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Drahflow comments on Time to See If We Can Apply Anything We Have Learned - Less Wrong
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A next step in setting up a decent experiment would be to select 4 groups (1, 2, 3 + Control) of people randomly. To give findings most applicable to rational people, we can just as well select within LW.
Another step: Select a common task the utility of which is perceived as high by most people on LW, yet which is seldomly performed.
Proposal: During two weeks, run for (at least) 10 Minutes on three of each four consecutive days.
Ideally, the experiment would then continue with another task, but switching group members. This improves the experiment via control for different motivation between participants. Also trying a different task gives us a chance to see if there is a general method or whether the method must be selected specific to the task.
If anybody is willing to participate in this experiment, I am willing to coordinate. If somebody else is willing (and more qualified) to coordinate, I hereby enlist as participant.
Qualification: I am a computer scientist, I have one contact to a psychology researcher, I feel competent in statistics. Then again I lost 20$ (of 100$) over 3 month in prediction markets.
The fact that I'd be participating in an experiment for SCIENCE! would motivate me overwhelmingly more than any of those techniques.
No, no. You skipped a step. You didn't actually think hard about the implications of the three positions or work out any stark contradictions between them. If you'd done that, you'd have thought up multiple small focused experiments to resolve each individual area of contradiction. Instead you hastily propose one big complex setup that looks more like a contest between three self-help techniques. Whatever the outcome, it won't bring us any closer to the correct constructive theory of human motivation. Yvain has eloquently described the same problem in the thread nearby.
Sorry if this sounded harsh.
No, but a setup which does not try to understand more deeply which parts of which theory contribute to its success still gives pretty useful results about which approach has the highest expected utility.
So, are we going to get this experiment running or not?
Do you have a better proposal?
I would also join, but we should take Cousin_It's suggestions. And we should send our ideas to some psychologists for feedback.