More Dakka

Epistemic Status: Hopefully enough Dakka

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book Inadequate Eqilibria is excellent. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t done so. Three recent reviews are Scott Aaronson’s, Robin Hanson’s (which inspired You Have the Right to Think and a great discussion in its comments) and Scott Alexander’s. Alexander’s review was an excellent summary of key points, but like many he found the last part of the book, ascribing much modesty to status and prescribing how to learn when to trust yourself, less convincing.

My posts, including Zeroing Out and Leaders of Men have been attempts to extend the last part, offering additional tools. Daniel Speyer offers good concrete suggestions as well. My hope here is to offer both another concrete path to finding such opportunities, and additional justification of the central role of social control (as opposed to object-level concerns) in many modest actions and modesty arguments.

Eliezer uses several examples of civilizational inadequacy. Two central examples are the failure of the Bank of Japan and later the European Central Bank to print sufficient amounts of money, and the failure of anyone to try treating seasonal affective disorder with sufficiently intense artificial light.

In a MetaMed case, a patient suffered from a disease with a well-known reliable biomarker and a safe treatment. In studies, the treatment improved the biomarker linearly with dosage. Studies observed that sick patients whose biomarkers reached healthy levels experienced full remission. The treatment was fully safe. No one tried increasing the dose enough to reduce the biomarker to healthy levels. If they did, they never reported their results.

In his excellent post Sunset at Noon, Raymond points out Gratitude Journals:

“Rationalists obviously don’t *actually* take ideas seriously. Like, take the Gratitude Journal. This is the one peer-reviewed intervention that *actually increases your subjective well being*, and costs barely anything. And no one I know has even seriously tried it. Do literally *none* of these people care about their own happiness?”

“Huh. Do *you* keep a gratitude journal?”

“Lol. No, obviously.”

– Some Guy at the Effective Altruism Summit of 2012

Gratitude journals are awkward interventions, as Raymond found, and we need to find details that make it our own, or it won’t work. But the active ingredient, gratitude, obviously works and is freely available. Remember the last time someone expressed gratitude to you and it made your day worse? Remember the last time you expressed gratitude to someone else, or felt gratitude about someone or something, and it made your day worse?

In my experience it happens approximately zero times. Gratitude just works, unmistakably. I once sent a single gratitude letter. It increased my baseline well-beingThen I didn’t write more. I do try to remember to feel gratitude, and express it. That helps. But I can’t think of a good reason not to do that more, or for anyone I know to not do it more.

In all four cases, our civilization has (it seems) correctly found the solution. We’ve tested it. It works. The more you do, the better it works. There’s probably a level where side effects would happen, but there’s no sign of them yet.

We know the solution. Our bullets work. We just need more. We need More (and better) (metaphorical) Dakka – rather than firing the standard number of metaphorical bullets, we need to fire more, absurdly more, whatever it takes until the enemy keels over dead.

And then we decide we’re out of bullets. We stop.

If it helps but doesn’t solve your problem, perhaps you’re not using enough.


We don’t use enough to find out how much enough would be, or what bad things it might cause. More Dakka might backfire. It also might solve your problem.

The Bank of Japan didn’t have enough money. They printed some. It helped a little. They could have kept printing more money until printing more money either solves their problem or starts to cause other problems. They didn’t.

Yes, some countries printed too much money and very bad things happened, but no  countries printed too much money because they wanted more inflation. That’s not a thing.

Doctors saw patients suffer for lack of light. They gave them light. It helped a little. They could have tried more light until it solved their problem or started causing other problems. They didn’t.

Yes,people suffer from too much sunlight, or spending too long in tanning beds, but those are skin conditions (as far as I know) and we don’t have examples of too much of this kind of artificial light, other than it being unpleasant.

Doctors saw patients suffer from a disease in direct proportion to a biomarker. They gave them a drug. It helped a little, with few if any side effects. They could have increased the dose until it either solved the problem or started causing other problems. They didn’t.

