Jocko Podcast
I've recently been extracting extraordinary value from the Jocko Podcast.
Jocko Willink is a retired Navy SEAL commander, jiu-jitsu black belt, management consultant and, in my opinion, master rationalist. His podcast typically consists of detailed analysis of some book on military history or strategy followed by a hands-on Q&A session. Last week's episode (#38) was particularly good and if you want to just dive in, I would start there.
As a sales pitch, I'll briefly describe some of his recurring talking points:
- Extreme ownership. Take ownership of all outcomes. If your superior gave you "bad orders", you should have challenged the orders or adapted them better to the situation; if your subordinates failed to carry out a task, then it is your own instructions to them that were insufficient. If the failure is entirely your own, admit your mistake and humbly open yourself to feedback. By taking on this attitude you become a better leader and through modeling you promote greater ownership throughout your organization. I don't think I have to point out the similarities between this and "Heroic Morality" we talk about around here.
- Mental toughness and discipline. Jocko's language around this topic is particularly refreshing, speaking as someone who has spent too much time around "self help" literature, in which I would partly include Less Wrong. His ideas are not particularly new, but it is valuable to have an example of somebody who reliably executes on his the philosophy of "Decide to do it, then do it." If you find that you didn't do it, then you didn't truly decide to do it. In any case, your own choice or lack thereof is the only factor. "Discipline is freedom." If you adopt this habit as your reality, it become true.
- Decentralized command. This refers specifically to his leadership philosophy. Every subordinate needs to truly understand the leader's intent in order to execute instructions in a creative and adaptable way. Individuals within a structure need to understand the high-level goals well enough to be able to act in a almost all situations without consulting their superiors. This tightens the OODA loop on an organizational level.
- Leadership as manipulation. Perhaps the greatest surprise to me was the subtlety of Jocko's thinking about leadership, probably because I brought in many erroneous assumptions about the nature of a SEAL commander. Jocko talks constantly about using self-awareness, detachment from one's ideas, control of one's own emotions, awareness of how one is perceived, and perspective-taking of one's subordinates and superiors. He comes off more as HPMOR!Quirrell than as a "drill sergeant".
The Q&A sessions, in which he answers questions asked by his fans on Twitter, tend to be very valuable. It's one thing to read the bullet points above, nod your head and say, "That sounds good." It's another to have Jocko walk through the tactical implementation of this ideas in a wide variety of daily situations, ranging from parenting difficulties to office misunderstandings.
For a taste of Jocko, maybe start with his appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast or the Sam Harris podcast.
Update to the list of apps that are useful to me
on the 22 August 2015, I wrote an apps list of useful apps, in the comments were a number of suggestions which I immediately tried. This is an update. Original can be found at this link:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mnm/a_list_of_apps_that_are_useful_to_me_and_other/
I rewrite the whole list below.
But first - my recommended list in short:
- Get an external battery block (and own more than enough spare power cables)
- Wunderlist
- Ingress
- How are you feeling?
- Alarm clock plus
- Twilight
- Business calendar
- Clipper
- Rain alarm
- Data monitor
- Rescuetime
- Powercalc
- Es File viewer
- WheresmyDroid?
- Google Docs/sheets etc.
- (possibly pushbullet and DTG GTD but I have not had them for long enough)
New:
Timestamp Widget. - on clicking to open it - it logs a timestamp. Can include notes too.
Wunderlist - Recommend it - for shared shopping lists, or any kind of list of things to do. It's not perfect but it works.
T2 mood tracker - as a second backup to my other mood tracker. This one takes more effort to do so I only enter the data every few days. YMMV it might be useful to you.
HOVBX - an overlay for google hangouts that sits on top of the call buttons so you don't accidentally call people (useful for groups who butt-dial each other)
Fleksy - A different keyboard - it seems faster but I am used to swiftkey so I don't use this one.
Tagtime - useful to try. reminds you hourly or so to tag what you are currently working on. I used it for a while to help keep me on track. I noticed I was significantly off track and eventually stopped using it because I felt bad about it. I feel like I spend more time on-task now but because I want to. This was a step in the journey of deciding to do that.
Alarm clock plus - it's the best alarm clock app. I don't use alarms often but this one does everything.
Squats/Push ups/sit ups/pull ups - Rittr labs - good at a simple exercise routine. Just tells you what to do. designed to get you from zero to "up to N" of an exercise (250 or 100) so gives you instruction on how many to do each day. Worth trying. Didn't work for me, but for other reasons about my lifestyle.
Twilight - mentioned above, replaces night mode and does what f.lux with a PC (filters to be less blue at night)
World clock - started talking to people in different time zones and this was handy.
CPU-Z - lists out all the phone's sensors and tells you their outputs. cool for looking at gyroscopes/accelerometers.
Coffee meets bagel - dating app. One profile per day, accept/reject. Has a different feel to tinder
Bumble - US only; Like Tinder but the girl has to message you first or the connection disappears.
Business Calendar - Best calendar I have found so far
Clipper - Clipboard app for holding the last 20 or so things you have copied. Also for showing you what's currently on the "copy"
Pixlr - photo editor. It's a good one, don't use it often
Rain Alarm - Very good app. Tells you if it's raining anywhere nearby. Can be enough to tell you "I should walk home sooner" but also just interesting to have a bit more awareness of your environment.
Audio Scope - Cool science app for viewing the audio scope
Spectrum analyze - Cool science app for viewing the audio spectrum
Frequensee - Fun science app for viewing audio spectrum data
PitchLab lite - Neat for understanding pitch when singing or listening to musical notes. Another science-visualisation app
Spectralview analyser - another spectrum analyser
Pulsepoint AED - Initiative to gather a public map of all AED's worldwide. To help; get the app and check the details of nearby AED's
FBreader - Ebook reader. Pretty good, can control brightness and font size.
KIK - Social app like whatsapp/viber etc. Don't use it yet, got it on a recommendation.
Wildwilderness - Reporting app for if you see suspicious wildlife trade going on anywhere in the world. Can report anonymously, any details help.
DGT GTD - Newly suggested by LW, have not tried to use it yet
Pushbullet - Syncs phone notifications with your PC so you can access things via PC.
I have noticed I often wish "Damn I wish someone had made an app for that" and when I search for it I can't find it. Then I outsource the search to facebook or other people; and they can usually say - yes, its called X. Which I can put down to an inability to know how to search for an app on my part; more than anything else.
With that in mind; I wanted to solve the problem of finding apps for other people.
The following is a list of apps that I find useful (and use often) for productive reasons:
The environment
This list is long. The most valuable ones are the top section that I use regularly.
Other things to mention:
Internal storage - I have a large internal memory card because I knew I would need lots of space. So I played the "out of sight out of mind game" and tried to give myself as much space as possible by buying a large internal card. The future of phones is to not use a microSD card and just use internal storage. I was taking 1000 photos a month, and since having storage troubles and my phone slowing down I don't take nearly even 1 photo a day. I would like to change that and will probably make it a future bug of mine to solve.
Battery - I use anker external battery blocks to save myself the trouble of worrying about batteries. If prepared I leave my house with 2 days of phone charge (of 100% use). I used to count "wins" of days I beat my phone battery (stay awake longer than it) but they are few and far between. Also I doubled my external battery power and it sits at two days not one (28000mA + 2*460ma spare phone batteries) This is still true but those batteries don't do what they used to. Anker have excellent service and refunded the battery that did not stay strong. I would recommend to all phone users to have a power block. Phones just are not made with enough battery.
Phone - I have a Samsung S4 (android Running KitKat) because it has a few features I found useful that were not found in many other phones - Cheap, Removable battery, external storage card, replaceable case. I am now on lolipop, and have made use of the external antenna port for a particularly bad low-signal location.
Screen cover - I am using the one that came with the phone still Still
I carry a spare phone case, in the beginning I used to go through one each month; now I have a harder case than before it hasn't broken. I change phone case colours for aesthetics every few months.
I also have swapped out the plastic frame that holds the phone case on as these broke, it was a few dollars on ebay and I needed a teeny screwdriver but other than that it works great now!
