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Gray comments on Personal Benefits from Rationality - Less Wrong
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My housemate has almost completely hacked my brain (liberally apply computer programming and Godel, Escher, Bach to your mind) to think in isomorphisms, efficient algorithms, and the like. This has caused improvements like using a queue instead of a stack for scheduling chores (one bad chore in a stack will cause me to look for other easier chores to stack on top of it) which means my weekly chores get done in an afternoon instead of a week, and a general attitude of thinking about problems instead of solving them. Usually, a bit of thought will reveal some underlying pattern that has an optimal solution ready and waiting.
Rationality gave me this because it told me, at one point, about behavioral hacks. So I looked for my smartest, most effective, and most awesome friend, and made them my housemate.
Djikstra said that computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes, so it shouldn't be surprising that things like algorithms and data structures has relevance to even mundane reality. I think one way I look at myself is an extremely small and limited computer. On the fly, my brain is slow at performing operations, I have a hard time recalling information, and I do so with limited accuracy. Sometimes I make mistakes while performing operations.
So what are we doing when we try to organize ourselves and make plans but trying to compile a program for these very far from optimal circumstances? Obviously, if I make plenty of mistakes, I need to write in plenty of redundancy; and I have to employ "tricks" in order to achieve meta-cognition at the right times (something that goes beyond the computer analogy, I know).
This involves, as I see it, a further way of looking at yourself. You see yourself as both the machine executing instructions, and the programmer writing those instructions (as well as the compiler, trying to translate the program to machine language). Nietzsche wrote that we have to develop as both commanders and obeyers. I thought this was hogwash, but I've learned that there is a lot of truth to that.