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AdeleneDawner comments on Rationalist Horoscopes: Low-hanging utility generator? - Less Wrong
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Horoscope content ideas, separated for voting, please contribute:
Today, indulge your curiosity. Find the answers to three interesting questions not directly related to your current projects. (Bonus points for finding answers to questions that can't be answered via Google or Wikipedia, like the name of that cute person you see in the library every so often.)
Take some time to optimize the things you pay attention to for signal to noise ratio. Remove boring RSS feeds from your reader; find out how to stop receiving junk mail or getting calls from telemarketers; get rid of objects that clutter your living space or work space; perhaps even have a heart-to-heart with that friend you've been growing away from.
Today is a good day for starting new things. Choose something new that you've been putting off, and spend at least an hour working on it.
If you think about it carefully, the universe has recently shown you several examples of people working together successfully. What common principle can you see at work in these events?
(Horoscope idea based on this study.)
That thing you're hesitating over trying, the likes of which you've never done before, is probably easier than you think it is. You're likely overestimating the difficulty because you lack any reference for it. Bear this in mind when reconsidering whether or not to try it.
Yesterday you did something for which you probably want to apologize. What was it? Can you do something today to make it right?
Take the time to evaluate your default responses to questions. They may not be as good as you think they are.
Possible alternative: Today, you may not give a default answer to any question more meaningful than "how are you?".
Question your questions. Are you asking the right things?
What do you want? What are you doing to get it?
Think about how your ideal self would handle the challenges you encounter. What would you do if you were smarter?
Alternate version, because imagining what you would do if you were smarter is fairly impossible:
Think about how your ideal self would handle the challenges you encounter. What would you do if you always followed your goals?
Actually, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, there've been reports from people who've tried the 'what would I do if I were smarter' trick, and had good results with it. It sounds like it shouldn't work, definitely, but it seems that in practice it does anyway, probably by cashing out to "what would I do if I wasn't stuck" or something.
Here's an example from no less than Claude Shannon.
There seems to be a general trick to expecting more of yourself.
I can get more willpower by thinking "I don't have enough strength, but I put myself in the hands of the Lord, who'll give me his strength" - and I discovered that trick long after I became an atheist! I suspect the trick is to enforce the expectation of undepleting willpower, which makes it true.
It might be a rigged self-test. Where else can we test if the trick works?
The being stuck thing sounds like it matters a lot here. Thinking hard is a lot of work to begin with, and most habits people end up stuck with replace needing to think with rote responses that can be broken with a change of mindset.
A follow-up on this might be how well it works on people in different situations. You need to have some idea on what useful smartness is like, and someone who has grown up in very disadvantaged conditions might just not have enough exposure to that to form useful models. Someone with mental issues might not be able to break their habits of behavior to get benefit from the thing. People who are already pushing themselves hard cognitively, like math grad students, pro chess players or stock traders might get less out of it, though the exercise could still help them come up with a new perspective on things.
I wonder if there's a generalizable attitude here. This reminds me a bit about the pedagogical advice that you should always tell children that their academic success is because they worked hard, not because they are talented, since otherwise they'll model themselves as having some comfortable level of talent and stop pushing themselves to whatever actual limits their achievement might have.
It doesn't seem to be just a question of working harder. You can still get stuck to thinking that you're as smart as you think you are and therefore can keep working like you've always worked and do a bunch of ineffective hard work. Thinking what a smarter person would do also makes you question the quality of your metacognition.
Well, it was already pointed out that getting feedback on the usefulness of various horoscopes is a good idea, and coding has commenced with that as part of the plan, so I think the thing to do is actually try it and see how it works.
I had no idea. That's really cool.
People do not, by default, apply the full extent of their intellectual capabilities to most problems. This being the case, to imagine what you would do if you were smarter requires only extending yourself to meet the smarter person's default, background, unconscious level of smart thinking. In some cases this will be possible via the act of explicit attention and deliberate focus.
Your subconscious is trying to tell you something! Get a piece of paper and, for each of the previous three days, write down 3 things that happened as they leap into your mind. Put the paper down and come back to it several hours later and write down the theme that connects these nine events and what lesson you should learn from it.
One of the things that you're told today, which you've heard a thousand times before, will be false. Find it.
Meta-content: "Try to be more specific and concrete". :)
(what I'm saying is that most of these could use a "for example..." or similar).
I think that's going to be tricky to do in some cases without interfering with the near-universal applicability of the advice. That said, I'm going to give it a try with the suggestions I've already made.
Focus on granularizing your goals. When something you want to do seems impossible, try to break it down into a series of smaller steps.
See if you can understand the functioning of an object well enough to create it from raw materials or scrap. Start with something simple, like paper fasteners.
*contemplates how to make staples out of paperclips*
Making staples is the superior option only if you are racist or sexist. If you're not, it's more helpful for your rationality to make paperclips from other scrap. After all, you probably want a sense of "completeness" -- that you've made something fully functional. And when you attach that "home-made" paperclip to your first sufficiently-slim stack of paper, you can feel good in having done all of it yourself. (Racists and sexists aren't interested in that feeling.)
In contrast, if you chose staples as your project, how would you put them to use, to test their functionality? You would need a stapler. And unless you do this entire project again, but for a stapler -- something more complex than a paperclip -- as a SUBSTEP to your first achievement, you just can't get that same feeling of accomplishment when you apply your first "home-made" staple. Rather, you will have to "live on someone else's strength" -- specifically, whoever made the stapler.
Also, paperclips are re-usable and make great gifts, if the recipient likes paperclips.
I suspect that someone could get that feeling from using homemade staples in a pre-made stapler, just the same as they could get that feeling from using a homemade paperclip on pre-made paper. (Paper's a lot easier to make by hand than a stapler, though.)
On the other hand, hand-making a staple to fit in a standard stapler is a lot harder than hand-making a useable paperclip.
This makes no sense. I would prefer see less silly comments about racism. (This is different from the actual novel argument about the benefit of homemade paperclips over staples. That kind of creativity is mildly entertaining.)
Are you saying humans should make staples???
Are you trying to manipulate humans on this website into making a decision by associating the other option with racists or sexists?
Or is there some intrinsic relation between Clippies and Staplies, unknown to me, that makes helping Staplies over Clippies a form of racism or sexism?
Today, spend time thinking about possible failure modes of your plans. What are the most likely things that could go wrong, and how will you handle it if they do?
Keep an eye out for good ideas in unusual places today.
An etherpad document for horoscope theme ideas and partially-formed horoscopes has been started here.
The time for a lucid appraisal of your own abilities is prior to action, not in the middle of it. Once you find yourself engaged in real-time application of some skill or other, act as if your mastery of that skill isn't at issue at all, rather than let yourself be distracted by assessments of the likelihood of failure, because they are likely to be self-fulfilling prophecies. (src)
Make a specific commitment today that you're confident you can follow through on. Write it down and post it somewhere where you'll see it regularly until it's done.
Today, be paranoid. Don't assume that the people around you are trustworthy, or sane, without evidence. (Evidence gained before today is, of course, admissable.)
Take some time to test your beliefs today. Devise and carry out at least one experiment.
Take the time today to put some important information in a more intuitive format. For example, you might make a pie chart or other visual representation of how you spent your money last month, or how you spent your time yesterday.
Take a minute to think which sentence or paragraph you spoke or wrote yesterday was the MOST effective in achieving your goals and which sentence or paragraph was the least effective. If the results have not come in, mark a note to your future self to do the same.
Are there any notes from your past self about analysis of previous sentences? Check if results have come in.