Some brief comments based on my literature review of habits + a few conversations w/ people involved w/ said papers:
Apparently the current consensus is that implementation intentions aren’t that good, or something? I was pretty surprised by this, but I had a recent chat w/ Wendy Wood, who’s done a lot of work looking into habituation, and apparently she now thinks that rewards are a better way of incentivizing behavior. I don’t agree, but it’s interesting to note experts (or at least one) shifting away from this paradigm. (Or, my sense was that Wood’s sense was that everyone wants to make implementation intentions out to be this Magic Tool, but actually they’re only effective for a more narrow range of use-cases.)
One of the reasons that TAPs fail is because the action you’ve linked it to from the trigger is way too far removed from the trigger, temporally, spatially, or otherwise. EX: If your TAP is “see pedestrian crossing sign on the drive back from work → go running”, it’ll probably fail because you have no affordance to act on the TAP. So specificity and atomicity seem very important to make them actionable. (I think this is the more correct way of interpereting “start small” when people talk about setting your TAPs.)
I think that the sort of intentionality / directed attention we’re trying to point to when we talk of Summon Sapience is very important, but I don’t think it’s best put within the TAP framework. In line with 2), having a TAP for “trigger → apply effort” feels like you’d encounter a lot of resistance, which is the opposite of what you want your TAPs to be.
Thanks for calling your posts to my attention! I’ll take a look at them before the next cycle of habit-building rolls around. My sense is that positive (and especially negative) reinforcement learning are overpowered in habit-building as well, but I don’t know of a systematic way to apply it to every problem—fast feedback loops seem to be essential.
Point 2 is absolutely correct. Regardless of whether we use TAPs or reinforcement learning to build habits, the general principle is that every habit can be built out of tiny microhabits that you learn and become comfortable with one at a time.
Some brief comments based on my literature review of habits + a few conversations w/ people involved w/ said papers:
Apparently the current consensus is that implementation intentions aren’t that good, or something? I was pretty surprised by this, but I had a recent chat w/ Wendy Wood, who’s done a lot of work looking into habituation, and apparently she now thinks that rewards are a better way of incentivizing behavior. I don’t agree, but it’s interesting to note experts (or at least one) shifting away from this paradigm. (Or, my sense was that Wood’s sense was that everyone wants to make implementation intentions out to be this Magic Tool, but actually they’re only effective for a more narrow range of use-cases.)
One of the reasons that TAPs fail is because the action you’ve linked it to from the trigger is way too far removed from the trigger, temporally, spatially, or otherwise. EX: If your TAP is “see pedestrian crossing sign on the drive back from work → go running”, it’ll probably fail because you have no affordance to act on the TAP. So specificity and atomicity seem very important to make them actionable. (I think this is the more correct way of interpereting “start small” when people talk about setting your TAPs.)
I think that the sort of intentionality / directed attention we’re trying to point to when we talk of Summon Sapience is very important, but I don’t think it’s best put within the TAP framework. In line with 2), having a TAP for “trigger → apply effort” feels like you’d encounter a lot of resistance, which is the opposite of what you want your TAPs to be.
Thanks for calling your posts to my attention! I’ll take a look at them before the next cycle of habit-building rolls around. My sense is that positive (and especially negative) reinforcement learning are overpowered in habit-building as well, but I don’t know of a systematic way to apply it to every problem—fast feedback loops seem to be essential.
Point 2 is absolutely correct. Regardless of whether we use TAPs or reinforcement learning to build habits, the general principle is that every habit can be built out of tiny microhabits that you learn and become comfortable with one at a time.