Yes, drug overdoses cause bad side effects, but we could find no record of this drug causing any bad side effects at any reasonable dosage, or any theory why it would.

People express gratitude. We are told it improves subjective well-being in studies. Our subjective well-being improves a little. We could express more gratitude, with no real downsides. Almost all of us don’t.

On that note, thanks for reading!

A decision was universally made that enough, despite obviously not being enough, was enough. ‘More’ was never tried.

This is important on two levels.


The first level is practical. If you think a problem could be solved or a situation improved by More Dakka, there’s a good chance you’re right.

Sometimes a little more is a little better. Sometimes a lot more is a lot better. Sometimes each attempt is unlikely to work, but improves your chances.

If something is a good idea, you need a reason to not try doing more of it.

No, seriously. You need a reason.

The second level is, ‘do more of what is already working and see if it works more’ is as basic as it gets. If we can’t reliably try that, we can’t reliably try anything. How could you ever say ‘If that worked someone would have tried it’?

You can’t. If no one says they tried it, probably no one tried it. There might be good reasons not to try it. There also might not. There’d still be a good chance no one tried it.

There’s also a chance someone did try it and isn’t reporting the results anywhere you can find. That doesn’t mean it didn’t work, let alone that it can never work.


Why would this be an overlooked strategy?

It sounds crazy that it could be overlooked. It’s overlooked.

Eliezer gives three tools to recognize places systems fail, using highly useful economic arguments I recommend using frequently:


2. Cases where decision-makers can’t reliably learn the information they need to make decisions, even though someone else has that information


In these cases, I do not think such explanations are enough.

If the Bank of Japan didn’t print more money, that implies the Bank of Japan wasn’t sufficiently incentivized to hit their inflation target. They must have been maximizing primarily for prestige instead. I can buy that, but why didn’t they think the best way to do that was to hit the inflation target? Alexander’s suggested payoff matrix, where printing more money makes failure much worse, isn’t good enough. It can’t be central on its own. The answer was too clear, the payoff worth the odds, and they had the information, as I detail later.

Eliezer gives the model of researchers looking for citations plus grant givers looking for prestige, as the explanation for why his SAD treatment wasn’t tested. I don’t buy it. Story doesn’t make sense.

If more light worked, you’d get a lot of citations, for not much cost or effort. If you’re writing a grant, this costs little money and could help many people. It’s less prestigious to up the dosage than be original, but it’s still a big prestige win.

If you say they want to associate with high status research folk, then they won’t care about the grant contents, so it reduces to a one-factor market, where again researchers should try this.

Alexander noticed the same confusion on that one.

In the drug dosage case, Eliezer’s tools do better. No doctor takes the risk of being sued if something goes wrong, and no company makes money by funding the study and it’s too expensive for a grant, and trying it on your own feels too risky. Maybe. It still does not feel like enough. The paths forward are too easy, too cheap, the payoff too large and obvious. Even one wealthy patient could break through, and it would be worth it. Yet even our patient, as far as we know, didn’t even try it and certainly didn’t report back.

The gratitude case doesn’t fit the three modes at all.


Here is my model.I hope it illuminates when to try such things yourself.

Two key insights here are The Thing and the Symbolic Representation of The Thing, and Scott Alexander’s Concept-Shaped Holes Can Be Impossible To Notice. Both are worth reading, in that order.

I’ll summarize the relevant points.

The standard amount of something, by definition, counts as the symbolic representation of the thing. The Bank of Japan ‘printed money.’ The standard SAD treatment ‘exposes people to light.’ Our patients’ doctors prescribed ‘standard drug.’ Today, various people ‘left with plenty of time,’ ‘came up with a plan,’ ‘were part of a community,’ ‘ate pizza,’ ‘listened to the other person,’ ‘focused on their breath,’ ‘bought enough nipple tops for the baby’s bottles,’ ‘did their job’ and ‘added salt and pepper.’

They got results. A little. Better than nothing. But much less than was desired.

