I agree that it is probably too hard to “take a final exam all the time.” On the other hand, I feel like I could make a much weaker claim that this is an improvement over a lot of productivity techniques, which often seem to more-or-less be dependent on just having enough willpower to actually learn.
At least in this case, each action you do can be informed directly by whether you actually succeed or fail at the goal (like getting upvotes on a post). Whether or not learning is a good instrumental proxy for getting upvotes in this setting is an open question.
I agree that it is probably too hard to “take a final exam all the time.” On the other hand, I feel like I could make a much weaker claim that this is an improvement over a lot of productivity techniques, which often seem to more-or-less be dependent on just having enough willpower to actually learn.
At least in this case, each action you do can be informed directly by whether you actually succeed or fail at the goal (like getting upvotes on a post). Whether or not learning is a good instrumental proxy for getting upvotes in this setting is an open question.