Moving to a new URL…

This blog is an experiment slash dare to myself in a couple different ways.

One, to see if there really is something to be discovered in the mashing up of technology, psychology, self-help, game theory, and silliness. I think there is.

Two, it was a test for myself to see if I could bootstrap the blog to gain some readers without publicizing it or linking to it from any of my other projects. Thanks to Gina from Lifehacker and Merlin Mann from 43 Folders, who have a very keen eye watching all corners of the internet and were kind enough to link to me a couple times, I did gain a significant number of readers.

Three, I was curious to see if this experiment could eventually be incorporated into my other projects at The Robot Co-op.

And so, today, which also happens to be the 2nd anniversary of the day we started our company, we’re launching a new blog called Mutual Improvement which will be very similar to this blog in spirit, but even more ambitious and wild. I’ll be continuing the series of cognitive biases and exercises for lost souls (and rewriting many of the existing ones as well) and many of the other ideas I’ve started up.

So, if anything from the last couple months has peaked your interest, please update your bookmarks, add this new RSS feed, read about our new inspiration, and enjoy.

Click Here: http://mutualimprovement.com/

Thanks!

Erik Benson

Find your clean sweep score (Exercise #22)

This is an exercise in finding one thing explicitly and one thing implicitly.  First, measure yourself against a fairly conservative and responsible checklist of things that should increase your personal freedom.  Second, find your hidden personal biases against certain seemingly responsible behaviors.

According to the Better Me website the Clean Sweep Program is:

A checklist of 100 items which, when completed, give one complete personal freedom. These 100 items are grouped in 4 areas of life with 25 in each group: Physical Environment, Well-being, Money and Relationships. These 4 areas are the cornerstone for a strong and healthy life and the program helps a person to clean up, restore and polish virtually every aspect of his/her life. The program takes between 6 – 24 months to complete.

It’s a bold claim.  At first I was curious about which authority they were claiming that these 100 things are actually worth achieving.  The creator of this site, Michael Cooper, is a graduate of Coach University and I think these 100 things are something from their program… and prospective new coaches are encouraged to get their own lives in order before coaching others.

The 100 things are split up into four categories: Physical Environment, Well-being, Money, and Relationships.  Each category has 25 things that, together, imply health and personal freedom.  The idea is that the best way to solve problems and improve yourself is to create the space and mental state that best accommodates problem solving and self-improvement.

I took it and got a 77 out of 100.  I think I cheated on a few though.  I have strong personal preferences against a couple of them (mostly drinking caffeine and alcohol).  However an interesting comment from them is:

Those last 5 or 10 are the ones which are most worth taking care of, given our egos are well entrenched among these incompletions.

That seems true to me.  We all have personal behaviors or habits that we believe our personality is permanently intertwined with.  For that reason alone I suggest that you take this test and pay particular attention to the things on the list that you say to yourself either “Not only do I not want to do that, but I think it’s wrong” or “It’s not that I don’t want to do that, it’s that I can’t”.  Both of these responses indicate a strong emotional conflict between your behaviors and your actual self.  Take a look at WHY you think something is wrong or impossible and you may find some deeply rooted hidden biases in yourself.

• The Clean Sweep checklist
• The “Clean Sweep my life to 100%” goal

Illusion of Control (Cognitive Bias #10)

This is the tendency to believe that you control, or at least partially influence, things that you do not.   For example, that by leaning to one side after you have bowled a definite gutter ball you might influence it to move back towards the center.  Okay, not really… but I do do that sometimes.

This is the fuzzy land of superstitions that you don’t really believe rationally but which you still engage in emotionally.  If you had $100 bet on the outcome of a coin toss, what would you do?  Loosen up your shoulders?  Hop up and down?  Toss the coin up high, or keep it low?  People who win a lot of coin tosses in a row might begin to feel like they’re better guessers.  They might get angry with you if you try to make them lose their concentration.
One question I have about this bias is whether or not it is a harmful one.  What are the consequences of feeling like you’re actually playing the video game even though you haven’t put any coins in it and it’s on demo mode?  What side effects are there to screaming at the television telling the character not to go into the basement when they will sure get killed?  Does it give you a false sense of confidence that eventually leads you making choices that lead to failure?  It seems like if that were the case, that the illusion of control would correct itself over time… leading to a sense of control that was fairly accurate.  In other words, if the illusion of control was harmful, it would eventually lead you to believe that your control of things was harmful and therefore make you try to control things less in order to not harm them.  However, if the illusion of control has neutral or positive benefits, then that would explain why it stuck around… it would self-reinforce itself.

If you think about it with squinty eyes, you can even see how optimism and the “go get ’em” attitude of many very successful people involves an element of this illusion of control.  It’s in that first split second of coming across a chance event or occurance that might end up being in your favor or against it… do you shy away from it, look at it indifferently, or take it on as something you can influence?  And which reaction leads to the best outcomes?

Walking through this list of biases has been very interesting for me due to this strange confusion about their role and impact on the practical matters of how our brain works.  They exist because they often lead to a net gain somehow… they are shortcuts and assumptions that we can’t help but make if we are to have any hope of processing as much information as we do on a daily basis.  And yet at some point every shortcut will reveal flaws and occassionally steer us wrong.  At which point should we meet the bias and say, “Thank you for your shortcut, but I will take it from here”?  This is the relationship we must become aware of, between the conscious and the subconscious.  Between the fast, cheap, and general, to the slow, expensive, and specific.

Lose weight with Traineo.com

Traineo is a new website that helps you meet your diet and exercise goals with a bit of peer pressure. An interesting web 2.0 take on it, and one that I’ve been waiting for. Since I’m not much of a diet-watcher, some of the tools seem a little awkward: you have to rate your diet subjectively (poor to great) and that you enter your calories in by number. I’m curious to see whether or not that data has any value over time especially since I don’t know inuitively how many calories are in things.

The best feature is how you can add motivators… these are people that will be emailed either your weight change or your actual weight (you can set that up in the preferences) weekly and will therefore serve to deliver a continuous but friendly stream of peer pressure to you.

(Found via Lifehacker)

Seattle’s “One Less Car Challenge”

If you live in Seattle, and you’ve been thinking about the possibility of getting rid of your car but don’t know if it’s feasible, you might want to think about trying the One Less Car Challenge:

What is the One Less Car Challenge?

The One Less Car Challenge is a new program that gives you a taste of living with one less car. Basically, you go on a “car diet” for a month by not driving your second car – or your only car. You’ll get great tips on how to get around by bus, bike & foot, as well as some nifty incentives – like some free Flexcar use for the month.

You may even prove to yourself that you don’t need that extra car. If you sell your extra car, you’ll get even bigger incentives – and save yourself thousands of dollars a year!

Flexcar will reimburse you $50/month (max two months) of Flexcar time if you participate. And if you end up selling or donating your car after the end of the challenge, you’ll get an extra $100/month of Flexcar credit for up to six months.

I think this is a great idea.

Learn more here.

Hyperbolic Discounting (Cognitive Bias #9)

This is the tendency for people to value more immediate payoffs higher than remote payoffs.

Sort of makes sense, right?  I’d prefer to get $5 today than $5 tomorrow.  But would I rather get $10 today or $11 next week?  Or would I rather get $500 today or $1,000 a year from now?  In all three cases I’d probably take what I could get now rather than wait for the bigger payoff in the future.
However, the other twist is that this bias diminishes if both payoffs aren’t that close to the present.  For example, I’d rather take $1,000 5 years from now than $500 4 years from now.  As long as I’m waiting 4 years, might as well wait the 5th for twice as much.  But if you compare it to the example in the paragraph above, you’ll see how this logic seems to flip flop a bit.  In both cases waiting a year could gain me $500, but waiting a year right now seems harder than waiting a year 4 years from now.  Hence the hyperbolic nature of this bias… it slowly twists over time.  It’s irrational because you treat the same problem differenly depending on an arbitrary variable (its nearness in time to you).
Marketers can take advantage of this bias by offering you something small now in exchange for something bigger later.  Credit cards, banks, and loan companies seem to thrive on this bias alone.

Brainwave states

The brain is an electrochemical organ that emits an electrical charge that can be measured and also influenced through a technique known as entrainment. Entrainment is the tendency for two oscillating systems that have similar periods to fall into synch with one another. What usually happens is that the system with the greater frequency slows down to match the system with the lesser frequency. I had a very strange experience with this when I was on my meditation retreat last month when my heart beat kept synching itself to the ticking of my bedside clock. Other anecdotal evidence of these things include how people you’re having a close rapport with will often mirror breathing patterns, and for women who live together to slowly gain matching menstrual cycles.

In any case, the brainwave states are typically divided into these five categories:

• Gamma: 38-80 Hz (waves per second). A heightened state of awareness. Your mind will feel loose and free, able to make wide connections quickly. Good for wit, improve, problem-solving, and sometimes even ESP.
• Beta: 12-38 Hz. A focused state. You will often be in this state when engaged in conversation, leading a group, or engaged in something new.
• Alpha: 8-12 Hz. A meditative or relaxed state. Associated with taking a rest between working states, or taking a shower, or driving down a familiar road, or on a walk.
• Theta: 3-8 Hz. A sleepy state. Right after you wake up or right before you fall asleep. You are still thinking but everything is a bit groggy and slow. Hypnosis can often take people into this very suggestible state.
• Delta : 0.2-3 Hz. Deep, dreamless sleep.

Once you recognize these states, it’s possible to take advantages of the strengths of each. The alpha and theta states are great for new idea generation… the commonly reported phenomenon of getting your best ideas in the shower, or driving to work, or walking to the store seem to support this. On the other hand, Beta and gamma states are best for intensely social and communicative environments… first dates, parties, etc.

There are biofeedback and brainwave alteration tools out there to help entrain you into deeper slower states of awareness. My question for you is, do you know what you’d want to do with these different states if you could better control them?

Returned from the river

I just returned from 16 days of vacation in northern California. The second week of this trip was spent kayaking down the Klamath River. I’ve never spent an extended period of time on a river before and it had a profound effect on my mindset. So many things now seem to be understood within the metaphor of the river.

Most of the river is hidden. The surface of the river might seem calm and happy, while just underneath a powerful current pushes and pulls. We slide effortlessly down the river most of the time, but every once in a while the hidden power of the river will surge up in a wave or pull you down into a hole.

Navigating the river is about knowing when to trust it, and when to direct it. The power of the river is so strong that you can never directly oppose it. It’s much better to use arms, legs, and oars to bend your course in the river, than to use them to try to go against it. The former will let you borrow from the strength of the river while the latter will only tire you out.

I also read a great book while on this trip called The Wisdom of Insecurity. It was incredibly applicable to the trip as a whole. The gist of it is that it’s often fear of insecurity that drives one to seek security in life. However, the true nature of insecurity is what leads to surprise, wonder, gratitude, and love. Being comfortable with insecurity became familiar to me, and seemed to be connected with the real nature of nature. Kayaking the river wouldn’t have been as much fun if every twist and turn was known beforehand. Sure, it’s a cliché revelation, but it’s always nice when you can experience a cliché firsthand rather than simply letting them slide meaninglessly over you. For, what is a cliché other than a piece of wisdom that has ceased to have meaning due to simplified repetition? Both the river and the book were good tools for me to crack the meaning back out of the phrase.

I’m looking forward to getting back on my feet over here.

Focusing Effect (Cognitive Bias #8)

This is the tendency to compare two things based on one dimension rather than taking all dimensions into consideration.  For example, if you currently dislike your job because it has a terrible commute and someone offers you a job that’s within walking distance of your house, you may be susceptible to thinking the second job is therefore better.

At first glance, it appears that the thing you hate about your current job doesn’t exist in the new one, and therefore you would be happier there.  Of course, there are many other things that could contribute to the second job being better or worse than the first one.  We tend to conduct comparisons along one axis and assume that all other things are equal.  This is obviously a silly tactic.

If you tend to focus on the negative, the focusing effect can create a downward spiral of negative thinking.  By focusing on a negative aspect of your current situation, many other things that you don’t have will always look like they’re better… from which the term “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” is coined.  You begin to see yourself as an unlucky or lower person than others.

If you tend to focus on the positive, the focusing effect can create an attitude of complacency and stability.  Everything will seem worse (or potentially worse) than your current situation, so you will never change jobs, never move to a new city, never meet new people, simply because you imagine the rest of the world’s experiences to be slightly or drastically worse than your own.

Which of these two sides of the focusing effect bias coin do you land on?  I think I’m probably more on the negative side, thinking things could always be better… but at the same time I’m optimistic that I could reach those better things if I simply focused more.

Six brainwashing techniques and the decognition process

Persuasion and Brainwashing Techniques Being Used on the Public Today is a fascinating article by Dick Sutphen about, well, how persuasion and brainwashing techniques are being used on the public today by religious organizations, the military, human-potential organizations, and the media.

