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A collection of Stubs.
In light of SDR's comment yesterday, instead of writing a new post today I compiled my list of ideas I wanted to write about, partly to lay them out there and see if any stood out as better than the rest, and partly so that maybe they would be a little more out in the wild than if I hold them until I get around to them. I realise there is not a thesis in this post, but I figured it would be better to write one of these than to write each in it's own post with the potential to be good or bad.
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/many-draft-concepts/
I create ideas at about the rate of 3 a day, without trying to. I write at about a rate of 1.5 a day. Which leaves me always behind. Even if I write about the best ideas I can think of, some good ones might never be covered. This is an effort to draft out a good stack of them so that maybe it can help me not have to write them all out, by better defining which ones are the good ones and which ones are a bit more useless.
With that in mind, in no particular order - a list of unwritten posts:
From my old table of contents
Goals of your lesswrong group – As a guided/workthrough exercise in deciding why the group exists and what it should do. Help people work out what they want out of it (do people know)? setting goals, doing something particularly interesting or routine, having fun, changing your mind, being activists in the world around you. Whatever the reasons you care about, work them out and move towards them. Nothing particularly groundbreaking in the process here. Sit down with the group with pens and paper, maybe run a resolve cycle, maybe talk about ideas and settle on a few, then decide how to carry them out. Relevant links: Sydney meetup, group resources (estimate 2hrs to write)
Goals interrogation + Goal levels – Goal interrogation is about asking <is this thing I want to do actually a goal of mine> and <is my current plan the best way to achieve that>, goal levels are something out of Sydney Lesswrong that help you have mutual long term goals and supporting short term goal. There are 3 main levels, Dream, Year, Daily (or approximate) you want dream goals like going to the moon, you want yearly goals like getting another year further in your degree and you want daily goals like studying today that contribute to the upper level goals. Any time you are feeling lost you can look at the guide you set out for yourself and use it to direct you. (3hrs)
How to human – A zero to human guide. A guide for basic functionality of a humanoid system. Something of a conglomeration of maslow, mental health, so you feel like shit and system thinking. Am I conscious?Am I breathing? Am I bleeding or injured (major or minor)? Am I falling or otherwise in danger and about to cause the earlier questions to return false? Do I know where I am? Am I safe? Do I need to relieve myself (or other bodily functions, i.e. itchy)? Have I had enough water? sleep? food? Is my mind altered (alcohol or other drugs)? Am I stuck with sensory input I can't control (noise, smells, things touching me)? Am I too hot or too cold? Is my environment too hot or too cold? Or unstable? Am I with people or alone? Is this okay? Am I clean (showered, teeth, other personal cleaning rituals)? Have I had some sunlight and fresh air in the past few days? Have I had too much sunlight or wind in the past few days? Do I feel stressed? Okay? Happy? Worried? Suspicious? Scared? Was I doing something? What am I doing? do I want to be doing something else? Am I being watched (is that okay?)? Have I interacted with humans in the past 24 hours? Have I had alone time in the past 24 hours? Do I have any existing conditions I can run a check on - i.e. depression? Are my valuables secure? Are the people I care about safe? (4hrs)
List of common strategies for getting shit done – things like scheduling/allocating time, pomodoros, committing to things externally, complice, beeminder, other trackers. (4hrs)
List of superpowers and kryptonites – when asking the question “what are my superpowers?” and “what are my kryptonites?”. Knowledge is power; working with your powers and working out how to avoid your kryptonites is a method to improve yourself. What are you really good at, and what do you absolutely suck at and would be better delegating to other people. The more you know about yourself, the more you can do the right thing by your powers or weaknesses and save yourself troubles.
List of effective behaviours – small life-improving habits that add together to make awesomeness from nothing. And how to pick them up. Short list: toothbrush in the shower, scales in front of the fridge, healthy food in the most accessible position in the fridge, make the unhealthy stuff a little more inacessible, keep some clocks fast - i.e. the clock in your car (so you get there early), prepare for expected barriers ahead of time (i.e. packing the gym bag and leaving it at the door), and more.
