I am much better at cutting myself off before I convince myself not to take positive and productive steps towards self-improvement, which was previously quite a large problem for me.
Could you expand on what you changed?
Well, I can say that I feel as though I greatly increased in my ability to set goals for myself. Previously I would feel totally scattered and disorganized, and I often felt as though I lacked direction. I've been reading Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias for about half a year now and I feel that my ability to break down my larger goals into workable sub-goals has dramatically increased.
I used to simply have a goal like "get in shape" or "learn category theory" or "learn Mandarin" and the result simply would not materialize for m...
When faced with a decision that might be really important — if say, the life of a loved one may be at risk — many people, though unfortunately not all, are moved to a sense of responsibility whereby they suddenly care more about being right than about looking right, feeling right, or even feeling good. It's when we have something to protect that many of us are most motivated to transcend our usual desires to "win the debate", "uphold our beliefs", or "have faith", and instead actually try to become right ... to have the best shot we can at saving the day with the decisions we make.
The upcoming technological singularity — an event where the lives of all our loved ones may or may not hang in the balance — is for many people a great inspiration to become more rational. Also, most of us want to convince others to be more rational, and videos are a powerful way to reach people, so I want to know:
What do you think is the online video that best inspires a strong initial interest in rationality or the singularity?
Please upvote each comment that contains a video that you approve for this purpose, not just your favorite; I want to use approval voting here so we get a robust ordering on the videos. Also to this end, please post at most one video per comment.
If you don't already have a favorite but want one, a place to start looking is the Singularity Summit videos at vimeo.com. Vimeo allows you to like/dislike videos, so that's another way you can donate information.
Some things to consider when voting:
I will periodically update this post with a list of links and their ratings, so we all have an easily accessible source of high-quality presentations we can send to our friends and colleauges to inspire rationality :)
List of videos; last updated April 17, 2011.