It strikes me that this discussion of the benefits of religiosity, separate from its truth, is reminiscent of the placebo effect.
rlp10
Karma: 118
I used to be a professional tarot reader and astrologer
May I ask, at that time did you thoroughly believe that you were actually able to predict the future?
Also, with the benefit of hindsight, do you consider yourself to have used the dark arts?
Hi, I’m Richard. I’m a lawyer, practising in Norwich, England. I’ve been ‘lurking’ on lesswrong, and working my way through the sequences, for some time.
I have an interest in technology, and particularly open source projects. For example, I’m writing this right now in Emacs.
I hope I will be able to contribute positively to this community, which has certainly already helped me a great deal.
I’ve been working on anti-akrasia software. Currently it allows a person to log their daily activities, and assess how ‘productive’ they have been each day.
What I envision is a program with a modular facility: people can suggest and code modules providing anti-akrasia techniques.
A user would configure the program: my goals are X and Y and the anti-akrasia techniques I am using are A, B and C. Then the user would operate the program for a few days logging their daily activities, including how much closer towards their goals this takes them.
A user could then analyse the success of different techniques, with the software doing the heavy-lifting (i.e. applying bayes to suggest how much the user should believe that a certain technique is effective in helping them achieve their goals). Based on this information, the user would reconfigure the software, varying their goals or changing which techniques they are using.
If the user was willing, anonymous data could be collected to provide wider information on what techniques work and for what kinds of goals.
Any people capable of coding would be able to submit (a) modules for anti-akrasia techniques and (b) modules for analysing the data.
Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated!