Group rationality diary, 5/21/12

cata

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of May 21st. 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!

Previously: 5/14/12 (and explanation)

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of May 21st. 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!

Over the last week:

Been practicing being much more open and sympathetic with people (especially wife) about emotions. Has had some big gains.

Wife has been using personal TDT on everything and has become much more effective at excercises, food habits, and sequence reading.

Used the "I am a rationalist, I can do X and nothing bad will happen." thought pattern to motivate myself to try things that I was previously averse to. (mostly gross and/or sexy things)

Been climbing trees at all opportunities (who knew there were so many opportunities for so much fun).

Been practicing being generally excited and high-energy about life. (yeeehaw! high fives all around!)

Dabbled in various day-planning and productivity techniques. Mild gains. Limiting factor seems to be attention span.

Rewarding self for noticing and siezing opportunities to be socially or otherwise courageous.

Being Specific. Holy crap! Once you start noticing this, it is everywhere. Still not super good at automatically being specific, but I'm quite good at noticing unspecific things now.

Had some unfortunate emotional instability over last few days. Was very depressed and useless yesterday. I don't like being depressed. Also some useless rage. Didn't break anything or blow up, but can't do much else when mad. (EDIT: realizing how poor internet text is for conveying emotion. I feel like having a big lesswrong internet hug, but it is hard to communicate this.)

Now if only I can make myself actually work...

Do you notice yourself ever wanting to scream at people to be specific? Also, screaming at people on the Tv to be more specifi happens a lot. I wont even mention listening to politicians......

12Mercurial14y

Such as...? (Sorry, it just begged to be said, and no one else took the bait!)