Group Rationality Diary, November 16-30

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for November 16-30 (that I've now fished out of my drafts folder, *cough*.)

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.

The poll earlier this month seems to be sufficiently in favor of maintaining the current schedule that extra votes are unlikely to change things much, but if you'd really like to register your opinion, you are welcome to do so here.

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

Immediate past diary: November 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for November 16-30 (that I've now fished out of my drafts folder, *cough*.)

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: November 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

Victim? No. I track the time taken and by it and it is seldom 'random googling'.

From an old post of mine on c2 ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BreadthFirstLearning ):

I don't use DepthFirstLearning, but rather AstarLearning, meaning, that I have a learning goal in mind all the time (since I can remember) and try to learn everything, that contributes to this goal (minimizes the distance to the goal). The goal is motivated by a curiosity how things work or could be made to work (at an abstract scale, including social problems). The distance to this goal is measured by the usefulness of the knowledge to achieve this. Interestingly I have found, that learning this way all the pieces of information quickly form a coherent picture and fit together. Though I have to admit, that this might be my subjective impression and I hope that this beautiful picture is not an artifact of my mind. As to the personal usefulness of this approach, I think, that it provides me with a clear profile as well as an in-depth expertise in my field.

There are times where I really just read stuff sometimes for the fun of it and sometimes when I am exhausted. But even then I track it and all suring takes about 10% of my online time.