…except that then I tried looking for examples of such and came up blank. The example I ended up giving, “sleeping at night”, was a biological imperative that was never really “discovered”, per se.

Compare to genetics. If there’s a mutation that gives even a small benefit, it predictably reaches fixation in the population (where every single organism has it) after a certain number of generations.

Compare also to other kinds of ideas, like technology. When a new technology (let’s say the cell phone) is invented, it starts with a group of early adopters. As the technology gradually gets better and cheaper, and people notice that cell phone users have a big advantage over non-users, new people buy cell phones. Eventually it reaches the point where the cell-phone-less are at a big disadvantage, and even the grumpy old holdouts like myself are forced to purchase them. Even if we never reach literal fixation because of the Amish, the indigent, etc, there’s still a point in which having a cell phone seems to become the default state.

The same is true in the economy. One business gets a bright idea, like outsourcing to China or something, they get rich and outcompete their rivals, their rivals pick up on the idea, and eventually businesses-that-don’t-outsource-to-China gets reduced to a weird niche market.

This should be able to work with lifehacks. Whether it’s students trying to get the best grade, workers trying to be most productive, or suitors trying to appear most attractive, people compete with each other all the time. If there were some meme that consistently offered its users an advantage in productivity or energy or even mood, it ought to reach fixation as surely as new technologies or business practices.

And I can’t think of any that have.

Some possible explanations:

1. There are no exceptionally good life hacks. The human body and brain are optimized really really well, or else have really really strong tendencies to return to equilibrium after a disruption.

2. Life hacks, as a category, have some characteristic that makes fixation an unreasonable goal for them. Maybe there is so much variation in people that no lifehack can ever improve more than a small percent of them. This seems like a less bleak version of (1) – the stuff everyone has in common is optimized really really well, but there are some individualized flaws you can pick off on a person-by-person basis.

3. Life hacks as a category didn’t exist until kind of recently, or it if did they weren’t as good as modern life hacks. Even though there are some great ones out there now, they haven’t existed long enough to achieve fixation.

4. All the genuinely useful life hacks take work, and people are really bad at doing work, so nothing that takes work can ever achieve fixation. The level of work it takes to understand a cell phone or computer doesn’t count; these life hacks take more work, or different kinds of work.

5. Some life hacks have totally reached fixation and I’m just too stupid to think of them. Or – life hacks that reach fixation become so entrenched that it’s very hard to think of them as lifehacks any more. Compare the genetics student who says “No mutations have ever reached fixation in the human population, and I know this because most of the people I see aren’t mutants.”

The last explanation seems most promising, which means I should probably look harder for fixated life hacks.

There are some things I want to exclude right away. New technologies like the cell phone can reach fixation, but I don’t think I’d want to call them life hacks; I’d rather limit the term to non-medical interventions or at least technologies specifically related to health and productivity. Certain ideas like religion have reached fixation in their populations, and it would be fascinating to think of in what senses those are life hacks, but I don’t think that’s where we’re going here. I’m looking specifically at things that act directly to raise energy levels, intelligence, social skills, or organizational ability.

I will grudgingly accept three-ring binders, to-do lists, calendars, and filing cabinets as sort of examples – even though I don’t use a calendar or to-do list and it doesn’t seem to have left me unable to compete with the rest of humanity, and even though these all fall into a sort of general “keep organized by writing things down and sorting them” category.

I will grudgingly accept backpacks, briefcases, and the like, even though “things that hold other things” seems to be a pretty basic human invention and if we have to go back to the Paleolithic before getting a genuinely useful life hack we are doing very poorly indeed. This might also be a piece of technology which escapes that category only through the cheap trick of going so far back that it doesn’t seem like a technology anymore.

I will grudgingly accept “diet and exercise”, since even people who are bad at diet and exercise probably eat better and exercise more than they would if they were unaware that diet and exercise were things they should do. But I don’t know if this was ever really “discovered” or if it got a lot of help from a biological imperative.

I will grudgingly accept “take a deep breath and count to ten in order to not get angry”, since everyone seems to know about it.

But none of these seem to fall into classical life hack categories like “thing that a man with slick hair teaches a class on, telling you that it will change your life”, or “thing that you can buy at the Sharper Image”. And they all seem pretty old. Cell phones took like fifteen years to achieve fixation; how come for life hacks we have to look all the way back to whichever caveman first realized you could carry tools in a sack made of animal skin?

