Group Rationality Diary, August 16-31

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for August 16-31.

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.

Previous diary: August 1-15

Next diary: September 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for August 16-31.

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.

Previous diary: August 1-15

Next diary: September 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

In Ham Land:

According to Liz, no frills Cryonics may cost approximately the same as World of Warcraft on a yearly basis. I do expect to sometime in the next year have a job that could support a gaming habit on the side. If I'm going to continue not even poking the idea of actually signing up for cryonics, I have to admit myself I am not optimizing for life. Examining my own emotions... Yes. I do not really alieve that me not being alive tomorrow would be this terribly awful thing. System 2 recognized this as a probable failure mode and takes great care not to take direction from this part of my brain, but it's still there.
This weekend has been an experience in trying to reframe the unhelpful "You are shit. You're so deeply shit that rationality training can't even dig you out of your shit." voice in my head. It is has been too long since I have interacted with people who both deliberately avoid being reinforcers of this and do not try to smother the emotion away with mere feel-good strokes. It hurts to brush up against the edge of doing more Things, it brings back all the failures and shame of not doing more Things before. Reframing much of this pain as a signal of growth--much like outright panic might be the sign of a truly important discovery--and being curious about the way in which I might fail sounds way too simple to work. And yet... I am curious where it might lead me before it crashes.
When doing a conference thing... or any intensely social thing, this appears to be consistent in some smaller examples in my journal... I HAVE to plan in some time to rest and regroup. At the very least, I cannot skip morning prep and meditation as I tend to do on vacation. I spent the last day and a half of the CFAR Alumni Reunion as an ineffectual zombie of tiredness because I was trying to discount sleep in favor of interesting conversations. (This is a natural consequence of how I "planned" for the event: I only brainstormed things to do, rather than go through a whole murphy-jitsu session.) I have thought this thought before: that taking breaks was important for a.) my health, and b.) actually being fully present for whatever thing it happens to feels important to not walk away from.
My to-go packs need optimizing. Melatonin would have been just as if not more useful than the caffeine. Water bottles never got refilled. The snacks I carry turned out to be very useful, I got dizzy a few times and someone else needed my jerky because of low iron. There were not shampoos or conditioners, I may want to at least have soap in my backpack. I would have liked needle and thread at a couple of points.
Tried adrafinil. Felt AWESOME while on it, felt less awesome and cry-ish later in the day. Unsure how much was the event vs. the drug. Will look up side effects and probably buy some.
Also, aim for talks that are not already familiar to me. I aimed to reinforce ideas I already knew, which I was working on doing at home anyways, and missed much opportunity to find novel thoughts and network with differently focused people.
I am moving my to-do's off of HabitRPG now. It tends to fail me when I am not alone and at my computer all day. It has done wonders for keeping me basically functional on most days. I do not want alone and at my computer to be the majority of my life anymore. So, I'm opting for something more flexible. Google Now for daily functionality and alarms + Evernote for reference and my next actions lists.
this is not an exhaustive list but I want to do other things.

Re: cryonics, I've been playing with the same sort of "revealed preference" idea, but on reflection I don't think it survives a status quo reversal test. If I'd been signed up by default, I would not cancel my membership in exchange for a smallish annuity and a larger lump sum payment that's equivalent to the time and other costs of signing up for cryonics.

5Viliam_Bur12y

I believe that reframing these "voices in head" is critical for long-term productivity. Essentially, these voices determine your internal reinforcements (rewards, punishments) for things that happen to you, which makes you do more or less of them later. This is sometimes even more important than what actually happened; the same thing may happen to two people, one of them will reward themselves for it, other will punish themselves. In short term, you can try using "willpower", but in long term the balance will go towards the things you reward yourself for doing. Of these two kinds of reinforcement -- rewards, punishments -- I would recommend focusing on rewards. Because if you want to live rationally, you must notice what is happening to you. You may say "I will reward myself for doing X, and punish myself for doing Y", but unless you use some automatic detector, you actually mean "I will reward myself for noticing that I am doing X, and punish myself for noticing than I am doing Y." Punishing yourself for noticing, that's not a good idea; instead of reducing Y, it could just reduce your self-awareness. [...] Heh, I know what you mean. There is no success that a brain sufficiently trained in negative thinking couldn't interpret as a failure. Even "I wasn't as great yesterday as I am today... therefore I am a loser" can seem credible from a specific angle (where yesterday is forever, and today is just an exception) and suddenly you punish yourself for improving, which is like the most unreasonable thing you could do. -- Although it probably made sense in ancient environment, where "yesterday and days before that" were better evidence of your social status than an exceptional "today". So you are essentially telling yourself not to overestimate your social status. Not completely incorrect, but comes with the horrible side effect of not doing the useful thing which could threaten the status balance. So... be nice to yourself! ♡ Especially when you do the right thing.