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:
- Established a useful new habit
- Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
- Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
- Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
- Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
- Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
- Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
- Tried doing any of the above and failed
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!
Hello everyone! This is Valentine.
I spent my first day back from minicamp... sleeping! And spending time with my wonderful wife. I was optimizing for recovery there after getting a total of something like 12 hours of sleep over the weekend. Totally worth it for all those amazing conversations and connections, though!
But after that, starting this morning I used a number of Critch's techniques to help deal with some aversions and emotional distaste surrounding writing my dissertation. I've been using the trick Anna & Critch told me independently (I think!) of rewarding the noticing of something that I want to change; that was the one key piece of habit-changing that I had totally missed.
I noticed rather quickly that there's always a sufficiently meta-level that can be modified in order to deal with the difficulty at hand. For instance, this morning when it came time to start working on my dissertation, I noticed some disquiet inside about that. It wasn't immediately obvious that I could just make myself want to write. But I wanted to want to write, and I could use the why behind that in near-mode to create a slight increase in my wanting to write - which I immediately rewarded. And then that snowballed.
I found I had to add an odd loop I hadn't initially expected: I had to (a) reward noticing feelings of guilt or anxiety associated with the writing and (b) reward any small improvements from a CBT blow against the distorted thinking underlying the feelings. I've known CBT to work pretty well in the past, but adding this bit with conditioning via rewarding small improvements made it much more rapid to turn into relatively automatic habit.
I also spent a good chunk of time journaling the whole weekend since that's what I've found to be effective for reinforcing episodic memory.
Much of this happened via the Pomodoro technique. I've used it before, but I weaved conditioning stuff into it (rewarding myself for starting one & rewarding myself for having completed one, and rewarding noticing a desire to do something distracting and also for returning attention to the task at hand).
Hi, I'm bit late to this discussion, but this sounds like something that I could try to implement. Do you know whether these techniques are written up somewhere (I know pomodoro, but I mean the notice/reward part)? What constitues a reward? Thank you!