A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy

I'm not sure, given the ability for feedback between instructors and students. This only works well for extremely small class sizes. For those 300 student monstrosities, yeah, videotape is better.

The particular part about you quoted, regarding whether to donate, does actually sound like status quo bias. I'm not sure if it hits the nail on the head in this example, you would need to know his mind to say so.

I was trying to imply that he was in video games for selfish reasons: because it would be a fun job for him and the pay is good. So I expect that he's keeping the money because simply because he really likes money. If the situation were reversed, and he was already donating a chunk to charity (for some reason), I would expect him to gradually stop doing this. However, If you believe him when he says his goal is to save the world, and not think as I do that his motivations are mostly selfish, then status quo bias could definitely be a suspect here. In real world cases it's certainly a worthy consideration.

Or, if you have specific skill that can be helpful for a charity organization, that may be a better investment than just giving them money.

How does this make sense? By donating your labor you're effectively giving the charity money, since now they don't have to pay someone to do said labor. Since it's rare that your skills and an organization's needs are going to line up, it's almost always going to be more efficient to just make a donation.

If you think the organization is going to waste your donation, you shouldn't offer them labor instead - you should find a better organization.

Most charities suck. A few don't. Finding the ones that suck least and then pumping money into them is actually a pretty efficient way to make the world a better place.

For clear cut examples, the question certainly remains. Your example of the comedian is what got me thinking about this though, because if I heard of a person doing what he's doing, the "fake justifications" explanation would seem like the vastly more likely one to me.

There's no way he actually thinks Garfield is the best way to comedy superstardom, or even a reasonable use of his time at all. In your example, we can look into his mind and see that he's doing comedian training. If I met this guy in reality though, my explanation of his behavior would be "He's lazy and just wants to watch tv all day. He tells himself it's training because he doesn't want to admit this".

I think "Kaizen Project" would respect the Japanese roots best, but I think the suggestions below work better for other reasons.

"Tsuyoku" is "stronger" and "naritai" is "I want to become".

Tsuyoku is the adverb form of strong (tsuyoi), so it would translate roughly as "strongly". In Japanese "strongly become" is equivalent to "become strong".

I suggest "Tokujyou Project", which would translate roughly as "bad-ass project".

Why not just call it "self-improvement"? The phrase had more specific connotations in the linked post (self-improvement as opposed to self-abasement), but those don't apply here, and in general avoiding needless cryptic jargon is good PR and anti-cultishness.

For diet, in my experience, trying to eliminate a food directly is nearly impossible; instead, I approach it from the opposite direction and look for foods to add, which can displace the unwanted ones. From this angle, a lot of subtle failure modes become more obvious; to displace candy, you need something (or some combination of things) that's equally convenient (or you'll backslide when you don't have time to cook), non-perishable (or you'll backslide when you haven't grocery shopped for awhile), portable (or you'll backslide when travedlling), and calorie-containing (or you'll backslide when you really need the calories).

My most important self-improvement project recently has been researching and experimenting with nootropics. Gadget shopping can sometimes be a self-improvement project; buying a Roomba is better than cleaning, for example, and buying a smartphone can convert a lot of downtime into reading time. Trying new software, particularly in categories you've never used before, gives you new capabilities. You do have to be honest with yourself about how much the actual benefit is, and how much money is worth to you, though.

Any time spent searching for and addressing bad habits is especially well spent, if it has a reasonable chance of turning up new insights. But they only count if they're actionable; deciding to be more considerate is worthless unless it's followed by thinking about or researching a specific cue to consider, deciding to study more is worthless unless it's followed by choosing a distraction to eliminate, etc. This is mostly a matter of sitting down with a diary and thinking. (Thanks Alicorn, for pressuring me into doing this more; my diary's been getting a lot more entries since I started reading Luminosity, and some of those entries had important insights.)

Want to become slightly cooler? Learn to sing some songs. (I assume this makes you cooler?)

Depends on the songs. :)

Hmm, what's Japanese for "I want to become cooler"?

Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to say 'self-improvement' in English.

However, there are 42 ways to say "self-improvement" in Japanese.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to say 'self-improvement' in English.

Anthony Robbins coined the word CANI, which is short for "Constant And Never-ending Improvement".

Some might find it useful. Me, I can't take it seriously because it's too close to the Finnish word "kani", meaning "bunny" (as in the animal).

I would count (b) only the first time, when it's precedent-setting. I wouldn't count (a) at all, unless my current shoes were in such poor condition that they were a genuine obstacle to running; the connection between buying running shoes and running is quite tenuous, despite the name and the marketing.

Comments on HN and LW result in immediate reward through upvoting and replies whereas writing a book is a more solitary experience. If you identify this difference as a likely cause for your behavior and if you believe that the difference in value to you is as large as you say, then you should test this hypothesis by turning book-writing into a more interactive, immediately rewarding process. Blogging and sending pieces to friends once they are written come to mind.

More generally, consider structuring your social environment such that social expectations and rewards line up with activities you consider valuable. I have found this to be a powerful way to change my behavior.

Squatting heavy once a week will make you stronger than almost everyone at almost everything, younger, healthier, leaner, smarter*, richer, prettier; takes about fifteen minutes. How does that compare to your current exercise regimen?

