Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

I was a July minicamp attendee. I did the big reading through the Sequences thing when lukeprog was doing it at Common Sense Atheism, so I'd day fewer of the benefits were rationality level-ups and more were life hacking. Post-minicamp I am:

doing sit-ups, push-ups, and squats every day (using the apps from the 200 situps guy), up from not doing this at all
martial arts training four times a week (aikido and krav) again, up from not doing things at all
using RTM to manage tasks which means
dropping way fewer small tasks
breaking tasks down into steps more efficiently
knocked off about three lagging tasks (not timebound, so I was making no progress on them) in the month that I got back
stopped using inbox as task manager, so I could actually only keep emails I was replying to in there
using beeminder to get down to inbox zero (currently three)
working in pomodoros has sped up my writing to the point where:
I miss doing a daily posts to my blog more rarely (one over two weeks compared to 0-2 a week) and have had more double post days than previously (which translates into higher page views and more money for me)
Less time writing left me more time for leisure reading

OK, those count as benefits. We shouldn't just give all the credit to the lifehacking community, since LW/SI successfully got you to implement lifehacking techniques.

Of course, anything can be called instrumentally rational if it works, but I wonder how other approaches compare to explicit rationality in successfully convincing oneself to lifehack . For example, the sort of motivational techniques used for salespeople.

11palladias14y

I should add that I had a bit of a crestfallen feeling for the first few days of minicamp, since being more efficient and organized feels like a really lame superpower. I expected a bit more of it to be about choosing awesome goals. But then I realized that I'd always be grateful for a genie that magically gave me an extra hour, and I shouldn't look a gift genie in the mouth, just because it wasn't magic. So, now that I've got more time, it's up to me to do superheroic things with it. Once I finish my Halloween costume.

4gwern14y

How are you both posting more to your blog, and spending less time writing?

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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