MicroUSB cables - I went through a lot of effort to sort this out, it's still not sorted, but its "okay for now". The advice I have - buy several good cables (read online reviews about it), test them wherever possible, and realise that they die. Also carry a spare or two. I have now spent far too much time on this problem. I am at the end of my phone's life and the MicroUSB port is dying, I have replaced it with a new one which is also not great, and I now leave my phone plugged into it's microUSB cable. I now use Anker brand cabled which are excellent, but my phone still kills one every few weeks. The whole idea of the MicroUSB plug is awful. They don't work very well at all.
Restart - I restart my phone probably most days when it gets slow. It's got programming bugs, but this solution works for now.
The overlays
These sit on my screen all the time.
Data monitor - Gives an overview of bits per second upload or download. updated every second. ✓
CpuTemp - Gives an overlay of the current core temperature. My phone is always hot, I run it hard with bluetooth, GPS and wifi blaring all the time. I also have a lot of active apps. ✓
M̶i̶n̶d̶f̶u̶l̶n̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶-̶ ̶M̶y̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶l̶f̶ ̶h̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶m̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶c̶k̶,̶ ̶"̶A̶m̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶-̶v̶a̶l̶u̶e̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶?̶"̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶i̶m̶e̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶p̶s̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶d̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶c̶r̶a̶p̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶.̶ Wow that didn't last. It was so annoying that I stopped using it.
Facebook chat heads - I often have them open, they have memory leaks and start slowing down my phone after a while, I close and reopen them when I care enough.✓ memory leaks improved but are still there.
The normals:
Facebook - communicate with people. I do this a lot.✓
Inkpad - its a note-taking app, but not an exceptionally great one; open to a better suggestion.✓
Ingress - it makes me walk; it gave me friends; it put me in a community. Downside is that it takes up more time than you want to give it. It's a mobile GPS game. Join the Resistance. Highly recommend
Maps (google maps) - I use this most days; mostly for traffic assistance to places that I know how to get to.✓
Camera - I take about 1000 photos a month. Generic phone-app one. I take significantly less photos now, my phone slowed down so the activation energy for *open the camera* is higher. I plan to try to fix this soon
Assistive light - Generic torch app (widget) I use this daily.✓
Hello - SMS app. I don't like it but its marginally better than the native one.✓
S̶u̶n̶r̶i̶s̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶e̶n̶d̶a̶r̶ ̶-̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶a̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶e̶n̶d̶a̶r̶;̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶e̶n̶d̶a̶r̶.̶ ̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶b̶a̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶u̶n̶d̶.̶ ̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶"̶f̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ ̶s̶y̶n̶c̶"̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶h̶e̶l̶p̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶e̶n̶t̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶r̶a̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶l̶i̶f̶e̶.̶
Business Calendar - works better, has a better interface than Sunrise.
Phone, address book, chrome browser.✓ I use tab sync, and recommend it for all your chrome-enabled devices.
GPS logger - I have a log of my current gps location every 5 minutes. If google tracks me I might as well track myself. I don't use this data yet but its free for me to track; so if I can find a use for the historic data that will be a win. I don't make use of this data and can access my google data just fine so I might stop tracking this.
Quantified apps:
Fit - google fit; here for multiple redundancy✓
S Health - Samsung health - here for multiple redundancy✓
Fitbit - I wear a flex step tracker every day, and input my weight daily manually through this app✓
Basis - I wear a B1 watch, and track my sleep like a hawk.✓
Rescuetime - I track my hours on technology and wish it would give a better breakdown. (I also paid for their premium service)✓
Voice recorder - generic phone app; I record around 1-2 hours of things I do per week. Would like to increase that. I now use this for one hour a month or less.
Narrative - I recently acquired a life-logging device called a narrative, and don't really know how to best use the data it gives. But its a start. I tried using the device but it has poor battery life. I also received negative feedback when wearing it in casual settings. This increases the activation energy to using it. I also can't seem to wear it at the right height and would regularly take photos of the tops of people's heads. I would come home with a photo a minute for a day (and have the battery die on it a few times) and have one use-able photo in the lot. significantly lower than I was expecting.
How are you feeling? - Mood tracking app - this one is broken but the best one I have found, it doesn't seem to open itself after a phone restart; so it won't remind you to enter in a current mood. I use a widget so that I can enter in the mood quickly. The best parts of this app are the way it lets you zoom out, and having a 10 point scale. I used to write a quick sentence about what I was feeling, but that took too much time so I stopped doing it. Highly recommend I use this every day.
Stopwatch - "hybrid stopwatch" - about once a week I time something and my phone didn't have a native one. This app is good at being a stopwatch.✓
Callinspector - tracks ingoing or outgoing calls and gives summaries of things like, who you most frequently call, how much data you use, etc. can also set data limits. I dont do anything with this data so I think I will stop using it and save my phone's battery life.
Misc
Powercalc - the best calculator app I could find ✓
N̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶e̶ ̶-̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶s̶a̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶(̶i̶t̶ ̶d̶i̶m̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶e̶e̶n̶)̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶t̶e̶n̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶.̶ ̶ ̶I̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶d̶i̶m̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶l̶u̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶e̶m̶i̶t̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶e̶e̶n̶;̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶g̶a̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶s̶l̶e̶e̶p̶ ̶e̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶s̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶r̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶i̶t̶.̶ ̶
Advanced signal status - about once a month I am in a place with low phone signal - this one makes me feel better about knowing more details of what that means.✓
Ebay - To be able to buy those $5 solutions to problems on the spot is probably worth more than $5 of "impulse purchases" that they might be classified as.✓
C̶a̶l̶ ̶-̶ ̶a̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶e̶n̶d̶a̶r̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶i̶m̶e̶s̶ ̶c̶a̶t̶c̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶s̶s̶e̶s̶.̶ Nope just using business calendar now.
ES file explorer - for searching the guts of my phone for files that are annoying to find. Not as used or as useful as I thought it would be but still useful.✓
Maps.Me - I went on an exploring adventure to places without signal; so I needed an offline mapping system. This map saved my life.✓ Have not used this since then, but I will not delete it.
Wikipedia - information lookup✓
Youtube - don't use it often, but its there.✓
How are you feeling? (again) - I have this in multiple places to make it as easy as possible for me to enter in this data✓
Play store - Makes it easy to find.✓
Gallery - I take a lot of photos, but this is the native gallery and I could use a better app.✓
Social
In no particular order;
F̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ ̶g̶r̶o̶u̶p̶s̶ was so annoying I got rid of it, Yahoo Mail, Skype, Facebook Messenger chat heads, Whatsapp, meetup, google+, Hangouts, Slack, Viber, OKcupid, Gmail, Tinder, Chatango, CoffeeMeetsBagel, Signal. Of which I use very little.
They do social things.
I don't really use: Viber, OKC, Gmail, Tinder, Chatango, CMB, Signal, whatsapp, G+.
I use: Slack, Facebook messenger, yahoo mail every day.
Not used:
(ticks here mean they are still in this category and are not used)
Trello✓
Workflowy✓
pocketbook✓
snapchat Deleted.
AnkiDroid - Anki memoriser app for a phone. ✓
MyFitnessPal - looks like a really good app, have not used it ✓
Fitocracy - looked good✓
I got these apps for a reason; but don't use them.
Not on my front pages:
These I don't use as often; or have not moved to my front pages (skipping the ones I didn't install or don't use)
S memo - samsung note taking thing, I rarely use, but do use once a month or so.✓
Drive, Docs, Sheets - The google package. Its terrible to interact with documents on your phone, but I still sometimes access things from my phone.✓Useful for viewing, not effective for editing.
bubble - I don't think I have ever used this Deleted
Compass pro - gives extra details about direction. I never use it.Deleted
(ingress apps) Glypher, Agentstats, integrated timer, cram, notify Don't use them, but still there
TripView (public transport app for my city) Deleted
Convertpad - converts numbers to other numbers. Sometimes quicker than a google search.✓
ABC Iview - National TV broadcasting channel app. Every program on this channel is uploaded to this app, I have used it once to watch a documentary since I got the app. Deleted
AnkiDroid - I don't need to memorise information in the way it is intended to be used; so I don't use it. Cram is also a flashcard app but I don't use it. Not used
First aid - I know my first aid but I have it anyway for the marginal loss of 50mb of space. Still haven't used it once.
Triangle scanner - I can scan details from NFC chips sometimes. Still haven't used it once.
MX player - does videos better than native apps. Rarely used
Zarchiver - Iunno. Does something. Rarely used
Pandora - Never used Deleted
Soundcloud - used once every two months, some of my friends post music online. Deleted - They have a web interface.
Barcode scanner - never used
Diskusage - Very useful. Visualises where data is being taken up on your phone, helps when trying to free up space.✓
Swiftkey - Better than native keyboards. Gives more freedom, I wanted a keyboard with black background and pale keys, swiftkey has it.✓
Google calendar - don't use it, but its there to try to use.✓
Sleepbot - doesn't seem to work with my phone, also I track with other methods, and I forget to turn it on; so its entirely not useful in my life for sleep tracking. Deleted
My service provider's app.
AdobeAcrobat - use often; not via the icon though. ✓
Wheresmydroid? - seems good to have; never used. My phone is attached to me too well for me to lose it often. I have it open most of the waking day maybe. ✓ I actually set this up and tested if it worked. It doesn't work from install, needs an account (which I now have) make sure you actually have an account
Uber - I don't use ubers. Deleted
Terminal emulator, AIDE, PdDroid party, Processing Android, An editor for processing, processing reference, learn C++ - programming apps for my phone, I don't use them, and I don't program much. Deleted some to make space on my phone.
Airbnb - Have not used yet, done a few searches for estimating prices of things. Deleted - Web interface better.
Heart rate - measures your heart rate using the camera/flash. Neat, not useful other than showing off to people how its possible to do. ✓
Basis - (B1 app), - has less info available than their new app. ✓
BPM counter - Neat if you care about what a "BPM" is for music. Don't use often. ✓
Sketch guru - fun to play with, draws things. ✓
DJ studio 5 - I did a dj thing for a friend once, used my phone. was good. ✓
Facebook calendar Sync - as the name says. ✓
Dual N-back - I Don't use it. I don't think it has value giving properties. Deleted
Awesome calendar - I don't use but it comes with good reccomendations. Deleted Use Business Calendar now.
Battery monitor 3 - Makes a graph of temperature and frequency of the cores. Useful to see a few times. Eventually its a bell curve. ✓
urbanspoon - local food places app. ✓use google mostly now.
Gumtree - Australian Ebay (also ebay owns it now) ✓
Printer app to go with my printer ✓
Car Roadside assistance app to go with my insurance ✓
Virgin air entertainment app - you can use your phone while on the plane and download entertainment from their in-flight system. ✓
Two things now;
What am I missing? Was this useful? Ask me to elaborate on any app and why I used it. If I get time I will do that anyway.
P.S. this took 1.5 hours to review and rewrite.
P.P.S - I was intending to make, keep and maintain a list of useful apps, that is not what this document is. If there are enough suggestions that it's time to make and keep a list; I will do that.
My table of contents links to my other writings
Purposeful Anti-Rush
Why do we rush?
Things happen; Life gets in the way, and suddenly we find ourselves trying to get to somewhere with less time than it's possible to actually get there in. So in the intention to get there sooner; to somehow compensate ourselves for not being on time; we rush. We run; we get clumsy, we drop things; we forget things; we make mistakes; we scribble instead of writing, we scramble and we slip up.
I am today telling you to stop that. Don't do that. It's literally the opposite of what you want to do. This is a bug I have.
Rushing has a tendency to do the opposite of what I want it to do. I rush with the key in the lock; I rush on slippery surfaces and I fall over, I rush with coins and I drop them. NO! BAD! Stop that. This is one of my bugs.
What you (or I) really want when we are rushing is to get there sooner, to get things done faster.
Instrumental experiment: Next time you are rushing I want you to experiment and pay attention; try to figure out what you end up doing that takes longer than it otherwise would if you weren't rushing.
The time after that when you are rushing; instead try slowing down, and this time observe to see if you get there faster.
Run as many experiments as you like.
Experimenter’s note: Maybe you are really good at rushing and really bad at slowing down. Maybe you don't need to try this. Maybe slowing down and being nervous about being late together are entirely unhelpful for you. Report back.
When you are rushing, purposefully slow down. (or at least try it)
Meta: Time to write 20mins
My Table of contents contains other things I have written.
Feedback welcome.
Study partner matching thread
Nate Soares recommends pairing up when studying, so I figured it would be useful to facilitate that.
If you are looking for a study partner, please post a top-level comment saying:
- What you want to study
- Your level of relevant background knowledge
- If you have sources in mind (MOOCs, textbooks, etc), what those are
- Your time zone
Proposal for increasing instrumental rationality value of the LessWrong community
There were some concerns here (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distraction_why_less/) regarding value of LessWrong community from the perspective of instrumental rationality.
In the discussion on the relevant topic I've seen the story about how community can help http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/2l73 from this perspective.
And I think It's a great thing that local community can help people in various ways to achieve their goals. Also it's not the first time I hear about how this kind of community is helpful as a way of achieving personal goals.
Local LessWrong meetups and communities are great, but they have kind of different focus. And a lot of people live in places where there are no local community or it's not active/regular.
So I propose to form small groups (4-8 people). Initially, groups would meet (using whatever means that are convenient for a particular group), discuss the goals of each participant in a long and in a short term (life/year/month/etc). They would collectively analyze proposed strategies for achieving these goals. Discuss how short term goals align with long term goals. And determine whether the particular tactics for achieving stated goal is optimal. And is there any way to improve on it?
Afterwards, the group would meet weekly to:
Set their short term goals, retrospect on the goals set for previous period. Discuss how successfully they were achieved, what problems people encountered and what alterations to overall strategy follows. And they will also analyze how newly set short-term goals coincide with long-term goals.
In this way, each member of the group would receive helpful feedback on his goals and on his approach to attaining them. And also he will fill accountable, in a way, for goals, he have stated before the group and this could be an additional boost to productivity.
I also expect that group would be helpful from the perspective of overcoming different kind of fallacies and gaining more accurate beliefs about the world. Because it's easier for people to spot errors in the beliefs/judgment of others. I hope that group's would be able to develop friendly environment and so it would be easier for people to get to know about their errors and change their mind. Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
Group will reflect on it's effectiveness and procedures every month(?) and will incrementally improve itself. Obviously if somebody have some great idea about group proceedings it makes sense to discuss it after usual meeting and implement it right away. But I think regular in-depth retrospective on internal workings is also important.
If there are several groups available - groups will be able to share insights, things group have learned during it's operation. (I'm not sure how much of this kind of insights would be generated, but maybe it would make sense to once in a while publish post that would sum up groups collective insights.)
There are some things that I'm not sure about:
- I think it would be worth to discuss possibility of shuffling group members (or at least exchanging members in some manner) once in a while to provide fresh insight on goals/problems that people are facing and make the flow of ideas between groups more agile.
- How the groups should be initially formed? Just random assignment or it's reasonable to devise some criteria? (Goals alignment/Diversity/Geography/etc?)
I think initial reglament of the group should be developed by the group, though I guess it's reasonable to discuss some general recommendations.
So what do you think?
If you interested - fill up this google form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1IsUQTp_6pGyNglBiPOGDuwdGTBOolAKfAfRrQloYN_o/viewform?usp=send_form
Instrumental Rationality Questions Thread
Previous thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mnq/instrumental_rationality_questions_thread/
This thread is for asking the rationalist community for practical advice. It's inspired by the stupid questions series, but with an explicit focus on instrumental rationality.
Questions ranging from easy ("this is probably trivial for half the people on this site") to hard ("maybe someone here has a good answer, but probably not") are welcome. However, please stick to problems that you actually face or anticipate facing soon, not hypotheticals.
As with the stupid questions thread, don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better, and please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
(See also the Boring Advice Repository)
Notes on Actually Trying
These ideas came out of a recent discussion on actually trying at Citadel, Boston's Less Wrong house.
What does "Actually Trying" mean?
Actually Trying means applying the combination of effort and optimization power needed to accomplish a difficult but feasible goal. The effort and optimization power are both necessary.
