It appears that AJ Jacobs is writing a book on self experimentation and this very lovely article on managing the many daemons in your brain is a portion. It is a good addition to the thread about self control and attention management. My favorite bit involves a shocking idea. Language evolved so we could talk to ourselves. [...]
Here’s a amusing addition to the pile of commitment techniques. This is analogous to the software you can install that denies you access to the internet for an interval. In this art project the artist suggests a service that allows you to mail you phone or lap top away on vacation. There are services [1] that allow [...]
Thursday, February 18, 2010
One of the things that puzzles me about the vast literature on organizational dynamics, self control, will power, etc. etc. is that it seems to ignore an important reality about actual work. In my experience work comes in two flavors – everything is going just fine v.s. stuck. In the first mode you think [...]
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Arising from my interest in impulse control, hyperbolic discounting, and will power I have been nursing an interest in how people enforce their personal rules. Say you wish to promise to go to bed at 10pm, or not to drink before 5pm, or to save 10% of your income, or call your mom once [...]
I’m liking these thin skinned vaults. People used to do amazing things with bricks and tiles, and folks at MIT are working to bring it back. In the US we have a lot of amazing tile/masonry buildings via the work of Guastavino. And, have look at these mostly abandoned buildings in Cuba, also via satellite. One contributor [...]
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Chris points out a provocative idea. No doubt I’m getting this wrong, I’ll need to read the paper (pdf). But the idea is that an animal’s problems with hyperbolic discounting are more severe for some goods v.s. others. Further the poor tend to live in circumstances where the goods most effected by the problem [...]
Cars get into accidents. Adding cars to the system increases the number of accidents. The paper discussed here argues that adding a car in a high traffic state adds about $2,500 worth of additional costs, almost $7 dollars a day! Here in Boston, a bus/subway transit pass costs a bit less than $2/day. My somewhat [...]
Wow! This a wonderfully counter intuitive bit of social science! Imagine that you would like to be sword swallower. In service of achieving that goal you set out to accumulate assorted accouterments: a sword, some books on sword swallowing, you study your vocabulary, you watch some videos, you take a course. Each of these moves [...]
Why do we read those blogs, email, chats, twitter, voice mails, newspapers, magazines, etc. etc. Presumably there is some logic to that. Some motivational schema. There’s money in the answer to this question. Will my students pay attention? Will my novel be a hit? Will my newspaper survive? So, surely this question has [...]
People lose control and act impulsively all time. It is important to forgive ‘em. If you never act impulsively then you seem humorless, uptight, officious, bureaucratic. When professionals act impulsively we wonder: should let this guy steer the ship? One scheme to temper impulses is to smooth things a bit using a group. When your managerial team act [...]
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