My plan is to pick one of these and predict like hell, because sixteen possibilities makes this look more daunting than it is, and then I plan to move on to others or come up with my own when it’s semi-habitual. I did a sort of method of elimination to pick my initial habit-former. I’m not going to list my entire process, unless someone really wants me to, but I settled on #13 because:
It’s not associated with an activity that has an ugh field around it for me.
I haven’t been here long, but I feel like I’ve seen comments like this a lot, of the form, “This is all Well and Good, but how precisely do I really, actually implement this?” And sometimes that’s a valid point. Sometimes what looks like a suggestion is all noise and no signal (or all signal? Hell, I don’t know).
Other times someone is apt to say, “I predict that this post will not result in actual improvement of Problem X,” in Rationalspeak and all, and they are universally acclaimed. For you see, in this way, they and all of their followers are above the fray.
When the suggestions are good, I’ve always felt that it’s a bit inconsiderate to immediately ping the Burden of Thought back at someone who just wrote a blog post on a site as critical as LessWrong. I share things when my brain sputters out and can’t go any further on its own; it needs help from the tribe. Did you or the people who upvoted you think for five minutes by the clock about how you might form a predicting habit before outsourcing the question to Julia_Galef? It’s awfully easy to never form a predicting habit when the President of CFAR conveniently never gets back to you! You also could have #8-ed and predicted whether or not you would be able to come up with a way to build a predicting habit.
I sort of (read: completely) made an example out of you for community’s sake, so sorry if I was hurtful or otherwise. This is not all directed at you in particular; it was an opportunity to make an observation.
Fair call on my intellectual laziness in not performing the brainstorming myself. Point taken. However, if you are noticing a pattern of many people doing this over time, it seems like this is something article authors could take into account to get more impact out of their articles. Unless the point is to make the person reading do the brainstorming to build that habit, then the time of many readers can be saved by the person who wrote the article, and presumably has already passed this point and thus put in the time sharing tips or a call to action on how to get started.
I want to stress that I don’t consider this an obligation on the article author. If Julia, or anyone else, doesn’t want to put in that time, then we can be grateful (and I am) that they have shared with us the time they have already. However, I do view it as an opportunity for authors who wish to have a greater impact.
On a a more concrete level, thanks for sharing your thought process on this topic. Very useful.
My plan is to pick one of these and predict like hell, because sixteen possibilities makes this look more daunting than it is, and then I plan to move on to others or come up with my own when it’s semi-habitual. I did a sort of method of elimination to pick my initial habit-former. I’m not going to list my entire process, unless someone really wants me to, but I settled on #13 because:
I already do something similar to this. All I have to do is affix a Predict step to the beginning of my algorithm.
Successful and unsuccessful predictions are very clear cut, which is good for getting System 1′s attention and successfully forming the habit.
It has few, if any, trivial inconveniences.
It’s not associated with an activity that has an ugh field around it for me.
I haven’t been here long, but I feel like I’ve seen comments like this a lot, of the form, “This is all Well and Good, but how precisely do I really, actually implement this?” And sometimes that’s a valid point. Sometimes what looks like a suggestion is all noise and no signal (or all signal? Hell, I don’t know).
Other times someone is apt to say, “I predict that this post will not result in actual improvement of Problem X,” in Rationalspeak and all, and they are universally acclaimed. For you see, in this way, they and all of their followers are above the fray.
When the suggestions are good, I’ve always felt that it’s a bit inconsiderate to immediately ping the Burden of Thought back at someone who just wrote a blog post on a site as critical as LessWrong. I share things when my brain sputters out and can’t go any further on its own; it needs help from the tribe. Did you or the people who upvoted you think for five minutes by the clock about how you might form a predicting habit before outsourcing the question to Julia_Galef? It’s awfully easy to never form a predicting habit when the President of CFAR conveniently never gets back to you! You also could have #8-ed and predicted whether or not you would be able to come up with a way to build a predicting habit.
I sort of (read: completely) made an example out of you for community’s sake, so sorry if I was hurtful or otherwise. This is not all directed at you in particular; it was an opportunity to make an observation.
Fair call on my intellectual laziness in not performing the brainstorming myself. Point taken. However, if you are noticing a pattern of many people doing this over time, it seems like this is something article authors could take into account to get more impact out of their articles. Unless the point is to make the person reading do the brainstorming to build that habit, then the time of many readers can be saved by the person who wrote the article, and presumably has already passed this point and thus put in the time sharing tips or a call to action on how to get started.
I want to stress that I don’t consider this an obligation on the article author. If Julia, or anyone else, doesn’t want to put in that time, then we can be grateful (and I am) that they have shared with us the time they have already. However, I do view it as an opportunity for authors who wish to have a greater impact.
On a a more concrete level, thanks for sharing your thought process on this topic. Very useful.