Matti — LessWrong

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Matti — LessWrong

Replying toMeetup : Mountain View: More on Reinforcement

Meetup : Mountain View: More on Reinforcement

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 in the group were told to applaud after every speaker, whether they felt like applauding or not. Thus from the beginning the shy were encouraged, the

Matti14y

Breaking the chain of akrasia

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. Its practical understanding will require direct observation of PBers acting as problematically dilatory and self-conscious individuals. As a rule, psychologists avoid the time and

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Replying toThe Physiology of Willpower

Matti17y

The Physiology of Willpower

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 autonomous regulation and controlled regulation. Because making decisions represents one instance of self-regulation, the authors also differentiate between autonomous choice and controlled choice. Three experiments support the hypothesis that whereas conditions representing controlled choice would be egodepleting, conditions that represented autonomous choice would not. In Experiment 3, the authors found significant mediation by perceived self-determination of the relation between the choice condition (autonomous vs. controlled) and ego-depletion as measured by performance.

Replying toRationality in the Media: Don't (New Yorker, May 2009)

Matti17y

Rationality in the Media: Don't (New Yorker, May 2009)

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 related to professional and educational success, especially in complex and demanding environments. Although performance on tests of Gf can be improved through direct practice on the tests

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