Rationalist Horoscopes: Low-hanging utility generator?

However, if one could describe a typical important crisis/situation in a significantly vague manner, you could perhaps get people to recognize an important problem in their life that they have been neglecting. Then, perhaps give some generic advice that, thanks to our brain's heuristics, brings a solution to mind.

That's basically the idea, yes. The forer effect might be used to make things emotionally salient in useful ways, but there definitely should be more to any given horoscope than that.

Oh, this gives me an idea on what you could do instead of random groupings: Have some simple learning algorithm divide everyone into some fuzzy set of categories given ONLY the data abut how good they rank previous pieces of advice. Just have some highly ranked standard pieces that new people are given at the start and group people for whom the same ones worked in the same group. Then when a new piece is entered into the system it tests it against all the different groups and tend to give it to those in the same groups as the ones it worked for in the original test.

The "pices" could be different things: quotes, advice, statements about your personality, predictions, whatever.

One thing that's important to note is that you can be in any number of groups; A "rank maximally good" rock would be placed in ALL groups. The groups would not be anything made to mimic some specific human word but just unsupervisedly lerned from the raw data. In practice the groups might turn you to correlate to things like "optimistic" and "likes quotes" but also things like"guillable" or "wont actually follow the advice just votes based of what sounds good". Oh, and while I'm saying things like being "in" or "not in" a group it obviusly shuldnt be a binary thing just a probablility of geting pices belonging to that group.

Good idea, but I'm not sure if it can be worked into an rss feed, and if not it'll be tricky to implement. I plan on asking a more tech-savvy friend about it later tonight, though.

If we did do this, it seems to me that it'd need at least two dimensions: Likelihood of the advice working, and usefulness of the advice when it does work. The second might actually be more important than the first, for this purpose - if something works consistently, it seems like it'd be better to establish it as a habit rather than being intermittently reminded of it and otherwise ignoring it. (And we could certainly publish a list of suggested habits if the data points that way for enough things.)

I suspect it'd be pretty easy to set up a tumblr account, or several, for the actual distribution of randomized suggestions. Those come with rss feeds, so that should make just about everybody happy on that end. (I have no idea how tumblr interacts with smartphones, but I expect that they can handle rss feeds - correct me if I'm wrong, though.)

We'd also need a way to have more suggestions added, though, and have those moderated in some way. That gets a bit trickier, but may be able to be semi-automated - perhaps any LW post that gets more than a certain number of upvotes could be flaged to have someone check it out and condense it into a few sentences if it's appropriate.

Rebranding is the big hurdle, though, and not something I'm useful at.

I suspect that you could openly tell everyone that the groups are randomly assigned, if the grouping has some inertia to it -- that is, if your being in the same group as someone today is a moderately strong predictor of your being in the same group as them again tomorrow.

Sounds similar, yeah. The random quote generator I had in mind was actually a bit of code in a 'pet' in Second Life, which chose a random quote from a list and displayed it to everyone in the area every 10 minutes or so. The quotes weren't anything special, just a bunch of things I'd saved because they sounded interesting or useful, but I got the same effect you're talking about, of every so often having one go *click* somehow. (Also it was quite amusing when it'd insert a particularly relevant quote into the middle of a conversation, which happened perhaps once or twice a week.)

I think people who don't believe in the supernatural and still practice "magic" do something like this with a Tarot deck.

I did this (minus the practice 'magic' part) for a year or two with a Tarot deck. Like any semi-structured meditation technique, it sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.

That's part of what I mean by memetic immune response, yeah.

I was thinking of quotes from the quote threads, but not of using all of them - only ones over a certain karma score, and even then they'd need to be vetted to make sure that they're generally useful and don't depend on some specific context.

If someone or some group wanted to generate a bunch of quotes from the sequences, that'd work too, but I'm not personally interested enough in that aspect of the idea to put that much effort into it.

Take the time to evaluate your default responses to questions. They may not be as good as you think they are.

