Group Rationality Diary, August 1-15

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for August 1-15.

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 cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Immediate past diary: July 16-31

Next diary: August 16-31

Rationality Diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for August 1-15.

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 cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Immediate past diary: July 16-31

Next diary: August 16-31

Rationality Diaries archive

Recently, when considering why I've done something, I've been consciously distinguishing between historical cause and justification. I can't seem to find the sequence post that prompted this effort. In the process I've come across some moderately vile or at least disappointing motivations. I experience considerable cognitive dissonance when I find myself doing something that appears to be right for what I consider to be the wrong reasons. Usually that involves doing something for signaling purposes that I really should have done anyway; I can't justifiably change my behavior, but I despise signaling as a motivation.

On a separate note, when considering my personal future, I've been trying to make explicit predictions with probability estimates about what will happen, at least in my own head. The intent was to stem my tendancy to catastrophise, but it seems to have backfired; in cases where I was catastrophising it turned out to be correct catastrophising, and I walked around for a few days thinking things wouldn't really be that bad when they actually were that bad. That was depressing. I intend to continue the mental predictions anyway.

In both cases I think I've sacrificed hedons for bayes points. I'm comfortable with the tradeoff but it's still a tradeoff.

I despise signaling as a motivation.

I'm curious why. After you've thought about it: va zl rkcrevrapr, gur uvfgbevpny pnhfr nccrnef gb or fvtanyyvat sbe zbfg crbcyr.