I used to write rationalist horoscopes. All of them were "Today your life will be determined by the laws of physics and logic."
For some reason, they never really caught on.
Most horoscopes work because of the forer effect, which is an application of positive bias. Now, if everything we do with these "horoscopes" is based on this effect, then there would really be no appreciable benefits of this project. However, if one could describe a typical important crisis/situation in a significantly vague manner, you could perhaps get people to recognize an important problem in their life that they have been neglecting. Then, perhaps give some generic advice that, thanks to our brain's heuristics, brings a solution to mind.
For instance:
You are facing an important choice, and you haven't taken the time to think about it for five minutes to see if there is a better action than the ones immediately apparent. Make some time right now to think about it, and see if you can come up with something better.
Just typing that, I actually recognized a personal issue that's been generally percolating through my mind recently, but I haven't explicitly devoted any time to solving the problem. I'm going to take my own advice now.
This is a good idea, but coming up with good horoscopes and judging their quality is hard. What if every time you give a horoscope, you also ask how good the previous one was? So if on one day the horoscope says to pay attention to X, on the next day you're asked whether you noticed anything important about X (and if so, then more people are told to pay attention to it).
Seems like it might be worthwhile to flesh out, perhaps develop as an app / plugin / whatever the kids are up to these days. May need to be rebranded....
Is there any consensus on 'personality types', e.g. is Myers-Briggs useful at all? That could be one way to divide the horoscopes up.
(You could also divide it based on blood type or something but give the same advice to everyone - if you're obvious / sarcastic enough about it.)
I know it's a silly idea, but it seems like it might be useful. I've played with random quote dispensers in the past, and if they have a good list of quotes to start with they can be surprisingly useful, in my experience - the quote might be useless 9 times out of 10, but that tenth time, when it makes you realize that a connection exists that you never would have noticed otherwise, is pretty awesome.
So something like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies?
I've found them useful in the past; interestingly, I get a similar effect with spaced repetition - more th...
This does not look like horoscope, but like the well known practice of a daily/weekly proverb and/or suggestion. Which is a great idea.
You can make a rationalist calendar out of it, or a service that sends the user a nicely segmented suggestion every time period.
A bit more context-based version is the Force Your Connections trick from the Mind Performance Hacks book. It's basically how all those movie/computer game/postmodernist paper online title generators work, except the grammar that defines the generated phrases can be relevant to a problem domain. Morphological analysis is apparently the version of this that's presented in a way in which it sounds justifiable to hire a very expensive consultant to do it for you.
I think people who don't believe in the supernatural and still practice "magic" do somet...
I'd probably enjoy something like this, just because it would give me an anchor point on "what should I focus on TODAY", without having to do a cognitively expensive cost-benefit analysis of all the techniques I'd like to get better at. I tend to waste far too much cognitive effort trying to pick where I should start...
I like this idea, but I would lean towards quotes from the sequences (or occasionally HP:MOR) rather than the ones that you find in the quotes thread, often are imprecise to the extent that I would lose the emotional utility (I think this is the reaction that you're referring to when you say 'memetic immune response'.)
Take the time to evaluate your default responses to questions. They may not be as good as you think they are.
Possible alternative: Today, you may not give a default answer to any question more meaningful than "how are you?".
Making staples is the superior option only if you are racist or sexist. If you're not, it's more helpful for your rationality to make paperclips from other scrap. After all, you probably want a sense of "completeness" -- that you've made something fully functional. And when you attach that "home-made" paperclip to your first sufficiently-slim stack of paper, you can feel good in having done all of it yourself. (Racists and sexists aren't interested in that feeling.)
In contrast, if you chose staples as your project, how would you put them to use, to test their functionality? You would need a stapler. And unless you do this entire project again, but for a stapler -- something more complex than a paperclip -- as a SUBSTEP to your first achievement, you just can't get that same feeling of accomplishment when you apply your first "home-made" staple. Rather, you will have to "live on someone else's strength" -- specifically, whoever made the stapler.
Also, paperclips are re-usable and make great gifts, if the recipient likes paperclips.
If you're going to divide it up in a way to make it more emotionally available, maybe separate by Myers-Briggs category?
(5:29:23 PM) Adelene: ...horoscopes are for people who, like [mutual friend], prefer to have an authority tell them what to do. *blink*
(5:30:18 PM) Alicorn: *blink*
(5:30:50 PM) Adelene: This is an observation that my brain made just now, but it seems to make a fair bit of sense.
(5:31:18 PM) Alicorn: Plausible.
(5:32:21 PM) Adelene: Especially given that horoscopes seem not to actually make predictions about the future: They say 'X is a good thing to do today', not 'X will happen today'.
(5:32:36 PM) Alicorn: *nod*
(5:32:53 PM) Adelene: ...rationalist horoscopes?
(5:33:07 PM) Alicorn: like what?
(5:33:33 PM) Adelene: "Focus on granularizing your goals this week."
(5:33:43 PM) Alicorn: hmm
(5:34:09 PM) Alicorn: divided according to some mechanism like star sign, or no?
(5:34:38 PM) Adelene: The only advantage I see to that is that it may make it more emotionally plausible.
(5:35:06 PM) Adelene: There may be some other advantage to having different people doing different things at any given time tho.
(5:35:23 PM) Alicorn: According to [other friend], birth *season* has empirically interesting effects in a few areas...
(5:36:35 PM) Adelene: I don't think we can cash that out very well into advice, and anyway I expect that having that close of a similarity with actual horoscopes is likely to provoke a memetic immune response for most people. Could do it based on some kind of personality test tho.
(5:36:50 PM) Alicorn: *nod*
(5:39:08 PM) Adelene: Really, I think the bulk of the utility of such a thing would be in giving people generally-useful cues to work from - having any given day's horoscope (or whatever we'd call it) be randomly picked from a set of good ones that haven't been used recently should be just fine.
(5:39:15 PM) Alicorn: *nod*
(5:40:00 PM) Adelene: Maybe pair it with a rationality quote of the day, too.
(5:40:10 PM) Alicorn: Yessss.
I know it's a silly idea, but it seems like it might be useful. I've played with random quote dispensers in the past, and if they have a good list of quotes to start with they can be surprisingly useful, in my experience - the quote might be useless 9 times out of 10, but that tenth time, when it makes you realize that a connection exists that you never would have noticed otherwise, is pretty awesome. Something like a daily horoscope might have a similar effect, but in a more practical way, getting people to consider taking actions in contexts where they wouldn't usually consider those actions and occasionally finding an unusually good, but not intuitively obvious, match. And that's on top of any benefits that such a system would have for people who do work better when they're told what to do.
Thoughts?