Mass_Driver comments on Get Curious - Less Wrong

51 Post author: lukeprog 24 February 2012 05:10AM

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Comment author: lukeprog 23 February 2012 01:12:19AM 16 points [-]

Good. Let's see if we can make progress.

  1. New habit: Every time you're wrong, write down what you were wrong about.
  2. Play 'the calibration game': Use Wits & Wagers cards and give your confidence intervals. You'll probably find that 40% of the time, the correct answer was outside your 90% confidence interval. Write down all those failures.
  3. If the different hypotheses don't matter for which actions you take, you're either bad at realizing the decision-theoretic implications of various hypotheses, or you're bad at spending your time thinking about things that matter. Which do you think it is?
  4. Rarely is new information not evidence for or against old ideas. Maybe you need more practice in model-building? This is a separate post I'd like to write at some time; I'm not sure what useful thing I can say about it now.
  5. Re: your "heinous lack of virtue." Reward yourself for effort, not for results. You have more control over the former.
Comment author: [deleted] 23 February 2012 02:52:21PM 2 points [-]

Awesome. I'm going to keep that in mind. I only have a quibble about

Reward yourself for effort, not for results.

That could lead me to try but nowhere near as hard as I can, and making excuses when I fail.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 23 February 2012 03:15:45PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Zvi 25 February 2012 03:25:41PM 0 points [-]

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.