Why? Because our brains aren’t evolved to optimize happiness, they’re evolved to steer the world to more-preferred states, and to optimize our expectations of others’ perception of us. So if you start from those points, your inquiry (and subsequent optimizations) will benefit from hardware assistance.
Have you written elsewhere in more detail about this? I’m particularly interested in any tips you have on using our social expectation machinery successfully.
Have you written elsewhere in more detail about this?
Well, I did a multi-part video series/audio CD on this topic a couple months ago (called, “The Secrets of ‘Meaning’ and ‘Purpose’”); my comment above was more or less an attempt to summarize one of its key ideas in a couple of sentences. I’ve also written about it in my newsletter before, but none of these materials are publicly available at the moment, even for sale.
(I keep meaning to put them up for sale but I’m usually too busy getting my current month CD, newsletter, and workshop put together to spend much time on trying to get more business. Probably I should think more strategically and move “posting on LW” a bit lower on my priorities… ;-) )
I’m particularly interested in any tips you have on using our social expectation machinery successfully.
Think character/identity-priming. What “kind of person” do you want to be, in the sense of “the kind of person who would X”… where X is whatever you would like to motivate yourself to be/do. What kind of person do you want to see yourself as? Be sure to see it from the outside, as if it were someone else.
Experiments show that “kind-of-personness” priming has a big effect on people’s decisions; when our identity is primed as belonging to a particular group, we automatically behave more like a stereotype of that group. So, pick what group(s) you want to prime yourself as a member of, and go for it. ;-)
Have you written elsewhere in more detail about this? I’m particularly interested in any tips you have on using our social expectation machinery successfully.
Well, I did a multi-part video series/audio CD on this topic a couple months ago (called, “The Secrets of ‘Meaning’ and ‘Purpose’”); my comment above was more or less an attempt to summarize one of its key ideas in a couple of sentences. I’ve also written about it in my newsletter before, but none of these materials are publicly available at the moment, even for sale.
(I keep meaning to put them up for sale but I’m usually too busy getting my current month CD, newsletter, and workshop put together to spend much time on trying to get more business. Probably I should think more strategically and move “posting on LW” a bit lower on my priorities… ;-) )
Think character/identity-priming. What “kind of person” do you want to be, in the sense of “the kind of person who would X”… where X is whatever you would like to motivate yourself to be/do. What kind of person do you want to see yourself as? Be sure to see it from the outside, as if it were someone else.
Experiments show that “kind-of-personness” priming has a big effect on people’s decisions; when our identity is primed as belonging to a particular group, we automatically behave more like a stereotype of that group. So, pick what group(s) you want to prime yourself as a member of, and go for it. ;-)