Failure Modes that can Resemble Actually Trying
Pretending to try
Pretending to try means doing things that superficially resemble actually trying but are missing a key piece. You could, for example, make a plan related to your goal and diligently carry it out but never stop to notice that the plan was optimized for convenience or sounding good or gaming a measurement rather than achieving the goal. Alternatively, you could have a truly great plan and put effort into carrying it out until it gets difficult.
Trying to Try
Trying to try is when you throw a lot of time and perhaps mental anguish at a task but not actually do the task. Writer's block is the classic example of this.
Sphexing
Sphexing is the act of carrying out a plan or behavior repeatedly despite it not working.
The Two Modes Model of Actually Trying
Actually Trying requires a combination of optimization power and effort, but each of those is done with a very different way of thinking, so it's helpful to do the two separately. In the first way of thinking, Optimizing Mode, you think hard about the problem you are trying to solve, develop a plan, look carefully at whether it's actually well-suited to solving the problem (as opposed to pretending to try) and perhaps Murphy-jitsu it. In Executing Mode, you carry out the plan.
Executing Mode breaks down when you reach an obstacle that you either don't know how to overcome or where the solution is something you don't want to do. In my personal experience, this is where things tend to get derailed. There are a few ways to respond to this situation:
- Return to Optimizing Mode to figure out how to overcome the obstacle / improve your plan (good),
- Ask for help / consult a relevant expert (good),
- Take a break, which could lead to a eureka moment, lead to Optimizing Mode or lead to derailing (ok),
- Sphex (bad),
- Derail / procrastinate (bad), or
- Punt / give up (ok if the obstacle is insurmountable).
The key is to respond constructively to obstacles. This usually means getting back to Optimizing Mode, either directly or after a break. The failure modes here are derailing immediately, a "break" that turns into a derailment, and sphexing. In our discussion, we shared a few techniques we had used to get back to Optimizing Mode. These techniques tended to focus on some combination of removing the temptation to derail, providing a reminder to optimize, and changing mental state.
Getting Back to Optimizing Mode
Context switches are often helpful here. Because for many people, work and procrastination both tend to be computer-based activities, it is both easy and tempting to switch to a time-wasting activity immediately upon hitting an obstacle. Stepping away from the computer takes away the immediate distraction and depending on what you do away from the computer, helps you either think about the problem or change your mental state. Depending on what sort of mood I'm in, I sometimes step away from the computer with a pen and paper to write down my thoughts (thinking about the problem), or I may step away to replenish my supply of water and/or caffeine (changing my mental state). Other people in the discussion said they found going for a walk or getting more strenuous exercise to be helpful when they needed a break. Strenuous exercise has the additional advantage of having very low risk of turning into a longer-than-intended break.
The danger with breaks is that they can turn into derailment. Open-ended breaks ("I'll just browse Reddit for five minutes") have a tendency to expand, so it's best to avoid them in favor of things with more definite endings. The other common say for breaks to turn into derailment is to return from a break and go to something non-productive. I have had some success with attaching a sticky-note to my monitor reminding me what to do when I return to my computer. I have also found that if the note makes clear what problem I need to solve also makes me less likely to sphex when I return to my computer.
In the week or so since the discussion that inspired this post, I have found that asking myself "what would Actually Trying look like right now?" This has helped me stay on track when I have encountered difficult problems at work.
Instrumental Rationality Questions Thread
This thread is for asking the rationalist community for practical advice. It's inspired by the stupid questions series, but with an explicit focus on instrumental rationality.
Questions ranging from easy ("this is probably trivial for half the people on this site") to hard ("maybe someone here has a good answer, but probably not") are welcome. However, please stick to problems that you actually face or anticipate facing soon, not hypotheticals.
As with the stupid questions thread, don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better, and please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
(See also the Boring Advice Repository)
Min/max goal factoring and belief mapping exercise
Edit 3: Removed description of previous edits and added the following:
This thread used to contain the description of a rationality exercise.
I have removed it and plan to rewrite it better.
I will repost it here, or delete this thread and repost in the discussion.
Thank you.
How to save (a lot of) money on flying
I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.
If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money. The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin. Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz. While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense). However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc). I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin). These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.
Relevant warnings by gwillen:
Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has. This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.
That is all.
[Link]How to Achieve Impossible Career Goals (My manifesto on instrumental rationality)
Hey guys,
Don't normally post from my blog to here, but the latest massive post on goal achievement in 2015 has a ton that would be relevant to people here.
Some things that I think would be of particular interest to LWers:
- The section called "Map the Path to Your Goal" has some really great stuff on planning that haven't seen many other places. I know planning gets a bad wrap here, but when combined with the "Contigency Plans" method near the bottom of the post, I've found this stuff to be killer for getting results for students.
- At the bottom, there's a section called "Choosing More Habits" that breaks down habits into the only five categories you should ever focus on. If you're planning to systematically take on new habits in 2015, this will help.
- The section called "a proactive mindset" has some fun mental reframes to play around with.
Is arguing worth it? If so, when and when not? Also, how do I become less arrogant?
I've had several political arguments about That Which Must Not Be Named in the past few days with people of a wide variety of... strong opinions. I'm rather doubtful I've changed anyone's mind about anything, but I've spent a lot of time trying to do so. I also seem to have offended one person I know rather severely. Also, even if I have managed to change someone's mind about something through argument, it feels as though someone will end up having to argue with them later down the line when the next controversy happens.
It's very discouraging to feel this way. It is frustrating when making an argument is taken as a reason for personal attack. And it's annoying to me to feel like I'm being forced into something by the disapproval of others. I'm tempted to just retreat from democratic engagement entirely. But there are disadvantages to this, for example it makes it easier to maintain irrational beliefs if you never talk to people who disagree with you.
I think a big part of the problem is that I have an irrational alief that makes me feel like my opinions are uniquely valuable and important to share with others. I do think I'm smarter, more moderate, and more creative than most. But the feeling's magnitude and influence over my behavior is far greater than what's justified by the facts.
How do I destroy this feeling? Indulging it satisfies some competitive urges of mine and boosts my self-esteem. But I think it's bad overall despite this, because it makes evaluating the social consequences of my choices more difficult. It's like a small addiction, and I have no idea how to get over it.
Does anyone else here have an opinion on any of this? Advice from your own lives, perhaps?
Things to consider when optimizing: Commuting, Transportation
Previous topics:
[This is] a series of discussion posts, where each post is of the form "Let's brainstorm things you might consider when optimizing X", where X is something like sleep, exercise, commuting, studying, etc. Think of it like a specialized repository.
In the spirit of try more things, the direct benefit is to provide insights like "Oh, I never realized that BLAH is a knob I can fiddle. This gives me an idea of how I might change BLAH given my particular circumstances. I will try this and see what happens!"
The indirect benefit is to practice instrumental rationality using the "toy problem" provided by a general prompt.
Accordingly, participation could be in many forms:
* Pointers to scientific research
* General directions to consider
* Personal experience
* Boring advice
* Intersections with other community ideas, biases
* Cost-benefit, value-of-information analysis
* Related questions
* Other musings, thoughts, speculation, links, theories, etc.
This post is on commuting and transportation.
Things to consider when optimizing: Sleep
I'd like to have a series of discussion posts, where each post is of the form "Let's brainstorm things you might consider when optimizing X", where X is something like sleep, exercise, commuting, studying, etc. Think of it like a specialized repository.
In the spirit of try more things, the direct benefit is to provide insights like "Oh, I never realized that BLAH is a knob I can fiddle. This gives me an idea of how I might change BLAH given my particular circumstances. I will try this and see what happens!"
The indirect benefit is to practice instrumental rationality using the "toy problem" provided by a general prompt.
Accordingly, participation could be in many forms:
* Pointers to scientific research
* General directions to consider
* Personal experience
* Boring advice
* Intersections with other community ideas, biases
* Cost-benefit, value-of-information analysis
* Related questions
* Other musings, thoughts, speculation, links, theories, etc.
This post is on sleep and circadian rhythms.
Talking to yourself: A useful thinking tool that seems understudied and underdiscussed
I have returned from a particularly fruitful Google search, with unexpected results.
My question was simple. I was pretty sure that talking to myself aloud makes me temporarily better at solving problems that need a lot of working memory. It is a thinking tool that I find to be of great value, and that I imagine would be of interest to anyone who'd like to optimize their problem solving. I just wanted to collect some evidence on that, make sure I'm not deluding myself, and possibly learn how to enhance the effect.
