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aelephant comments on What have you recently tried, and failed at? - Less Wrong
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I was thinking about my own repetitive checking of websites recently in the context of lukeprog's post about Behavioral Psychology. It seems to me that the reason it is so easy to become habituated to it is because it offers "Applied Intermittent Reinforcement". Your reward is reading some new nugget of knowledge or some great insight, but you never know for certain when & where you will stumble across it.
It's possible, but the issue is that the sentiment is different for different sites. For example, if one of the sites I went to was a tumblr with smiling faces on it, and then I stopped going to that tumblr and I was less happy, the intermittent reinforcement wouldn't be the important mechanism. Some of the sites- like Facebook- were very much a "almost none of this is going to be interesting enough to devote time to, but at least it's novel" resource, and I don't miss them when I'm not going there. So the sites that I do miss must be giving me something, but it's not obvious yet what.