This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for September 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.
Next diary: September 16-30
Previous diary: August 16-31
Pushing a couple of blogs to Feedly instead of manually checking them has massively reduced the time I spend mindlessly checking the sites, so that is a win. Instead I check Feedly, browse through the titles and read what interests me from time to time. It might be because there is a backlog of blog posts and I manually have to sift through the titles to find those that really interest me. In any case the payoff seems to be much more leveled and thus not as stimulating to the seeking system.
But the win is completely offset by spending the now freed up time browing Lesswrong and Reddit, netting me the same amount of wasted times and useless drivel. It seems like I'll have to find a way to filter the interesting things from those two sites. For LessWrong it will have to be something that notifies me at fixed times whether an interesting discussion has new posts, especially since most of the interesting conversations seem to happen in the comments of the open thread. For Reddit I might make the radical decision to cut it out completely.
Your win isn't completely offset -- you spend more of your time on consuming content and less on fruitless search.