Stress prevention checklist – feeling off? You want to have already outsourced the hard work for “things I should check on about myself” to your past self. Make it easier for future you. Especially in the times that you might be vulnerable. Generate a list of things that you want to check are working correctly. i.e. did I drink today? Did I do my regular exercise? Did I take my medication? Have I run late today? Do I have my work under control?
Make it easier for future you. Especially in the times that you might be vulnerable. – as its own post in curtailing bad habits that you can expect to happen when you are compromised. inspired by candy-bar moments and turning them into carrot-moments or other more productive things. This applies beyond diet, and might involve turning TV-hour into book-hour (for other tasks you want to do instead of tasks you automatically do)
A p=np approach to learning – Sometimes you have to learn things the long way; but sometimes there is a short cut. Where you could say, “I wish someone had just taken me on the easy path early on”. It’s not a perfect idea; but start looking for the shortcuts where you might be saying “I wish someone had told me sooner”. Of course the answer is, “but I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway” which is something that can be worked on as well. (2hrs)
Rationalists guide to dating – Attraction. Relationships. Doing things with a known preference. Don’t like unintelligent people? Don’t try to date them. Think first; then act - and iteratively experiment; an exercise in thinking hard about things before trying trial-and-error on the world. Think about places where you might meet the kinds of people you want to meet, then use strategies that go there instead of strategies that flop in the general direction of progress. (half written)
Training inherent powers (weights, temperatures, smells, estimation powers) – practice makes perfect right? Imagine if you knew the temperature always, the weight of things by lifting them, the composition of foods by tasting them, the distance between things without measuring. How can we train these, how can we improve. Probably not inherently useful to life, but fun to train your system 1! (2hrs)
Strike to the heart of the question. The strongest one; not the one you want to defeat – Steelman not Strawman. Don’t ask “how do I win at the question”; ask, “am I giving the best answer to the best question I can give”. More poetic than anything else - this post would enumerate the feelings of victory and what not to feel victorious about, as well as trying to feel what it's like to be on the other side of the discussion to yourself, frustratingly trying to get a point across while a point is being flung at yourself. (2hrs)
How to approach a new problem – similar to the “How to solve X” post. But considerations for working backwards from a wicked problem, as well as trying “The least bad solution I know of”, Murphy-jitsu, and known solutions to similar problems. Step 0. I notice I am approaching a problem.
Turning Stimming into a flourish – For autists, to make a presentability out of a flaw.
How to manage time – estimating the length of future tasks (and more), covered in notch system, and do tasks in a different order. But presented on it's own.
Spices – Adventures in sensory experience land. I ran an event of spice-smelling/guessing for a group of 30 people. I wrote several documents in the process about spices and how to run the event. I want to publish these. As an exercise - it's a fun game of guess-the-spice.
Wing it VS Plan – All of the what, why, who, and what you should do of the two. Some people seem to be the kind of person who is always just winging it. In contrast, some people make ridiculously complicated plans that work. Most of us are probably somewhere in the middle. I suggest that the more of a planner you can be the better because you can always fall back on winging it, and you probably will. But if you don't have a plan and are already winging it - you can't fall back on the other option. This concept came to me while playing ingress, which encourages you to plan your actions before you make them.
On-stage bias – The changes we make when we go onto a stage include extra makeup to adjust for the bright lights, and speaking louder to adjust for the audience which is far away. When we consider the rest of our lives, maybe we want to appear specifically X (i.e, confident, friendly) so we should change ourselves to suit the natural skews in how we present based on the "stage" we are appearing on. appear as the person you want to appear as, not the person you naturally appear as.
Creating a workspace – considerations when thinking about a “place” of work, including desk, screen, surrounding distractions, and basically any factors that come into it. Similar to how the very long list of sleep maintenance suggestions covers environmental factors in your sleep environment but for a workspace.
