Cool feature! I’ve also noticed myself doing this.
A trick I’ve found for making behavior changes like this: Start with a “dopamine neutral” change that sets up a behavioral pathway for later changes. In this case, the “dopamine neutral” change is making notifications real-time. After a while, you unlearn the behavior of looking at your user page, because you’re getting that info through notifications. Then you can slow the notifications down. The risk of setting them to daily or weekly right away is that you never unlearn the behavior of going straight to your userpage to get the latest changes.
Probably overkill for this use case, but the general pattern can be useful in other contexts. Example: Resolve to only open your web browser through a command line script. This is close to dopamine neutral. But once you’ve got that behavioral hook embedded, you can modify the script so that it forces you to wait 10 minutes, or asks you some questions about your intentions, or gets you to specify a whitelist of domains you will visit, or whatever. Then opening your browser through some other method serves as a Schelling fence you know not to cross. (If you find yourself making “just this once” modifications to the script, you could design some policies for when modifications can be made.) I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of building systems like this.
Can you explain this strategy more? In theory a random reinforcement schedule shouldn’t create any less dopamine when rewarded, and should be the most resistant to extinction. I’m having trouble understanding what you mean by dopamine neutral I think.
I think this is the idea: people can form habits, and habits have friction—you’ll keep doing them even if they’re painful (they oppose momentary preferences, as opposed to reflective preferences). But you probably won’t adopt a new habit if it’s painful. Therefore, to successfully build a habit that changes your actions from momentary to reflective, you should first adopt a habit, then make it painful—don’t combine the two steps.
Checking your userpage and checking your karma notifications are both random reinforcers, ergo switching from one to the other is dopamine neutral. Step one is to extinguish the behavior of checking your userpage by making that dopamine neutral behavior swap. Step two is decrease notification frequency.
Cool feature! I’ve also noticed myself doing this.
A trick I’ve found for making behavior changes like this: Start with a “dopamine neutral” change that sets up a behavioral pathway for later changes. In this case, the “dopamine neutral” change is making notifications real-time. After a while, you unlearn the behavior of looking at your user page, because you’re getting that info through notifications. Then you can slow the notifications down. The risk of setting them to daily or weekly right away is that you never unlearn the behavior of going straight to your userpage to get the latest changes.
Probably overkill for this use case, but the general pattern can be useful in other contexts. Example: Resolve to only open your web browser through a command line script. This is close to dopamine neutral. But once you’ve got that behavioral hook embedded, you can modify the script so that it forces you to wait 10 minutes, or asks you some questions about your intentions, or gets you to specify a whitelist of domains you will visit, or whatever. Then opening your browser through some other method serves as a Schelling fence you know not to cross. (If you find yourself making “just this once” modifications to the script, you could design some policies for when modifications can be made.) I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of building systems like this.
Can you explain this strategy more? In theory a random reinforcement schedule shouldn’t create any less dopamine when rewarded, and should be the most resistant to extinction. I’m having trouble understanding what you mean by dopamine neutral I think.
I think this is the idea: people can form habits, and habits have friction—you’ll keep doing them even if they’re painful (they oppose momentary preferences, as opposed to reflective preferences). But you probably won’t adopt a new habit if it’s painful. Therefore, to successfully build a habit that changes your actions from momentary to reflective, you should first adopt a habit, then make it painful—don’t combine the two steps.
Checking your userpage and checking your karma notifications are both random reinforcers, ergo switching from one to the other is dopamine neutral. Step one is to extinguish the behavior of checking your userpage by making that dopamine neutral behavior swap. Step two is decrease notification frequency.