The referenced work by Andrew Critch on hedonic awareness is not yet published science. It’s his private work that he developed at the University of Berkeley for a course on psychology for mathematicians; brought to the Center for Applied Rationality; and then developed into a CFAR workshop unit.
Dang it. I was trying looking him up until I saw the Author's Note.
For anyone who has taken the workshop or is otherwise familiar with his work (or similar work), could you provide a summary? I'm sure it's more complicated than portrayed here, but is keeping a bag of chocolates with you and rewarding yourself like you were training a pidgeon a decent start? I'd love to try it out.
The most immediately useful thing I learned from Critch is that the human mind is sophisticated enough that it can give itself chocolates without chocolate. If you get good at noticing your thoughts you can give yourself reinforcement entirely in the confines of your brains, eg by thinking "smiley face!" or something whenever you notice yourself thinking about getting some exercise.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: