You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

JoshuaFox comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: lukeprog 27 August 2012 12:04AM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (179)
Tags: stupid_questions open_thread

Comments (179)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: palladias 27 August 2012 09:05:03PM 6 points [-]

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
Comment author: JoshuaFox 28 August 2012 06:33:03AM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: palladias 28 August 2012 06:41:53AM 5 points [-]

I'm not sure. One thing that worked pretty well for me at minicamp was that the instructors were pretty meticulous about describing levels of confidence in different hacks. Everything from "Here are some well-regarded, peer reviewed studies you can look at" to "It's worked pretty well for us, and most of the people who've tried, and here's how we think it fits into what we know about the brain" to "we don't know why this works, but it has for most people, so we think it's worth trying out, so make sure you tell us if you try and get bupkis so we're hearing about negative data" to "this is something that worked for me that you might find useful."

I think this is a pretty audience-specific selling point, but it did a great job of mitigating the suspicious-seeming levels of enthusiasm most lifehackers open with.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit