Rationality, competitiveness and akrasia

I declare my future self to be another person who I wish to bend to my will.

Is it? The first example of gamification that comes to my mind is usually Stack Overflow, and while it is about motivating people to do what the site creators want, that happens to be something the users want too, with overt mechanisms.

Holy crap...

I had to close that page when I was halfway through it because it was giving me the creeps.

Would you be willing to expand on your thoughts on this article?

I read the article and did some quick Wiki-checking into Rhabdomyolysis.

6 occurences per 100,000 people. (according to the article you linked)

What is the rate of occurence for heart attack during exercise? Or stroke? Serious infections or illnessed picked up at the gym? Or a traffic accident on the way to the gym?

It sounds to me a bit like fear-mongering.

Exercising yourself (literally) to death is a possibility even for a fit person, but my original inclination to this article is that certain people are predisposed to be adversely effected by the intense training associated with Crossfit, and that may lead to rhabdomyolysis.

How is that any different than any other predisposition and it's implications on which activities an individual should be cautious of, or avoid altogether?

R> binom.test(c(221,  1950000), p=(26000 / 262764948))

    Exact binomial test

data:  c(221, 1950000)
number of successes = 221, number of trials = 1950221, p-value = 0.04758
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 9.895e-05
95% confidence interval:
 9.887e-05 1.293e-04

Or rather, a soldier will fight long and hard for the ability to reliably signal to others that they fought long and hard.

This is why we need the rationality ribbons.

Chore Wars? http://www.chorewars.com/

Worked for a while in my family - the kids were arguing over who got to clean the toilet for the XP bonus :-)

2 will still lead to some strange behavior. For example, when composing a comment on a forum, rather than typing directly into the textarea you'll switch to a text editor and copy-paste when you're done.

Rescuetime seems to fit this niche already.

A lot of anti-akrasia recipies rely on good faith to some extent, so I don't think it's a huge problem (implementing those and getting enough people to use them would be a much bigger hurdle!). If some people want to cheat themselves to stop improving themselves, hey, their loss.

Procrastination could be described as the short-term mind vs. the medium-term mind, and cheating would often require a minimum of planning and of thinking beyond the long term - precisely the stuff that the short-term mind doesn't do.

Perhaps, but in many schools grades are kept secret (at least they are at my university), thereby destroying their ability to foster competition. On the other hand, I know some Japanese schools post grades in public areas, in rank order no less.

This seems to have worked for me. For the first part of high school I was a terrible student, then in one technical lab-based class with a lot of opportunity for student interaction, I started getting way better grades on the quizzes than everyone else, and earned the admiration of some of my peers for it. I thought "This feels kinda good," and next year (my last year of high school) I got straight As in all classes. And then I got more straight As through 4 years of undergrad.

Yeah, maybe every school is an anti-akrasia school to some extent.

I can see that. However, I am especially interested in the education of the person who is the best in the school. So much more progress is made by the top 0.1% intellectual elite.

There's no real reason to avoid competition unless the competition happens to be threatening your life. Gambling, for instance, isn't real competition. Simply not avoiding something isn't the same as seeking it out. LessWrong doesn't fail to properly compete, it avoids competition. Rationality isn't fueled by neutrality—not in humans, anyway. LessWrong is optimized to minimize conflict under the guise that conflict impedes rationality rather than the already well observed phenomenon of diverse opinions and viewpoints coming together to mutually benefit each other by trying to rip the other guy's world view apart. Being a good rationalist simply means that, at the end of the day, your opinion will make sense, whether you agree with anyone—your pre-debate self included—or not.

Rationality isn't tested for quality in a laboratory by some competent rational agent; that makes no sense. It can only be tested in the field. It doesn't matter how good your equations look on paper, if your device explodes and kills you, your device explodes and kills you. A good Bayesian takes this explosion hypothesis into account and isn't swayed by delusions of having been right. Rationality is tested by combat with other rational agents on the world stage. There's no law, conviction, or Bayesian measurement that states that Hawking or Einstein or Yudkowsky are qualified to conduct rationality measurements. If a child can find a flaw in your logic, no matter how intelligent your colleagues are and none of them saw it first, then that child is thinking in a way that nobody on your team is thinking, and they have found a flaw in your reasoning.

LessWrong isn't fostering this process along; it actively prevents it. It is a community of like-minded people consulting each other in a "hive mind" sort of format—brainstorming, as it were. Anyone who is upvoted well is considered part of a purely rational exo-thought process. This is about as useful as armchair reasoning all by your lonesome, just at the group level rather than the level of the individual. It's not unproductive, it's simply a real waste of what could be a finely tuned rationality advancing system. Hope this makes sense to anyone else.

As far as losing site of the goal goes, what kind of goal post makes the question, "How do you test rationality?" come to mind in the first place? You'll realize this isn't a thought that everyone has/asks themselves very often.