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Elo comments on Open thread, June 27 - July 3, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Quantified hedonism - Personal Key Performance Indicators
The phrase burn the boats comes from the VIking practice of burning boats on the shore before invading so they have to win and settle. No retreat, it's an inspiring analogy, but I heard it in the context of another Real Social Dynamics video, so the implication is to approach sets as if there is no retreat? Bizaare, those guys.....anyway that RSDPapa video suggested that personal KPI's were useful. What's measured gets improved, or so the saying goes. So which KPI's should you choose? After some though, I reckon psychological distress, a construct referring to anxiety and depression which conceptualise enduring hedonic losses, and PERMA, a construct referring to the key determinants of subject well-being, seem like appropriate KPI's.
So how do you measure them? There are validated psychological scales for each.
Psychological distress
PERMA:
Unfortunately, things get a bit tricky here with achievement. Many psychological scales are paywalled such that you need to buy them specifically (academic institution access is insufficient). If anyone can post a workaround.. :)
If you administer these scales on yourself monthly, you can start to build a picture of your hedonic progress in life, quantitatively, albeit abstractly. Too difficult for you? Try this unvalidated scale for PERMA.
Tourism isn't this esoteric, life changing right of passage experience people will tell you that it is
Or: Why I would want to move to the Cayman Islands (but I don't have retirement savings of substance or hospital or finance career capital)
I think the urge to travel just to see different countries is a kind of OCD. Unhealthy! The way tourism tends to work commodifies it. It doesn’t accrue that benefit that experience hunting usually does, hedonically. Plus, it’s super expensive and moving tends to accrue hedonic costs anyway. Even though climate does accrue hedonic benefits, it would be unsustainable and lead to negative self past comparison since you are returning to your home country. Not to mention when you travel you tend to compromise on your lifestyle - fitness, exercise, relationships, nutrition, sleep...unacceptable!
Virtual tourism. It’s my new hobby. Sure, it might be interesting to check out the Northern Lights or mecca (both literally desserts, that you are paying for!) but really any place can, by a business or government, be turned into a tourist spot with a bit of work. In real time, moment to moment, I find travellng super boring except when it’s ongoing constant novelty of like, sitting on the roof of a van in a rural area, or I’m on my computer!
I keep hearing about how great travel is. My conclusion is that no, it's not worth the cost. Or at least, the component I thought they were referring to - sight seeing, isn't. Other parts of travel are okay, but certainly not lifechanging after the first or second time of eye-openingness.
Case study: Machu Pichu. If that rock in Guatape was difficult enough, consider the downsides of Machu Pichu to get your mind off it. Then put the nail in the coffin with the danger statistics. Consolation prize? Machu pichu on Google street view.
So what is worthwhile when travelling. One, of course, is doing so with the intend of moving - when a place has better opportunities than your past residence. Let's consider a case that will be relevant to already very high standard of living Westerners - moving to the Carribean. Because really, I can find no better place one might like to move than the Cayman Islands. English is spoken, close to the US and UK, Strategic advantages in the financial industry, without a unsophisticated undiversified economy, as with the rest of the Carribean competitors honestly that tend to dependent on fish or petrol. And, you're in the Carribean, with enviable climate (a known determinant of subjective wellbeing!). It's a country that knows the importance of having a strategic advantage that doesn't mean it's just a mine, like say Australia, where pushes to develop a more sophisticated economy have failed and derived, which I think is a good sign of a country that won't thrive in the 21st century....anywho, Google Images the place, it looks way better than the rest of Central and South America and the Carribean as a whole! I'm very suprised I don't see it topping lists of expat wellbeing or quality of life indexes but I guess it gets it might get missed cause of its size. With the greater income inequality, you can probably hire a personal chef even as a minimum wage worker from the Western world to cook you Chinese food or whatever it is you want, healthy and convenient (not to mention they can belp with maintenance and such).
Alas, maybe I am just in a bad mood. I am travelling right now and have a return flight that is way too far away and I have nothing I left I want to do on this continent. It sucks when the street smells like shit, it's dusty and smoggy enough to irritate your eyes, cars are loud and dangerous, people are suspicious and don't move out of the way, and the hotel locks up early for the night, but you don't know exactly when, and after a certain time you can't buy water outside so if you don't have enough you go thirsty and non-brushed cause the water from the tap is unsafe. At least I came across this which will aid my quest to become a better blogger: This is effective copywriting and feedback giving.
Open questions
Thoughts on the King, Warrior, Magician, Lover archetypes? Useful?
