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Meme: Valuable Vulnerability

3 scarcegreengrass 27 June 2016 11:54PM
There's an idea i've encountered in a couple essays and posts (not on LW) that being emotionally vulnerable is, counterintuitively, a desirable trait. I think this is usually defined as being in a state where what you observe is liable to create negative emotions in you (or in some definitions, a variety of emotions). I've heard several people recommend this meme but i'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Personally i usually aim for more manageable emotional states, and i rarely cultivate this kind of state. On the other hand, its popularity suggests, in my opinion, that it has at least some usefulness. 

What do LWers think about this concept? What do you think is the main rationale for this idea, and do you think it is a good policy?

Where can I go to exploit social influence to fight akrasia?

9 Snorri 26 March 2015 03:39PM

Briefly: I'm looking for a person (or group) with whom I can mutually discuss self improvement and personal goals (and nothing else) on a regular basis.

Also, note, this post is an example of asking a personally important question on LW. The following idea is not meant as a general mindhack, but just as something I want to try out myself.

We are unconsciously motivated by those around us. The Milgram experiment and the Asch conformity experiment are the two best examples of social influence that come to my mind, though I'm sure there are plenty more (if you haven't heard of them, I really suggest spending a minute).

I've tended to see this drive to conform to the expectations of others as a weakness of the human mind, and yes, it can be destructive. However, as long as its there, I should exploit it. Specifically, I want to exploit it to fight akrasia.

Utilizing positive social influence is a pretty common tactic for fighting drug addictions (like in AA), but I haven't really heard of it being used to fight unproductivity. Sharing your personal work/improvement goals with someone in the same position as yourself, along with reflecting on previous attempts, could potentially be powerful. Humans simply feel more responsible for the things they tell other people about, and less responsible for the things they bottle up and don't tell anyone (like all of my productivity strategies).

The setup that I envision would be something like this:

  • On a chat room, or some system like skype.1
  • Meet weekly at a very specific time for a set amount of time.
  • Your partner has a list of the productivity goals you set during the previous session. They ask you about your performance, forcing you to explain either your success or your failure.
  • Your partner tries to articulate what went wrong or what went right from your explanation (giving you a second perspective).
  • Once both parties have shared and evaluated, you set your new goals in light of your new experience (and with your partner's input, hopefully being more effective).
  • The partnership continues as long as it is useful for all parties.

I've tried doing something similar to this with my friends, but it just didn't work. We already knew each other too well, and there wasn't that air of dispassionate professionality. We were friends, but not partners (in this sense of the word).

If something close to what I describe already exists, or at least serves the same purpose, I would love to hear about it (I already tried the LW study hall, but it wasn't really the structure or atmosphere I was going for). Otherwise, I'd be thrilled to find someone here to try doing this with. You can PM me if you don't want to post here.

 


 

1. After explaining this whole idea to someone IRL, they remarked that there would be little social influence because we would only be meeting online in a pseudo-anonymous way. However, I don't find this to be the case personally when I talk with people online, so a virtual environment would be no detriment (hopefully this isn't just unique to me).

Edit (29/3/2015): Just for the record, I wanted to say that I was able to make the connection I wanted, via a PM. Thanks LW!

The Classic Literature Workshop

2 Ritalin 16 June 2013 09:54AM

From EY's Facebook page, there were two posts that got me thinking about fiction and how to work it better and make it stronger:

It would have been trivial to fix _Revenge of the Sith_'s inadequate motivation of Anakin's dark turn; have Padme already in the hospital slowly dying as her children come to term, not just some nebulous "visions". (Bonus points if you have Yoda lecture Anakin about the inevitability of death, but I'd understand if they didn't go there.) At the end, Anakin doesn't try to choke Padme; he watches the ship with her fly out of his reach, away from his ability to use his unnatural Sith powers to save her. Now Anakin's motives are 320% more sympathetic and the movie makes 170% more sense. If I'd put some serious work in, I'm pretty sure I could've had the movie audience in tears.

I still feel a sense of genuine puzzlement on how such disastrous writing happens in movies and TV shows. Are the viewers who care about this such a tiny percentage that it's not worth trying to sell to them? Are there really so few writers who could read over the script and see in 30 seconds how to fix something like this? (If option 2 is really the problem and people know it's the problem, I'd happily do it for $10,000 a shot.) Is it Graham's Design Paradox - can Hollywood moguls just not tell the difference between competent writers making such an offer, and fakers who'll take the money and run? Are the producers' egos so grotesque that they can't ask a writer for help? Is there some twisted sense of superiority bound up with believing that the audience is too dumb to care about this kind of thing, even though it looks to me like they do? I don't understand how a >$100M movie ends up with flaws that I could fix at the script stage with 30 seconds of advice.

