Group rationality diary, 11/28/12

cata

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of November 27th. 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!

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

(Sorry for being a day late on this one, life is really full of things lately!)

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of November 27th. 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!

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

(Sorry for being a day late on this one, life is really full of things lately!)

Shifting about between positions is more important than having one best position. If I were to sit like I'm sitting now all day, I'd be in the hospital tomorrow.

Something that's been working well for me for a few months: a computer on my desk at work, but a folding laptop stand next to it with my laptop on top. SSH/X11 on a fast network makes the two interfaces basically interchangeable, but multitasking between one project and another means that I spend about 4 or 5 hours a day standing and I switch between standing and sitting dozens of times over the course of the day. It turns out that "those tests displaying on the other computer are done running, I should look over the results" is a much better m... (read more)