There is some research that claims the feeling of being watched motivates you to engage in more prosocial behavior. Our gaze recognition ability is apparently hard for us to suppress even when we try to intentionally. When I think about times when I've been around friends, however, I usually feel the pressure to act in a way I feel will impress that specific friend, which is not necessarily pro-social. I imagine the disembodied eyes are not registered as "friends" and heighten our anxiety about who might be looking at us. I wonder whether having pictures of your role models in your workspace and people in your life who encourage you to do well when you talk to them might encourage you to engage in behavior more in line with those virtues you'd like to cultivate. Especially if you intentionally go for pictures where the people in them are looking at the camera directly.

Personal Decision Making (textbook about applied decision-making, for the class I'm taking right now)

The reason the book struck me as interesting was the author is employed at the university I'm going to, so if I get stuck its possible I could go and talk to him myself, and that its based in experimental psychology / psychology of decision making research.

The "3 Secrets" the book talks about are various techniques for addressing and recognizing biases, recognizing and overcoming failures of creativity, and developing the courage necessary to make and commit to rational choices. It covers various techniques for dealing with each of these dimensions of decision making, such as forced fit and stimulus variation for creativity.

From his blurb at the uni website:

"Dr. Anderson has been teaching at Portland State University since 1968. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1957 and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from The Johns Hopkins University in 1963. His current interests are in applications of decision psychology and decision analysis to personal decision making and public policy decision making."

From the book sleeve:

"Barry F. Anderson is professor emeritus of Psychology at Portland State University. He teaches courses on Personal Decision Making,
Decision Psychology, Conflict Resolution, and Ethical Decision Making. He also publishes in the areas of cognitive psychology and judgment and decision making and consults on personal decisions and on public and private policy decisions. In The Three Secrets of Wise Decision Making he uses his many years of varied experience to bring the technology of rational decision making to the lay reader in a manner that is understandable, engaging, and readily applicable to real-life decision making."

from the website:

"As the world has become more complex and information more abundant, decisions have become more difficult. As the pace of change and the range of choice have increased, decisions have to be made more often. Yet most of us still make decisions with no more knowledge about decision processes than our ancestors had in a simpler age, hundreds of years ago.

    Mathematicians, economists, psychologists, and practitioners have developed a variety of powerful and easily applied tools for decision making. Evidence is accumulating that better decision processes lead to better outcomes and that unaided human decision processes are not good enough for many decisions. More to the present point, evidence is also accumulating that learning better decision processes can make people better decision makers in their daily lives. The Three Secrets of Wise Decision Making brings the best of the new methods to the intelligent reader.

    The Three Secrets is designed expressly to help people make better decisions. It has been repeatedly tested in a course on personal decision making. The approach of the book is unabashedly practical. Except for portions of the second chapter, the emphasis is consistently on what to do. What the second chapter does is provide a brief overview of basic cognitive processes and the ways in which they tend to limit decision quality and also a brief explanation of the basic decision aids and the ways in which each supplements basic cognitive processes to enhance rationality, creativity, or judgment—the "three secrets". Some understanding of why the techniques are needed and how they work should enable the reader to apply them with greater effectiveness and satisfaction.

    The Three Secrets is organized around the Decision Ladder, a structured array of techniques to suit all decision problems and all decision makers. The Ladder extends from largely intuitive approaches, at the bottom, to decision trees, at the top. The key rung on the Ladder is the decision table and its variants: fact tables, plusses-and-minuses value tables, and 1-to-10 value tables. In the last chapter, the decision tree is introduced as a more sophisticated way of dealing with risky decisions and sequences of decisions. It is recommended that the reader start at the bottom of the Decision Ladder when beginning work on any decision problem and work up only so far as necessary. This keeps the process of decision making from becoming more complicated than would be appropriate for either the decision problem or the decision maker.

    The Three Secrets is richly provided with examples taken from life. One of the examples, Amelia’s career decision, runs through the entire book, adding human interest and conceptual continuity."