The Bank of Australia printed enough money. Eliezer Yudkowsky exposed his wife to enough light. Our patient was told to take enough of the drug to actually work. Meanwhile, other people actually left with plenty of time, actually came up with a workable plan, actually were part of a community, ate real pizza, actually listened to another person, actually focused on their breath, bought enough nipple tops for the baby’s bottles, actually did their job, and added copious amounts of sea salt and freshly ground pepper.

Some of these are about quality rather than quantity. You could also think of that as a bigger quantity of effort, or willingness to pay more money or devote more time. Still, it’s worth noting that an important variant of ‘use more,’ ‘do more’ or ‘do more often’ is ‘do it better.’

Being part of that second group is harder than it looks:

You need to realize the thing might exist at all.

You need to realize the symbolic representation of the thing isn’t the thing.

You need to ignore the idea that you’ve done your job.

You need to actually care about solving the problem.

You need to think about the problem a little.

You need to ignore the idea that no one could blame you for not trying.

You need to not care that what you’re about to do is unusual or weird or socially awkward.

You need to not care that what you’re about to do might be high status.

You need to not care that what you’re about to do might be low status.

You need to not care that what you’re about to do might not work.

You need to not be concerned that what you’re about to do might work.

You need to not care that what you’re about to do might backfire.

You need to not care that what you’re about to do is immodest.

You need to not instinctively assume that this will backfire because attempting it would be immodest, so the world will find some way to strike you down.

You need to not care about the implicit accusation you’re making against everyone who didn’t try it.

You need to not care that what you’re about to do might be wasteful. Or inappropriate. Or weird. Or unfair. Or morally wrong. Or something.

Why is this list getting so long? What is that answer of ‘don’t do it’ doing on the bottom of the page?


Long list is long. A lot of items are related. Some will be obvious, some won’t be. Let’s go through the list.

You need to realize the thing might exist at all.

One cannot do better unless one realizes it might be possible to do better. Scott gives several examples of situations in which he doubted the existence of the thing.


Scott gives several examples where he thought he knew what the thing was, only to find out he had no idea; what he thought was the thing was actually a symbolic representation, a pale shadow. If you think having a few friends is what a community is, it won’t occur to you to seek out a real one.

You need to ignore the idea that you’ve done your job.

There was a box marked ‘thing’. You’ve checked that box off by getting the symbolic version of the thing. It’s easy to then think you’ve done the job and are somehow done. Even if you’re doing this for yourself or someone you care about, there’s this urge to get to and think ‘job done’, ‘quest complete’, and not think about details. You need to realize you’re not doing the job so you can say you’ve done the job, or so you can tell yourself you’ve done the job. Even if you didn’t get what you wanted, your real job was to get the right to tell a story you can tell yourself that you tried to get it, right?

You need to actually care about solving the problem.

You’re doing the job so the job gets done.  That’s why doing the symbolic version doesn’t mean you’re done. Often people don’t care much about solving the problem. They care whether they’re responsible. They care  whether socially appropriate steps have been taken.


Alexander notes how important this one is, and it’s really big.

People often care primarily about doing that which no one could blame them for. Being blamed or scapegoated is really bad. Even self-blame! We instinctively fear someone will discover and expose us, and make ourselves feel bad. We cover up the evidence and create justifications. Doing the normal means no one could blame you. If you don’t grasp that this is a thing,  read as much of Atlas Shrugged as needed until you grasp that. It should only take a chapter or two, but this idea alone is worth a thousand page book in order to get, if that’s what it takes. I’m not kidding.

Blame does happen. The real incentive here is big. The incentive people think they have to do this, even when the chance of being blamed is minimal, is much, much bigger.

You need to think about the problem a little.

People don’t like thinking.


There’s a primal fear of doing anything unusual or weird. More would be unusual and weird. It might be slightly socially awkward. You’d never know until it actually was awkward. That would be just awful. Can’t have that. No one is watching or cares, but some day someone might find you out and then expose you as no good. We go around being normal, only guessing which slightly weird things would get us in trouble, or that we’d need to get someone else in trouble for! So we try to do none of them. That’s what happens when not operating on object-level causal models full of gears about what will work.


