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xamdam comments on The ABC's of Luminosity - Less Wrong
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Comments (30)
Thanks, helpful.
Curious how you use your own mail logs. I've never found them helpful other than showing people that yes, they really did say that possibly stupid thing.
WM performance seem generally important but it's largely just a tool that helps many activities and does not seem in the same category as Alicorn's series. Did I miss something?
Which PUAs did you find helpful - I am married with 3 and not interested in reading their literature for its intended purpose (though I read the Game, it was interesting and well-written). I'm willing to read them for the articles ;)
BTW, since you mentioned tools I think I can bootstrap myself to singularity with just my iphone ;) (The statement is more about the iphone than me). Between audiobooks, ITunes EDU-type stuff, instapaper and full wiki (I use trunk) not a minute goes to waste. We should have a "tools for thought" thread!
They show me whether or how I've changed my mind. When I started participating here heavily, I used Spotlight to ask my past selves how they'd felt over time about "rationality", because my initial reaction was that LW was a strange place to find myself in, for a critic of rationality - as I then (2009) thought of myself.
I was led for instance to a 2001 email conversation about the definition Rawls gives of rationality in his Theory of Justice, to this 2004 blog entry, shortly followed by a book proposal to my editor in an IT-related journal about rational processes in software engineering (very brief excerpt: "rational behavior is that which achieves our ends; rational behavior fits the world as it really is"). Then my email records show me dropping the term altogether - I didn't use it on a single occasion until very recently. (The book didn't pan out.)
This little look in the rearview mirror was useful in assessing my motivations in participating here. "Rationality" is too easy an applause light, calling people "irrational" too much of an accusation, for me not to question why I should take an interest in Less Wrong. Spotting the words I quote above showed me that my definition of the term tracked with how it's used here, and my recollection of previous thinking, such as the 2004 blog entry, told me that what I'd been objecting to all this while is the oversimplifying (e.g. Cartesian) connotations of the term, and so I made peace with my past selves as I walked into this rationalist trap. ;)
(ETA: In a sense these records are just part of my outboard brain, same as the iPhone. I'm with you in thinking this is one of the things Stross gets right about the future, the self gets more distributed in space.)