EDIT: @mjdominus on Twitter proposes caffeine. That sounds right to me.

When I first heard about this, my thought was “No way that is ever going to work”. I have always been under the impression that conditioning is kind of like tickling. You can’t tickle yourself. You’d be expecting it.

Let’s start by distinguishing a couple of possibilities:

1) This process doesn’t work at all

2) This process works by making you want the reward. Suppose you promise yourself a candy bar each time you do homework. You are hungry and want the candy bar, but you would feel bad if you ate it without doing homework. Therefore, you grudgingly do homework to get at the candy bar.

3) This process works by changing your urges and desires. After eating a candy bar each time you do homework, your brain associates homework with a nice, delicious-feeling, and you enjoy doing homework more from now on.

Let’s start with 3, the most encouraging possibility. This gains a little support from the Little Albert experiment. Here, a baby who had no particular fear of rats was exposed several times to rats plus loud, terrifying noises. Eventually the baby came to fear rats, even without the noise, presumably because the fear of the noise had generalized onto the rat through association. It’s easy to see how this could mean something like the happiness of candy-bar-eating generalizing to homework. Nevertheless, I believe this argument proves too much.

Every evening, I sit down at the table, get a plate and some silverware, and eat dinner. It’s usually something I really like, and it usually includes dessert, which I like even more. If eating good food isn’t rewarding, I don’t know what is, and sure enough I rarely skip dinnertime.

However, if for some reason I don’t have dinner – maybe I’ve promised my friends I’ll go out with a late dinner for them and so I can’t stuff myself first – I do not feel the slightest urge to sit down at the dinner table with a plate and sort of move my silverware around in the air making little eating motions, and when I tried it (empiricism!) I did not find it at all pleasant.

Take a second to think about how weird that is (the result, not me trying the experiment). Sitting at the table and moving my silverware, in conditions exactly like these, has been quickly associated with reward every single time I’ve done it in the past, for decades, ever since I learned to feed myself. But I don’t feel even a little bit of urge to do this. None at all. You may generate additional examples at your leisure, but the point is that just being consistently associated with a positive reinforcer in a low time-delay way does not make a neutral activity (let alone an actively unpleasant activity) become desirable.

What happened with Little Albert, then? First of all, he was classical conditioning and not operant conditioning. Second of all, Albert had no understanding or control over what was going on. Each time he heard the noise, he was very surprised – he was receiving a new fact from the Universe. But it wasn’t information he understood; he had no idea what the connection between the rat and the noise was and whether it would recur. He just knew that there was some mysterious rat -> noise connection.

Compare this to me eating dinner. The connection between sitting down and eating dinner is not at all a new fact fed me by the Universe; it’s something I plan myself. And it is not mysterious whether any given sitting and silverware-waving will reward me; I know it will reward me if and only if I am planning to eat dinner. Therefore the brain does not think of silverware-waving as an activity that might, who knows, lead to reward in the future.

(one might object that my inner pigeon – or lizard brain, to mix animal metaphors – doesn’t share my complex explicit knowledge of the reward structure of dinner-eating. But the little I know of the brain’s reinforcement mechanism suggests that reinforcement learning is based on surprise – technically the difference between predicted and observed values of some complicated Bayesian equation encoded in dopaminergic neurons or something – and that this system is actually quite good at predicting expected reward from an action, within certain limits)

So (3), the hypothesis that the reward will cause me to start enjoying homework, seems wrong. What about (2) – “I don’t like homework much, but at least I get some candy out of it”?

Here there’s a ceiling on how much the candy can reinforce your homework-doing behavior, and that ceiling is how much you like candy.

Suppose you have a big box of candy in the fridge. If you haven’t eaten it all already, that suggests your desire for candy isn’t even enough to reinforce the action of going to the fridge, getting a candy bar, and eating it, let alone the much more complicated task of doing homework. Yes, maybe there are good reasons why you don’t eat the candy – for example, you’re afraid of getting fat. But these issues don’t go away when you use the candy as a reward for homework completion. However little you want the candy bar you were barely even willing to take out of the fridge, that’s how much it’s motivating your homework.

Maybe you say “I will allow myself exactly one candy bar a day, but only if I finish my homework”. Even if you can stick to this rule, here the candy bar becomes an extrinsic reward motivating the homework. We all know what happens with extrinsic rewards – overjustification effect! You gradually start interpreting the task at hand as an annoying impediment to getting the reward, lose your intrinsic motivation, and as soon as the reward is removed, you’re even less willing to do the task than before.