The Blue School appears to be a neuroscience driven playgroup for children to learn about their own neuroanatomy and emotional self-regulation and are given language to describe their feelings...

"So young children at the Blue School learn about what has been called “the amygdala hijack” — what happens to their brains when they flip out. Teachers try to get children into a “toward state,” in which they are open to new ideas. Periods of reflection are built into the day for students and teachers alike, because reflection helps executive function — the ability to process information in an orderly way, focus on tasks and exhibit self-control. Last year, the curriculum guide was amended to include the term “meta-cognition”: the ability to think about thinking.

“Having language for these mental experiences gives children more chances to regulate their emotions,” said David Rock, who is a member of the Blue School’s board and a founder of NeuroLeadership Institute, a global research group dedicated to understanding the brain science of leadership.

That language is then filtered through a 6-year-old’s brain.

Miles, one of the kindergartners drawing their emotions, showed off his picture and described the battle it depicted between happiness and anger this way: “The happy fights angry, but angry gets blocked by the force field and can’t get out.” Happiness could escape through his mouth, Miles explained. But anger got trapped, turning into sadness.

With ample research showing that negative emotions impede learning while positive emotions broaden children’s attention and their ability to acquire and retain information, strategies for regulating emotions are getting more emphasis in progressive schools across the country."

It might be a useful habit to remember, whenever you're making a choice about some situation, that "doing nothing" is never actually an available option. Even if you avoid doing the task you're considering, you're still making some kind of choice about how you spend your time, and you're still doing something relative to that task. For example, if the task is "paint the barn" the alternative is "leave the bare barn exposed to the elements", not "store the barn in some impermeable stasis field and return to paint it later". Being able to clearly articulate what that "nothing" slot entails, its consequences and rewards, might be a helpful way to motivate yourself to make better choices.

I am working on internalising this, because if I don't think about it, a part of me tends to just think that I'm doing the equivalent of sticking the task in an atemporal stasis field instead of leaving it unattended. If I don't exercise, I don't stay "the same amount fit". I get weaker (or, as aelephant points out, I could be getting stronger, during a recovery period - in which case "doing nothing" (as far as exercise) is the better option, after evaluation) . If I don't study, I don't stay "the same amount knowledgeable". I forget. Sure, there are things which remain effectively "in stasis" - Olympus Mons will probably stay about the same whether I climb it in ten years (somehow) or a hundred years - but I won't be the same by then. Or things that are so transient and commonplace that they might as well be in stasis - If I'm thinking of going somewhere, I might think, "I might miss catching this taxi cab, but I miss cabs all the time, there are always more cabs, and I can catch another one". But subjectively static opportunities are rare.

I saw this post on a discussion thread earlier:

We routinely deny, or act in spite of, inconvenient truths. We can recognize that there is no meaning to love beyond evolutionary and chemical triggers, yet we fight for it just as fervently. Nihilists write books about nihilism despite it's admitted pointlessness. We are as blind as our very genes which multiply and propagate themselves despite our executioner sun which grows daily above our heads, eventually to the point of consuming everything we know. By the very act of living and pursuing human concocted dreams and desires, we are in a constant denial of our situation.

I wonder a few things. Is this sort of experience related to the spoiler effect people claim to experience when they know the ending of a good book in advance? If so, this (paper itself here, thanks gwern) might be relevant. Its a wired article, referring to a study where it appeared the opposite of the spoiler effect is actually true - knowing the ending in advance improves people's subjective experience of a good short story. Do people subjectively experience the spoiler effect anyways? I'm wondering if it isn't really something like this:

              1.A person reads a short story they enjoy with a spoiler in mind.

              2.A person anticipates the ending experience and ramp up for it

              3.A person enjoys it more than if unspoiled.

              4.person carries a "spoiler effect" meme, and engages in the mind projection fallacy to imagine what life would have   been like had they been able to read the short story without a spoiler.

              5.They decide to accept the validity of this projection, and this reinforces the meme, because they experience annoyance with their experience of the story compared to the imagined experience of the unspoiled story.

