The biggest problem with dopamine is that its design lags considerably behind the current version of the game, amounting to a million-year-old evolutionary algorithm coping with a new world. But the problem is that the algorithm is almost impossible to rewrite.

The essence of using dopamine is to recognize more details about yourself, and thus partially change the design of the game's goals. I can't change the bamboo poles or the height/width of the gates, but I can stretch the poles forward into the city. Instead of bending the pole harder.]

This requires rewriting the application for a specific scenario in the upper layers of your own operating system. The details are so extensive that it's almost impossible to get it right without conscious design. But the upside is that once you start conscious programming, the world becomes a much friendlier place.

An example:

There's an anti-common-sense secret to learning a language: don't review it.

It's easy to imagine that when you review, if you remember something you feel like it's deserved, with little positive feedback, and if you forget something you feel bad, full of negative feedback.

The right thing to do is to replace review with lots of input: if you encounter a lot of it, it's a case of review naturally remembering it. If you don't encounter it much, you don't use it often enough, and you'll forget it sooner or later.

The key word here is “mass input”, you have to keep acquiring new things in large quantities, and then brutally and mercilessly throw away most of them like monkeys breaking up grains, leaving only a small amount of knowledge that can be mastered efficiently. So you follow your dopamine, and progress efficiently.

The biggest problem with dopamine is that its design lags considerably behind the current version of the game, amounting to a million-year-old evolutionary algorithm coping with a new world. But the problem is that the algorithm is almost impossible to rewrite.

The essence of using dopamine is to recognize more details about yourself, and thus partially change the design of the game's goals. I can't change the bamboo poles or the height/width of the gates, but I can stretch the poles forward into the city. Instead of bending the pole harder.]

This requires rewriting the application for a specific scenario in the upper layers of your own operating system. The details are so extensive that it's almost impossible to get it right without conscious design. But the upside is that once you start conscious programming, the world becomes a much friendlier place.

An example:

There's an anti-common-sense secret to learning a language: don't review it.

It's easy to imagine that when you review, if you remember something you feel like it's deserved, with little positive feedback, and if you forget something you feel bad, full of negative feedback.

The right thing to do is to replace review with lots of input: if you encounter a lot of it, it's a case of review naturally remembering it. If you don't encounter it much, you don't use it often enough, and you'll forget it sooner or later.

The key word here is “mass input”, you have to keep acquiring new things in large quantities, and then brutally and mercilessly throw away most of them like monkeys breaking up grains, leaving only a small amount of knowledge that can be mastered efficiently. So you follow your dopamine, and progress efficiently.