Group rationality diary, 8/20/12

cata

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of August 20th. 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.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Last week's diary; archive of prior diaries.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of August 20th. 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

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Last week's diary; archive of prior diaries.

(Note that there are a few LWers attempting or contemplating polyphasic sleep right now. If you are considering it seriously we'd love your participation in a data collection effort on before and after cognitive performance.)

Polyphasic Sleep
How to have 19-22hrs of fun every day

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107056/Minicamp2012/PolyphasicSleep/index.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107056/Minicamp2012/PolyphasicSleep.zip

which includes at slides 114 and 115

Theory:
http://trypolyphasic.com/forum/post/8455/#p8455
http://trypolyphasic.com/forum/topic/876/uber-and-everyman-theory-analysis/
Experience:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/ ... and see links at bottom, particularly...
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/11/polyphasic-sleep-log-days-25-30-final-update/
Note that Steve's experience of the flexibility of his near-uberman schedule doesn't match with other reports. I think this flexibility may be available after stabilisation, but come at a high cost before.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/polyphasic-sleep-update-day-90/
Steve's report of euphoric mood is fairly common on the Uberman schedule, and much less common on schedules that include regular core sleep.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/02/polyphasic-sleep-20/ Some experiments in flexibility
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/polyphasic-sleep-the-return-to-monophasic/ Why did he stop?
http://trypolyphasic.com/forum/forum/17/adaptation/
And https://groups.google.com/d/topic/polyphasic/FTWKW0pvKZ0/discussion

and finally

My sleep tracks (which include masking sound including walla to drown out distracting conversation):

My schedule calculator: http://bit.ly/poly-schedule-tool

The nap tracks are no longer available from Matt's dropbox, but fortunately I saved all except the 15min one and have made them available here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BwP3_2aUw0uPczVqVHpKUFhMd1E

0Paul Crowley12y

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107056/Minicamp2012/PolyphasicSleep/index.html This is now a 404. (Came here to re-download the nap tracks, which still work fine :))

0Risto_Saarelma14y

Another random fun thing I realized. I addition to being a lot like the first half of the reported archaic human bimodal sleep, an Everyman core sleep is also a lot like the first phase of the night's sleep done in the Wake-Back-To-Bed lucid dream induction technique. Just tried a WBTB with 5 hours of initial sleep, and it led to a lucid dream (slept another 3 hours afterwards). 5 hours is pretty close to the Everyman-2 core sleep. I wonder if, in addition to being potentially nice for lucid dreams, adopting a bimodal schedule for a full night's sleep could be used as a stepping stone to adopting an Everyman sleep schedule, since you're training yourself to sleep no more than 4+ hours at a time.