A helpful key to understanding the art and technique of character in storytelling, is to consider the folk-psychological notion from Internal Family Systems of people being composed of different 'parts' embodying different drives or goals. A shallow character is then a character with only one 'part'.

A good rule of thumb is that to create a 3D character, that person must contain at least two different 2D characters who come into conflict. Contrary to the first thought that crosses your mind, three-dimensional good people are constructed by combining at least two different good people with two different ideals, not by combining a good person and a bad person. Deep sympathetic characters have two sympathetic parts in conflict, not a sympathetic part in conflict with an unsympathetic part. Deep smart characters are created by combining at least two different people who are geniuses.

E.g. HPMOR!Hermione contains both a sensible young girl who tries to keep herself and her friends out of trouble, and a starry-eyed heroine, neither of whom are stupid. (Actually, since HPMOR!Hermione is also the one character who I created as close to her canon self as I could manage - she didn't *need* upgrading - I should credit this one to J. K. Rowling.) (Admittedly, I didn't actually follow that rule deliberately to construct Methods, I figured it out afterward when everyone was praising the characterization and I was like, "Wait, people are calling me a character author now? What the hell did I just do right?")

If instead you try to construct a genius character by having an emotionally impoverished 'genius' part in conflict with a warm nongenius part... ugh. Cliche. Don't write the first thing that pops into your head from watching Star Trek. This is not how real geniuses work. HPMOR!Harry, the primary protagonist, contains so many different people he has to give them names, and none of them are stupid, nor does any one of them contain his emotions set aside in a neat jar; they contain different mixtures of emotions and ideals. Combining two cliche characters won't be enough to build a deep character. Combining two different realistic people in that character's situation works much better. Two is not a limit, it's a minimum, but everyone involved still has to be recognizably the same person when combined.

Closely related is Orson Scott Card's observation that a conflict between Good and Evil can be interesting, but it's often not half as interesting as a conflict between Good and Good. All standard rules about cliches still apply, and a conflict between good and good which you've previously read about and to which the reader can already guess your correct approved answer, cannot carry the story. A good rule of thumb is that if you have a conflict between good and good which you feel unsure about yourself, or which you can remember feeling unsure about, or you're not sure where exactly to draw the line, you can build a story around it. I consider the most successful moral conflict in HPMOR to be the argument between Harry and Dumbledore in Ch. 77 because it almost perfectly divided the readers on who was in the right *and* about whose side the author was taking. (*This* was done by deliberately following Orson Scott Card's rule, not by accident. Likewise _Three Worlds Collide_, though it was only afterward that I realized how much of the praise for that story, which I hadn't dreamed would be considered literarily meritful by serious SF writers, stemmed from the sheer rarity of stories built around genuinely open moral arguments. Orson Scott Card: "Propaganda only works when the reader feels like you've been absolutely fair to other side", and writing about a moral dilemma where *you're* still trying to figure out the answer is an excellent way to achieve this.)

Character shallowness can be a symptom of moral shallowness if it reflects a conflict between Good and Evil drawn along lines too clear to bring two good parts of a good character into conflict. This is why it would've been hard for Lord of the Rings to contain conflicted characters without becoming an entirely different story, though as Robin Hanson has just remarked, LotR is a Mileu story, not a Character story. Conflicts between evil and evil are even shallower than conflicts between good and evil, which is why what passes for 'maturity' in some literature is so uninteresting. There's nothing to choose there, no decision to await with bated breath, just an author showing off their disillusionment as a claim of sophistication.

 

I was wondering if we could apply this process to older fiction, Great Literature that is historically praised, and excellent by its own time's standards, but which, if published by a modern author, would seem substandard or inappropriate in one way or another.

Given our community's propensity for challenging sacred cows, and the unique tool-set available to us, I am sure we could take some great works of the past and turn them into awesome works of the present.


Of course, it doesn't have to be a laboratory where we rewrite the whole damn things. Just proprely-grounded suggestions on how to improve this or that work would be great.

