Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted - Less Wrong

56 Post author: Alicorn 27 April 2009 04:49PM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 11 February 2013 06:44:41AM *  2 points [-]

One of the benefits I've found from keeping my identity small doesn't seem to be reducible to keeping my object-level views honest. Namely, I've recently identified areas of my life in which my identity was preventing me from trying new things, e.g. I thought of myself as the kind of person who didn't care about nutrition or exercise. I wasn't mistaken about any property of the world but I was supplying myself with excuses for not expanding my comfort zone. (Edit: Academician describes this happening to him in this post which I think is a useful follow-up to Keep Your Identity Small.)