Group rationality diary, 6/4/12

cata

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of June 4th. 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, 5/21/12, 5/28/12)

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of June 4th. 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!

(Previously: 5/14/12, 5/21/12, 5/28/12)

Failed last habit-making attempt. I owe my brother $10. On the other hand, I have taken Vaniver's advice to start taking notes on my crazy fanfic ideas. I started putting everything on a mind map, though I'll probably move it to an arrow chart instead so I can draw cool arrows all over the place and better show sequential order of events/avoid mixing incompatible elements.

I tried the updating game yesterday. I didn't realize how much I'd been flinching away from trying the calibration tests I saved to my favorites bar. My compy crashed a little way in, and I didn't quite feel like restarting. So I'm reframing it as a challenge to input what feel like wildly under-confident 95% ranges until my guesses are so obviously inclusive of the real answer that I'm forced to start correcting the other way. I also consciously reminded myself in the morning that that wobbly feeling of "I know next to nothing about this, but surely it's not too far from..." is what overconfidence feels like, and that if I ever get that feeling about a RL guess I should seriously consider how much of my plotting is made contingent on that point.