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Error comments on Channel factors - Less Wrong Discussion

17 Post author: benkuhn 12 March 2014 04:52AM

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Comment author: Error 12 March 2014 01:23:38PM 6 points [-]

And whenever you notice you forgot to do this routine you immediately smile and congratulate yourself on noticing this, which of course means you're more likely to remember it next time.

Upvoted for this part. I'm not sure if reward for noticing failure is mentioned in most self-training routines, but it feels like an important missing piece to me. The normal reaction to noticing failure is some degree of self-loathing instead, which of course encourages putting the task out of one's mind.

Also I like the idea of simple self-congratulation as a reward. Most examples I see are things like "eat an M&M when you do what you're supposed to", which is useless if the thing you are trying to train is not eating junk food (or if you're like me and will munch through the whole bag without being aware of it).

Comment author: Nisan 14 March 2014 04:23:21AM 2 points [-]

Reward for noticing failure is something CFAR taught as part of its "internal operant conditioning" suite. I don't know if it's strictly a CFAR thing, and I don't know whether they still teach it.