http://i.imgur.com/034rPCz.jpg

One of the more commonly seen types of posts on the front page are testimonials from people who've hit it big, offering advice on how to do the same thing. But I noticed that while a few parallels can be seen in their methods, for the most part they advise a wide range of different methods. Can they all be true? Maybe. But I mean to propose a different possibility.

In the 1960s, B.F. Skinner undertook a series of experiments with a variety of animals, but most famously pigeons. His goal was to determine to what extent he could shape their behavior through a sort of automated training regimen called operant conditioning. (In fact, I wrote a [horror story](https://www.inkitt.com/stories/horror/6667) about it)

If you've ever sprayed a cat with a spray bottle or given it a treat when it's good, you've engaged in reinforcement and punishment, two key elements of operant conditioning. But supposing you gave the treats randomly? That's what Skinner did with his pigeons. 

http://i.imgur.com/JyxPzka.jpg

Confining them to small cages in a grid so they could not see one another but he could monitor their individual behavior, he first rewarded them for performing specific actions to create the association in their minds between action and reward.

Then, after a time, he set the treat dispenser to give out treats at random intervals. The fascinating result was that every time, the pigeons inferred that whatever they happened to be doing at the time caused the treat to be dispensed! So if they were hopping just then, they would set about hopping in the hopes of another treat.

http://i.imgur.com/53IVg7T.jpg

But if, the next time a treat was dispensed, they were instead twirling? They would not give up hopping because it worked for them once. Rather, they would begin doing both. A sort of hopping, twirling dance. So it went, each time they did something different when a treat was dispensed, they would add that move to their dance routine. 

Before you get high and mighty about how much smarter humans are than pigeons, remember that we used to dance in the hopes of making it rain. And really, [a lot of modern superstitions](http://thelottolife.com/blog/2013/12/12/17-weird-lottery-superstitions-that-players-use-but-will-it.html#.V55ehfkrLIU) follow the same basic pattern of mistakenly inferring causality based on a coincidence. 

http://i.imgur.com/cBzOBT6.jpg

I've recently had some unexpected success on this site. But I am not about to set myself up as someone qualified to tell you how to do it. Because what worked for me may not work for you. Some of the advice I have seen is valid outside of Steem and just generally good life advice like "be persistent" and "you can't win if you don't play" but the more specific stuff where people purport to have determined patterns in Steemian behavior or applied complex ideas pushed by economists to this site are somewhat sketchy. 

Where large sums of money are involved, we desperately want to be in control and understand how it works so we can be more effective and thus more successful. But in many cases, like the US economy, nobody really fully understands how it all works. They just convincingly pretend to so people will buy their books and employ them, the way that medieval kings employed men claiming to be wizards, who said they could discern the future from the stars or bring down plagues upon their enemies. 

http://i.imgur.com/qpX7xU6.jpg

I don't really know why I've been doing better and better recently. I know that I'll use the increased voting power to preferentially seek out quality content being ignored, because getting noticed was my big problem early on. I already haunt the "new" tab for each tag instead of "trending" for that reason. But I can't tell **you** how to use this site and wouldn't presume to. Just don't let Steemit make a pigeon out of you. :)