Hmm. It's an interesting point.

I'm not entirely clear on the purpose of the rule. It makes sense to not just increase the redundancy of anything people have said in other threads that have already got a lot of attention, but I'm sure there's plenty of interesting stuff buried deep in comment threads that haven't got much light and might be worth sharing. Conversely, there will be some quotes here from outside LW/OB that a high proportion of readers have seen already.

So it's definitely something that made sense when the LW/OB community was smaller and there wasn't much good stuff that people weren't seeing anyway, but perhaps it's time to relax the rule a little bit, replace it with the substance.

I suppose there were studies of placebo effect - which I haven't read - but just a thought: Could it be that placebo treatment induces the placebo effect not only by making the patients believe they perceive a positive effect, but by actually changing their behavior? Of course it depends on the treated problem, but placebo surely raises the patients' expectation of getting better and thus raises their motivation to help themselves (according to the procrastination equation).

Do you know about any research that relates this to the "anti-" case of this? That is, how expectancy, "value", delay and impulsiveness affects evaluation of risk and potential future punishment and how it affects one's behavior under that evaluation?
I wonder how this can be applied to action one might perform that is shunned by society, such as crime. Perhaps it's basically the same case (we incorporate the risk and adverse effects to the value and expectancy), but it seems that there are two stages in such cases which make it more complex - there's the cost of doing the action, there's the expected reward (which has its own value, expectancy, etc...) of the action, and then there's the expected punishment exerted by society (which has its own expectancy - the probability of getting caught - value/loss of value, etc.). How does the temporal relations between the reward and the punishment affect the decision? The crime might have immediate benefit which means that it comes before the punishment (if get caught), or the crime might induce permanent change to the world which might be enjoyed after the punishment (if the culprit will be able to enjoy said change) so the reward comes after the punishment. Any thoughts/research about it? I used the example of crime, but this applies to any kind of action taken "against society" or anything that calls for expected counter-action from the surroundings. Dissidents, rebels and such can be inspected similarly.

I wish to expand on your conclusions and look for their limits. It might be more relevant to the "Go Try Things" post, but it being a kind of series of posts, I suppose it makes sense most to comment here.

So, data collection is good. But aside of getting one better at some area in which one tries to reach expertise or improvement, data collection is also good for discovering almost totally new facets of reality, territory that is outside the map's margins.

Data collection bring to light not only known unknowns, but unknown unknowns too. There's a risk involved, however. It seems that for the most part, the opportunity cost of researching unknown unknowns is greater than researching known unknowns: When practicing anything, the costs and possible benefits are pretty known. You know what you have to do to get better at playing an instrument, build better robots, programming or dancing tango. You also pretty much know what are the fruits of that labor (though perhaps not entirely, especially when it is many "quantum steps" away in terms of skill expertise).

On the other hand, when you consider whether to delve into some new unknown territory, you’re less familiar with the costs (you don’t know whether you’ll enjoy “uncovering data” or not, for example) as well as with the possible utility. Let's say some person A is invited to a salsa dancing party or class. He considers the idea but decides not to go. He thinks how It will obviously take a few hours which he could invest in more familiar activities that yield more utility than dancing; it will probably have some social costs involved, as in any new endeavor which is unfamiliar and especially one involves the moving of one’s body; even if he will enjoy it he doesn’t think he’ll have the time to invest on more such occasions, and he doesn’t think doing it once will be very useful, etc. etc. etc.

However, what if this person is unaware that salsa, if he were to try it out, will greatly benefit him? Elevate his spirit, exercise his body and provide some new kind of social interactions which will benefit him on non-dancing social occasions, and that if he decided to fully incorporate it in his life, it would provide excellent rest from his usual activity (say, his profession) and even benefit it in other ways?

So it must be benefitial to also collect data outside of the map, to explore new frontiers and horizons. But there must be a limit to this. The great many activities the world provides can probably fill a few life-times of human beings (or maybe not?). But either way, there must be some point where more exploration is actually adverse in its effects, if no activity is being engaged more than superficially. So how can one decide whether to embark on exploration or not?

Of course, there is meta-data available on activities. There is some text on the internet for probably most tried-out activities out there, friends share their experience with things they’ve done, movies and books tell us about activities unknown to us, and so on. But would such data actually help a person decide whether to engage in an activity or not, is it overwhelming enough to “change his mind” from not-doing the activity to doing it? My guess is not. Most people (as noted on “Hold off proposing solutions”) probably decide if they want to engage in the activity upon first hearing about the opportunity to engage in it, and, more than that, I suspect that their decision is based less upon the nature of the activity and more upon the nature of the “activists”, the people who are commonly engaged in that activity. Many activities produce some kind of culture around them, which hardy can be ignored. Since for an activity to exists it needs to be done, and if it is being done then someone must be doing it, so to imagine that activity one must imagine someone doing that activity, or imagine oneself as the kind of person who does that (of course, if it is taken more seriously, one can imagine the activity more “naturally”, ignoring the nature of other people who engage in that).

To actually decide whether to engage in some new activity, one needs to take the decision seriously. But then, to avoid such “paralysis analysis”, it would probably be easier just to start “doing it” instead of thinking about it (with the exception of activities with really high costs such as exploring the south pole or conceiving a child). But then again, there must be a limit to the amount of “new things” a person can do. Some people are likely (have high probability) to greatly beefit from exploration, while others are unlikely to benefit from it. How can one recognize which one she/he is?

What do you think?

I strongly agree with this sentiment. I keep a folder for this very purpose; whenever an interesting thought comes to mind I type it up along with as many of the related strands of thought as I can as quickly as possible and then save it to the folder and move on. I've found that this is a fairly useful procedure for organizing my thoughts and documenting my progress in my various areas of interest.

I'm not sure that's true once you limit it to adult classes (far more likely to be taking the occasional class for fun), and particularly in the case of an art class.

There are two ends to optimize here; you can focus on selecting the best things, or focus on getting rid of the worst things. I used to read way too much news, for example; and after reading something good I'd usually go on to read its comments even if I knew (or would have known if I'd thought about it) that they wouldn't be worth it. Before deciding which of two good books to cut, install a time profiler like RescueTime or ManicTime to make sure you know where your reading time's really going.

Hmm... Does Anki allow me to review all of my decks of study material simultaneously? Specifically opening up an individual topic of study defeats at least half of the purpose that I use spaced repetition for!

You just pointed it out. The difference between "mind" and "mindless". If a human is guessing, there are different techniques for determining things thought up by another human than things not thought up at all.

(caveat: anthropic argument)

All these games seem interesting, but more complicated than strictly necessary and plagued by the (possibly unavoidable) problem that guessing someone's mind involves different skills/knowledge than guessing mindless laws of nature. Is there a game that captures induction more cleanly, so we can expect skill at that game to generalize better?