So both (2) and (3) are pretty unlikely. That leaves us with (1) – don’t even bother.

Luckily, my friend helpfully clarified that this wasn’t what her class taught at all (I think maybe they originally tried this, but considerations like the ones I mentioned convinced them to change?). Their new policy is that you should reinforce yourself with a “victory gesture” – for example, pumping your fist and shouting “YEAH!” and visualizing an image corresponding to your success and trying to feel really good about yourself.

So for example, as soon as you sit down to start your homework, you make the victory gesture and imagine yourself graduating summa cum laude from school, and then you feel really good and have reinforced the behavior of sitting down to do your homework. And maybe you do it again when you finish, because peak end rule.

She claims a few benefits of this method. First, it’s very fast, so you can reinforce things right as they happen instead of with time delay which gives your brain enough time to lose the connection. Second, it’s intrinsic, so it’s not going to sap your natural motivation the same way the candy bar might.

I understand the claim that rewards delivered very immediately after a stimulus can work better for conditioning – I was referred to a couple of papers proving this, though I don’t remember them. But I notice I am confused. When we have good examples of real conditioning, immediate reward isn’t especially important. For example, people often use the language of behaviorism to talk about addiction, say alcoholism. But the chemical rewards of getting drunk don’t manifest until a little while after you’ve had your first beer – certainly not within a split second – and certainly alcoholism can reinforce even longer term behaviors, like leaving home and going to the bar. Pornography is another good example of effective behaviorism, but going to a porn site gives only delayed rewards – first you have to find a video you like, then you have to wait for it to buffer, then you have to sit through the boring part where the nice lady and the plumber are discussing the best ways to fix her faulty pipes, and so on. It seems that when we have a real effect that definitely works, immediacy is not required (indeed, if it were humans would have a lot of trouble learning anything but the most basic reflexes).

But okay. Ignore that. It would really really really really bad mind design to allow your own consciously generate-able emotions to feed back into the reinforcement mechanism.

Start with one obvious point. I said the candy bar couldn’t be much of a reinforcer if you otherwise left it in the jar without eating it. The same seems broadly true of a victory gesture. I don’t feel the slightest urge to perform a victory gesture, and having tried it empirically I don’t feel the slightest urge to repeat it. This bodes poorly for its ability to be a strong reinforcer.

And over several billion years of evolution, the brain has every incentive to get rid of that behavior if indeed it was ever possible. Imagine a world in which our own thoughts and feelings can be strongly reinforcing. You’re a caveman, encountering a saber-toothed tiger. You have two choices. You can either feel fear, which is an unpleasant emotion. Or you can feel happiness, which is a pleasant emotion. First you try feeling fear, but that’s unpleasant! You don’t like fear! The feeling of fear is negatively reinforced and your brain learns to stop feeling it. Then you try happiness! You like happiness! The decision to feel happiness is positively reinforced. Yes, you decide, saber-toothed tigers are wonderful things and you are overjoyed there is one in front of you getting into a pouncing position and licking its lips and…well, this caveman isn’t going to live very long.

From the little I know about the reward system, it seems to operate on a basis of predicting pleasure level, then upregulating actions that result in world-states that seem more pleasurable than predicted and downregulating actions that result in world-states that seem less pleasurable than predicted. I don’t think you can prevent the “I’m going to do my victory gesture!” part of you and the “I’m going to predict my pleasure at time t+1″ part of you from talking to each other, I don’t think internal pleasure is as reinforcing as external world-state results, and I don’t think the pleasure of making a victory gesture is strong enough to do much anyway.

…there were a lot of “I thinks” in that paragraph. Do we have any evidence here?

The literature on this is hiding under the obscure term “self-consequation”, and unfortunately it is all from Scientific Prehistory, ie the 1970s and 1980s before journal articles were uploaded to the Internet. I am able to find this full study, which does pretty much exactly the experiment listed at the beginning of this post – feed people candy in return for studying – and finds that it helps only if other people are there keeping them honest. But I am also able to find this abstract, which appears to be from a study showing the opposite – some kind of benefit – but is totally unavailable on the Internet. Both studies seem to refer to a long literature supporting their result and (sigh) neither seems aware of the other’s existence. However, I am more skeptical of the second, both because I can’t see it and because I worry that experimental protocols aren’t real self-reinforcement. That is, if an experimenter gives you their bag of candy and tells you to reinforce yourself by eating some when you do something good, that’s still different from using your own bag of candy and coming up with the idea on your own, even if the experimenter is out of the room when you’re working.