Doing or tying to do something high status is to claim high status. Claiming status you’re not entitled to is a good way to get into a lot of trouble. Claiming to usefully think, or to know something, is automatically high status. Are you sure you have that right?


Your status would go down. That’s even worse. If it’s high status you lose, if it’s low status you also lose, and you don’t even know which one it is since no one does it! Might even be both. Better to leave the whole thing alone.


Failing is just awful. Even things that are supposed to mostly fail. Even getting ludicrous odds. Only explicitly permitted narrow exceptions are permitted, which shrink each year. Otherwise we must, must succeed, or nothing we do will ever work and everyone will know that. I founded a company once*. It didn’t work. Now everyone knows rationalists can’t found companies. Shouldn’t have tried.

* – Well, three times.


Even worse, it might work. Then what? No idea. Does not compute. You’d have to keep doing weird thing, or advocate for weird thing. How weird would that be? What about the people you’d prove wrong? What would you even say?


It might not only not work, it might have real consequences. That’s a thing. Can’t think of why that might happen. Every brainstormed risk seems highly improbable and not that big a deal. But why take that risk?


By modesty, anything you think of, that’s worth thinking, has been thought of. Anything worth trying has been tried, anything worth doing done. Ignore that there’s a first time for everything. Who are you to claim there’s something worth trying? Who are you to claim you know better than everyone else? Did you not notice all the other people? Are you really high status enough to claim you know better than all of them? Let’s see that hero licence of yours, buster. Object-level claims are status claims!


The world won’t let you get away with that. It will make this blow up in your face. And laugh. At you. People know this. They’ll  instinctively join the conspiracy making it happen, coordinating seamlessly. Their alternative is thinking for themselves, or other people might thinking for themselves rather than playing imitation games. Unthinkable. Let’s scapegoat someone and reinforce norms.


You’re not only calling them wrong. You’re saying the answer was in front of their face the whole time. They had an obvious solution and didn’t take it. You’re telling them they didn’t have a good reason for that. They gonna be pissed.

You need to not care that what you’re about to do might be wasteful. Or inappropriate. Or unfair. Or low status. Or lack prestige. Or be morally wrong. Or something. There’s gotta be something!

The answer is right there at the bottom of the page. This isn’t done, so don’t do it. Find a reason. If there isn’t a good one, go with what you got. Flail around as needed.

That’s what the Bank of Japan was actually afraid of. Nothing. A vague feeling they were supposed to be afraid of something, so they kept brainstorming until something sounded plausible.

Printing money might mean printing too much! The opposite is true. Not printing money now means having to print even more later, as the economy suffers.

Printing money would destroy their credibility! The opposite is true. Not printing money destroyed their credibility.

People don’t like it when we print too much money! The opposite is true. Everyone was yelling at them to print more money.

The markets don’t like it when we print too much money! The opposite is true. We have real time data. The Nikkei goes up on talk of printing money, down on talk of not printing money, and goes wild on actual unexpected money printing. It’s almost as if the market thinks printing money is awesome and has a rational expectations model. The bond market? The  rising interest rates? Not a peep.

Printing money wouldn’t be prestigious! It would hurt bank independence! The opposite is true. Not printing money forced Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to threaten them into printing more money. They were seen as failures. Everyone respects the Bank of Australia because they did print more money.

This same vague fear, combined with trivial inconveniences, is what stops the other solutions, too.

Not only are these trivial fears that shouldn’t stop us, they’re not even things that would happen. When you try the thing, almost nothing bad of this sort ever happens at all.

At all. This is low risks of shockingly mild social disapproval. Ignore.

These worries aren’t real. They’re in your head. 

They’re in my head, too. The voice of Pat Modesto is in your head. It is insidious. It says whatever it has to. It lies. It cheats. It is the opposite of useful.

