gjm 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: gjm 08 May 2011 09:44:51AM 1 point [-]

The trouble with not waiting is that it increases your number of mental context switches, and they can be really expensive. Whether "don't wait" is good advice probably depends on details like the distribution of waiting times, what sort of tasks one's working on, and one's mental context-switch speed.