Posts added to the list since then
Doing a cost|benefit analysis - This is something we rely on when enumerating the options and choices ahead of us, but something I have never explicitly looked into. Some costs that can get overlooked include: Time, Money, Energy, Emotions, Space, Clutter, Distraction/Attention, Memory, Side effects, and probably more. I'd like to see a How to X guide for CBA. (wikipedia)
Extinction learning at home - A cross between intermittent reward (the worst kind of addiction), and what we know about extinguishing it. Then applying that to "convincing" yourself to extinguish bad habits by experiential learning. Uses the CFAR internal Double Crux technique, precommit yourself to a challenge, for example - "If I scroll through 20 facebook posts in a row and they are all not worth my time, I will be convinced that I should spend less time on facebook because it's not worth my time" Adjust 20 to whatever position your double crux believes to be true, then run a test and iterate. You have to genuinely agree with the premise before running the test. This can work for a number of committed habits which you want to extinguish. (new idea as at the writing of this post)
How to write a dating ad - A suggestion to include information that is easy to ask questions about (this is hard). For example; don't write, "I like camping", write "I like hiking overnight with my dog", giving away details in a way that makes them worth inquiring about. The same reason applies to why writing "I'm a great guy" is really not going to get people to believe you, as opposed to demonstrating the claim. (show, don't tell)
How to give yourself aversions - an investigation into aversive actions and potentially how to avoid collecting them when you have a better understanding of how they happen. (I have not done the research and will need to do that before publishing the post)
How to give someone else an aversion - similar to above, we know we can work differently to other people, and at the intersection of that is a misunderstanding that can leave people uncomfortable.
Lists - Creating lists is a great thing, currently in draft - some considerations about what lists are, what they do, what they are used for, what they can be used for, where they come in handy, and the suggestion that you should use lists more. (also some digital list-keeping solutions)
Choice to remember the details - this stems from choosing to remember names, a point in the conversation where people sometimes tune out. As a mindfulness concept you can choose to remember the details. (short article, not exactly sure why I wanted to write about this)
What is a problem - On the path of problem solving, understanding what a problem is will help you to understand how to attack it. Nothing more complicated than this picture to explain it. The barrier is a problem. This doesn't seem important on it's own but as a foundation for thinking about problems it's good to have sitting around somewhere.
How to/not attend a meetup - for anyone who has never been to a meetup, and anyone who wants the good tips on etiquette for being the new guy in a room of friends. First meetup: shut up and listen, try not to be too much of an impact on the existing meetup group or you might misunderstand the culture.
Noticing the world, Repercussions and taking advantage of them - There are regularly world events that I notice. Things like the olympics, Pokemon go coming out, the (recent) spaceX rocket failure. I try to notice when big events happen and try to think about how to take advantage of the event or the repercussions caused by that event. Motivated to think not only about all the olympians (and the fuss leading up to the olympics), but all the people at home who signed up to a gym because of the publicity of the competitive sport. If only I could get in on the profit of gym signups...
leastgood but only solution I know of - So you know of a solution, but it's rubbish. Or probably is. Also you have no better solutions. Treat this solution as the best solution you have (because it is) and start implementing it, as you do that - keep looking for other solutions. But at least you have a solution to work with!
Self-management thoughts - When you ask yourself, "am I making progress?", "do I want to be in this conversation?" and other self management thoughts. And an investigation into them - it's a CFAR technique but their writing on the topic is brief. (needs research)
instrumental supply-hoarding behaviour - A discussion about the benefits of hoarding supplies for future use. Covering also - what supplies are not a good idea to store, and what supplies are. Maybe this will be useful for people who store things for later days, and hopefully help to consolidate and add some purposefulness to their process.
list of sub groups that I have tried - Before running my local lesswrong group I partook in a great deal of other groups. This was meant as a list with comments on each group.
If you have nothing to do – make better tools for use when real work comes along - This was probably going to be a poetic style motivation post about exactly what the title suggests. Be Prepared.
what other people are good at (as support) - When reaching out for support, some people will be good at things that other people are not. For example - emotional support, time to spend on each other, ideas for solving your problems. Different people might be better or worse than others. Thinking about this can make your strategies towards solving your problems a bit easier to manage. Knowing what works and what does not work, or what you can reliably expect when you reach out for support from some people - is going to supercharge your fulfilment of those needs.
