Vaniver comments on Group rationality diary, 1/9/13 - All

4 Post author: cata 10 January 2013 02:22AM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (53)
Tags: diary community rationality instrumental open_thread

Comments (53)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Vaniver 13 January 2013 06:48:35PM *  5 points [-]

So, after reading the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I decided that I would try out his method of developing virtues. Art of Manliness has an extended list of the virtues, but if you want to read Franklin's description, search the text for "It was about this time I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project". Basically, he kept a spreadsheet where he would tally the number of times he failed to live up to each virtue that day. In order to make the project doable and gradually scale up, he'd only focus on reducing one particular virtue each week, just noticing failings along other axis without seeking to correct them immediately.

Here's a template; here's my record, which will start tomorrow.

I considered abbreviating some of the periods for the virtues- I'm already the most temperate person I personally know, and so spending a week focusing on that seemed silly. I decided to go with it a general resistance to exceptions, and I expect that it'll still be useful as training the habit of actually recording this every day.

There is still some improvement to be made- I think I'll record the duration of my feed period and see if I can bring that down- and perhaps the primary benefit I will get from this project is not the recording of my actions, so much as the deliberate focus on "what does it mean for me to be X?"

Comment author: Vaniver 20 March 2013 02:22:06AM 2 points [-]

As is obvious from my record, I've stopped doing this, and figured I should do some sort of post-mortem.

  1. The immediate reason I stopped when I did was traveling; it was too much of a hassle to do it while traveling, and then when I got back it was too much of a hassle to do the days when I was gone, and I made the mistake of not doing today until I had done yesterday, which led to not doing either.
  2. The biggest reason I stopped was because I didn't have a good implementation / trigger. Doing it online was a mistake- yes, it was easy to make and publish the spreadsheet, but it also meant that I needed to be at a computer or on my phone. If I had been able to do it after I crawled into bed, I would have been much more likely to do it.
  3. Another reason was that the list of virtues wasn't particularly compelling to me. Each of them was something I endorsed, but it wasn't clear that each one of them was something that I wanted to actively work on. For some of them, I was able to think of a way to improve along that virtue (like switching to one meal a day for temperance), but for many of them I couldn't (for order, the main new thing I could do is spend time adding new systems to arrange my things/time/etc., and tracking lapses wasn't particularly motivating in avoiding those lapses in the future).
  4. Similarly, I prefer thinking in terms of systems to thinking in terms of goals (see Scott Adams on the subject).

Takeaway for me: I like the idea of daily reflection time, but if I want to record the results of my reflection I either need to schedule time for it on a computer (unlikely to work) or do it on a physical medium (likely to work, but then not as likely to get transcribed into electronic format). I like the idea of quarterly review and improvement for each virtue. I was surprised at my ability to think up ways to do various things better- I originally had thought "I've already developed X to the optimal level" for almost all of them but found that focused contemplation did come up with good ideas for several (but not all) of them. I think I got more from spending time inventing systems than spending time tracking myself, which suggests not spending the effort on tracking / not trying to spend the reflection time as tracking. I like the idea of having a dedicated aspect of myself to improve for every period of time, but I think that would be done better as ordering my list of 'lifestyle projects' and only working on one at a time (and switching to the next when I finish one) than as setting apart time to focus on things that I may or may not have a good plan of attack for.

Comment author: Michelle_Z 25 January 2013 11:32:18PM 0 points [-]

Why Ben Franklin's list and not another one? I mean, they're good virtues to have, but why those?

Comment author: Vaniver 26 January 2013 02:10:41AM 0 points [-]

Several reasons:

  1. Franklin was an atheist, and explicitly chose his list to be sure that no one would find it incompatible with their religion. That's solid evidence that the elements of the list will be chosen for practicality.
  2. With 13 subdivisions, it's more narrowly focused than the cardinal virtues, which are my next best candidate of practical virtues, and thus more likely to expose deficiencies.
  3. I get the impression, from the distance of centuries, that young Franklin is similar to present me, and old him is a good target to shoot for. Thus, anything he took seriously I should take seriously, and daily consideration of the list (and attempting to conform my life to it) seems like a more thorough introduction to it than just reading it and thinking about it.
  4. "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." Supposing there is a better set of virtues out there for me, I will be better prepared to tell after having done this.
Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 January 2013 09:18:03AM 1 point [-]

Franklin was an atheist, and explicitly chose his list to be sure that no one would find it incompatible with their religion. That's solid evidence that the elements of the list will be chosen for practicality.

Where did you get this idea? As far as I know, Franklin was a deist until the day he died and even thought organized religions, such as Christianity, were necessary to maintain morality amongst the common people.

Comment author: Vaniver 26 January 2013 02:57:33PM *  0 points [-]

Where did you get this idea?

First, I think Deism pre-Darwin more closely resembles atheism post-Darwin than Deism post-Darwin, and so it's more informative to modern readers to use the more similar reference point. Second, I don't see strong reason to believe the self-identification of historical figures in cases where the truth would damage their reputation. Franklin, in particular, gives many examples of bending his public conduct to maximize his reputation.

For example, I take this line from his autobiography to be more significant than the one where he calls himself a thorough Deist:

and farther, that my indiscrete disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horror by good people as an infidel or atheist.

As for:

even thought organized religions, such as Christianity, were necessary to maintain morality amongst the common people.

I don't think he thought organized effort was just for the common people:

My arguments perverted some others, particularly Collins and Ralph; but, each of them having afterwards wrong'd me greatly without the least compunction, and recollecting Keith's conduct towards me (who was another freethinker), and my own towards Vernon and Miss Read, which at times gave me great trouble, I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho' it might be true, was not very useful.

I get the sense he would have happily attended church if the local pastors were as good at other-improvement as he was at self-improvement, but they weren't, and so going would be a misspent hour. He still paid the subscription for them his whole life (as far as I can tell, as another reputation-preserving measure), and the Junto is probably the closest thing to a religious organization that he actively participated in.

Comment author: gwern 26 January 2013 02:18:21AM *  1 point [-]

5. Franklin is a high-status individual in American culture; emulating him may serve both to increase one's own motivation and to serve as defense against unpleasant criticism/mockery by others.

6. Franklin's rules are well-known on top of his high status; hence it saves effort explaining, and has other network-effect-like benefits (or maybe Schelling point is a better analogy) - you can probably find examples by other people and compare your attempt, which could be very interesting/entertaining.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit