If this post goes over well, I’m thinking of writing a sequel called When to Self-Improve in Practice where I discuss practical application of the value-creation formula. Feel free to comment or PM with ideas, questions, or a description of your situation in life so I can think of a new angle on how this sort of thinking might be applied.
I’d like to see this applied to common self-improvement strategies. 2 I’ve mentioned several times here are spaced repetition software (see also my own little article and dual n-back.
We could probably get somewhere figuring out their value.
For example, the Supermemo docs estimate that the average flashcard will require “30–40 seconds” per 3 years; I believe I’ve seen Anki-related material estimating the total timecost of review at around 5 minutes for 20-30 years. (The exponential backoff for review inherent to spaced repetition means that any further out is hard to guess at. At that point, you’re going years between reviews.) Both Anki and Supermemo keep detailed statistics, nor have I heard anything from Mnemosyne devs contradicting it, so this seems likely to be quite accurate to me.
At a minimum wage of $8/hr, that implies each card needs to be worth 66 cents to know. Or does it?
Dual n-back is harder to analyze. In my FAQ I have collected a number of reports of increased IQ and general anecdotal benefits.
My own personal regime is a daily 5 rounds at 270 seconds each, or roughly 22 minutes, or roughly $3 at minimum wage. I have done any nbacking on 221 days ($663?). If that translates into an effective IQ boost of 10 points (seems to be the mid-range of those who did see boosts, and consistent with the Jaeggi 2008 results), how much is that boost worth and was it worthwhile? If we jump from mere correlation to causation and take a high estimate of an income increase of 25%, then it would certainly seem to have been worthwhile. But this isn’t taking into account discounting, and is quite sloppy.
I’m pretty sure you’d be crazy to value the time and energy you spend on these activities at only $8/hour.
Another way of thinking the cards would be “if it takes me 30-40 seconds to memorize this card for 3 years, how many seconds do I expect to spend looking up the information on this card if I don’t bother to memorize it?” Would you really spend 30-40 seconds looking up information on the median card you’d consider memorizing?
As for dual-n-back, first there’s the critique you mention in your FAQ, which seems very damning. Second it’s quite unpleasant in my experience at least, and therefore uses up a lot of energy. And third, I’m inherently skeptical that simple mental activities like dual-n-back and nintendo brain age could increase your IQ faster than complex activities like writing software that someone might be willing to pay for or becoming proficient in economics—and these last activities have significant side benefits above and beyond possible IQ increase.
If you just want to increase your income I suspect there are much more efficient and direct ways of doing it. I have a few arbitrage-type ideas I can share via private message with anyone who expresses a desire to donate a lot of their income to preventing human existential risk.
For what it’s worth, when I first wrote this post many months ago, I thought time spent on pure self-improvement activities was generally time well spent. Now I think it’s generally not time well spent unless you’re at the point where you spend eight hours a day browsing reddit or something like that. My view is that if you’re able to spend a decent chunk of the day working on worthwhile projects, you should do that, and your self-improvement efforts should be limited to running day-long or week-long self-experiments on yourself that don’t cost you many productive hours and recording the results of those. (Example of such a self-experiment: if you’re a programmer, write down every bug you have, estimate how long it takes to solve, and once it’s solved record how long it actually took to solve and the details of your solution. Then periodically review for trends. I’ve done a little bit of this; it was highly unpleasant/boring but it seems intuitively like it could be quite beneficial so I’m planning to do it more.)
Why? I’m not a high-powered lawyer who earns thousands per hour and can easily take on new clients if he discovers he has 10 extra hours a week. Nor am I homo economicus—I am quite biased and crazy. (I think this goes for us all.)
Another way of thinking the cards would be
I should mention the implicit model was simplified for programming. What you get from memorizing a card is not just knowing it, but knowing you know it. Even if I don’t remember exactly one of the many quotes in my Mnemosyne database, I know that I know it and it’s in Mnemosyne. Useful for discussions. (Google is not helpful. If you don’t remember an exact long substring, its results are pretty worthless. As I have discovered to my ruth many times.)
first there’s the critique you mention in your FAQ, which seems very damning
As for n-backing versus writing software or learning economics, well, the latter are paradigmatic ‘crystallized intelligence’ as opposed to the ‘fluid intelligence’ that n-backing is supposed to help. I don’t know any good way to calculate their relative values, although it’s obvious to me that n-backing would be most valuable for children. (The Google Group’s uploaded files includes 1 or 2 studies showing that working-memory exercises helped childrens’ grades and behavior.)
Why? I’m not a high-powered lawyer who earns thousands per hour and can easily take on new clients if he discovers he has 10 extra hours a week. Nor am I homo economicus—I am quite biased and crazy. (I think this goes for us all.)
I suspect that a profit-maximizing human as smart as you appear to be who only had the credentials for a minimum-wage job would be working the minimum number of hours each week they could get away with in order to feed, clothe, and house themselves while they used as much of their spare time as possible to cook up something better. At this point converting time to money confuses things because their utility for money drops off so quickly once they have their basic needs covered.
Upon reflection, I revise my opinion to “if your lack of credentials and chutzpah means the best jobs available to you pay minimum wage only, improving your credentials/chutzpah is a more profit-maximizing use of time than intelligence enhancement.” If you’re a student then you’re already working on your credentials and your earning power is going to go up soon, so if you’re going to work for money it makes sense to put it off until then, and you should value your time at something rather close to the amount you’ll make after graduating (assuming you’ve got a typical discount rate).
(Google is not helpful. If you don’t remember an exact long substring, its results are pretty worthless. As I have discovered to my ruth many times.)
Try http://www.diigo.com/ -- it lets you do full-text searches on the pages you’ve bookmarked (along with a bunch of other cool features). At least, if they haven’t removed that in the latest version.
As for n-backing versus writing software or learning economics, well, the latter are paradigmatic ‘crystallized intelligence’ as opposed to the ‘fluid intelligence’ that n-backing is supposed to help.
I know that knowledge of economics is considered crystallized intelligence. I don’t see what this has to do with the possibility that the process of learning something new and wrapping your head around it builds fluid intelligence. If fluid intelligence doesn’t help me learn stuff faster, is it really worth having? Doesn’t it seem likely that learning things makes you better at learning things? If this is true, could an increase in fluid intelligence be the mechanism for it?
If fluid intelligence doesn’t help me learn stuff faster, is it really worth having? Doesn’t it seem likely that learning things makes you better at learning things? If this is true, could an increase in fluid intelligence be the mechanism for it?
Well… I suspect we may be having vocabulary issues here. Gf is defined as “the capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge.”
If your existing Gc already applies to a situation—say, your algebra applies to the economics you’re learning—then to some extent the problems of economics are not ‘novel’.
It’s only a pure-Gf problem when the problems are highly novel. In that case I find it intuitively plausible that a lot of irrelevant Gc wouldn’t help much.
Example: if I memorize a couple thousand English words (pronunciation & definition) for the GRE for a large increase in my Gc, why should I expect any increased ability to write proofs in mathematical set theory which will initially draw on Gf as a strange and alien subject?
I agree that memorizing words wouldn’t help your fluid intelligence.
If doing your first few set-theory proofs draws on Gf heavily, then strictly intuitively speaking it seems to me that this ought to improve Gf just about as fast as anything. Of course, solid experimental results rank above my intuition—but the dual-n-back result isn’t solid.
If fluid intelligence doesn’t help me learn stuff faster, is it really worth having?
Yes, you have to understand stuff before your can learn it. And be able to tell the difference between nonsense and things actually worth learning.
Doesn’t it seem likely that learning things makes you better at learning things?
Yes, it does make you better at learning things. There has been considerable research done on the subject.
If this is true, could an increase in fluid intelligence be the mechanism for it?
Basically, no. It’s not that it couldn’t be, just that it isn’t. People’s fluid intelligence is extremely hard to change. Very few things improve fluid intelligence and (unfortunately) learning stuff isn’t one of them. Dual-n-back training does give a modest effect, as does exercise (and particularly cerebellar targetted exercise).
Fortunately, learning stuff will improve your performance at all sorts of activities, even if your fluid intelligence isn’t much altered. Fluid intelligence is overrated.
Dual-n-back training does give a modest effect, as does exercise (and particularly cerebellar targetted exercise).
Could you expand on that? I had not heard that exercise actually affected Gf or that there was such a thing on cerebellar-targeted exercise. I know of occasional results like the prefrontal cortex’s cells enlarging after aerobic exercise, but that’s not an increase in Gf.
I’d like to see this applied to common self-improvement strategies. 2 I’ve mentioned several times here are spaced repetition software (see also my own little article and dual n-back.
We could probably get somewhere figuring out their value.
For example, the Supermemo docs estimate that the average flashcard will require “30–40 seconds” per 3 years; I believe I’ve seen Anki-related material estimating the total timecost of review at around 5 minutes for 20-30 years. (The exponential backoff for review inherent to spaced repetition means that any further out is hard to guess at. At that point, you’re going years between reviews.) Both Anki and Supermemo keep detailed statistics, nor have I heard anything from Mnemosyne devs contradicting it, so this seems likely to be quite accurate to me.
At a minimum wage of $8/hr, that implies each card needs to be worth 66 cents to know. Or does it?
Dual n-back is harder to analyze. In my FAQ I have collected a number of reports of increased IQ and general anecdotal benefits.
My own personal regime is a daily 5 rounds at 270 seconds each, or roughly 22 minutes, or roughly $3 at minimum wage. I have done any nbacking on 221 days ($663?). If that translates into an effective IQ boost of 10 points (seems to be the mid-range of those who did see boosts, and consistent with the Jaeggi 2008 results), how much is that boost worth and was it worthwhile? If we jump from mere correlation to causation and take a high estimate of an income increase of 25%, then it would certainly seem to have been worthwhile. But this isn’t taking into account discounting, and is quite sloppy.
I’m pretty sure you’d be crazy to value the time and energy you spend on these activities at only $8/hour.
Another way of thinking the cards would be “if it takes me 30-40 seconds to memorize this card for 3 years, how many seconds do I expect to spend looking up the information on this card if I don’t bother to memorize it?” Would you really spend 30-40 seconds looking up information on the median card you’d consider memorizing?
As for dual-n-back, first there’s the critique you mention in your FAQ, which seems very damning. Second it’s quite unpleasant in my experience at least, and therefore uses up a lot of energy. And third, I’m inherently skeptical that simple mental activities like dual-n-back and nintendo brain age could increase your IQ faster than complex activities like writing software that someone might be willing to pay for or becoming proficient in economics—and these last activities have significant side benefits above and beyond possible IQ increase.
If you just want to increase your income I suspect there are much more efficient and direct ways of doing it. I have a few arbitrage-type ideas I can share via private message with anyone who expresses a desire to donate a lot of their income to preventing human existential risk.
For what it’s worth, when I first wrote this post many months ago, I thought time spent on pure self-improvement activities was generally time well spent. Now I think it’s generally not time well spent unless you’re at the point where you spend eight hours a day browsing reddit or something like that. My view is that if you’re able to spend a decent chunk of the day working on worthwhile projects, you should do that, and your self-improvement efforts should be limited to running day-long or week-long self-experiments on yourself that don’t cost you many productive hours and recording the results of those. (Example of such a self-experiment: if you’re a programmer, write down every bug you have, estimate how long it takes to solve, and once it’s solved record how long it actually took to solve and the details of your solution. Then periodically review for trends. I’ve done a little bit of this; it was highly unpleasant/boring but it seems intuitively like it could be quite beneficial so I’m planning to do it more.)
Why? I’m not a high-powered lawyer who earns thousands per hour and can easily take on new clients if he discovers he has 10 extra hours a week. Nor am I homo economicus—I am quite biased and crazy. (I think this goes for us all.)
I should mention the implicit model was simplified for programming. What you get from memorizing a card is not just knowing it, but knowing you know it. Even if I don’t remember exactly one of the many quotes in my Mnemosyne database, I know that I know it and it’s in Mnemosyne. Useful for discussions. (Google is not helpful. If you don’t remember an exact long substring, its results are pretty worthless. As I have discovered to my ruth many times.)
