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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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As I understand it, this would be in effect only while you wear the avatar.

There's been some research to check for transfer to offline environments (eg here or, while less directly tied to the avatar, 'game transfer phenomena discussions of behaviors and habits do seem close). I think the science tends to be weaker, especially garden of forking paths problems, and they tend to only measure on scales of days rather than months or years, but it does match my experiences.

Now, these are usually small and fairly trivial things, and sometimes not even matters you'd consider character (or, conversely, are Character in the Calvin's Dad sense), so it's fair to say there's still a long way from the sort of mode changes that the OP was motioning around. But I think it's a quantitative rather than qualitative difference.

BTW, I think often doing a specific action is not the best way of encouraging it. Many actions lie at a point within the decision tree that youd never normally get to, and training that last step more wont help.

That's reasonable.

There's been some research to check for transfer to offline environments

Well yes, if we believe in reinforcement or some other mechanism like that, that can carry the short-term consequences into the long term. But there the proteus effect is not an alternative way that the character can take over long term. All the stuff about the mechanism of it suggests it doesnt have an independent long-term effect.