The being stuck thing sounds like it matters a lot here. Thinking hard is a lot of work to begin with, and most habits people end up stuck with replace needing to think with rote responses that can be broken with a change of mindset.
A follow-up on this might be how well it works on people in different situations. You need to have some idea on what useful smartness is like, and someone who has grown up in very disadvantaged conditions might just not have enough exposure to that to form useful models. Someone with mental issues might not be able to break their habits of behavior to get benefit from the thing. People who are already pushing themselves hard cognitively, like math grad students, pro chess players or stock traders might get less out of it, though the exercise could still help them come up with a new perspective on things.
I wonder if there's a generalizable attitude here. This reminds me a bit about the pedagogical advice that you should always tell children that their academic success is because they worked hard, not because they are talented, since otherwise they'll model themselves as having some comfortable level of talent and stop pushing themselves to whatever actual limits their achievement might have.
It doesn't seem to be just a question of working harder. You can still get stuck to thinking that you're as smart as you think you are and therefore can keep working like you've always worked and do a bunch of ineffective hard work. Thinking what a smarter person would do also makes you question the quality of your metacognition.
Well, it was already pointed out that getting feedback on the usefulness of various horoscopes is a good idea, and coding has commenced with that as part of the plan, so I think the thing to do is actually try it and see how it works.
(5:29:23 PM) Adelene: ...horoscopes are for people who, like [mutual friend], prefer to have an authority tell them what to do. *blink*
(5:30:18 PM) Alicorn: *blink*
(5:30:50 PM) Adelene: This is an observation that my brain made just now, but it seems to make a fair bit of sense.
(5:31:18 PM) Alicorn: Plausible.
(5:32:21 PM) Adelene: Especially given that horoscopes seem not to actually make predictions about the future: They say 'X is a good thing to do today', not 'X will happen today'.
(5:32:36 PM) Alicorn: *nod*
(5:32:53 PM) Adelene: ...rationalist horoscopes?
(5:33:07 PM) Alicorn: like what?
(5:33:33 PM) Adelene: "Focus on granularizing your goals this week."
(5:33:43 PM) Alicorn: hmm
(5:34:09 PM) Alicorn: divided according to some mechanism like star sign, or no?
(5:34:38 PM) Adelene: The only advantage I see to that is that it may make it more emotionally plausible.
(5:35:06 PM) Adelene: There may be some other advantage to having different people doing different things at any given time tho.
(5:35:23 PM) Alicorn: According to [other friend], birth *season* has empirically interesting effects in a few areas...
(5:36:35 PM) Adelene: I don't think we can cash that out very well into advice, and anyway I expect that having that close of a similarity with actual horoscopes is likely to provoke a memetic immune response for most people. Could do it based on some kind of personality test tho.
(5:36:50 PM) Alicorn: *nod*
(5:39:08 PM) Adelene: Really, I think the bulk of the utility of such a thing would be in giving people generally-useful cues to work from - having any given day's horoscope (or whatever we'd call it) be randomly picked from a set of good ones that haven't been used recently should be just fine.
(5:39:15 PM) Alicorn: *nod*
(5:40:00 PM) Adelene: Maybe pair it with a rationality quote of the day, too.
(5:40:10 PM) Alicorn: Yessss.
I know it's a silly idea, but it seems like it might be useful. I've played with random quote dispensers in the past, and if they have a good list of quotes to start with they can be surprisingly useful, in my experience - the quote might be useless 9 times out of 10, but that tenth time, when it makes you realize that a connection exists that you never would have noticed otherwise, is pretty awesome. Something like a daily horoscope might have a similar effect, but in a more practical way, getting people to consider taking actions in contexts where they wouldn't usually consider those actions and occasionally finding an unusually good, but not intuitively obvious, match. And that's on top of any benefits that such a system would have for people who do work better when they're told what to do.
Thoughts?