"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #5: TAPs

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It's January 5, so we move on to Training Regime Day 5: TAPs.  Trigger-Action Plan/Patterns; the basic components of the story-threads that spin together to make up your mind.

1. Pick an action
2. Pick a trigger
3. Practice 
   

  Okay, I can do that. This is pretty much the "Tiny Habit"  (BJ Fogg TED talk) approach to life: if you have the Motivation, the Ability, and a Trigger, then the Behavior can happen (B = M*A*T) and can grow, with frequent repetition, to become a part of your daily routine; action-trigger chaining, where you form a tiny habit and then consider the action to be a trigger for the next thing, was the basis years ago for my exercise patterns. (Start by walking around the kitchen table a particular number of times, and that's the trigger, the cue, for going down to the basement. Go down to the basement, and that's the cue for brushing my teeth, which is the cue for changing to my exercise shorts, which is the cue for doing one small warm-up, which... and so on. Try not to think more than a few seconds ahead...) Many such habits and a few such chains have been easy to make stick; some have repeatedly failed, either intermittently (I keep forgetting, and it bugs me) or pretty much totally (I just can't make myself do it more than a few times, and that bugs me a lot.)

   Going over the Training Regime review of this, I think in some cases I haven't been doing enough repetition. Repetition is basic to learning. In particular, I haven't done enough dummy repetition. Like Mark Xu, I sometimes forget my vitamins -- maybe once a month, which is not a big deal but it bugs me. My cue has been the after-exercise protein drink that I take them with, usually before even adding the protein powder. But often I'm thinking about other things at the same time, so sometimes I forget. How can I make it more automatic? Xu emphasizes the specificity of the action and of the trigger, emphasizes doing ten (ten is not the same number as nine. Do ten.) repetitions, and -- since you don't want to take your vitamins ten times in a row as practice -- adds the idea of a dummy rehearsal of the TAP, which I'd never done at all. Okay -- I hereby do a "seat-adjustment": instead of rehearsing the TAP itself, I will amplify that signal with something that I do prefer to rehearse. Each night I set out the stuff which starts the next day: I will put my vitamins on top of the protein powder, and then it will be really hard to forget to take them. And now, ten times over, I rehearse taking my vitamins and my protein powder out of the cupboard, putting one on the other, closing the cupboard door. Yes, that feels as silly as it sounds, but maybe it works. Tonight I really do expect to manage the TAP I rehearsed -- and rehearse it some more. Tomorrow I really do expect to accept the reminder and take my stupid vitamins.

  There is another aspect to repetition for learning, which I didn't see in the training regime: you're supposed to do spaced repetition, gradually stretching the gap more and more, ideally rehearsing whatever it is just before it would drop out of your reachable memory set. So you practice a small set of flashcards over and over, then review after an hour, then again after a few hours, then after a day, a few days, a week, a month; something like that. I've already repeated the vitamin TAP a few hours after the initial memorization and I expect to repeat it a couple of times tonight, not just do the action itself as if it were already set. 

  There's another forgetting that bugs me, that happens once a week or so. Living at the end of a culode-sac, I like to leave our small lamppost (in which I've set an LED nightlight bulb with adapter) on at night.. but I forget , or I forget to turn it off in the morning, and it's oddly wired: not only am I unable to stick a normal timer on it, but a basement socket on the same circuit simply doesn't work unless the outside light is on. So forget the timer, and try to remember to do it manually. I do remember to open our window shades in the morning and close them at night, so I normally use that as cue but sometimes I forget. Think of it as a TAP problem:  this morning I did the lamp, rehearsing with each of 11 shades. I'll certainly remember to rehearse the turning-on this evening, again 11 times, [note added later: done] and I have a reasonable expectation that this will drastically reduce my tendency to forget this particular action, especially if I remember to repeat the repetition-rehearsal on Sundays through January, and then once a month.

  And a different kind of TAP, trying one more time to address the messiness bug I mentioned on day 2: I decided to go back to my Pomodoro timer. That's just a 22:22 cellphone timer labelled "UDS" for "Up/Down/Stretch" to remind me to stand Up if I'm sitting, to sit Down if I'm standing, and in either case to Stretch just a little. I'm now using that alarm as a trigger to look at my desk and move one thing: throw it away, put it away, whatever. I will have done this about ten times today, and maybe it will help. (Of course it has helped a little already.) Certainly I'm finding that the fact that I'm going through the "Training Regime" does adjust some of my inner selves' attitudes, at least for the moment.

  Repetition is what it's all about. Repetition zero or more times is the Kleene closure, named for Stephen Cole Kleene who "invented regular expressions in 1951 to describe McCulloch-Pitts neural networks"... I had no idea. I first saw them in graduate school, 25 years later. He's 112 today. Happy Birthday, Stephen.