*http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000465

**http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0197-4580/PIIS0197458005002745.pdf

I don't think these kind of 'easy' wins are all that common in real life, certainly not those offering 300x improvements

That depends on the universe out of which you're selecting/counting them. In business, most attempts to improve things have zero (or very nearly zero) positive effect on the bottom line, and thus finding things that are 300x or more better than the worst case or even typical case isn't really that hard. ;-)

Understanding constraints and the Pareto Principle are critical to making effective improvements in business, i.e., ones that have non-zero chances of affecting the bottom line.

I think these types of wins are common, but not easy.

That is, working a little more on your primary project (the one that offers greatest ROI), or figuring out how to become more productive on your primary project, will usually be > 10x ROI of commenting on blog and web forums. But the latter is fun, immediately rewarding, doesn't require willpower, etc. We sometimes do it b/c we haven't explicitly recognized this difference (an easy win), but more often it is due to a limited ability to direct our attention to our most valuable project, not a limited ability to identify our most valuable project.

So the solution requires the hard work of greater willpower, increasing self-discipline and the ability to direct your attention. You know, what I'm failing at right now :). More generally, what almost anyone commenting on a web forum (instead of writing a great top-level post or book or starting a local LW chapter) is doing. At least, if you agree w/ me that commenting on web forums is a very low-valued activity.

Now I'm wondering how you could subvert that. I'm imagining something like a Legend of Zelda game which is split into two phases:

1. A fairly long preliminary phase, where you don't know about saving the world or anything. This should have maybe one or two boss fights and teach you how to play the game well.

2. A race against time to save the world. Bad stuff starts happening at preset times (plus or minus some randomness), and you've got to hurry and go for the high-probability ideas in order to maximize your chance of not losing. Skip the side-quests and mini-dungeons unless they've got some important items, because Kakariko village will be destroyed in 4-5 hours of game-time. To enhance the sense of urgency, make save-scumming impossible and make it harder to die in order to compensate for the increased difficulty of gameplay. Make sure there are several ways to win in any scenario, so the player doesn't have to rely on trial-and-error to find the one officially blessed way of doing something. And to hell with switch mazes.

I would definitely play this game. It would be intense. And the quest for 100% completion would result in absolutely crazy Let's Play videos.

I've long been a critic of experience point / levelling systems in RPGs because of this. They optimise for wanting to be a sociopath. The guy who slaughters everything possible becomes the most powerful. I found Vampire: Bloodlines an interesting alternative, in that you were rewarded skill points for finishing quests, and you'd get the same reward whether you slaughtered everyone, snuck through, or any other way of solving the problem.

As for side quests, I guess the problem is that the developers spend an enormous amount of time generating them all, and don't want to see that time as essentially wasted, especially since a large number of people don't do them anyway. Considering just how expensive a modern AAA game has become to create, it's hard to imagine you could persuade RPG developers to punish people for undertaking side quests, even if it does lead to the ridiculous situations where you're supposedly racing against time to save the world/galaxy/universe, but have time to help every kitten stuck in a tree on the way.

Wow Jim, that's actually a really really amazing insight.

a goal at the end that you're supposedly trying to get to, but in fact your goal is not to reach the end quickly but to search as much of the maze's area as you can

you put it off as long as possible, because you're optimizing for fraction-of-content-seen, rather than probability-world-is-saved, which is 1.0 from the very beginning

Do you think people get a feeling of, "Well, I'll get there eventually anyways, so I might as well (have some ice cream / surf the net / watch some TV / screw around)?" Fascinating if true... hmm...

And, the average person's gut morality is not consequentialist but virtue ethicist.

This seems at least partly depending on status. Roughly along a "virtue ethicist -> deontologist -> consequentialist" pathway. (With high IQ people more likely to emulate consequentialist morality cognitively.)

Could you elaborate on that, and/or give examples? I suspect that we're talking about completely different things, but I see a lot of high status, high IQ professions like investment banking that seem pretty well described by the idea that the survivors deserve money because they were tough.

Eliezer did. (Well, almost, for a while.)

What I don't even - what would it look like if there were more and less efficient ways to waste time?

I am reminded of this Anscombe quote:

"The general method that Wittgenstein does suggest is that of 'shewing that a man has supplied no meaning ["no reference"?] for certain signs in his sentences'. I can illustrate the method from Wittgenstein's later way of discussing problems. He once greeted me with the question: 'Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis? I replied: 'I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.' 'Well,' he asked, 'what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?'
This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to 'it looks as if' in 'it looks as if the sun goes round the earth'. My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. 'Exactly!' he said."

I have an exam I'm supposed to be revising for, but unless it contains a lot of questions on Starcraft 2, naked ladies and sandwiches, my study priorities are seriously off-kilter.

Reading this, however, has made me realise that I can become vastly more productive by studying courses with a high Starcraft 2, naked lady and sandwich syllabyus content, and I won't even have to change my behaviour.

I belive my problem is that I take to many of those "little breaks" and never actually get the project done, even though I may have most of the details worked out in my head already. It probably has to do with my ADHD as a kid, I have a short attention span and get off-task easily.

Oh look, a squirell...