Last updated April 10, 2022

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COGS 110 Project 2 - Applying the Value Equation

Goal

Reflect on how real-life challenges to learning can be understood in terms of the value equation, and how these situations can be hacked to improve the learning practice.

• actual examples from your own experiences, or based on discussions with other people
• Each paragraph should include:
  • a description of a specific learning situation and challenge
  • a hack (of any type or combination of types)
  • an explanation in terms of the value equation (no numeric values needed)

For each

• Think of additional precautionary measures and realism

Brainstorming

• Learning stock trading technical analysis, feeling overwhelmed with how much there is to learn

• Increase reward by valuing financial independence?

  • Have a larger purpose that overrides fear

• Find a course/resource and set deadlines for each chapter/video

  • Multiple spikes due to multiple short delay goals
  • Courses are structured to start with fundamentals then build up to more complex ideas

• Studying for midterms, procrastinating

• MACM101

  • Prepare a study guide to increase probability of success?
    • Have a plan, practice questions to do
  • Use the fear of a bad mark as a positive reward for doing it

• Reading books

• Made it a daily habit

  • While on the bus I read
    • Shortcuts decision-making process

• Start with books with themes and ideas you’re passionate about

  • Increases reward through competence as you will be more knowledgeable

• Learning to type on a split keyboard

• Measured progress, leads to confidence after seeing results, increasing probability of success

• Increased reward by recognizing the benefits of a split keyboard in long-term ergonomics

  • Spend lots of time using my pc, so having a reason important to me helped

• Learning to create videos for my youtube channel

• High reward as I think about the way I can positively impact the lives of others

• Watched tutorials on video editing to increase my probability of success for producing high quality videos

• Learning to improve my rank in a video game

• Watched professional players and their playstyle/routines to model behavior off of

  • Increased reward by imagining the potential competence and fame I could receive for being good
  • Increased probability of success, by knowing how they practice and how they play I could emulate it into my own gameplay to be as successful.

• Created a habit to practice before playing competitively

  • Warmed up, deathmath
    • Helped increase probability of success

• Gambling

Hacks

Reward

• Adding positive reward
• Diminishing negative reward

Probability of success

• Increasing self-efficacy
• Increasing self-esteem

Delay

• Increasing delay since I a

Outline

As of recently, I’ve been trying to learn the stock trading discipline of technical analysis, the skill of predicting future stock prices based on previous stock trading patterns. Unfortunately, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed with knowing where to start. To decrease my lack of direction and increase my probability of success/confidence to successfully learn the fundamentals, I asked my uncle who is experienced in the skill to give me resource recommendations, which turned out to be two books. He was also self-taught and is now fairly experienced, so I curated the belief that reading these books will lead me to be as competent as him; this led to an increase in my reward for reading the books, and an increase in my self-efficacy towards learning technical analysis. Paired with my already-existing values of wanting financial freedom (competence), and wanting to help my parents afford moving to British Columbia (relatedness), my reward for learning technical analysis grew quite high. To utilize this high reward, I have given myself personal deadlines to finish one chapter of the book each day, which allow for multiple spikes to occur in comparison to the single deadline/goal of completing the book. By having a strong and urgent reason for learning, I am able to make consistent progress towards becoming a knowledgeable investor.

Another current learning situation involves having to study for two upcoming midterms; to try and combat my procrastination, I’ve established a study plan to increase my confidence and probability of success. My professors have given me example problems and midterms to practice with, and claimed that the examples would be similar to the exam. Thus, if I work on and solve these questions as part of my study plan, I will know for sure that completing these problems will guarantee the reward of being more prepared for the test, increasing my probability of success. Consequently, I have distributed the practice into relatively even chunks of practice and studying across the days prior to the exams, but a problem I might face is actually following through on my plans. To add further incentives, I chose to use a task management app called “Habitica”, where your productivity influences your in-game character’s health and level points. I set reviewing to be a task I should do every day, so if I fail to check off the task at the end of the day I lose HP, but if I successfully do it then I get coins and experience points to buy new equipment and level up. I already use Habitica every day for other commitments and am quite invested in the game, so it is important that I stay alive and continue levelling up. Furthermore, I am part of a party in the app, so whenever I lose HP from not completing my tass, other members in my party do as well. As a result, the app adds a negative reward of harming the wellbeing of my fellow comrades for when I don’t complete the task of studying.