This might be just lousy Googling on my part, but the evidence is surprisingly unclear and disorganized. There are at least three seperate Wiki pages for it. They don't link to each other. Instead they present the distinct models of three seperate fields: autocommunication in communication studies, semiotics and other cultural studies, intrapersonal communication ("self-talk" redirects here) in anthropology and (older) psychology and private speech in developmental psychology. The first is useless for my purpose, the second mentions "may increase concentration and retention" with no source, the third confirms my suspicion that this behavior boosts memory, motivation and creativity, but it only talks about children.
Google Scholar yields lots of sports-related results for "self-talk" because it can apparently improve the performance of athletes and if there's something that obviously needs the optimization power of psychology departments, it is competitive sports. For "intrapersonal communication" it has papers indicating it helps in language acquisition and in dealing with social anxiety. Both are dwarfed by the results for "private speech", which again focus on children. There's very little on "autocommunication" and what is there has nothing to do with the functioning of individual minds.
So there's a bunch of converging pieces of evidence supporting the usefulness of this behavior, but they're from several seperate fields that don't seem to have noticed each other very much. How often do you find that?
Let me quickly list a few ways that I find it plausible to imagine talking to yourself could enhance rational thought.
- It taps the phonological loop, a distinct part of working memory that might otherwise sit idle in non-auditory tasks. More memory is always better, right?
- Auditory information is retained more easily, so making thoughts auditory helps remember them later.
- It lets you commit to thoughts, and build upon them, in a way that is more powerful (and slower) than unspoken thought while less powerful (but quicker) than action. (I don't have a good online source for this one, but Inside Jokes should convince you, and has lots of new cognitive science to boot.)
- System 1 does seem to understand language, especially if it does not use complex grammar - so this might be a useful way for results of System 2 reasoning to be propagated. Compare affirmations. Anecdotally, whenever I'm starting a complex task, I find stating my intent out loud makes a huge difference in how well the various submodules of my mind cooperate.
- It lets separate parts of your mind communicate in a fairly natural fashion, slows each of them down to the speed of your tongue and makes them not interrupt each other so much. (This is being used as a psychotherapy method.) In effect, your mouth becomes a kind of talking stick in their discussion.
All told, if you're talking to yourself you should be more able to solve complex problems than somebody of your IQ who doesn't, although somebody of your IQ with a pen and a piece of paper should still outthink both of you.
Given all that, I'm surprised this doesn't appear to have been discussed on LessWrong. Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth comes close but goes past it. Again, this might be me failing to use a search engine, but I think this is worth more of our attention that it has gotten so far.
I'm now almost certain talking to myself is useful, and I already find hindsight bias trying to convince me I've always been so sure. But I wasn't - I was suspicious because talking to yourself is an early warning sign of schizophrenia, and is frequent in dementia. But in those cases, it might simply be an autoregulatory response to failing working memory, not a pathogenetic element. After all, its memory enhancing effect is what the developmental psychologists say the kids use it for. I do expect social stigma, which is why I avoid talking to myself when around uninvolved or unsympathetic people, but my solving of complex problems tends to happen away from those anyway so that hasn't been an issue really.
So, what do you think? Useful?
What resources have increasing marginal utility?
Most resources you might think to amass have decreasing marginal utility: for example, a marginal extra $1,000 means much more to you if you have $0 than if you have $100,000. That means you can safely apply the 80-20 rule to most resources: you only need to get some of the resource to get most of the benefits of having it.
At the most recent CFAR workshop, Val dedicated a class to arguing that one resource in particular has increasing marginal utility, namely attention. Initially, efforts to free up your attention have little effect: the difference between juggling 10 things and 9 things is pretty small. But once you've freed up most of your attention, the effect is larger: the difference between juggling 2 things and 1 thing is huge. Val also argued that because of this funny property of attention, most people likely undervalue the value of freeing up attention by orders of magnitude.
During a conversation later in the workshop I suggested another resource that might have increasing marginal utility, namely trust. A society where people abide by contracts 80% of the time is not 80% as good as a society where people abide by contracts 100% of the time; most of the societal value of trust (e.g. decreasing transaction costs) doesn't seem to manifest until people are pretty close to 100% trustworthy. The analogous way to undervalue trust is to argue that e.g. cheating on your spouse is not so bad, because only one person gets hurt. But cheating on spouses in general undermines the trust that spouses should have in each other, and the cumulative impact of even 1% of spouses cheating on the institution of marriage as a whole could be quite negative. (Lots of things about the world make more sense from this perspective: for example, it seems like one of the main practical benefits of religion is that it fosters trust.)
What other resources have increasing marginal utility? How undervalued are they?
Decision Auctions aka "How to fairly assign chores, or decide who gets the last cookie"
After moving in with my new roomies (Danny and Bethany of Beeminder), I discovered they have a fair and useful way of auctioning off joint decisions. It helps you figure out how much you value certain chores or activities, and it guarantees that these decisions are worked out in a fair way. They call it "yootling", and wrote more about it here.
A quick example (Note: this only works if all participants are of the types of people who consider this sort of thing a Good Idea, and not A Grotesque Parody of Caring or whatnot):
Use Case: Who Picks up the Kids from Grandma's?
D and B are both busy working, but it's time to pick up the kids from their grandparents house. They decide to yootle for it.
B bids $100 (In a regular Normal Person exchange, this would be like saying "I'm elbows deep in code right now, and don't want to break flow. I'd really rather continue working right now, but of course I'll go if it's needed.")
D bids $15 (In a regular Normal Person exchange this would be like saying "I don't mind too much, though I do have other things to do now...")
So D "wins" the bid, and B pays him $15 to go get the kids from their grandma's.
Of course.... it would be a pain in the butt to constantly be paying each other, so instead they have a 10% chance of paying 10x the amount, and a 90% chance to pay nothing, using a random number generator.
This is made easier by the fact that we have a bot to run this, but before that they would use the high-tech solution of Holding Up Fingers.
We may do this multiple times per day, whenever there’s a good that we have shared ownership of and one of us wants to offload their shares onto the other person. The goods can be anything, e.g. the last brownie, but they’re more often “bads” like who will get up in the middle of the night with a vomiting child, or who will book plane tickets for a trip.We find this an elegant means of assigning loathed tasks. The person who minded least winds up doing the chore, but gets compensated for it at a price that by their own estimation was fair.
Joint purchase auctionThe decision auction and variants are about allocating shared or partially shared resources to one person or the other, or picking one person to do something. Once in a while you have the opposite problem: deciding on a joint purchase.Suppose Danny thinks we need a new sofa (this is very hypothetical). I think the one we have is just fine thank you. After some discussion I concede that it would be nice to have a sofa that was less doggy. Danny, being terribly excited about getting a new sofa does a bunch of research and finds his ideal sofa. I think it is a bit overpriced considering it is going to be a piece of gymnastics equipment for the kids for the next 6 years. Conflict ensues! I could bluff that I’m not interested in a new sofa at all and that he can buy it himself if he wants it that badly. But he probably doesn’t want it that bad, and I do want it a little. If only we could buy the sofa conditional on our combined utility for it exceeding the cost, and pay in proportion to our utilities to boot. Well, thanks to separate finances and the magic of mechanism design, we can! We submit sealed bids for the sofa and buy it if the sum of our bids is enough. (And, importantly, commit to not buying it for at least a year otherwise.) Any surplus is redistributed in proportion to our bids. For example, if Danny bid $80 and I bid $40 to buy a hundred dollar sofa, then we’d buy it, with Danny chipping in twice as much as me, namely $67 to my $33.