If someone else has these concerns, the concerns are in their head, whispering in their ear. Don’t hold it against them. Help them.

Some such worries are real. They can point to real costs and benefits. Check! But they’re mostly trying to halt thinking about the object level, to keep you from being the nail that sticks up and gets hammered down. When someone else raises them, mostly they’re the hammer. The fears are mirages we’ve been trained and built to see.

You don’t have that problem, you say? Great! Other people do have that problem. Sympathize and try to help. Otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing, only more so. And congratulations.


My practical suggestion is that if you do, buy or use a thing, and it seems like that was a reasonable thing to do, you should ask yourself:

Can I do more of this? Can I do this better? Put in more effort, more time and/or more money? Might that do the job better? Could that be a good idea? Could that be worth it? How much more? How much better?

Make a quick object level model of what would happen. See what it looks like. Discount your chances a little if no one does it, but only a little. Maybe half, tops. Less if those who succeeded wouldn’t say anything. In some cases, the thing you’re about to try is actually done all the time, but no one talks about it. If you suspect that, definitely try it.

You’ll hear the voice. This isn’t done. There must be a reason. When you hear that, get excited. You might be on to something.

If you’re getting odds to try, try. Use the try harder, Luke! You can do this. Pull out More Dakka.

It’s also worth looking back on things you’ve done in the past and asking the same question.

I’ve linked several times to the Challenging the Difficult sequence, but none of this need be difficult. Often all that’s needed, but never comes, is an ordinary effort.

The bigger picture point is also important. These are the most obvious things. Those bad reasons stop actual everyone from trying things that cost little, on any level, with little risk, on any level, and that carry huge benefits. For other things, they stop almost everyone. When someone does try them and reports back that it worked, they’re ignored.

Something possibly being slightly socially awkward, or causing a likely nominal failure, acts as a veto. Rationalizations for this are created as needed.

Adding that to the economic model of inadequate equilibria, and the fact that almost no one got as far as considering this idea at all, is it any wonder that you can beat ‘consensus’ by thinking of and trying object-level things?

Why wouldn’t that work?






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32 Responses to More Dakka

  1. “When you try the thing, almost nothing bad of this sort ever happens at all.”

    Absolute nonsense. I have often had vague worries about something being a bad idea, which I dismissed after thinking about it for a very long time and not being able to come up with any concrete idea of what bad things might happen. Then I did the thing. Then something very bad happened which I had never imagined.

    This is not an uncommon occurrence at all.

    • Doug S. says:

      Can you be more specific?

    • TheZvi says:

      I agree that’s a thing. I don’t want to give anyone the idea that I think that in general, “can’t give a convincing concrete set of physical actions that lead to bad things” to screen off “very bad feeling about this”. I especially hate the failure mode of “What’s bad about X?” and then only adding up the explicit bad things one can articulate. And it’s something I do think is worth its own post to talk about.

      The key, I think, is to cache out what types of vague fears you actually have. If the fear is “this thing has too many moving parts that all need to work and one of them will break” or similarly “there’s no margin for error here”, even if you can’t point to one that will break, that’s legit. If it’s “this changes too many things at once” that’s usually legit too. In any case, it’s a topic worth exploring. This seems related to security mindset.

      In meant that statement to refer to these types of situations, where the baseline action is already demonstrated safe and effective, and in particular to objections of the type generated by the process here. I find this is a place where the vague fear is very weak evidence.

  2. Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917

  3. scmccarthy says:

    Thanks for writing this. Feels like a good way of looking at things, and not one I’ve thought of before.

