at any other arbitrary point in time because 'everyone knows' that New Year's resolutions fail".
If someone had a problem that involved making life changes to fix or make progress on it, amongst the worst possible prescriptions for fixing this problem would be "make a resolution".
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I think there's a clear differentiation between how we behave towards individuals vs. how we view a large-scale phenomenon.
For an individual, the attempt to improve yourself is usually admirable.
But I am cynical about New Year's resolutions, and I think my priors are something like "the decision to make a change on New Years is more likely to fail than the same decision made at any other arbitrary point in time because 'everyone knows' that New Year's resolutions fail".
If someone had a problem that involved making life changes to fix or make progress on it, amongst the worst possible prescriptions for fixing this problem would be "make a resolution".