Focusing - An already written guide to Eugine Gendlin's focusing technique. That needs polishing before publishing. The short form: treat your system 1 as a very powerful machine that understands your problems and their solutions more than you do; use your system 2 to ask it questions and see what it returns.
Rewrite: how to become a 1000 year old vampire - I got as far as breaking down this post and got stuck at draft form before rewriting. Might take another stab at it soon.
Should you tell people your goals? - This thread in a post. In summary: It depends on the environment, the wrong environment is actually demotivational, the right environment is extra motivational.
Meta: this took around 4 hours to write up. Which is ridiculously longer than usual. I noticed a substantial number of breaks being taken - not sure if that relates to the difficulty of creating so many summaries or just me today. Still. This experiment might help my future writing focus/direction so I figured I would try it out. If you see an idea of particularly high value I will be happy to try to cover it in more detail.
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Skills training for dating anxiety
A half-baked literature review: Skills training for dating anxiety
In order to infer whether sociosexual skills training is a useful adjunct to standard treatment of anxiety, the first page of Google scholar was systematically reviewed for unique interventional studies that include with any measure of anxiety as an outcome, studies with comment on methodological issues or otherwise theorising with implications for the interpretation of the empirical evidence were discovered using the search terms: (1) social skills training for anxiety and (2) heterosexual social skills and (3) dating anxiety. And (4) behavioural replication training and (5) sensitivity training 10 studies were found, each very dated. The search space was expanded from (1) to searches (2) till (5) due to the keywords found in potentially relevant studies.
Studies that did not contextualise in terms of sexual motivations (e.g. dating) were excluded (namely: the study - Social skills training augments the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral group therapy for social anxiety disorder : www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005789405800619)
The studies found were (strike out: excluded):
- Social skills training and systematic desensitization in reducing dating anxiety: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0005796775900546
- Treatment strategies for dating anxiety in college men based on real-life practice.: psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1979-31475-001
- Evaluation of three dating-specific treatment approaches for heterosexual dating anxiety.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/43/2/259/
- A comparison between behavioral replication training and sensitivity training approaches to heterosexual dating anxiety.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/cou/23/3/190/
- Social skills training and systematic desensitization in reducing dating anxiety: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0005796775900546
- Social skills training augments the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral group therapy for social anxiety disorder : www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005789405800619
- Skills training as an approach to the treatment of heterosexual-social anxiety: A review.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/84/1/140/
- Self-ratings and judges' ratings of heterosexual social anxiety and skill: A generalizability study.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/47/1/164/
- Heterosexual social skills in a population of rapists and child molesters.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/53/1/55/
- The importance of behavioral and cognitive factors in heterosexual-social anxiety1: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1980.tb00834.x/abstract
The search is halted prematurely due to the discovery of a systematic review (see: Skills training as an approach to the treatment of heterosexual-social anxiety: A review.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/84/1/140/) However, other studies emerged after the review anyway. In any case, the review’s conclusions are likely to hold true and they do suggest that there is promise to sociosexual skills training, but methodological issues will hold back good empirical research. Therefore, it is not expected to be productive to continue this review.
It is hypothesised that the evidence is so dated due to changes in terminology. The literature approximates exposure treatments for social phobia or social anxiety. However, searches of the first page of Google Scholar (exposure therapy and social anxiety; exposure therapy and social phobia) yield no results except where pharmacotherapies are in adjunct to the therapy) which are inappropriate for our purposes.
Tl;dr. See: Skills training as an approach to the treatment of heterosexual-social anxiety: A review.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/84/1/140/
Research translation idea
I have an idea for teaching certain vulnerable young people the skills needed to achieve social skills without intoxication. I was wondering if you have any feedback for my proposal so that I can revise it. Many students report they drink or get high for the disinhibiting effects that help them socialise with the other sex. It is hypothesised that this is because of latent anxieties and inproper self-medication. Due to the irresponsiveness of the target population at universities to respond to demand reduction programs and health promotion, the inflexibility of the university’s institutions to delivering supply reduction campaigns, and the relative resource intensity of harm minimisation programs, alternative, innovative interventions are sought. One innovative strategy is to treat the underlying anxiety that motivates substance use in young people. The purpose of this social skills training program is to train groups of young people to socialise romantically and sexually with the opposite sex to replace substance-assisted romantic and sexual initiatory behaviour. Initial steps will be surveying the evidence-base, followed by the design, implementation and evaluation of a pilot program. This will be disseminated for critique by the broader scientific and clinical community before scaling if and as appropriate. The success of the program will be evaluated by structured interview eliciting psychological distress.