 

P.S. This post is itself a work in progress, and will update and improve as comments come. It's been a long time since I've last posted on LW, so advice is quite welcome. Our work is never over.

 

EDIT: Well, I like that this thread has turned out so lively, but I've got finals to prepare for and I can't afford to keep participating in the discussion to my satisfaction. I'll be back in July, and apologize in advance for being such a poor OP. That said, cheers!

[LINK] 23andme is 99$ now

5 Jabberslythe 12 December 2012 02:31AM

It's been reduced to 99$ and it seems like it is a permanent reduction. I was thinking of buying it at 299$ because it had not been on sale for a while, so I'm very pleased this happened.

Their press release on it:

http://blog.23andme.com/news/one-million-strong-a-note-from-23andmes-anne-wojcicki/

 

Track Your Happiness

5 Matt_Simpson 04 May 2011 02:59AM

Track your happiness using your iphone:

For thousands of years, people have been trying to understand the causes of happiness. What is it that makes people happy? Yet it wasn’t until very recently that science has turned its attention to this issue.

Track Your Happiness.org is a new scientific research project that aims to use modern technology to help answer this age-old question. Using this site in conjunction with your iPhone, you can systematically track your happiness and find out what factors – for you personally – are associated with greater happiness. Your responses, along with those from other users of trackyourhappiness.org, will also help us learn more about the causes and correlates of happiness.

Seems like a no-brainer to use this to me, at least if you have an iphone. For those with a droid, according to their twitter feed:

the next item on the roadmap is to make track your happiness available to as many people/phones as possible.

Despite being a really cool app for managing your happiness, this is just a great idea for doing research. Now I want to take advantage of the large iphone/droid user base to learn about people in some way. Any ideas?

Self Improvement - Broad vs Focused

8 Raemon 31 December 2010 03:39PM

 

Lately I've been identifying a lot of things about myself that need improvement and thinking about ways to fix them. This post is intended to A) talk about some overall strategies for self-improvement/goal-focusing, and B) if anyone's having similar problems, or wants to talk about additional problems they face, discuss specific strategies for dealing with those problems.

Those issues I'm facing include but are not limited to:

 

  1. Getting more exercise (I work at a computer for 9 hours a day, and spend about 3 hours commuting on a train). Maintaining good posture while working at said computer might be considered a related goal.
  2. Spending a higher percentage of the time working at a computer actually getting stuff done, instead of getting distracted by the internet.
  3. Get a new apartment, so I don't have to commute so much.
  4. Getting some manner of social life. More specifically, finding some recurring activity where I'll probably meet the same people over and over to improve the odds of making longterm friends.
  5. Improving my diet, which mostly means eating less cheese. I really like cheese, so this is difficult.
  6. Stop making so many off-color jokes. Somewhere there is a line between doing it ironically and actually contributing to overall weight of prejudice, and I think I've crossed that line.
  7. Somehow stop losing things so much, and/or being generally careless/clumsy. I lost my wallet and dropped my lap top in the space of a month, and manage to lose a wide array of smaller things on a regular basis. It ends up costing me a lot of money.

 

 

Of those things, three of them are things that require me to actively dedicate more time (finding an apartment, getting exercise, social life), and the others mostly consist of NOT doing things (eating cheese, making bad jokes, losing things, getting distracted by the internet), unless I can find some proactive thing to make it easier to not do them.

I *feel* like I have enough time that I should be able to address all of them at once. But looking at the whole list at once is intimidating. And when it comes to the "not doing bad thing X" items, remembering and following up on all of them is difficult. The worst one is "don't lose things." There's no particular recurring theme in how I lose stuff, or they type of stuff I Iose. I'm more careful with my wallet and computer now, but spending my entire life being super attentive and careful about *everything* seems way too stressful and impractical.

I guess my main question is:  when faced with a list of things that don't necessarily require separate time to accomplish, how many does it make sense to attempt at once? Just one? All of them? I know you're not supposed to quit drinking and smoking at the same time because you'll probably accomplish neither, but I'm not sure if the same principle applies here.

There probably isn't a universal answer to this, but knowing what other people have tried and accomplished would be helpful.

Later on I'm going to discuss some of the problems in more detail (I know that the brief blurbs are lacking a lot of information necessary for any kind of informed response, but a gigantic post that about my own problems seemed... not exactly narcissistic... but not appropriate as an initial post for some reason)