= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jonii comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (858)
So, hello. Has anyone here ever experienced spontaneous and sudden evaporation of akrasia alltogether? I'm asking mostly because this is exactly what happened to me, on 26th of August this year.
I didn't do anything special. I had tried taking cold showers every now and then for a week earlier, and started taking some nutrient pills around that time, that's pretty much it. Then, that morning, I suddenly started working on the projects I had planned and thought of.
That may not sound all that dramatic, but I haven't introduced myself yet. I have been my whole life a rock-solid underachiever. After elementary school doing homework was not enforced, so I gradually stopped doing that. University doesn't care if you participate in lectures, so I didn't. All my academic effort happens roughly one day before any given exam. It's not that I didn't like the subject I study, or that I didn't want to do it. I just couldn't. There was a mental block that totally prevented me from using my free time for any of my projects, things I wanted to work on.
So that day, I spontaneously figured that I gotta study one thing in order to be prepared for the next academic year. So I did. I figured my room was suboptimal for studying, and I started cleaning it a bit. I figured I would achieve more elsewhere, so I went there and studied more. Then the night came, and I slept. Next day, this happened again. By now, I've completely reshaped my apartment so that I can work even at home, and I do work. I'm writing this after going to university, participating lectures like I should, and doing, at my free time, at my home, additional studying and work related to the most difficult subjects, in an organized order(Say, today it's about SQL-stuff and Complex Analysis).
Basically, for my whole life, I have wished that I could just sit down and start working, for whatever reason, just because I felt like it was a good idea. Now I can, and it's like a goddamn superpower.
But the scary and weird thing is, I have absolutely no idea how did this happen. I don't feel that I have changed one bit, nor that I was doing things anyhow differently. If I traveled back to be me 2 months ago, I wouldn't start working, all I could wish is that the miracle happened again in this new timeline also.
As a sidenote, this sort of weird leaps are not unheard of. I play go. Ratings in the game are based on winning percentage, so if you win against 4k 50% of time, you're also 40, if there's one standard deviation of difference, you're either 3k or 5k, and so on. So basically, for 4k to win against 2k, there is about 2% chance(Is this right? I'm actually a bit unsure about exact numbers here). So, I started playing and after few months I encountered a block at 7k level. I kept on playing for a month or so, winning steadily about 50% of my games against 7k, and faring worse against stronger players. Then one morning, again, I started winning. It seemed I couldn't lose against 7k players, nor 6k, or even 5k. Next day, I was playing at 3k level. And though I tried, I didn't notice that anything had changed. It felt absurdly much that the rest of the world had just become weaker overnight. This was the most dramatic example, but even later on I have had similar leaps.
This exactly mirrors my experience with correcting an unrecognized thiamine deficiency with sulbutimine. You had a micronutrient defiiciency (possibly but not necessarily the same one I had), and those pills you mentioned taking fixed it.
Problems with brain biochemistry disguise themselves as psychological problems. This is a big deal and it needs more attention, because I think a lot of people are struggling with problems like this and don't know that fixing it is even possible.
Indeed. What's worse, a lot of them will spend years (and countless dollars) in therapy trying to talk their way out of their biochemical problems...
The phenomenon of plateaus in learning is fairly common, and in Go specifically if you look at a graph of how a population of players are distributed in terms of ranks, it has several noticeable discontinuities.
So the Go jump isn't too surprising.
The one with akrasia is, because I wouldn't think of that as something you were learning.
My particular jumps in Go strength came after reading more new theory, trying to integrate it into my game for a while (and failing), and then frustratedly taking a break. I'd come back a few kyu stronger, and games would consolidate this into maybe another stone or two's increase in strength.
This happened enough that I stopped feeling frustrated (rather just stuck) and proactively took breaks. Usually about a week would do it.
After reading the post about Go, I started playing for a while ... and I was so bad so consistently I quit playing (out of discomfort with opponent discomfort, rather than frustration).
Has anyone had the experience of playing several games with no improvement? On the last online game I played, the person I played against paused to ask me if I understood the rules. The next question was, 'do you understand that you're supposed to surround my stones?' or something like that.
I know that I have trouble making any plans spanning several moves, and when I do make 'plans' I can't recall them after activity on another part of the board..
There is a proverb in go: "Lose your 100 first games as fast as possible", mostly because there is little use in making plans before you have some sort of intuition of what's going on on the board. So if you just play and lose without thinking too much about it, you get to the fun part faster.
Nice quote. My interest in playing Go has been rekindled, thank you, and I agree with Relsqui that it applies to many contexts.
