cousin_it comments on "Epiphany addiction" - Less Wrong

52 Post author: cousin_it 03 August 2012 05:52PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (92)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 August 2012 07:21:03PM 7 points [-]

I independently invented a similar concept, "epiphany junkies", but didn't get around to posting it yet. A couple of points that would've been in that post:

  • Achieving an amazing insight about your past suffering (especially other people hurting you somehow), is probably not worth much. The past is past, and unreachable; five seconds ago is as far away as forever. You shouldn't even have been chewing that cud in the first place.
  • You probably need a lot of small, nondramatic life optimizations more than you need any particular big huge insight. Besides the addictive quality, a problem with being an epiphany junkie is that it trains you to think that progress comes in the form of dramatic, self-justifying insights about your mother, instead of realizing that you need to stop thinking about all the things wrong with an email after you send it.
Comment author: cousin_it 06 August 2012 12:25:45AM *  7 points [-]

If you use Gmail, you can enable the "undo send" feature in settings. I use it a lot, with the longest possible timeout (30 seconds), and think the timeout should be even longer, like 5 minutes.

Comment author: Alicorn 06 August 2012 12:57:05AM 1 point [-]

I love that feature. I notice typos right after sending all the time and then I can undo.