jsalvatier comments on What are good topics for literature review prizes? - Less Wrong

4 Post author: jsalvatier 02 September 2011 11:48PM

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Comment author: gwern 03 September 2011 01:02:54AM *  8 points [-]

Hm. We are principally interested here, practicality-wise, in akrasia and productivity. I don't know of any particular area of the akrasia literature that hasn't been discussed thoroughly here. Productivity-wise, software tools outside psychological training like dual n-back and spaced repetition tools like Mnemosyne/Anki already have their coverage. Nootropics are a common interest, but the major ones seem covered either by Wikipedia or my own stuff.

Maybe there's an area of psychology missing? For example, I've wondered how well-researched the Big Five personality factors are, and in particular, what the research on Conscientiousness says. I've collected a number of citations on it, but this has always been half-hearted. Which is too bad, because Conscientiousness seems like a major factor that LWers lack, and is pretty closely related to akrasia. Lukeprog claimed there was research into how to improve it in one of the reviews he cited, but I couldn't refind it.

Comment author: jsalvatier 03 September 2011 02:49:53PM 1 point [-]

I think perhaps the problem is that we aren't aware of all the little subfields that are useful and interesting. For example, I know of people working on posts that cover the literature on 'brainstorming' and 'learning how to solve physics problems'. Both of these sound really interesting and quite useful, but I don't want to make a prize about these since people are already working on them.

Conscientiousness sounds like it might be a good topic.

Comment author: gwern 04 September 2011 05:41:40PM 2 points [-]

Conscientiousness sounds like it might be a good topic.

A new citation I've worked in, the Terman study (only very intelligent children were used) discussed in http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/04/earnings-effects-of-personality.html - eyeballing it, going from 10th to 90th in Conscientiousness was worth $800,000 over a lifetime. More than a similar jump in IQ.

Comment author: jsalvatier 04 September 2011 05:58:41PM 0 points [-]

Very interesting. I am especially interested in this because I have recently acquired some artificial conscientiousness via habitual use of task lists.