Possible alternative: Today, you may not give a default answer to any question more meaningful than "how are you?".

Today, indulge your curiosity. Find the answers to three interesting questions not directly related to your current projects. (Bonus points for finding answers to questions that can't be answered via Google or Wikipedia, like the name of that cute person you see in the library every so often.)

Take some time to optimize the things you pay attention to for signal to noise ratio. Remove boring RSS feeds from your reader; find out how to stop receiving junk mail or getting calls from telemarketers; get rid of objects that clutter your living space or work space; perhaps even have a heart-to-heart with that friend you've been growing away from.

Today is a good day for starting new things. Choose something new that you've been putting off, and spend at least an hour working on it.

If you think about it carefully, the universe has recently shown you several examples of people working together successfully. What common principle can you see at work in these events?

(Horoscope idea based on this study.)

What do you want? What are you doing to get it?

Think about how your ideal self would handle the challenges you encounter. What would you do if you were smarter?

Yesterday you did something for which you probably want to apologize. What was it? Can you do something today to make it right?

Your subconscious is trying to tell you something! Get a piece of paper and, for each of the previous three days, write down 3 things that happened as they leap into your mind. Put the paper down and come back to it several hours later and write down the theme that connects these nine events and what lesson you should learn from it.

That thing you're hesitating over trying, the likes of which you've never done before, is probably easier than you think it is. You're likely overestimating the difficulty because you lack any reference for it. Bear this in mind when reconsidering whether or not to try it.

Question your questions. Are you asking the right things?

Meta-content: "Try to be more specific and concrete". :)

(what I'm saying is that most of these could use a "for example..." or similar).

See if you can understand the functioning of an object well enough to create it from raw materials or scrap. Start with something simple, like paper fasteners.

Focus on granularizing your goals. When something you want to do seems impossible, try to break it down into a series of smaller steps.

One of the things that you're told today, which you've heard a thousand times before, will be false. Find it.

Today, spend time thinking about possible failure modes of your plans. What are the most likely things that could go wrong, and how will you handle it if they do?

Keep an eye out for good ideas in unusual places today.

An etherpad document for horoscope theme ideas and partially-formed horoscopes has been started here.

The time for a lucid appraisal of your own abilities is prior to action, not in the middle of it. Once you find yourself engaged in real-time application of some skill or other, act as if your mastery of that skill isn't at issue at all, rather than let yourself be distracted by assessments of the likelihood of failure, because they are likely to be self-fulfilling prophecies. (src)

Make a specific commitment today that you're confident you can follow through on. Write it down and post it somewhere where you'll see it regularly until it's done.

Today, be paranoid. Don't assume that the people around you are trustworthy, or sane, without evidence. (Evidence gained before today is, of course, admissable.)

Take some time to test your beliefs today. Devise and carry out at least one experiment.

Take the time today to put some important information in a more intuitive format. For example, you might make a pie chart or other visual representation of how you spent your money last month, or how you spent your time yesterday.

• Take a minute to think which sentence or paragraph you spoke or wrote yesterday was the MOST effective in achieving your goals and which sentence or paragraph was the least effective. If the results have not come in, mark a note to your future self to do the same.

• Are there any notes from your past self about analysis of previous sentences? Check if results have come in.

Well given the low reliability and low validity (see here for a bit of an overview) i'm not sure that would work to well

Splitting LessWrong by MB type isn't going to be a even distribution. The Hamming distance from INTJ isn't very great for most of us...

That seems like the most likely way of dividing it, to me. I'm not entirely comfortable with endorsing that model (I don't know enough about it, basically), but it looks plausible at least. (I'm not entirely sure we're going to divide it up at all, at this point, but the code's written in such a way as to at least allow it.)

I suppose it'd be interesting to allow the different M-B groups to optimize the quotes that the groups get separately, rather than having all the votes go into the same database - I don't think it'd be all that hard to set that up, and it'd give us some interesting data on M-B.