It’s a long article so I’ll paraphrase the six techniques here:

1. Isolation: the meeting or training takes place in a place where participants are cut off from the outside world. This often involves making a public commitment to stay during the training. When training takes place in isolation like this, there is usually a quick follow-up session to ensure that the technique has really taken hold.
2. Fatigue: a schedule is maintained that ensures physical and mental fatigue. This means long hours, few breaks, and very little time for relaxing or reflection.
3. Tension: techniques are used to increase tension in the group. For example, perhaps there are a few truisms thrown around that might make you feel like you are doing something wrong. Or that you are a sinner, or depressed, or generally unhappy.
4. Uncertainty: people are randomly put on the spot. Forced to withdraw into anger, fear, or awe. Revivalist churches and human-potential seminars include asking people to come on stage and talk about humiliating or weak moments in their lives. This withdrawn, fearful, state, makes you many times more susceptible to suggestions as your guard is down and you are looking for safety and reassurance in whatever form it takes.
5. Jargon: new language to talk about what’s going on. It could help label the “enemy”, whether it be ignorant people, people who aren’t yet enlightened, or evil people. Also, new language to talk about people who are “fixed”: either enlightened, saved, or healed.
6. Humorlessness: there’s no humor involved until the process is complete. The humor then serves as a way to celebrate and seal the deal.

A couple other techniques can be used in addition to help the effects become more pronounced. These three steps are called the “decognition process” as they help slow down and eventually stop thinking altogether.

1. Alertness Reduction: one part of this is to force participants to keep a poor diet: either lots of sugar, or very bland foods. Sugar throws your nervous system off. A very bland diet (usually fruits and vegetables and no dairy or meat) will make you more spacey. Another part is inadequate sleep after long hours of intense discomfort or strenuous physical activity.
2. Programmed Confusion: a deluge of new information, combined with questions, discussion groups, and one-to-one create a sense of jumbled-ness that make it easier to insert crazy ideas.
3. Thought Stopping: most of these brainwashing techniques encourage stopping your thoughts in one of three ways. All three processes can be very helpful if you are controlling the process. The only danger comes when you allow someone else who you don’t fully know the motives of to take you through these steps and slowly alter deep beliefs about yourself and the world.
   1. Marching to a beat, usually at around 1 or 1.5 steps per second, is particularly useful. Both the military and Hitler used this to great effect. The beat puts you in a slightly altered state of awareness that is close to hypnosis and makes you more susceptible to suggestions.
   2. Meditation is the second form of thought stopping. An hour to an hour and a half of meditation a day for several weeks is enough to keep you in a constant “slow” state that is more focused and susceptible to suggestions (both good and bad).
   3. Chanting is the third form of thought stopping, and has the same general technique as marching. The beat helps put you in a slightly different state of awareness.

The full article really is pretty interesting, and goes more in depth about things like persuasion, misuses in the media and by the government, and some cautions.

Link to the full article [via Omni Brain]

Make a promise (Exercise #21)

One of the best ways to change habitual behavior is to commit to it.  This is obvious to us, and is often why we don’t commit to changing behaviors.  If you’re a smoker and you want to quit, make a list of the 10 people in your life that you are most concerned with keeping a high reputation with, and give each one of them a written statement that says, “I promise you that I will never smoke another cigarette.”  Simply thinking about that will let you know just how powerful the force of public commitment is… more powerful than internal commitment, more powerful than the patch, and more powerful than any plan to slowly wean yourself off cigarettes.

If smoking isn’t the main thing you’d like to change, choose something else.  Make a promise about an absolute thing like never doing something again or completing something by an exact date.  Immediate and drastic change that you can’t wimp out on.  Write them down on note cards or blank business cards and hand them out to 10 (or more) people that you desperately want to respect you.  No need to even include an “or else”… that way there’s no way out.

Endowment Effect (Cognitive Bias #7)

This is the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it. For example, if you own a certain t-shirt, you will place a higher price on it than a tshirt that you don’t own. Most economists believe that you will be willing to sell something for the same price you paid to receive it, but if this bias is real (and there is some debate), then the simple act of owning an object will inflate the price. Perhaps because the cost of choosing is valuable in itself. Perhaps because of the effort involved in finding it in the first place, and having to find it again if you wanted it again. Perhaps because of a sense of scarcity (what if you can’t repurchase the item you just sold for the same price). Whatever the cause, it seems like a bias that encourages inflation… and therefore rewards buying early, and holding on to what you have.

Identify three things that you don’t like about yourself (Exercise #20)

There’s a hidden cost in the things we don’t like about ourselves.  In addition to the fact that the things are usually undesirable traits in the first place, what is usually neglected is the cost of thinking about the undesirable trait over and over again.  In most cases, we are slowly changing creatures and things we don’t like will stick around for years, sometimes decades.  It’s a good idea to check in occassionally with a few of the most costly of these traits and make sure we’re not letting them use up more of our energy, time, and self-esteem than it would take to fix them.

Make a list of the top 3 things you don’t like about yourself.

