December 30, 2013.

More Rational Resolutions

Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:

Can "goal factoring" help you keep your New Year's resolution to hit the gym every day in 2014?

They sye that time 'eals all things,

They sye you can always forget;

But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years 

They twist my 'eart-strings yet! 

"Goal factoring," a method of designing better plans, is one of the techniques taught by the Center for Applied Rationality, which hosts three-day workshops that teach attendees how to use science-based approaches to achieve goals. A November workshop in Ossining, N.Y., instructed 23 participants on how thinking about one's future self as a different person can help goal-setting and why building up an "emotional library" of associations can reduce procrastination.

She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about. 

CFAR, a Berkeley, Calif.-based nonprofit, is prominent in the growing "rationality movement," which explores the science of optimized decision-making. In recent years, books about decision-making and probability theory----including "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, who writes a regular column for The Wall Street Journal, and "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman----have been best-sellers. Websites like Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong serve as communities for those who believe the best way to be effective, whether in changing eating habits or changing the world, is to actively look at the lessons of science and hard data. The movement draws on some of the same research as economists who argue that investors behave irrationally.