Background reading
Gender differences in social anxiety disorder: results from the national epidemiologic sample on alcohol and related conditions. - www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21903358
Examining Sex and Gender Differences in Anxiety Disorders - www.intechopen.com/books/a-fresh-look-at-anxiety-disorders/examining-sex-and-gender-differences-in-anxiety-disorders
not academic but interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSZky8dk7OE
rational dating - can we escape the rat race be setting smarter goals?
According to evolutionary psychologists as well as the cultural main stream, men are going for sensually attractive women, while women are going for men who can provide them safety (plus other things we don't need to get into here). Whereas we might think that modern, cultured people are somewhat above those basic instincts and actually look for mates which fit their individual character, values, preferences, and interests, the world of online dating seems to throw us back a couple of centuries of progress. Many dating sites have been designed to increase usage and interaction with the site (so that more ads can be shown) and do this by relying a lot on pictures of their users to incite other users' interest. On the other hand, our individual character, values, preferences, and interests (or, ICVPI, for short) are to a large extent represented in text form as either essays or predefined answers to predefined questions. Now, while the text contains a lot of the relevant information, it is severely disadvantaged by this site design. Not only do the pictures have a much higher salience, their presence also directly speaks to our impulses and emotions (or system one, for those who have read Kahneman's "Thinking fast and slow") which hinders the already somewhat harder processing of text by system two.
The result of this click-optimizing is that user's choices whom to contact are much more driven by pictures (and therefore, looks) than by other criteria. This leads to the destructive effect that visually attractive women are swamped in messages among which it is hard and tedious to chose ones to reply to, while the less attractive ones do not have enough choice to find men that match their individual preferences. In other words, the mutual matching between people who might fit each other is more sabotaged than helped by those picture-driven dating sites.
Now, as a basic rationalist I will of course question my motivations and ask myself if the run for beauty is really for my own best or if it is a learned behavior stemming from our (in this case arguably superficial) culture. If we leave aside the antiquated Freudian principle of "drive" and read psychologists like Rogers and Fromm, we might realize that hunting for beautiful mates is just one way among others for a man to boost his self-esteem, not necessarily a motivator in and of itself. Indeed, modern studies have shown that lasting self-esteem and deep happiness can be created best by exercising our strengths in a meaningful way. (For details and the studies see Seligman's "Authentic Happiness".) Following this argument, if I get my self-esteem and social recognition from (for example) writing awesome blog articles and helping lots of people at work, then this positive emotion will "buffer" (in Seligman's terms) against any judgmental looks and statements that I will be facing when going out with my awesome, but ugly, new girl friend. (Can you hear them saying "what? are you dating her?" in a raising voice that bounces back from the ceiling?)
To sum up, wouldn't it be the most rational thing to simply switch off pictures on the dating site (Firefox currently has AddOns for this, Chrome can do it natively, just type "block" in the search box on the settings page), thus keeping my impulsive system one at calm, write more thoughtful messages, and get more and better responses, both because I am writing to less message-swamped women and because my own messages are better. Then dating will be less like a meaningless competition, the resulting relationships are more profound, and I will find out that my friends are not actually prejudiced against ugly people and will not look down at me for making that choice. Just let go of my own prejudices and false beliefs and I win. Right?
Rationality and Relationships September 2011
The recent popularity/controversy of articles such as Alicorn's Polyhacking and of course lukeprog's Rationality and Relationships (preceded by his Rationality Lessons from Romance 1 and 2) leads me to believe that this topic deserves a monthly open discussion thread.
I can't think of any rules. Have at it!
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