The important thing here is to find the things that bother us the most.  Sure, you might like to be a foot taller, to have the bone structure of a hummingbird, and have a turtle shell to allow easy sleeping on sidewalks, but does it truly bother you to your core that you don’t have these qualities?  In my experience, the things that bother me most, the things that most encourage the slow and steady buildup of self hate, are the things that I know I could change about myself, but only lack the energy and motivation to do so.  It’s the ability to blame yourself for the undesirable trait that stabs deepest.  So, think hard… what do you really dislike about yourself, name two or three.

How long have you disliked each thing?

Sometimes we rationalize undesirable traits by thinking one of two things: either they are not really THAT nagging, or they are too difficult to change.  Losing 20 pounds, or improving conversational skills, or reinventing your career path are not simple tasks.  However, if you can think back to the first time you considered this trait it becomes more clear how costly keeping them around can be.  Thinking about something once or twice a week, each time with self-criticism and disgust, for years or even decades can really bring you down.  It also brings home the point that it’s possible that this trait is going to stick around for as long as it wants to… sometimes they magically disappear but most of the time they only go away with concerted effort.  When framed like that, imagining yourself having this same conversation with yourself 10 years from now, it becomes easier to motivate yourself to make changes now so that you can save yourself all of those years.

Imagine life without the trait.

Imagine that through some miracle the thing you hated most about yourself was gone.  You would wake up each morning and not have that same thought.  You would be in other situations and not have that insecurity.  How much relief would it bring?  It might help to think about other traits you have had in the past (maybe something like childhood awkwardness or acne or harmful relationships) and how liberating the day was when you found that that particular burden had come to an end.

Write out steps for removing each undesired trait.

What would it take to get fix the thing you hated most about yourself.  Exactly how much effort would it take, how much money, how much of a lifestyle change?  What is the cost of reaching that point?  Compare this cost to the real cost of keeping it around.

Strongly consider changing the top-most undesirable trait.

Really think about it.  Why not do it?  Why not double down on fixing one major source of unhappiness… and give it everything it takes until it’s resolved?  Not only would it remove a self-sabotaging source of self-hate, but it would build up confidence in your ability to make positive changes in your life and give you momentum for more changes.  In my case, the appeal is also to simply have a new project… one that has a real benefit.  You can research the problem, consult friends, and make it a thing.  As a thing, you can rise to the challenge and keep yourself interested in a subject for the duration of its resolution.  Good luck!

I’m back…

I forgot to mention here that I was going to spend 10 days at a silent retreat.  Well, I just got back and have lots of new ideas for ways to take mutual-improvement to the next level.  Stay tuned.

The rules for online dating

The Style Life Challenge I wrote about a couple days got an interesting response (see the comments). While we're on the topic, I thought I'd also mention the female-equivalent of male-centric The Game… a book called The Rules, written by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider. They've sold over 2 million copies since 1995, and have built sort of a mini-movement around this book. Most people consider both the books to be rather sexist, misguided, and full of advice that will only work for the most pathetic and desparate people around. I'm not really trying to convince otherwise… but for some reason I find the information in these books to be really fascinating. What's most interesting about these books, to me, is that they're taking something that's traditionally thought of pretty sacred (the search for romance, love, soul mates, marriage, whatever), and turned it into a deliberate set of rules, exercises, and tricks that people who feel frustrated, unhappy, and limited can use to begin to feel empowered, self-confident, and able to impact their own lives for the better.

Here's a list of a more recent set of rules that Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider came up with for online dating.

1. Don't answer men's ads or email them first
2. Create a good screen name (they gave BlondeBeauty50 as an example of a good screen name)
3. Less is more when writing your ad
4. Post a smiling photo
5. Wait 24 hours to respond
6. Don't answer on weekends or holidays
7. Write light and breezy emails
8. Never email a second time if he neglected to respond to your email
9. For the first three months (!) don't initiate an email, only respond
10. Block yourself from instant messages
11. Don't volunteer your phone number first
12. If he doesn't ask you out within four emails, delete/next
13. Screen out Mr. Wrong
14. Don't waste your time on time wasters
15. Don't force the relationship from email to phone
16. Put safety first
17. Don't ad-interrogate on dates

I know from my experience of online dating that rules sort of evolve out of usage of the system. You learn from experiences and try to avoid making the same mistakes twice. I have my own rules of sorts… most involving clear pictures, short emails, quick and inexpensive first dates, clear and early communication of disinterest when it clearly isn't going to work, and relying on first impressions and not dragging things out simply to prove yourself. Most of the rules above actually don't sound absolutely horrendous, even though several do play into lame gender roles, everyone is different, and to call them rules is more than a little misguided. What do you think?