gwern comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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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.
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).