OK, those count as benefits. We shouldn’t just give all the credit to the lifehacking community, since LW/SI successfully got you to implement lifehacking techniques.
Of course, anything can be called instrumentally rational if it works, but I wonder how other approaches compare to explicit rationality in successfully convincing oneself to lifehack . For example, the sort of motivational techniques used for salespeople.
I’m not sure. One thing that worked pretty well for me at minicamp was that the instructors were pretty meticulous about describing levels of confidence in different hacks. Everything from “Here are some well-regarded, peer reviewed studies you can look at” to “It’s worked pretty well for us, and most of the people who’ve tried, and here’s how we think it fits into what we know about the brain” to “we don’t know why this works, but it has for most people, so we think it’s worth trying out, so make sure you tell us if you try and get bupkis so we’re hearing about negative data” to “this is something that worked for me that you might find useful.”
I think this is a pretty audience-specific selling point, but it did a great job of mitigating the suspicious-seeming levels of enthusiasm most lifehackers open with.
OK, those count as benefits. We shouldn’t just give all the credit to the lifehacking community, since LW/SI successfully got you to implement lifehacking techniques.
Of course, anything can be called instrumentally rational if it works, but I wonder how other approaches compare to explicit rationality in successfully convincing oneself to lifehack . For example, the sort of motivational techniques used for salespeople.
I’m not sure. One thing that worked pretty well for me at minicamp was that the instructors were pretty meticulous about describing levels of confidence in different hacks. Everything from “Here are some well-regarded, peer reviewed studies you can look at” to “It’s worked pretty well for us, and most of the people who’ve tried, and here’s how we think it fits into what we know about the brain” to “we don’t know why this works, but it has for most people, so we think it’s worth trying out, so make sure you tell us if you try and get bupkis so we’re hearing about negative data” to “this is something that worked for me that you might find useful.”
I think this is a pretty audience-specific selling point, but it did a great job of mitigating the suspicious-seeming levels of enthusiasm most lifehackers open with.