Thank you, I've been trying to remember the actual wording of that proverb. A Go player told it to me years ago and it's nice to remember whenever I'm new to, and sucking at, anything. "This is a necessary frustrating hard part; keep going and you'll move through it."
Sure, every Go player hits a plateau in their playing career, in fact more than one.
As a proto-Go player (and I think of myself as a dabbler still), I used to have a specific computer program as my sole opponent: IgoWin, a tiny 9x9 Go program which I still think makes a pretty good introduction to the game.
When you start out as a total beginner IgoWin gives you 5 handicap stones, which on a 9x9 board makes for a real easy games. Then, as is traditional, every time you win a game it takes away one handicap stone, until the games start to become challenging again.
My first ever plateau in learning Go was when I got IgoWin to play me even, taking Black. As White I was totally unable to beat it. No matter how much I played (for weeks on end) I couldn't figure out how to get past that.
After a while I broke down and asked a friend of mine who I knew was a player to teach me the basics. Two or three games with him on a 13x13 board later, I was able to clobber IgoWin as White in even games. I started playing human opponents exclusively, and later learned that bots like IgoWin are considered a bad way to learn, because Go playing programs so lack an understanding of the game that playing them will give you bad habits.
So the idea is that there are plateaus, but there are also plateau-busters. For me, playing with a "real" opponent who knew what he was doing was one. Another was reading in-depth reviews of games at the GTL. Yet another was to do lots of tsumego from graded problems books. Also, reading important books like In the Beginning or Attack and Defence, which help make sense of the whole game and give you a conceptual framework in which to plan your moves.
Thank you. Since I'm embarassed about wasting the time of real people (though I've read I shouldn't be), I think playing a computer is for me.
Even if I learn bad habits, it'll be a way to 'get through' my first 100 games. From playing one online computer game of Go, I find that I enjoy playing and losing to a computer because I know the computer is infinitely patient and doesn't analyze my mistakes or wonder what I'm thinking about for so long.
So my question is; did you find that the experience you gained from the computer outweighed any bad habits you learned, or would it have been preferable to meet with your friend right at the beginning?
I definitely got over my bad habits pretty fast. I think I did, anyway.
My mistake was definitely using the full board.
I would try playing as much as possible on KGS, using 9x9s and 13x13s in the beginner room. Just try to get a feel for (and understand) common patterns. People are quite friendly and willing to do reviews.
Personally, I think 9x9s and Igowin are just boring, and don't teach you much. So try to get past this. Lots of the fun in Go is trying to implement new ideas. 9x9s are generally too constrained for this.
I have dedicated much of my life for overcoming akrasia, especially after I found LW I've been working hard(well, thinking hard and planning hard mostly), does that count as learning?
More details? I may try to replicate this.
It might. The difference between that and Go seems intuitively large, but I can't properly articulate why.
Huh. I could use a miracle like that.
What were the pills you had recently started taking?
Sorry, I don't know. Omega 3, vitamins, stuff like that, but I threw the package away. It was some sort of combination box of all those supposedly important nutritients you need to take daily, with quite a lot of different stuff in it.
Are you going to be able to buy the same mix once this runs out?
Sure. I might comment here after I buy more of that.
I experienced this several times. Last time I had this feeling was just a week ago. There were at least two more occasions, both during this year.
And I'd very, very much like to know what causes this state, and how to induce it at will.
Dunno if this is all that interesting story, but some people found it interesting, or at least inspiring, so I thought I should share. shrug
Thanks for sharing. I've had akrasia evaporate for short periods of time before, but the cause was always identifiable:
Taking THC once cured me of an internet addiction, and that solved my akrasia problem at the time.
Another time, my akrasia was due to problems in my social network. A positive change in my social network removed that problem.
Are you comfortable elaborating on the problems in your social network? I've had some very frustrating issues which could be described the same way, so any related data is of interest.
Abrupt changes due to chemistry are not unheard of. Maybe you could stop taking any and all vitamins/supplements to see what happens - if you dare.
I haven't been taking those all that much lately, once every 4 days or so for the last two weeks.
Deficiencies can be small - chemicals, after all. If you aren't taking them all that much, then it's an even cheaper experiment.
It would take longer, which is my main concern. Gotta see if this remains stabile for a reasonable amount of time until I can go testing around. For the last few weeks, it's been far from stabile, I've remodeled my life just to be able to work more efficiently, and today is the first time I managed to actually work school-related stuff while being home, something I didn't think was possible few months back(Before this, when I absolutely had to do something, I had to leave my apartment in order to do it).