Generosity without sacrificing social efficiency“The payments are simply what keep us honest in assessing that.”If you’re thinking “how mercenary all this is!” then, well, I’m unclear how you made it this far into this post. But it’s not nearly as cold as it may sound. We do nice things for each other all the time, and frequently use yootling to make sure it’s socially efficient to do so. Suppose I invite Danny to a sing-along showing of Once More With Feeling (this may or may not be hypothetical) and Danny doesn’t exactly want to go but can see that I have value for his company. He might (quite non-hypothetically) say “I’ll half-accompany you!” by which he means that he’ll yootle me for whether he goes or not. In other words, he magnanimously decides to treat his joining me as a 50/50 joint decision. If I have greater value for him coming than he has for not coming, then I’ll pay him to come. But if it’s the other way around, he will pay me to let him off the hook. We don’t actually care much about the payments, though those are necessary for the auction to work. We care about making sure that he comes to the Buffy sing-along if and only if my value for his company exceeds his value for staying home. The payments are simply what keep us honest in assessing that. The increased fairness — the winner sharing their utility with the loser — is icing.
Try more things.
(Cross-posted from my personal site.)
Several months ago I began a list of "things to try," which I share at the bottom of this post. It suggests many mundane, trivial-to-medium-cost changes to lifestyle and routine. Now that I've spent some time with most of them and pursued at least as many more personal items in the same spirit, I'll suggest you do something similar. Why?
- Raise the temperature in your optimization algorithm: avoid the trap of doing too much analysis on too little data and escape local optima.
- You can think of this as a system for self-improvement; something that operates on a meta level, unlike an object-level goal or technique; something that helps you fail at almost everything but still win big.
- Variety of experience is an intrinsic pleasure to many, and it may make you feel less that time has flown as you look back on your life.
- Practice implementing small life changes, practice observing the effects of the changes, practice noticing further opportunities for changes, practice value of information calculations, and reinforce your self-image as an empiricist working to improve your life. Build small skills in the right order and you'll have better chances at bigger wins in the future.
- Advice often falls prey to the typical-mind (or typical-body) fallacy. That doesn't mean you should dismiss it out of hand. Think about not just how likely it is to work for you, but how beneficial it would be if it worked, how much it would cost to try, and how likely it is that trying it would give you enough information to change your behavior. Then just try it anyway if it's cheap enough, because you forgot to account for uncertainty in your model inputs.
- Speaking of value of information: don't ignore tweakable variables just because you don't yet have a gwern-tier tracking and evaluation apparatus for the perfect self-experiment. Sometimes you can expect consciously noticeable non-placebo effects from a successful trial. You might do better picking the low hanging fruit to gain momentum before you invest in a Zeo and a statistics textbook.
- You know what, if there's an effect, it may not even need to be non-placebo. C.f. "Lampshading," as well as the often-observed "honeymoon" period of success with new productivity systems.
- It's very tempting, especially in certain communities, to focus exclusively on shiny, counterintuitive, "rational," tech-based, hackeresque, or otherwise clever interventions and grand personal development schemes. Some of these are even good, but one suspects that some are optimized for punchiness, not effectiveness. Conversely, mundane ideas may not propagate as well, despite being potentially equally or more likely to succeed.
- If you were already convinced of all of the above, then great! I hope you have the agency to try stuff like this all the time. If not, you might find it useful, as I did, just to have a list like this available. It's one less trivial inconvenience between thinking "I should try more things" and actually trying something. I've also found that I'm more likely to notice and remember optimization opportunities now that I have a place to capture them. And having spent the time to write them down and occasionally look over them, I'm more likely to notice when I'm in a position to enact something context-dependent on the list.
I removed the terribly personal items from my list, but what remains is still somewhat tailored to my own situation and habits. These are not recommendations; they are just things that struck me as having enough potential value to try for a week or two. The list isn't not remotely comprehensive, even as far as mundane self-experiments are concerned, but it's left as an exercise to the reader to find and fill the gaps. Take this list as an example or as a starting point, and brainstorm ideas of your own in the comments. The usual recommendation applies against going overboard in domains where you're currently impulsive or unreflective.
Related posts: Boring Advice Repository, Break your habits: Be more empirical, On saying the obvious, Value of Information: Four Examples, Spend money on ergonomics, Go try things, Don't fear failure, Just try it: Quantity trumps quality, No, seriously, just try it, etc.
Confidence In Opinions, Intensity In Opinion
On a scale of 1 to 100, how sure are you?
It's a good thing to ask yourself from time to time about intense beliefs, especially if you're having a disagreement with someone else smart.
Just putting a number on something is good. If you're in business, putting any number in the high 90's is dangerous and shouldn't happen too often.
Yet, you still have to aggressively and intensely pursue your plans.
You can be only 80% sure you're correct, and still intensely pursue a course of action.
Most people make a mistake: they only go intensely after things they have a very high certainty will work.
But this is backwards. It's absolutely right to say "I'm only 80% sure that going and making a great talk to this group will help develop my business," and to still aggressively pursue giving a great talk.
The same is true with having ridiculously exceptionally good service. You can say, "I'm only 60% sure that doing this is going to lead to more customer loyalty... this might just be a time sink and cost more than it returns. But let's kill it on it, and find it."
You don't need to be highly confident to intensely pursue something.
In fact, intensely pursuing not-certain things seems to be how the world develops.
New Monthly Thread: Bragging
In an attempt to encourage more people to actually do awesome things (a la instrumental rationality), I am proposing a new monthly thread (can be changed to bi-weekly, should that be demanded). Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of you self as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.
Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread.This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesomest thing they've done all month. not will do. not are working on. have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.
So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?
Effective Rationality Training Online
Article Prerequisite: Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality
Introduction
The goal of this post is to explore the idea of rationality training, feedback and ideas are greatly appreciated.
Less Wrong’s stated mission is to help people become more rational, and it has made progress toward that goal. Members read and discuss useful ideas on the internet, get instant feedback because of the voting system, and schedule meetups with other members. Less Wrong also helps attract more people to rationality.
Less Wrong helps with sharing ideas, but it fails to help people put elements of epistemic and instrumental rationality into practice. This is a serious problem, but it would be hard to fix without altering the core functionality of Less Wrong.
Having separate websites for reading and discussing ideas and then actually using those ideas would improve the real world performance of the Less Wrong community while maintaining the idea discussion, “marketing”, and other benefits of the Less Wrong website.
How to create a useful website for self improvement
1. Knowledge Management
When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised. A wiki would allow for the creation of a large body of organized knowledge that is frequently revised. Each wiki post would have a description, benefits of the topic described, resources to learn the topic, user submitted resources to learn the topic, and reviews of each resource. Posts would be organized hierarchically and voted on for usefulness to help readers effectively improve what they are looking for. Users could share self-improvement plans to help others improve effectiveness in general or in a specific topic as quickly as possible.
2. Effective Learning
Resources to learn topics should be arranged or written for effective skill acquisition, and there may be different resource categories like exercises for deliberate practice or active recall questions for spaced repetition.
3. Quality Contributors
Contributors would, at the very least, need to be familiar with how to write articles that supported the skill acquisition process agreed upon by the entire community. Required writing and research skills would produce higher quality work. I am not sure if being a rationalist would improve the quality of articles.
Problems
1. Difficult requirements
The number of prerequisites necessary to contribute to and use the wiki would really lower the amount of people who will be able to benefit from the wiki. It's a trade off between effectiveness and popularity. What elements should be included to maximize the effectiveness of the website?
2. Interest
There has to be enough interest in the website, or else a different project should be started instead. How many people in the Less Wrong community, and the world at large, would be interested in self improvement and rationality?
3. Increasing the effectiveness of non altruistic people
How much of the target audience wants to improve the world? If most do not, then the wiki would essentially be a net negative on the world. What should the criteria be to view and contribute to the wiki? Perhaps only Less Wrong members should be able to view and edit the wiki, and contributors must read a quick start guide and pass a quick test before being allowed to post.
Useful Questions Repository
See also: Boring Advice Repository, Solved Problems Repository, Grad Student Advice Repository, Useful Concepts Repository, Bad Concepts Repository
I just got back from the July CFAR workshop, where I was a guest instructor. One useful piece of rationality I started paying more attention to as a result of the workshop is the idea of useful questions to ask in various situations, particularly because I had been introduced to a new one:
"What skill am I actually training?"
This is a question that can be asked whenever you're practicing something, but more generally it can also be asked whenever you're doing something you do frequently, and it can help you notice when you're practicing a skill you weren't intending to train. Some examples of when to use this question:
- You practice a piece of music so quickly that you consistently make mistakes. What skill are you actually training? How to play with mistakes.
