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Armok_GoB comments on Get Curious - Less Wrong
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I consistently fail several times over at this. I always feel I DO know everything worth knowing, and while obviously wrong can't come up with any salient counterexamples. Probably related to memory problems I have, I don't seem able to come up with examples or counterexamples of anything ever.
And when I do consider multiple possibilities, they never seem to matter for what actions I should take, which drains any motivation to find out the answer if it takes more than 30 seconds of googling or I happen to not be at my computer when the question occurs.
All the information I take in seems to be about new ideas, not evidence for or against old ones.
All this is obviously absurd and I'm a bad rationalist and deserve extremely low status for this heinous lack of virtue, being but a burden to the tribe! Woe is me!
Help?
Good. Let's see if we can make progress.
Awesome. I'm going to keep that in mind. I only have a quibble about
That could lead me to try but nowhere near as hard as I can, and making excuses when I fail.
To clarify: reward yourself for taking new and improved actions, or for taking more of the right kind of actions, even if these actions don't immediately cause the desired results. Once your new level becomes a habit, stop rewarding yourself and reward the next level up. Rinse and repeat until you're close enough to a goal that it makes sense to reward yourself directly for the results you actually want.
I continue to celebrate a job well done even if it's force of habit, if only to give myself better incentives to form more good habits.
There's signaling effort (especially to yourself), and then there's effort. You want to reward effort but not signaling effort.
Often one will make a cursory attempt at something, but with the goal of signaling to themselves or others that they put in effort or tried rather than doing what was most likely to accomplish the goal. This leads to statements like "I tried to get there on time" or "I did everything I was supposed to do." That's excuse making. Don't reward that.
Instead, reward yourself to the extent that you did that which you had reason to believe was most likely to work, including doing your best to figure that out, even if it didn't succeed. Do the opposite if you didn't make the best decisions and put forth your best efforts, even if you do succeed.
The danger is that effort is much easier to self-deceive about than results - and the people who need this the most will often have the most trouble with that. Not enough attention is paid to this problem, and it may well deserve a top level post.
you need both the instances you are right and the instances you are wrong to do correct stats... otherwise i can have 90% confidence, be wrong one time out of 10, and 100% of those times that i am wrong, have the answer outside 90% confidence interval.
... my "not true rejection!" alarm is going of but I can't seem to find anything to do with that information either.
Yeah, sounds like you have a general motivation problem that needs fixing before you can get better at a lot of other things.
Not quite, but it seem unlikely this conversation will get further without getting into mental problems I really don't want to discus with someone whose opinion I care about, like you.
I find your honesty in these posts inspiring. I wish more people had such courage.
Ah, yea. Backing out of a conversation and retracting all my posts as soon as it gets uncomfortable sure is courageous!
It still took a good bit of nerve to make those posts.
Sure.
Post some hypotheses and/or predictions at Less Wrong. There's a least a reasonable chance that people will tell you if you're mistaken.
This is true for me as well. Which is why I try to rely on programs that prompt me to reply at random intervals through computer popups or sms, rather than habit.
I highly doubt you have zero control over effort. Akrasia limits your ability to act on willpower, it doesn't negate willpower entirely. Reward yourself for those 30 second googling bursts if nothing else.
I'm serious, have a jar of mini chocolate chips by your desk and pop one in your mouth every time you google an interesting question on scholar or wikipedia.
Is there any evidence this works? 1) Does the brain treat these discretionary pleasures as reinforcement? 2) If it does, do attribution effects undermine the efficacy? Research in attribution effects show that extrinsic rewards sometimes undermine intrinsic interest, i.e., curiosity. "Negative effects are found on high-interest tasks when the rewards are tangible, expected (offered beforehand), and loosely tied to level of performance."
Disagree. The target of your advice has reported serious health problems (and his akrasia would probably be a lot easier to overcome if it weren't for the health problems, according to my models (which are based only on what he has posted to LW and on information not specific to him)) so I would advise him not to choose what to eat for its reward value.
To help him decide what weight to give my advice, I will add that I have had serious health problems for the last 40 years.
Moreover, I have serious doubts about the usefulness of setting up blatantly artificial (i.e., self-imposed for the purpose of conditioning oneself) cause-and_effect relationships between desired changes in behavior and rewards even when the rewards have no expected negative effect on health.
You're right. This was very poorly considered advice. I'm ashamed to admit I kind of recognized that as I was writing it, but posted it anyways for reasonable-sounding justifications that now suspiciously elude memory.
I know the feeling (from times I have given advice).
maaaan i have to condition myself NOT to google interesting questions else i can't get any work done for my job. But i see what you mean, that may work for conditioning oneself to work.
(A caution: I've found that naive implementations of the "reward oneself with candy" method for overcoming akrasia don't work because it becomes too tempting to just eat the candy for no reason. It has been suggested to me that it might help to explicitly write down beforehand exactly what actions justify a reward, but I haven't gotten around to testing this yet. Individual results may vary; further research is needed.)