Group Rationality Diary, January 1-15

therufs

Happy new year to those who are celebrating! This is the public group rationality diary for January 1-15.

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 cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Next diary: January 16-31

Previous diary: December 16-31

Rationality diaries archive

Overall goal: Attempt to survive until medical science reaches actuarial escape velocity for my income bracket.

Last year's main New Year's Resolution: Remove sugary/caffeinated drinks as a staple of my diet.

Method: Started buying grapefruit-flavoured Perrier instead of pop. Discovered rooibos is a decent replacement for regular tea.

Result: High level of success. I still tend to unthinkingly default to pop or iced tea at restaurants, but don't really touch the stuff at home.

This year's main New Year's Resolution: Gain better control of my sleep cycle.

Side-note: Circadian cycle was much improved for a while a month ago, while house-sitting. Possible cause: Rarely bothered using artificial light. Possible cause: Dog demanding food every morning.

Methods so far: Replaced bed-side light with a remote-controlled colour-changing bulb, which I leave on 'red'. Installed f.lux to redden laptop screen after sunset. Am attempting to revive a custom from my childhood, the "half-hour", a period before the intended bedtime for relaxation. Added wake and sleep alarms to phone. Bookmarked a page on microdose melatonin to read in the next few days. Network TV hasn't been great for last few seasons, am expecting to stop bothering with any show broadcast in late prime-time.

Success so far: Started 'half-hour' at 9:30pm, with sleep-time supposed to start at 10pm. Currently 1:30am, still awake. Am expecting to feel urges to have mid-day siestas; planning on resisting urges to increase sleepiness at planned bedtime.

I've been learning to solve a standard 3x3 rubik's cube, which isn't a very useful skill but it is something I have a hard time with, both in terms of having very little skill with spatial reasoning and having a general mental block that makes me very adverse to this kind of thing. I think it's been good to push myself out of my comfort zone and grapple with something I've labeled as too hard for me to do with a good bit of success.

I've also being trying to reduce my sugar intake which is pretty hard for me especially around holidays and when I feel generally crappy. I've always had a very hard time regulating how much sugar I eat in a healthy way. Since I've been realizing what a problem it is, I've been trying harder to permanently kick my addiction and improve my health. I've found that vanilla scented candles helps reduce my desire to snack on sugar and that it's also much easier to resist buying sugary food than resist it once it's in my house so I've been trying to be better about that.

I learned to cube with the Rubiety Society method (developed by Alice Yu and friends), which makes the necessary algorithms easier to remember by turning them into stories (along the lines of "family drops kids off at summer camp", where each step in the story corresponds to a cube move).

I noticed that I have been finding myself reading articles and discussions on stressful subjects I can't do anything about (ranging from "things I should donate to if I had net positive income" to "hanging out with friends"), and the resulting feelings are clearly not doing anything good for my health. So I'm filtering: anything sufficiently stressful that shows up in my feeds gets removed/blocked/"I don't want to see this"'d. Still working on convincing myself not to read the comments on SSC's "Things I will regret writing" articles (I should just avoid those articles entirely, eventually). One can't very well unlearn helplessness when constantly indulging in reminders.

Polyphasic sleep by the end of the year. Probably Dymaxion. I just made a REM-detecting alarm, and will be testing it after I recover from my wisdom teeth removal. (takes ~ 6 weeks for the healing to complete properly...)

This is just a short comment to let others know that user UnrequitedHope has sent me a reply via PM (to this comment) - and for that matter a rather thoughtful one, relative to my expectations. Hopefully this is not violating their privacy or anything. Posting as a top-level reply, since replying to downvoted comments is officially "discouraged".

Nah, man. I don't mind.

Trying to notice and update on how much brainpower is used by/distraction is caused by looming unmade decisions, even fairly trivial ones.

I budgeted to buy some things to make my life better, and then made a request to my local Less Wrong group in order to find a list of low-hanging fruit that i might not have thought of. we came up with a few really interesting ideas.

And now I've made a LessWrong discussion post to gather a wider list of things: http://lesswrong.com/lw/li4/low_hanging_fruit_for_buying_a_better_life/

Not really sure if this is the right place (other than the open thread I can't really think of anything that might fit though) so..

http://lesswrong.com/lw/le5/welcome_to_less_wrong_7th_thread_december_2014/bsl1

I attempted to ask her out. I almost did it and had a fucking movie moment when the bus came right when I was thinking the situation is not the most optimal but tried to say it and.. "oh it's my bus cya!". God fucking damnit. I've waited outside for 20 minutes and she didn't show up and thought that she can't take 20 minutes getting dressed so I thought I probably missed her. Went back in and my friend asked who I'm waiting for. Said a different girl's name and made some sexually-flavoured comment about her to change the topic (Got a good success rate). He said that he's gonna wait with me and I didn't want the streissland effect on me so I waited with him and this FUCKING moment. She basically comes out of the changing room and I'm like, "fuck it it's now or never". So I went after her like a creepy stalker (should've middlefingered the cameras as I've made the observation that a lot of guys wanna fuck girls but they only think about ends and their means are either zero or well quite lacking. This would've given them a pissed off feeling as I'm basically tellling them I've got the guts to ask the hot girl out and they don't) and told her to wait for a second but the FUCKING WORDS DIDN'T COME OUT OF MY MOUTH. Knew dropping your pants is always the best way to get that point across but didn't want my balls to freeze. Anyway my memory's hazy here but we were walking in a parell line and she somehow got ahead of me and I was basically (I think before that happened) speaking in a low voice to myself (I think uttered is the right word) saying that I thought I left that behind me. Also did my usual body language thing because that's what I always do and it helps to get the point across. Anyway she got ahead of me and then I noticed her butt was really fucking sexy and maybe it gave me courage and maybe not I just thought that "fuck, this is important to me" and followed her even like a creepier stalker. Again the fucking words didn't come out of my mouth. And well this is basically how I started this comment. Sub-optimal environment but it was important to me. And then the fucking bus came. Oh shit.

For some reason though, I don't particularly feel like I've failed. Intellectually I feel like the whole act had some rather significant holes in there. My plan, while not perfect because it relied on external and uncontrollable variables (like miss lazy taking 20 minutes to get dressed. At least the end result was pretty pretty) that are basically grey area in planning that makes my whole plan fall apart if their value isn't True. I've made a mistake coming back down as I felt that she have left already even though the time frame between her going down and me deserting my fellow employees in order to score a shot was pretty small. Guess I need to tune my decision theory or some other thing I don't know of yet and may Eliezer bless me with his rationality or something like that. But seriously I don't feel like I've failed. Emotionally I didn't feel anything but intellectually I felt that certain variables that were not properly optimized in my decisions. To be honest it feels like an abrupt end of an episode that I'll have to fill in next time we meet.

Also you know what'd be really fucking weird? If she's reading this right now.

Recommendations:

Find 1-3 relationships blogs or forums that talk about typical problems and that you enjoy reading. This recommendation is not to find The Best Advice, but to get a peek at what ordinary smart people (of wide variety) think and have trouble with.

If you are not already a member of a club centered on doing a thing you like, which has occasional social functions (both meanings), you should strongly consider that.

If you have trouble getting the words out of your mouth, consider playing the rejection therapy game a bit.

3bogus11y

Y'know, this is the kind of stuff that can creep people out, for pretty good reasons. I think you need to stop thinking about "asking this girl out" on a "date", and focus on making a good impression on her. What does this girl even know about you? Are you on friendly and trusting terms with each other? (not necessarily 'friends', but comfortable enough that you could see the two of you hanging out without it being a big deal). You should start from these basics, and if you have these nailed down there's no reason for the issue of "asking her out" to even come up as a huge problem.