All of Matti's Comments + Replies

Matti00

Karen Pryor, writing in Shoot the dog:

I went through Werner Erhard's "est" course, a program with overtones of hucksterism but that, from a training standpoint, I found to be an ingenious and often brilliant application of shaping and reinforcement. The program was called, rightly I think, the Training. The leader was called the Trainer. The shaping goal was improved self-awareness, and the principal reinforcer was not the Trainer's responses but the nonverbal behavior of the whole group.

To develop group behavior as a reinforcer, the 250 people

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Matti20

You give any group of people a perfectionism or fear of failure test along with almost any procrastination scale and you get pretty much anywhere from a negative to at best a very weak positive correlation. And if you control for self-efficacy or self-confidence, that weak correlation disappears. Science does not back you up.

The above made me think of a paragraph that caught my eye while I was skimming through Robert Boice's Procrastination and Blocking: A Novel, Practical Approach:

Second, [Procrastination and Blocking] seems hard to define and study.

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0[anonymous]
Interesting. I skimmed the introduction and it sounds like he's writing about the kind of procrastination I mean when I say "procrastination". Looks potentially worth a read; thanks for the tip.
Matti30

The amount of will-power or self-regulatory strength that is used up when making choices depends on the type of choice being made. Autonomous choices don't result in ego-depletion. If you're doing things you want to do, things you like doing, your brain doesn't have to expend 'will-power'.

Choice and Ego-Depletion: The Moderating Role of Autonomy

The self-regulatory strength model maintains that all acts of self-regulation, self-control, and choice result in a state of fatigue called ego-depletion. Self-determination theory differentiates between autono

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Matti40

I think you can change one's IQ.

I recently stumbled upon a paper published last year that suggests that fluid intelligence can be trained and that the training effect is dosage-dependent:

Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory Jaeggi et al. PNAS. 2008.

Fluid intelligence (Gf ) refers to the ability to reason and to solvenew problems independently of previously acquired knowledge. Gf is critical for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, and it isconsidered one of the most important factors in learning. More- over, Gf is closely relate

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2anonym
For anybody who's interested in trying the "dual n-back" task mentioned in Jaeggi et al., there is Brain Workshop, a free, open-source implementation, with a lively community of users.
0AnlamK
Hey thanks for this. I'm always up for an article in intelligence research.