Part of my new years resolution was to start reading more books to cultivate an intellectual life outside of school, but finding the motivation to do so is challenging with easily available distractions like mobile social media consumption. However, I overcame this by making reading easily accessible and reading books about topics I enjoy. First off, I borrowed my mom’s kindle and began keeping it in my backpack whenever I went outside, so the delay for reading becomes virtually 0 as I can easily pull it out of my bag. To improve the reward of reading, I downloaded books related to self-improvement to increase the reward of reading books. By learning about new practices and concepts that can take improve my mindset and skills, I gain higher levels of competency from reading. Additionally, the motivational aspects and frequent idea of how we are in control of our destiny through our effort and behavior promotes autonomy, another innate desire. As a result, during free time in transit, instead of traditionally choosing to go on social media, a kindle’s similar delay paired with it’s higher reward makes it more appealing to do during such situations. As a result, I was able to read 20+ books within the first half of this year, and turn the idleness of transit into profound learning experiences.

I spend most of my time on the computer, so I decided to learn to type on a split keyboard for the positive reward of better long-term health and ergonomics. However, making the initial switch posed as a negative reward as my typing speeds were reduced from 140 to 20 words perminute and the new layout was uncomfortable. Initially, I experienced the negative rewards outweighing the positive rewards, so I increased the reward by pairing this learning with the creation of a YouTube video showcasing my progress. Not only was the learning experience tied to improving my skills, it was also holding me accountable towards making more content for my YouTube channel, which was an important aspect of my life during that time. To further hack the value equation, I would record my typing speed after each training session and plot it on a graph, which resulted in an increasing graph. As a result, visually seeing my typing improvement increased my perceived probability of success of the reward of improving my typing skills, increasing the overall value of the practice.

When I used to have free time in high school, I would consistently practice my skills and learn strategies to be capable of competing against the best and achieve high ranks across various first-person shooter games in hopes of one day playing professionally. One practice that helped me was focusing on specific aspects of a professional player’s playstyle to model my own behavior off of. First off, I would define what skill I wanted to work on that another player possessed, which was then followed by research and personal implementation into my own playstyle. For example, aiming onto targets in such video games requires good hand-eye coordination using your mouse, so I followed a certain player’s aim routine to. By having their skill as a goal and the routine as a clear and proven path to get there, I had a high probability of success and a high reward that came from the competence associated with improving my aim. Furthermore, these players were famous and making good money by playing professionally, so to encourage myself and increase the reward of following through on applying my improvements, I would imagine the potential earnings, and fame I could achieve if I became as good as them.

When I got my first Virtual Reality headset, I became obsessed with mastering the game “Beat Saber”. In the game, you slash through incoming blocks in sync to a chosen song using light sabers wielded by your controllers, and your score after each song/map depends on how wide your swings were and how close to the center your cuts. The difficulty of songs were determined by the total blocks of the course divided by the duration of the song, also known as blocks per second. Unfortunately, I hit a plateau where I struggled to complete a map on the next difficulty level of 9 blocks per second, which resulted in a low self-efficacy and probability of success towards continuing to play. To regain some confidence, I decided to play each song at a reduced speed like 0.6x the original speed, which was much more manageable for me. As I became confident at a certain speed, I would increment the current speed by 5% and would continue the process of mastering and increasing the difficulty until I was finally able to complete the song at normal speed. Additionally, these play sessions would only occur during my 30 minutes breaks away from studying or productive work, so that would have been my delay for achieving each 5% increase. As my break was close to finishing, I experienced a stronger resolve to try and perform to the best of my ability, which ended up proving effective as I always successfuly completed the songs near the end of my play session.

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Created:: 2021-11-05 17:25