  4. Doug S. says:

    Banks hate low nominal interest rates. They make money by borrowing money from depositors at one rate, and lending at a higher rate. But they can’t easily give depositors less than zero interest, so when interest rates get low, then the difference gets smaller and the banks profits get smaller. So bankers can be expected to have a conflict of interest that would lead them to favor higher nominal interest rates…

    • TheZvi says:

      Yes, that’s also in the mix if we want to dive into the weeds more. One could think of this as an explicit incentive *not* to hit the inflation target, although once you’ve hit zero it stops mattering, or at least matters less. And if you actually understand the full situation, printing more money (in some form) now leads to being able to raise rates sooner with a stronger economy, which is good for bankers too, especially since Japanese banks in particular are being pressured to support the economy by loaning money to failing businesses…

      But that’s too much in the weeds I think. The basic reply is that yes, you can also tell the explicit counter-incentive story here, as opposed to the prestige story, and it fits somewhat better, but I still think it doesn’t explain the magnitude of the error or in particular why they suddenly made a *much larger* error than usual when they had to start doing slightly outsized things as opposed to normally sized things. Central banks normally show this bias in regular situations but only small (e.g. the Fed seems to have a target of 2% in the Price is Right without-going-over sense rather than going for an average of 2%, but that’s still pretty close).

      • Petja Ylitalo says:

        Also: bank outlending rates are dependent on what rate banks are willing to lend at, which is dependent on bank inlending rates, but if banks don´t actually get any cheaper inlending rates, why would outlending rates go down?

        Also: see actual bank profitability during periods of really low interest rates, banks are one of the few businesses that actually do well during those times.

  5. romeostevens says:

    Why is the list long? Because you have the generative seed that is able to keep spitting out different versions/frames on the thing. Other people don’t. You are confused why other people can’t seem to get the thing even though they follow directions. They are confused how you seem to be doing the thing by following directions that clearly don’t work.

    Installing the actual seed is a matter of schema induction, and takes years for sufficiently complex seeds. Mimesis helps. Developing language that makes the same sorts of (new) distinctions that a functioning seed makes also helps. Deliberate practice helps.

    A couple years ago now I decided to Actually Try the meditation thing (including, for the reasons mentioned, gratitude meditation) it helped. A little.

    • romeostevens says:

      Or for another gloss: rationality techniques are an output, not an input.

    • TheZvi says:

      I feel like you should say more here, perhaps a full post. There’s interesting theories and sketching them out in more detail would be useful. As you note, this is a gloss of something much more detailed that’s in your head.

  6. > Everyone respects the Bank of Australia because they did print more money.

    I think you might be referring to the 2008 crisis. While there was monetary policy easing, the main stimulus was fiscal i.e. government spending, mostly targeted at people who would spend the money quickly. This was textbook Keynesian stimulus but was still massively controversial.

    [One reason it was controversial was that people did not believe that the spending would be reined in post crisis. And indeed every budget since then has been in deficit for various reasons.]

    As far as I can tell the Reserve Bank of Australia did not engage in quantitative easing. The policy rate was 1.5% not 0.

    Your wider point is intact of course.

    BTW your blog is just wonderful according to me.

    • TheZvi says:

      I didn’t use the USA and its spending as an example because we failed at this too. We should have cut rates much faster, and then done more money printing of various forms faster after hitting zero. I believe that Ben Bernanke knew this, and was unable to convince enough Fed members to be able to do it (for similar reasons that BoJ had) and therefore did whatever the other members would let him do. Because Ben couldn’t convince them, we instead were forced to try stimulus, which is a much worse version of the same thing (for various reasons) and then given we were going to rely on stimulus and think the monetary authority wouldn’t cancel it out by acting last (which would mean we just spent the money for no reason, unclear to what extent exactly that did happen), we didn’t do enough stimulus (because various members of congress were vaguely worried that a trillion sounded like a big number, and other similar vague-More-Dakka-must-be-bad-worries).

      The Bank of Australia reacted quickly enough slash had a good enough situation that it didn’t have to actually print tons of money, for various reasons, including that it credibly would have done so if it needed to (e.g. it was doing something approximating NGDP targeting) and basically missed the great recession as a result. To the extent they didn’t actually need to print money, the threat of printing money was enough to not need to print it (e.g. the Chunk Norris strategy / credibility). That’s my view, but it’s not as well researched on those details as I’d like, I just wasn’t happy with the details of other examples. Bank of Switzerland folded, ECB is terrible, etc. As you say, general point stands.