I also wonder whether there's a way to modify the mind projection fallacy to set up a feedback loop? Imagining how wonderful it will be to be in good shape while you're exercising, maybe, then fantasising about being in good shape, then thinking how much better actually being in shape will be than fantasising, then fantasising again with the updated impression that the real thing was better, so your fantasy of the thing becomes better to compensate, then reminding yourself that the fantasy is not as good...

Another explanation for why it might seem better not to know things seems to be related to suspended disbelief. Maybe whatever the real explanation is, it won't match up to our imagined explanation, or the joy of discovering that explanation independently (which at the very least includes knowing the answer's 'aha' moment plus a bit of pride about finding it yourself). If its the latter, you'd think everyone would have some motivation to get out there and do science and it might be wise to be more forgiving of people who do science, although prolific scientists might seem greedy to the rest of us, I guess. If its the former (not matching the imagined explanation), like, "its more fun to imagine fairies did it", that'd be the suspended disbelief instance. Like, knowing how the props work in a movie might be distracting to the experience of feeling like the movie events are real while watching them. Maybe it ruins the 'escapism' of it for some people who don't compartmentalise the explanation vs. the experience well. I've long been a fan of doing both - picking apart the special effects *while* being immersed in the story and feeling as though it is true. But I wonder if I might cry at sad parts or get more shocked at horrific parts more if on some level I didn't know the way it worked. Spoiler effect? Mind projection fallacy? Narrative disruption? All, some, or none of the above? Like, the apologist is facilitating your enjoyment of a movie, and the revolutionary is there fighting for dominance. It makes me wonder whether people who are sleep deprived are more likely not to want to know how things work.

As a meme, the idea that knowing how things work makes them less fun seems to be a useful protective meme for bigger plexes like religion and belief in the supernatural. It could be that there are just so many people who hold these plexes that the meme gets replicated a lot as a byproduct, without having much survival value on its own. Like a beneficial (to the memeplex) virus.

On a related note, I just saw a meme (the picture-with-text-on-it-kind) about mamavirus and its hitchiking virus, Sputnik, the other day. I was shocked to learn something new from a meme. Kind of wondering about the educational value of weird memes now.

Oh just realised I never thought about the having-a-name-for-a-thing-means-it-has-an-atomic-essence-or-associated-meaning-unit vs knowing what it was made of sort of alluded to by the title much. I am guessing there are more or less "atomic" sensations like redness that can't be reduced in more elementary terms, but that this doesn't mean they're qualia, any more than an intelligent vcr might have any lower level reductive explanation of the experience from inside the algorithm of having its "eject" button pushed in terms of other experiences, but does not necessarily exist in some dualistic mindspace interacting via its mechanical pineal gland as a result.

I was wondering if anyone has ever had the feeling, like I get sometimes, that they were addicted to 'meta-level' optimizing rather than low-level acting? As in, I'd rather think about how to encourage myself to brush my teeth more than brush my teeth. I'm guessing there's something about this under the akrasia threads?

The motivations to remain in meta and thinking about things rather than acting on them seems to be that it takes less effort to think about doing things than to do them, and there is potentially more long-term benefit in making an overall improvement than in engaging in a specific action. The drawback is that if you remain thinking about meta all the time, you won't get anything done.

I'm interested in keeping a notebook to check my ideas / knowledge on subjects. For example, if I wanted to find out whether there were anything in the notion of ESP that was worth merit, I could create a section titled "ESP", where I'd keep copies of research papers, critical commentary on methodology, questions, personal experiments if any, and so on. There might be some appendixes or cheat sheets with common errors in thinking and information about them, notes on the scientific method/philosophy of science, statistics formulae for estimating error and likelihood and doing hypothesis testing, maybe a few inspirational quotes. I'm pretty busy, so it might be a very backburnered project, but I feel like it could be useful. I can already see some benefits and disadvantages, eg it can be on subjects a person might like to keep private, like dating, overcoming psychological issues, sex, and so on, but peer review might not be as readily available.

Any thoughts on the format or arrangement for something like this? Is anybody doing anything similar?