gwern comments on Logging progress improving conscientiousness and overcoming procrastination at LessWrong - Less Wrong

2 Post author: ChrisHallquist 19 July 2012 04:35AM

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Comment author: gwern 20 July 2012 02:49:20PM 1 point [-]

I just ran into http://eshock.blog.com/ which seems like almost the perfect example: outright negative reinforcement, which he admits has wound up training him to not use it:

To recap the last 12 days: Things worked out for me, but not as well as they should. I didn’t use the device anymore. I had to manage certain important things besides just working and that sort of throwed me out of my routine or made me fall back to old methods. I also highly suspect that I have not been using the device anymore because I trained myself to avoid it (because it is painful). Some superficial reasons exists, such as broken bluetooth kernel drivers, that attributed to the lack of usage....You might just avoid or stop using it without your consent, as part of a negative reinforcement learning curve...Very quickly you will have difficulties to ‘push the trigger’ initially. You can only apply light to medium shocks, because it quickly becomes near-impossible to you to expose yourself to shocks that are too painful (you literally become incapable of pushing the trigger or just bearing with it)