Yes, there are others. As my enthusiasm for n-backing wanes, I’ve been falling behind on the other null-results. Here’s a recent one: “Improvement in working memory is not related to increased intelligence scores”.
As for n-backing versus writing software or learning economics, well, the latter are paradigmatic ‘crystallized intelligence’ as opposed to the ‘fluid intelligence’ that n-backing is supposed to help. I don’t know any good way to calculate their relative values, although it’s obvious to me that n-backing would be most valuable for children. (The Google Group’s uploaded files includes 1 or 2 studies showing that working-memory exercises helped childrens’ grades and behavior.)
I suspect that a profit-maximizing human as smart as you appear to be who only had the credentials for a minimum-wage job would be working the minimum number of hours each week they could get away with in order to feed, clothe, and house themselves while they used as much of their spare time as possible to cook up something better. At this point converting time to money confuses things because their utility for money drops off so quickly once they have their basic needs covered.
Upon reflection, I revise my opinion to “if your lack of credentials and chutzpah means the best jobs available to you pay minimum wage only, improving your credentials/chutzpah is a more profit-maximizing use of time than intelligence enhancement.” If you’re a student then you’re already working on your credentials and your earning power is going to go up soon, so if you’re going to work for money it makes sense to put it off until then, and you should value your time at something rather close to the amount you’ll make after graduating (assuming you’ve got a typical discount rate).
Try http://www.diigo.com/ -- it lets you do full-text searches on the pages you’ve bookmarked (along with a bunch of other cool features). At least, if they haven’t removed that in the latest version.
I know that knowledge of economics is considered crystallized intelligence. I don’t see what this has to do with the possibility that the process of learning something new and wrapping your head around it builds fluid intelligence. If fluid intelligence doesn’t help me learn stuff faster, is it really worth having? Doesn’t it seem likely that learning things makes you better at learning things? If this is true, could an increase in fluid intelligence be the mechanism for it?
Well… I suspect we may be having vocabulary issues here. Gf is defined as “the capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge.”
If your existing Gc already applies to a situation—say, your algebra applies to the economics you’re learning—then to some extent the problems of economics are not ‘novel’.
It’s only a pure-Gf problem when the problems are highly novel. In that case I find it intuitively plausible that a lot of irrelevant Gc wouldn’t help much.
Example: if I memorize a couple thousand English words (pronunciation & definition) for the GRE for a large increase in my Gc, why should I expect any increased ability to write proofs in mathematical set theory which will initially draw on Gf as a strange and alien subject?
I agree that memorizing words wouldn’t help your fluid intelligence.
If doing your first few set-theory proofs draws on Gf heavily, then strictly intuitively speaking it seems to me that this ought to improve Gf just about as fast as anything. Of course, solid experimental results rank above my intuition—but the dual-n-back result isn’t solid.
Yes, you have to understand stuff before your can learn it. And be able to tell the difference between nonsense and things actually worth learning.
Yes, it does make you better at learning things. There has been considerable research done on the subject.
Basically, no. It’s not that it couldn’t be, just that it isn’t. People’s fluid intelligence is extremely hard to change. Very few things improve fluid intelligence and (unfortunately) learning stuff isn’t one of them. Dual-n-back training does give a modest effect, as does exercise (and particularly cerebellar targetted exercise).
Fortunately, learning stuff will improve your performance at all sorts of activities, even if your fluid intelligence isn’t much altered. Fluid intelligence is overrated.
Could you expand on that? I had not heard that exercise actually affected Gf or that there was such a thing on cerebellar-targeted exercise. I know of occasional results like the prefrontal cortex’s cells enlarging after aerobic exercise, but that’s not an increase in Gf.
I’ve added 2 studies to the criticism section: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#criticism
This gives a 403 error:
http://community.haskell.org/~gwern/static/docs/chein2010.pdf
I believe all the PDF links should be working at the FAQ’s new home.
OK. You might want to make this page do a 301 redirect to the new FAQ location.
http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=dual+n+back+faq&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Yeah, for the PDFs you have to go to the actual wiki repo: https://patch-tag.com/r/gwern/Gwern/home . It is not a very good static copy of my wiki, I’ll admit.