Sniffnoy comments on The 5-Second Level - Less Wrong

111 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 May 2011 04:51AM

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Comment author: cousin_it 07 May 2011 11:55:49AM *  27 points [-]

"Be specific" is a nice flinch, I've always had it and it helps a lot. "Don't moralize" is a flinch I learned from experience and it also helps. Here's some other nice flinches I have:

  1. "Don't wait." Waiting for something always takes more time than I thought it would, so whenever I notice myself waiting, I switch to doing something useful in the meanwhile and push the waiting task into the background. Installing the habit took a little bit of effort, but by now it's automatic.

  2. "Don't hesitate." With some effort I got a working version of this flinch for tasks like programming, drawing or physical exercise. If something looks like it would make a good code fix or a good sketch, do it immediately. Would be nice to have this behavior for all other tasks too, but the change would take a lot of effort and I'm hesitating about it (ahem).

  3. "Don't take on debt." Anything that looks even vaguely similar to debt, I instinctively run away from it. Had this flinch since as far as I can remember. In fact I don't remember ever owing >100$ to anyone. So far it's served me well.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 08 May 2011 08:09:23AM 0 points [-]

"Don't wait." Waiting for something always takes more time than I thought it would, so whenever I notice myself waiting, I switch to doing something useful in the meanwhile and push the waiting task into the background. Installing the habit took a little bit of effort, but by now it's automatic.

For purposes of avoiding ambiguity this might be better phrased as "don't block" or "don't busy-wait". Although combined with #2 it might indeed become "don't wait" in the more general sense to some extent!