Briefly: I'm looking for a person (or group) with whom I can mutually discuss self improvement and personal goals (and nothing else) on a regular basis.

Also, note, this post is an example of asking a personally important question on LW. The following idea is not meant as a general mindhack, but just as something I want to try out myself.

We are unconsciously motivated by those around us. The Milgram experiment and the Asch conformity experiment are the two best examples of social influence that come to my mind, though I'm sure there are plenty more (if you haven't heard of them, I really suggest spending a minute).

I've tended to see this drive to conform to the expectations of others as a weakness of the human mind, and yes, it can be destructive. However, as long as its there, I should exploit it. Specifically, I want to exploit it to fight akrasia.

Utilizing positive social influence is a pretty common tactic for fighting drug addictions (like in AA), but I haven't really heard of it being used to fight unproductivity. Sharing your personal work/improvement goals with someone in the same position as yourself, along with reflecting on previous attempts, could potentially be powerful. Humans simply feel more responsible for the things they tell other people about, and less responsible for the things they bottle up and don't tell anyone (like all of my productivity strategies).

The setup that I envision would be something like this:

• On a chat room, or some system like skype.¹
• Meet weekly at a very specific time for a set amount of time.
• Your partner has a list of the productivity goals you set during the previous session. They ask you about your performance, forcing you to explain either your success or your failure.
• Your partner tries to articulate what went wrong or what went right from your explanation (giving you a second perspective).
• Once both parties have shared and evaluated, you set your new goals in light of your new experience (and with your partner's input, hopefully being more effective).
• The partnership continues as long as it is useful for all parties.

I've tried doing something similar to this with my friends, but it just didn't work. We already knew each other too well, and there wasn't that air of dispassionate professionality. We were friends, but not partners (in this sense of the word).

If something close to what I describe already exists, or at least serves the same purpose, I would love to hear about it (I already tried the LW study hall, but it wasn't really the structure or atmosphere I was going for). Otherwise, I'd be thrilled to find someone here to try doing this with. You can PM me if you don't want to post here.

1. After explaining this whole idea to someone IRL, they remarked that there would be little social influence because we would only be meeting online in a pseudo-anonymous way. However, I don't find this to be the case personally when I talk with people online, so a virtual environment would be no detriment (hopefully this isn't just unique to me).

Edit (29/3/2015): Just for the record, I wanted to say that I was able to make the connection I wanted, via a PM. Thanks LW!

Given LW’s keen interest in bias, it would seem pertinent to be aware of the biases engendered by the karma system. Note: I used to be strictly opposed to comment scoring mechanisms, but witnessing the general effectiveness in which LWers use karma has largely redeemed the system for me.

In “Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment” by Muchnik et al, random comments on a “social news aggregation Web site” were up-voted after being posted. The likelihood of such rigged comments receiving additional up-votes were quantified in comparison to a control group. The results show that users were significantly biased towards the randomly up-voted posts:

The up-vote treatment significantly increased the probability of up-voting by the first viewer by 32% over the control group ... Uptreated comments were not down-voted significantly more or less frequently than the control group, so users did not tend to correct the upward manipulation. In the absence of a correction, positive herding accumulated over time.

At the end of their five month testing period, the comments that had artificially received an up-vote had an average rating 25% higher than the control group. Interestingly, the severity of the bias was largely dependent on the topic of discussion:

We found significant positive herding effects for comment ratings in “politics,” “culture and society,” and “business,” but no detectable herding behavior for comments in “economics,” “IT,” “fun,” and “general news”.

The herding behavior outlined in the paper seems rather intuitive to me. If before I read a post, I see a little green ‘1’ next to it, I’m probably going to read the post in a better light than if I hadn't seen that little green ‘1’ next to it. Similarly, if I see a post that has a negative score, I’ll probably see flaws in it much more readily. One might say that this is the point of the rating system, as it allows the group as a whole to evaluate the content. However, I’m still unsettled by just how easily popular opinion was swayed in the experiment.

This certainly doesn't necessitate that we reprogram the site and eschew the karma system. Moreover, understanding the biases inherent in such a system will allow us to use it much more effectively. Discussion on how this bias affects LW in particular would be welcomed. Here are some questions to begin with:

• Should we worry about this bias at all? Are its effects negligible in the scheme of things?
• How does the culture of LW contribute to this herding behavior? Is it positive or negative?
• If there are damages, how can we mitigate them?

Notes:

In the paper, they mentioned that comments were not sorted by popularity, therefore “mitigating the selection bias.” This of course implies that the bias would be more severe on forums where comments are sorted by popularity, such as this one.

For those interested, another enlightening paper is “Overcoming the J-shaped distribution of product reviews” by Nan Hu et al, which discusses rating biases on websites such as amazon. User gwern has also recommended a longer 2007 paper by the same authors which the one above is based upon: "Why do Online Product Reviews have a J-shaped Distribution? Overcoming Biases in Online Word-of-Mouth Communication"

I've read about a quarter of the sequences, but I'm not sure if this topic has been addressed on LessWrong before. If it has, let me know.

The Upward Scaling Importance of Rationality goes like this:

The more influence your thought process and decisions have, the more important it is that you're rationalist. In the grand scheme of things, it is relatively unimportant that a barback at a restaurant is a rationalist, and I say this having done that. It is extremely important that a leader of a highly influential company, or a president of a university or country is a rationalist. Their decisions affect thousands if not millions of people.

The more influential you are, the more your decisions have potential to screw over other people. Influence doesn't necessarily have to be in a management position: elementary school teachers and police officers are highly influential, even though they aren't in control of an organization. Influence can even be by virtue of the people you reach out to. A famous person with a large fanbase or a parent of a child prodigy, both have the capacity to influence the world with their decisions.

Though arguably, this can  be extended to anyone who votes.

So rationality scales upward: the more influential someone is, the more important is it they're rationalists. Neglecting this can have bad consequences.