Cause prioritisation - community vs institutions*
I'm interested in crowdsourcing identifying disparities between community and institutional cause prioritisation attitudes.
If you could spare a minute could you please rate from 1-10, with a _ _% rating of your estimates of the:
...of individual media campaigns that would advocate for public debate, discussion and law reform without a specific agenda around each of the following areas:
Thank you.
In place of a media thread
Extraordinary series - check out 'how women judge men'
experience often doesn’t matter as much as GMA (g factor) for job performance. - parenthesis mine - GMA is an unconventional term, 'g' is more common.
precommitment smart contracts for happiness and health
I feel horrible saying this but I think I would be really upset if I had a kid (adopted or genetic) and they were born or become mentally handicapped or miserable like my biggest fear. It can happen whether you adopt (e.g. car crash) or your give birth, so I will not get myself a dependent. You can't give them away without suffering lots of hedonic and altruistic losses, anyhow! But, once you get 'clucky and partnered, things change!
Maybe I should do one of those things where I give a trusted reliable person (perhaps even a independent (commercial? automated?) service that does this so they won't pity me) information I don't want revealed (like linking all my personal and contact details of this account!) to if I have children to pre-empt doing so! I could put in a waiver for if the weight of objective evidence for having children increasing my happiness according to a tribunal of them and a selected few other intelligent, educated, good-willed people shifts.
Having been at the self-dev, PUA, systems, psychology, lesswrong, kegan, philosophy, and other things - game for a very long time. My discerning eye suggests that some of the model is good, and some is bad. My advice to anyone looking at that model is that there are equal parts shit and diamonds. If you haven't been reading in this area for 9 years you can't see what's what. Don't hold anything too closely but be a sponge and absorb it all. Throw out the shit when you come across it and keep the diamonds.
At the end of the 4 (KWML) pages suggest some various intelligent and reasonable ways to develop one's self:
These suggestions are not bad. save possibly the suggestion to take up a martial art which I disagree with and doing something that scares you. Anything that gets people to establish their purpose, have a plan and be more the people they want to be is a good thing.
Things like, "Work on becoming more decisive" are likely only to help the people who already think they are not decisive enough. Those who are decisive enough will probably skip it. HOWEVER if you already were* Study and practice the skills necessary for completing your goals, become a master of your trade. decisive and you thought you weren't you might end up down a rabbit hole trying to work out how to do the thing that you don't need to do.
Nate soares has a post on "should's" as well. http://mindingourway.com/not-because-you-should/ it's different but also covers the suggestion of not doing what you "should" but doing what you want to do instead.
So yea; do what you are doing with massive focus. Be so good they can't ignore you TM. etc. etc. This is not the first place to suggest such things. And I strongly believe that for some people this method of delivering advice is exactly what they need. For other's it's exactly not what they need. Good luck figuring out if it's you or not.
Is there more useful signal than noise here? It depends on who you are, where you are, and how good you are at working that out for yourself.
All I can say is - "maybe".
End note: I hope to soon write up a post on making advice applicable and thinking about basically "It depends on who you are, where you are, and how good you are at working that out for yourself." in more detail.
What other resources do you support in this field, ELO?
This is really hard to answer in the context of:
I'd be willing to give it a shot. What problems are you working on at the moment?
I've done a fair amount of reading and am comfortable in the social/PUA realm but am always on the lookout for more recommended resources (especially higher-level stuff).
Why do you focus on the suggestions that are also made elsewhere instead of what's unique in the King, Warrior, Magician, Lover framework?
The model is meaningless beyond what it suggests you do. If I were to spend a long time understanding the whole damn model I could possibly end up generating my own predictive set of ideas from that model. Because I have not spent that time - it's easier for me to just look at the (already generated) outputs of the model and comment on the results. I am not 100% sure that all those suggestions fit within the model itself but generally if the site ends in those kinds of suggestions, as above:
No, if you ignore the model you ignore the reason of why people recommend King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. I don't think anybody who recommended that book to me did so, because of a shallow list of recommendations that fits into a few bullet points.
This is similar how taking a list of bulletpoints about CFAR knowledge doesn't compare to evaluating the value that a CFAR workshop provides to it's attendies.
There's no value in forming a judgement of a model that one doesn't understand like this by a shallow look at it.
There plenty of shallow personal development literature out there that people who like to consume listicles but I haven't heared any recommendations for this book from that audience but mostly from people who think deeper and engage deeply with it.
I will be delighted to hear your review when you get around to writing it up.
My current state is that I haven't read the full book or used the ideas in my life but I know multiple people who do, who value the ideas highly and who are generally good sources of personal development ideas.