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D_Malik comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - LessWrong
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Wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it to decondition behaviors. I originally used this to stop myself cracking my knuckles or biting my lip, but it didn't have any apparent effect.
I then tried using it to destroy my sense of humour (partly because I thought this might boost productivity, by generally making actions' dopamine rewards match their actual usefulness). This seemed to actually work well; I now experience humour-type amusement 20%-50% as often as I did two months ago.
I would recommend other people think carefully before trying this; many people have told me this could lead to bad places.
Relatedly, you could get an electroshock collar (used to train dogs, or for BDSM), which would let you automate the deconditioning.
This strikes me as an extremely bad idea. Regardless of your stance on whether or not humor is irrational (this is to some extent an open question), the social benefits of humor are so obvious and significant that this seems extremely unlikely to be +EV even assuming there aren't any undesirable side effects.
There may perhaps be benefits in deconditioning certain types of humor (being a wiseass, for instance), but even then I would be very, very careful and read up a lot before trying anything.
and I thought LW was against spock-rationality
In theory. In practice, it would be Spock Rational to be against Spock Rationality, so we give it lip service.
I'm not quite sure I follow.
I'm against Spock too, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. It seems unlikely that your level of humour is exactly what you want. People try to strengthen or weaken their own emotions all the time, by becoming more confident, less anxious, less depressed, more motivated. The grandparent is evidence that you can do such self-modification easily through punishment or reinforcement.
Isn't humour it's own reward? What extra reinforcement system could you use to increase it?
This seems close to a fully general argument. That said, I'm not sure it's wrong-- but tread carefully.
It's not fully general; it's an instance of a general argument that things are unlikely to be optimal in the absence of strong optimization pressures. Which is true.
Of course, that doesn't mean you should fine-tune humour; we'd need to look at the costs and benefits of doing that versus whatever else we could be doing.
Yes, I upvoted it as an interesting idea, but wouldn't endorse actually putting it into practice.
I read that someone once ended up just conditioning themselves not to wear the collar by doing this. (I wish I could remember where - pretty sure it was an offhand mention in a post on this site.)
You might be able to solve that problem easily. For instance, you could reward yourself for putting the collar on, and punish yourself for taking it off (even when you had to take it off, eg to take a shower), or even for thinking about taking it off. You could try visualizing that the pain was caused by whatever you did wrong, rather than by the collar.
Then you'll be the person who wears dog collars and avoids bathing. Frankly, if you have something worse than that to recondition you should probably be receiving treatment from a professional anyway.
I've slapped myself in the face to stop paying attention to car brands, after having had to pay attention to car brand symbols for a while for other reasons. Worked.
Are there any good ways to stop myself from doing the equivalent of biting my lip?
(The actual behaviors I want to stop are: anything that involves touching my face, and also making pauses when I am speaking.)
[snaps rubber band] Ouch!
Maybe I'll give that a try. (Not to destroy my sense of humour, of course.) 3:-)