This is a continuation of my series of posts on why a diary can be a powerful tool for modifying behavior. Please check out my first post for the full context.

Benefit of Self-Recording 2: Small victories

In the real world, people don't radically change overnight. Most changes occur gradually. By all means, aim high in the long-term. In the short-term, you need to think in terms of incremental improvement. Quantitative records of your behavior will allow you to better articulate what a small step forward would actually look like. If the records say you smoke 20 cigarettes per day, you know that reducing smoking to 19 cigarettes per day is progress. If you exercise 10 minutes a day, you know that 10 minutes and 20 seconds constitutes an improvement.

Keeping records of the specific situations in which your target behavior occurs (or fails to occur) facilitates another kind of incremental improvement. Behavior can be changed one environment at the time. Furthermore, some environments will be more hostile to your desired behavior than others. Try ranking them by difficulty and start with the easier ones. For instance, it may be easier to avoid smoking when socializing with non-smokers than smokers. Or, it may be easier to start exercising on the weekends when you're not exhausted from work.

Every change in amount or specific environment constitutes a small victory. These are a great way of building confidence in your own ability and help you stay on track when the final goal is situated far into the future.

#psychology

Started using nostr.wine recently. It's insane how easy it was. Just give them your pub key, pay with lightning, and boom! You have access.

We all have behaviors that we struggle to add or subtract from our lives. One of the most basic techniques for doing so is to start recording how frequently the behavior in question occurs, and in what situations. If you want to add a behavior that currently has a frequency of zero, you should record the situations where you want it to occur, and what you were doing instead.

I've noticed that few people take this advice seriously. Maybe because of some notion that psychology is supposed to involve arcane mental wizardry and this just seems too simple. Well, solutions should be simple. Another set of reasons have to do with misconceptions about what can be recorded or how much work it would entail. Most importantly, however, is perhaps the lack of awareness around the many empirically verified benefits of self-recording. I'll be doing a short series on that, summarizing my thoughts around each benefit. One post. One benefit. Here's the first.

Benefit of Self-Recording #1: Change in the direction of your values

A common effect of observing our own behavior is that the behavior changes. This is known in the literature as "reactivity". There is nothing mystical about reactivity. If your primary concern is practical results, don't get hung up on "mind-over-matter" questions. Instead, let's look at the conditions under which reactivity tends to occur. It seems to happen if the self-observer assigns a negative or positive value to the behavior. Negative associations tend to decrease the frequency of the observed behavior, while positive associations tend to increase it. The key point is that you need both. Merely convincing yourself that a behavior is desirable or undesirable is not enough. You also need to become an observer of your own actions. Likewise, if you start self-recording and notice no change for weeks – examine your values. Try to articulate to yourself in writing why this behavior is good or bad for you. Reactivity will not always be enough to induce the change you want. But in many cases, it will, and it is an excellent place to start.

#psychology

Never had a Twitter account. Never will. I'd rather be on #nostr.

Brilliant example of training visual matching to sample.

https://youtu.be/yG12rqPaIdc

#video #dog

Would be nice to find relays with less shitcoin spam.

I recently read an interesting paper on behavior economics by Gerd Gigerenzer named "The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics" (2018). Gigerenzer discusses how behavior economists have essentially manufactured the belief that people suffer from persistent cognitive blind spots that need to be corrected through the use of benevolent "nudges" by central planners. The ending in this passage may be particularity amusing to bitcoiners:

"The argument that biases are costly is essential for justifying governmental paternalism. The irrationality argument provides a convenient rhetoric to attribute problems caused by flawed incentives and system failures to flaws inside people’s minds, detracting from political and industrial causes (e.g., Conley, 2013; Thaler, 2015; Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). Nicotine addiction and obesity have been attributed to people’s myopia and probability-blindness, not to the actions of the food and tobacco industry. Similarly, an article by the Deutsche Bank Research “Homo economicus – or more like Homer Simpson?” attributed the financial crisis to a list of 17 cognitive biases rather than the reckless practices and excessive fragility of banks and the financial system (Schneider, 2010)."

#Bitcoin #nostr

First step towards recovery: admit you have a problem. That will never happen.

"There have been landmark writings, even works of genius, in what are called the social sciences. But so many of these have been implicitly or explicitly attacks on things said by other writers in the social sciences that it is not at all clear how much net loss the society would have suffered if none of them in the whole profession had said anything." – Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.512

I think Norwegian Air is going to as well. That was a while ago though. Not sure if they went through with it.

Made this video a while back on memorizing randomly generated strings: https://odysee.com/@sudo_random:8/pilot:57?r=FZo7tpwgjSUku4YzcKD4iVpuz6hhfRXx