I will still try the technique, because it seems low cost and potentially high value. Really high value, actually. So high value that I would have expected the first person to get it right to take over the world. This is turning into another argument against it, isn’t it?

But yeah, as I was saying, I still intend to try the technique, even though it won’t be a very well-controlled experiment. And I’m glad I heard the idea for reminding me how little I know about behaviorism.

When I moved in with Mike, he already had Amazon Prime and I was able to piggyback off his account because we lived at the same household. And once again the Reddit hivemind has proven startlingly accurate.

My old algorithm for choosing a product was something like this:

1. Realize need for product
2. Go to store
3. Look over shelves full of competing brands of product
4. Reach for product with shiniest packaging
5. Think “No! That would not be virtuous!” Snatch back outreached arm.
6. Studiously examine marketing claims on packaging of all products.
7. Try to parse incomprehensible, unverifiable assertions like “Special n-acetylcysteine strip makes our product 150 kilojoules more convenient than competing brand!”
8. Furrow brow
9. Finally choose product which is cheap, but not too cheap, because the one that’s too cheap might be poor quality.
10. Be consumed by self-doubt.

My new algorithm for choosing a product goes more like this:

1. Type name of product into Amazon
2. Limit search to Prime-eligible and sort by average customer review
3. Find the inevitable five-star rated product which is also pretty cheap and has dozens of customer reviews all saying some variant on “I’ve used hundreds of different [product_type]s before, and finally my sainted grandmother, may she rest in peace, recommended [brand_name] to me. It was by far the best I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe it costs so little. [brand_name] has revolutionized my [product_type]-using-experience and I’m never going back to any of those other brands again!”
4. Buy that one
5. Profit

To my surprise, this second algorithm works a lot better.

(I’m not being sarcastic with that “to my surprise”, by the way. I have such a high prior for things not working – for magically returning themselves to baseline via mysterious set points despite all evidence that they shouldn’t – that it really did surprise me to find the second algorithm working better than the first.)

I have since successfully bought curtains that actually block light so that you can’t see it, industrial-strength earmuffs which I wear all the time people aren’t actively trying to talk to me and sometimes when they are, a laptop which has served me well beyond the incessant clicking noise (but see “earmuffs”, above), these amazing computer speakers that people actually remark upon, and a dream diary that legitimately looks like a sinister 16th-century magical grimoire while costing less than some non-grimoire-looking books.

Looking around the room for things to include in the above list, I also spot an Amazon purchase good enough that I feel compelled to mention it despite its not being recommended by Amazon. Andrew Rettek recommend for me IRON GYM, which aside from having the manliest name in the world is this really interesting contraption you attach to your door to turn it into a pull-up bar. I have no idea why I got it since I’m terrible at sticking to even non-contraption-requiring exercises like situps and pushups, but for some reason it seems to work. I think, as strange as this will be to relate, that the difference is that I have to shift to a near-the-floor position for situps and pushups, whereas I can just make use of the pull-up bar immediately when walking through a door without any positional change required. Judging by my difficulty getting off my comfy computer chair to do useful things, or getting out of bed in the morning, I think either people’s bodies or just my body may view change between sitting/lying and standing as some kind of bizarrely relevant millisecond-level-discounting trivial inconvenience cost factor when deciding what to do. In any case, the IRON GYM seems to work and I am now capable of multiple pull-ups, which would shock any of my high school gym teachers or really anyone else who knows anything about me at all.

It always makes me kind of surprised when things actually work the way I learned about in economics class. The first time I ever boycotted a company, I got inordinately excited walking past the store and not buying their products, because I was actually exerting economic power and affecting the market, just like those people in thought-experiments! And of course after three seconds I realized this was hilarious because of course everything I have bought or not bought since the moment I was born has been doing that. But until then it had always seemed like a passive process – buy something that doesn’t look terrible, or that a friend had used and not had any problems with, then hope for the best. That first boycott (I can’t even remember the company) made me feel like an active participant in the system again. And buying from Amazon is neat because it makes me feel the same way.