- You teach students math by putting them in a classroom and having them take notes while a lecturer talks about math. What skill are you actually training? How to take notes.
- A personal example: at the workshop, I noticed that I was more apprehensive about the idea of singing in public than I had previously thought I was. After walking outside and actually singing in public for a little, I had a hypothesis about why: for the past several years, I've been singing in public when I don't think anyone is around but stopping when I saw people because I didn't want to bother them. What skill was I actually training by doing that? How to not sing around people.
Many of the lessons of the sequences can also be packaged as useful questions, like "what do I believe and why do I believe it?" and "what would I expect to see if this were true?"
I'd like to invite people to post other examples of useful questions in the comments, hopefully together with an explanation of why they're useful and some examples of when to use them. As usual, one useful question per comment for voting purposes.
Instrumental rationality/self help resources
I took part in a recent discussion in the current Open Thread about how instrumental rationality is under-emphasized on this website. I've heard other people say similar things, and I am inclined to agree. Someone suggested that there should be a "Instrumental Rationality Books" thread, similar to the "best textbooks on every subject" thread. I thought this sounded like a good idea.
The title is "resources" because in addition to books, you can post self-help websites, online videos, whatever.
The decorum for this thread will be as follows:
- One resource per comment
- Place your comment in the appropriate category
- Only post resources you've actually used. Write a short review of your resource and if possible, a short summary of the key points. Say whether or not you would recommend the resource.
- Mention approximately how long it's been since you first used the resource and whether or not you have made external improvements in the subject area. On the other hand, keep in mind that there are a myriad of confounding factors that can be present when applying self-help resources to your life, and therefore it is perfectly acceptable to say "I would recommend this resource, but I have not improved" or "I do not recommend this resource, but I have improved".
I think depending on how this thread goes, in a few days I might make a meta post on this subject in an attempt to inspire discussion on how the LessWrong community can work together to attempt to reach some sort of a consensus on what the best instrumental rationality methods and resources might be. lukeprog has already done great work in his The Science of Winning at Life sequence, but his reviews are uber-conservative and only mention resources with lots of scientific and academic backing. I think this leaves out a lot of really good stuff, and I think that we should be able to draw distinctions between stuff that isn't necessarily drawing on science but is reasonable, rational, and helps a lot of people, and The Secret.
But I thought we should get the ball rolling a little before we have that conversation. In the meantime, if you have a meta comment, you can just go ahead and post it as a reply to the top-level post.
Bad Concepts Repository
We recently established a successful Useful Concepts Repository. It got me thinking about all the useless or actively harmful concepts I had carried around for in some cases most of my life before seeing them for what they were. Then it occurred to me that I probably still have some poisonous concepts lurking in my mind, and I thought creating this thread might be one way to discover what they are.
I'll start us off with one simple example: The Bohr model of the atom as it is taught in school is a dangerous thing to keep in your head for too long. I graduated from high school believing that it was basically a correct physical representation of atoms. (And I went to a *good* high school.) Some may say that the Bohr model serves a useful role as a lie-to-children to bridge understanding to the true physics, but if so, why do so many adults still think atoms look like concentric circular orbits of electrons around a nucleus?
There's one hallmark of truly bad concepts: they actively work against correct induction. Thinking in terms of the Bohr model actively prevents you from understanding molecular bonding and, really, everything about how an atom can serve as a functional piece of a real thing like a protein or a diamond.
Bad concepts don't have to be scientific. Religion is held to be a pretty harmful concept around here. There are certain political theories which might qualify, except I expect that one man's harmful political concept is another man's core value system, so as usual we should probably stay away from politics. But I welcome input as fuzzy as common folk advice you receive that turned out to be really costly.
[LINK] Mr. Money Mustache on Back of the Napkin Calculations and Financial Planning
A new Mr. Money Mustache article for those who enjoyed my sequence on financial planning and extreme early retirement.
Maximizing Financial Utility and Frugality
The past few days have seen an increase of chatter concerning retirement and financial planning. One of us is even putting out a prospectus for a rational financial planning sequence. Some others have derided the concept of saving for retirement, as there is a probability of death before that time.
I am of the Extreme Early Retirement group. The idea is to save and invest 60-90% of your income, and you will have enough money to retire within a decade rather than four decades of the normal working career. This requires you to exercise your frugality muscle (such as cutting cable, biking to work, eating out less), but due to hedonistic adaptation, you will come out no less unhappy.
The sequences have already spoken on how spending money does not make us happier (after our basic needs are met). A Rational Financial plan should take this into account, even if a majority of people would not want to consider it.
I am just a beginner, so I linked the two big names in EEA, Mr. Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme. You can find their journeys towards financial independence here and here.
ERE is an austerity heavyweight, while MMM lives a pretty luxurious lifestyle, but still spends much less than his former coworkers. He just spends on what is important to him, such as travelling with his family and eating organic food, and not on anything frivolous, such as cable or eating out. He lives very far from a deprived lifestyle which the average person would shy away from. It takes a paradigm shift and some grit, but the people of LessWrong are not the type to reject munchkin ideas because it takes a little bit of mental effort.
If I were to make a compilation of posts for a Rational Financial Planning sequence, it will go as such…
How Little Money you need to Retire ?
Basic Retirement Math
Rationalist Spending
Maximizing Utilons per Dollar
Utilons Free Of Charge
Investing Rationally Basics
These are just the basics. Investment advice is scare, and the above does not talk about many fianacial aspects, such as insurance, children, career choice. The authors do speak about them on their blog’s, but I omitted them for brevity. Read and follow these posts however, and you will be better off than 90% of your peers, and well on the road to Extreme Early Retirement.
[Edit] This idea of cutting your expenses and maximizing your savings obviously do not apply only to early retirement. Other financial goals, such as saving for a house, building up capital for a business, or giving more money to charity all will be more quickly accomplished if you learn to cut excesses from your life. The driving idea is the cost to live is very small, you are not made any happier by spending money on the extras, and you should put this money where it matters to you the most.
Petruchio
Preparing for a Rational Financial Planning Sequence
What follows is a rough outline for a possible rational financial planning sequence that was inspired by some other recent discussion here. I'm not sure how useful this would be to how many people. I know there are some LessWrongers who would enjoy and learn from this; but I don't know if there are 5, 50, or 500. If you'd like to read it, let me know. If 500 people tell me they can't wait for this, I'll probably write it. If 5 people say maybe they'll glance at it, then probably not.
Part I: Preliminaries:
Financial Rationality
Multiplying uncertainties
The inside and outside views
Interpolation is reliable; extrapolation isn't
Part II: This is important:
- Why to save for retirement
- Dying alone in a hole: the story of Jane.
- Why compound interest is cool
- 65-year old you will not want to live like a grad student
- 65-year old you will not want to work like 35-year old you
- Existential risk does not defeat personal risk
- Existential success does not defeat personal risk
Part III: Analyzing Your Life
(This section needs a lot more fleshing out, and thought)
Personal satisfaction and happiness: do what you love, and adjust your financial expectations accordingly
How much do you need to retire?
When do you want to retire?
How much do you need to live on today?
Big expenses you need to plan for
Increasing Income
College the best financial decision you'll ever make or the worst?
Choosing a career: what is your comparative advantage?
Switching careers
Career Decisions
equity vs salary; steady singles or home run hitter
employee or owner
Career Tactics
Salary negotiation
promotion
when to change jobs
Cutting Expenses
Save more tomorrow
Inheritance
Part IV: The Practical How-to Advice:
Emergency Cash
Credit cards: the good, the bad, and the criminal
Banking
Where to save (tax advantaged accounts)
The importance of fees
401K matching: the highest return you'll ever see
Social Security
Pensions
What to invest in (index funds)
diversification
stock vs bond funds
domestic vs. international
target retirement funds
Comic books are not a retirement plan (but a comic book store might be)
Avoiding hucksters and doomsayers
Investment Advisors
What if the shit hits the fan?
Can smart, rational investors beat the market?
Good debt; bad debt
Cars and other expensive purchases
Cutting out the middleman: making money on Craig's list, amazon, eBay and AirB&B
Buying a house
Renting vs. owning a house; rental parity
Student loans
Health Insurance
Life Insurance
Auto Insurance
Your Spouse: the most important financial decision you'll ever make
Diamonds are forever, but most women would rather have a house.