    • benquo says:

      Elaborating a bit: the heuristic generating the bottom line seems to be trying not to stick out. So, you don’t want to be scapegoatable by not having done your job, but there’s also little appeal and a lot of risk in going above and beyond.

      Except, of course, when metrics and endowment effects combine – e.g. if your initially profitable-seeming business gradually starts failing, you’ll be motivated to generate increasingly creative fraud schemes to keep up appearances. If you used to be a straight-A student, the risk of a B might lead to creative test-taking solutions. Etc.

      • TheZvi says:

        It is pretty amazing, often, how something you want to happen isn’t happening, but the moment you realize that it actually has to happen, there ends up being a way to make it happen, and it happens.

        This suggests a strategy of manipulating situations such that one will feel that things must happen. Some people pretend the deadline is today rather than next week; a similar thing could be to assume you need an A to pass instead of a B, or otherwise that non-exceptional solutions are actually not OK, because they probably aren’t OK, but that will get quite disheartening if you do that with things you often can’t do, and you keep missing those targets, even if the things you do to try to hit those targets are indeed the things you should be doing. So it’s a hard problem.

        Robin’s solution he mentions in the post is to imagine yourself with the appropriately high status (e.g. as above the audience, as an A student, as worthy of women’s attention, etc). This definitely can work if used carefully.

      • waltonmath says:

        @TheZvi, I had tried this before, after reading Scott’s posts about predictive processing. If I can convince myself something will get done within the next day, maybe that I will predict it will get done, and it will get done, just like how you move your arm by predicting it will be in the place you want it to be and then making the world fit that prediction. It mostly didn’t work — maybe I was unable to convince myself enough? Also, I have only a fuzzy model of how predictive processing works, maybe it would be good to improve it.

      • TheZvi says:

        @waltonmath, try starting out by predicting very short term stuff (e.g. predicting you will raise your arm). I ran that experiment and found it totally worked as a way to physically cause myself to do things. I am currently predicting that these words will appear rather than intentionally typing them. (End effect). It didn’t make the typing faster/better, but it’s a cool demonstration to one’s self that it works. Convincing yourself is indeed the hard part of using the process on useful things…

      • benquo says:

        I suspect hacks to force yourself to try are often misguided and effort is often better spent resolving why it is that you feel like you have to “try” but mustn’t succeed. Nate’s Half-assing it with everything you’ve got is an example of the sort of solution I’m suggesting.

    • TheZvi says:

      Lots of good stuff of this type at Overcoming Bias, and this seems very on point. Because habits and virtues and other messy stuff, the instinct to not show off in situations where it’s bad turns into a more general internalized worry we need to overcome even when the original motivation doesn’t make sense. So even though obviously we’d rather aim properly in a gunfight, no matter how big a status claim it might be, we choke anyway, so we ‘aim’ instead of aiming.

  7. waltonmath says:

    It’s worth keeping in mind that you can’t just do more of everything. You have only bounded resources, and it’s nice to preserve some Slack. But in a lot of the cases you’re pointing to, people already spend resources thinking about the idea of doing more, which could be spent just doing more. Doing more might even be cheaper than thinking about it!

  8. steve says:

    In the spirit of this post: thanks for the last year of posts.

  9. Jason Green-Lowe says:

    This was really useful for me! The post has a good, important idea that’s clearly expressed and pleasant to read. I’m going to try to apply it. Thank you for sharing. 🙂

  10. bugsbycarlin says:

    Others have probably said this, but here’s another reason for more dakka. Whenever you fire 1 bullet, you get +1 EXP. At least.

    If you fire a few bullets, you get a few EXP. If you fire lots of bullets, you get lots of EXP. You might even slowly increase the number of bullets you can fire per period.

    This generalizes completely.

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