= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
nyan_sandwich comments on Group rationality diary, 5/21/12 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (62)
Over the last week:
Been practicing being much more open and sympathetic with people (especially wife) about emotions. Has had some big gains.
Wife has been using personal TDT on everything and has become much more effective at excercises, food habits, and sequence reading.
Used the "I am a rationalist, I can do X and nothing bad will happen." thought pattern to motivate myself to try things that I was previously averse to. (mostly gross and/or sexy things)
Been climbing trees at all opportunities (who knew there were so many opportunities for so much fun).
Been practicing being generally excited and high-energy about life. (yeeehaw! high fives all around!)
Dabbled in various day-planning and productivity techniques. Mild gains. Limiting factor seems to be attention span.
Rewarding self for noticing and siezing opportunities to be socially or otherwise courageous.
Being Specific. Holy crap! Once you start noticing this, it is everywhere. Still not super good at automatically being specific, but I'm quite good at noticing unspecific things now.
Had some unfortunate emotional instability over last few days. Was very depressed and useless yesterday. I don't like being depressed. Also some useless rage. Didn't break anything or blow up, but can't do much else when mad. (EDIT: realizing how poor internet text is for conveying emotion. I feel like having a big lesswrong internet hug, but it is hard to communicate this.)
Now if only I can make myself actually work...
Such as...?
(Sorry, it just begged to be said, and no one else took the bait!)
(Surprised it took so long, actually.)
Last weekend, I was arguing with family members about the merits of rationality and decision theory. My uncle kept saying things that were painfully vague and didn't give me any mental images of what he was saying. I kept telling him to be more specific. I don't actually remember what was said (probably because it was so vague).
I do remember the things my dad said, because he was good at being specific. His objection to decision theory was that it wouldn't "[take] the road less travelled, and [thereby get] all the difference" (vivid example, quoted from poetry. +5 points, dad). Another example was Shackleton's antarctic expidition, where he quoted the newspaper ad asking for people to join. I was trying to explain that if it was in fact knowably a good idea to take the road less travelled, an expected utility calculation would capture that and make the right choice, and that decision theory was not a descriptive theory of how people would react to shackleton's ad. Then out came the vague philosophical objections that I don't remember. (probably somethign along the lines of outcome trees and numbers not being able to capture some mysterious essence)
So ironically, the only things I can remember are the things that were not painfully vague. I remember saying be specific a lot tho. Sorry.
*hug*
I'm enjoying this sentence enormously. Thank you.
Care to explain?
Nothing deep, just that the sentiment that opportunities to be specific are, in general, everywhere entertained me. It has a sort of superficial pattern-matching to self-contradiction that I enjoy.
Do you notice yourself ever wanting to scream at people to be specific? Also, screaming at people on the Tv to be more specifi happens a lot. I wont even mention listening to politicians......
Ha ha. Not really. It's more like "ugh, unspecific".
... this is the 21st century, right?
also, internet fist-bump for a fellow minicamper.