Hello, I'm Cord! I just attended the minicamp, have been running a meetup in Mountain View (the last one I'm leading is today :'( ), and this is my first post too!
As per Andrew Critch's instructions, I've been mentally rewarding myself with excitement and noting that I'm taking correct action when I do anything that gets me at all closer to things I want, including just remembering that they're things I want that I haven't done yet, and including remembering that I'm using this procedure.
This morning I was tired and annoyed about "having" to get up and write up my notes from the minicamp and not just rest. I started to feel mentally fuzzy and angry, as I often do in this situation. Then I remembered that I was rewarding myself for even remembering that there's something I wanted to do. So I did that, and that felt pretty cool, and then I wanted more, so I got up and started consolidating my notes. That was pretty cool too.
Just out of curiosity, how do you 'reward yourself with excitement'? Just a procedure of remembering a time you felt excited and trying to attach that feeling to the new thought?
Background: I and many other attendees at the CFAR rationality minicamp last weekend learned a lot about applied rationality, and made big personal lists of things we wanted to try out in our everyday lives. I think that a regular (weekly or maybe semi-weekly) post where people mention any new interesting habits, decisions, and actions they have taken recently would be cool as a supplement to this; it ought to be rewarding for people to be able to write a list of the cool things they did, and I expect it'll also be interesting for other people to peek in and see the sorts of goals and self-modifications people are working on. Others at minicamp seemed enthusiastic about the idea, so I hope it takes off. Feel free to meta-discuss whether this is a good idea or if it can be done better.
Addendum 5/15: By the way, non-minicamp people should feel free to post too! I am highly certain that minicamp attendees are not the only ones working on interesting things in their lives.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of May 14th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Discussion's likely to continue gradually through the week, so try to remember to check back now and then!