One or two incomes?
Live longer, be happier, get married
Children
Charity
If there are any topics you'd like to see covered that aren't here (wills? lawyers? the financial press?), let me know. Similarly, if you think there's a section that doesn't belong and should be dropped, let me know that too.
One caveat: while some sections are fairly generic, others will be very U.S. centric. The most specific advice will not be applicable to non-U.S. citizens and residents. That does limit the audience, but there's not too much I can do about that. Perhaps if it's successful I can seek out co-authors to do UK, Canadian, or other country editions.
A question for people who are interested in financial planning material: If this were available as a complete book (electronic and paper) today, how likely do you think it is that you would buy this book instead of one of the other available books on the subject? What would you pay for such a book? If this were available as both a book and a sequence on LessWrong, how might that change your decision?
For now, this discussion thread is just a minimum viable product (MVP) to find out if a sequence is worth the time it would take me to complete. If the MVP pans out, I'll write and post one or two of these chapters to further gauge interest. If the MVP doesn't look promising, I'll drop it and move on to my next book idea.
[LINK] Soylent crowdfunding
Rob Rhinehart's food replacement Soylent now has a crowdfunding campaign.
Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash.
If you're interested in one or more of these benefits, send in some money! There is also a new blog post.
Health/Longevity Link List
Dying or becoming severely physically/mentally ill is very likely going to significantly lower the output of your utility function, so it would probably be a very bad idea to ignore the low-hanging resources which can significantly extend the time for which you are alive and well. I have attempted to search LessWrong for a list of such resources, and haven't been able to find one.
Are there any books, websites, or posts that contain significantly low-hanging fruit in this area? If so, please list them in the comments below.
Solved Problems Repository
Follow-up to: Boring Advice Repository
Many practical problems in instrumental rationality appear to be wide open. Two I've been annoyed by recently are "what should I eat?" and "how should I exercise?" However, some appear to be more or less solved. For example, various mnemonic techniques like memory palaces, along with spaced repetition, seem to more or less solve the problem of memorization.
I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of solved problems in instrumental rationality. I'm pretty sure you all collectively know good examples; there's a comment I can't find from a user who said something like "taking a flattering photograph of yourself is a solved problem," and it's likely that there are other useful examples like this that aren't common knowledge. Err on the side of posting solutions which may not be universal but are still likely to be helpful to many people.
(This thread is allowed to not be boring! Go wild!)
Boring Advice Repository
This is an extension of a comment I made that I can't find and also a request for examples. It seems plausible that, when giving advice, many people optimize for deepness or punchiness of the advice rather than for actual practical value. There may be good reasons to do this - e.g. advice that sounds deep or punchy might be more likely to be listened to - but as a corollary, there could be valuable advice that people generally don't give because it doesn't sound deep or punchy. Let's call this boring advice.
An example that's been discussed on LW several times is "make checklists." Checklists are great. We should totally make checklists. But "make checklists" is not a deep or punchy thing to say. Other examples include "google things" and "exercise."
I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of boring advice. If you can, provide evidence and/or a plausible argument that your boring advice actually is useful, but I would prefer that you err on the side of boring but not necessarily useful in the name of more thoroughly searching a plausibly under-searched part of advicespace.
Upvotes on advice posted in this thread should be based on your estimate of the usefulness of the advice; in particular, please do not vote up advice just because it sounds deep or punchy.
Group rationality diary, 1/9/13
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of January 7th. 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 everyone who contributes! Happy New Year to folks; my resolution is to always post these on Monday evenings instead of letting them slip to Tuesday or Wednesday : >
Gauging of interest: LW stock picking?
EDIT: Based on criticism below, I am reconsidering how to proceed with this idea (or something in the neighbourhood).
A topic that has been on my mind recently is where, in our complicated lives, there might be low-hanging fruit ready to be picked by a motivated rationalist. Actual, practical, dollars-and-cents fruit.
In possibly-related news, here is how the writer of About.com's beginner's guide to investing describes the stock market:
Imagine you are partners in a private business with a man named Mr. Market. Each day, he comes to your office or home and offers to buy your interest in the company or sell you his [the choice is yours]. The catch is, Mr. Market is an emotional wreck. At times, he suffers from excessive highs and at others, suicidal lows. When he is on one of his manic highs, his offering price for the business is high as well, because everything in his world at the time is cheery. His outlook for the company is wonderful, so he is only willing to sell you his stake in the company at a premium. At other times, his mood goes south and all he sees is a dismal future for the company. In fact, he is so concerned, he is willing to sell you his part of the company for far less than it is worth. All the while, the underlying value of the company may not have changed - just Mr. Market's mood.
I have heard this narrative many times before, and I'd like to test whether it is accurate - and in particular, whether LWers can consistently beat the market.
The skeptic may well ask: why should LWers have an advantage? Why not go to the professionals - investment advisors? Also, isn't there a whole chapter in Kahneman about how even smart people suck at picking stocks? And what do you, simplicio, know about this anyway?
LWers may have an advantage by virtue of being educated about such topics as cognitive biases, sunk cost fallacy, probabilistic prediction, and expected utility - topics with which investment advisors et al. may or may not be familiar on a gut level. I am not sure if we're any better, but I'd like to test it. Also, if LW turns out to be any good at offering such advice, that advice would presumably be free, unlike that of yon advisor (fees tend to kill returns on investment - just ask anybody who uses Intrade). As for what I personally know - not very much yet. But I find competition very stimulating.
Accordingly, my proposal is for a contest: over the course of 2013, I will set up & maintain a Google Drive spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will be shared with contest participants. Each participant will have say $5,000 of play money to use "buying" (or "selling") stocks on the exchange of their choice. Contestants will record the date of purchase or sale, quantity, and preferably provide comments regarding why they are buying or selling.
At the end of this contest (Dec 31, 2013?), I will commit to Paypal the winner (defined as the person with the highest market valuation of play assets as of midnight on that date) the equivalent of $50 CAD in their local currency. In the unlikely event that I win, I will donate that $50 to the Against Malaria Foundation. (Above commitment does not take effect until I actually gauge interest in this contest, figure out an end date & rules etc., and decide to proceed. If anyone else wants to throw money in the pot, please do.)
The purposes of this post are therefore:
- to find out who is interested - please leave a comment below, and e-mail me at ispollock [at] gmail.com if you want in;
- to solicit constructive and destructive criticism of the project, especially from any local experienced investors (in particular, perhaps a one-year timeframe is too short for a meaningful contest? Also, real-world experience of transaction costs in buying and selling would be extremely helpful);
- to ask if anyone knows of a better software platform for the contest than Google Drive, or knows of any extremely helpful resources I should be reading/linking to.
Group rationality diary, 12/25/12
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for Christmas week. 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 everyone who contributes, and I hope everyone is having a nice holiday!
Group rationality diary, 12/10/12
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of December 10th. 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 everyone who contributes!
Group rationality diary, 11/28/12
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of November 27th. 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 everyone who contributes!
Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.
(Sorry for being a day late on this one, life is really full of things lately!)
Group rationality diary, 11/13/12
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 29th. 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 everyone who contributes!
Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum
Related to: Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity, Does My Vote Matter?
And voting adds legitimacy to it.
Thank you.
#annoyedbymotivatedcognition
Group rationality diary, 10/29/12
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 29th. 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 everyone who contributes!
Group rationality diary, 10/15/12
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 15th. 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 everyone who contributes!
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You should be EXTREMELY CAREFUL when using this strategy. It is, at a minimum, against airline policy.
If you have any kind of airline status or membership, and you do this too often, they will cancel it. If you try to do this on a round-trip ticket, they will cancel your return. If the airlines have any means of making your life difficult available to them, they WILL use it.
Obviously you also cannot check bags when using this strategy, since they will go to the wrong place (your ostensible, rather than your actual, destination.) This also means that if you have an overhead-sized carryon, and you board late and are forced to check it, your bag will NOT make it to your intended destination; it will go to the final destination marked on your ticket. If you try to argue about this, you run the risk of getting your ticket cancelled altogether, since you're violating airline policies by using a ticket in this way.