I found a website called Happier Human. It's about how to become and stay happier. I've trawled through it. Here are the best posts in my opinion:

[Meditate]. Don't [worry/overthink/fantasise/compare]. [Disregard desire]. [Motivate]. [Exercise gratitude]. [Don’t have kids].

[Buy many small gifts]. [Trade some happiness for productivity]. [Set] [happiness goals]

If you've found any other happiness interventions on any website, please share them.

Sorry if the positive illusions are old hat, but I searched and couldn't find any mention of this peer prediction stuff! If nothing else, I think the findings provide a quick heuristic for getting more reliable predictions of your future behavior - just poll a nearby friend!

Peer predictions are often superior to self-predictions. People, when predicting their own future outcomes, tend to give far too much weight to their intentions, goals, plans, desires, etc., and far to little consideration to the way things have turned out for them in the past. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed,

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done"

...and we are way less accurate for it! A recent study by Helzer and Dunning (2012) took Cornell undergraduates and had them each predict their next exam grade, and then had an anonymous peer predict it too, based solely on their score on the previous exam; despite the fact that the peer had such limited information (while the subjects have presumably perfect information about themselves), the peer predictions, based solely on the subjects' past performance, were much more accurate predictors of subjects' actual exam scores.

In another part of the study, participants were paired-up (remotely, anonymously) and rewarded for accurately predicting each other's scores. Peers were allowed to give just one piece of information to help their partner predict their score; further, they were allowed to request just one piece of information from their partner to aid them in predicting their partner's score. Across the board, participants would give information about their "aspiration level" (their own ideal "target" score) to the peer predicting them, but would be far less likely to ask for that information if they were trying to predict a peer; overwhelmingly, they would ask for information about the participant's past behavior (i.e., their score on the previous exam), finding this information to be more indicative of future performance. The authors note,

There are many reasons to use past behavior as an indicator of future action and achievement. The overarching reason is that past behavior is a product of a number of causal variables that sum up to produce it—and that suite of causal variables in the same proportion is likely to be in play for any future behavior in a similar context.

They go on to say, rather poetically I think, that they have observed "the triumph of hope over experience." People situate their representations of self more in what they strive to be rather than in who they have already been (or indeed, who they are), whereas they represent others more in terms of typical or average behavior (Williams, Gilovich, & Dunning, 2012).

I found a figure I want to include from another interesting article (Kruger & Dunning, 1999); it illustrates this "better than average effect" rather well. Depicted below is an graph summarizing the results of study #3 (perceived grammar ability and test performance as a function of actual test performance):

Along the abscissa, you've got reality: the quartiles represent scores on a test of grammatical ability. The vertical axis, with decile ticks, corresponds to the same peoples' self-predicted ability and test scores. Curiously, while no one is ready to admit mediocrity, neither is anyone readily forecasting perfection; the clear sweet spot is 65-70%. Those in the third quartile seem most accurate in their estimations while those the highest quartile often sold themselves short, underpredicting their actual achievement on average. Notice too that the widest reality/prediction gap is for those the lowest quartile.

I would like to share a doubt with you. Peter Achinstein, in his The Book of Evidence considers two probabilistic views about the conditions that must be satisfied in order for e to be evidence that h. The first one says that e is evidence that h when e increases the probability of h when added to some background information b:

(Increase in Probability) e is evidence that h iff P(h|e&b) > P(h|b).

The second one says that e is evidence that h when the probability of h conditional on e is higher than some threshold k:

(High Probability) e is evidence that h iff P(h|e) > k.

A plausible way of interpreting the second definition is by saying that k = 1/2. When one takes k to have such fixed value, it turns out that P(h|e) > k has the same truth-conditions as P(h|e) > P(~h|e) - at least if we are assuming that P is a function obeying Kolmogorov's axioms of the probability calculus. Now, Achinstein takes P(h|e) > k to be a necessary but insufficient condition for e to be evidence that h - while he claims that P(h|e&b) > P(h|b) is neither necessary nor sufficient for e to be evidence that h. That may seem shocking for those that take the condition fleshed out in (Increase in Probability) at least as a necessary condition for evidential support (I take it that the claim that it is necessary and sufficient is far from accepted - presumably one also wants to qualify e as true, or as known, or as justifiably believed, etc). So I would like to check one of Achinstein's counter-examples to the claim that increase in probability is a necessary condition for evidential support.

The relevant example is as follows:

The lottery counterexample

Suppose one has the following background b and piece of evidence e1:

b:  This is a fair lottery in which one ticket drawn at random will win.

e1: The New York Times reports that Bill Clinton owns all but one of the 1000 lottery tickets sold in a lottery.

Further, one also learns e2:

e2: The Washington Post reports that Bill Clinton owns all but one of the 1000 lottery tickets sold in a lottery. 

So, one has evidence in favor of

h:  Bill Clinton will win the lottery.

The point now is that, although it seems right to regard e2 as being evidence in favor of h, it fails to increase h's probability conditional on (b&e1) - at least so says Achinstein. According to his example, the following is true:

P(h|b&e1&e2) = P(h|b&e1) = 999/1000.

Well, I have my doubts about this counterexample. The problem with it seems to me to be this: that e1 and e2 are taken to be the same piece of evidence. Let me explain. If e1 and e2 increase the probability of h, that is because they increase the probability of a further proposition:

g: Bill Clinton owns all but one of the 1000 lottery tickets sold in a lottery,

and, as it happens, g increases the probability of h. That The New York Times reports g, assuming that the New York Times is reliable, increases the probability of g - and the same can be said about The Washington Post reporting g. But the counterexample seems to assume that both e1 and e2 are equivalent with g, and they're not. Now, it is clear that P(h|b&g) = P(h|b&g&g), but this does not show that e2 fails to increase h's probability on (b&e1). So, if it is true that e2 increases the probability of g conditional on e1, that is, if P(g|e1&e2) > P(g|e1), and if it is true that g increases the probability of h, then it is also true that e2 increases the probability of h. I may be missing something, but this reasoning sounds right to me - the example wouldn't be a counterexample. What do you think?

Drowning In An Information Ocean

I decided to take a look at the books hanging around the Future of Humanity Institute. It is a sobering and sad experience. I'd say there are little less than 2 thousand books.

80% of books I wouldn't mind reading,

1/2 I would read,

1/3 I should read

and 1/5 I must read!  

I predict that I'll read actually 1/400, counting the ones there, and their enhanced successors. How emotionally terrible is it to live in such a technically competent society and want to understand the world! Since 2000 I've abandoned TV, videogames, celebrity gossip, musical ability, knowledge about bands, politics, theater classes, dancing classes, handball, tennis, reading fiction, reading parts of Facebook, maintaining contact with groups X and Y of friends, newspapers, magazines and comics. All in the name of keeping up with human knowledge on some areas that fascinate me. Mostly areas having to do with the nature of minds and mental states. Come to think of it, the only two things that really, really interest me are minds and evolution. My curiosity is very narrow, it should be no trouble to learn a satisfactory amount about two things, right? So if you want to know what a mind is and what it does, and to get a grasp on the outlook of evolved stuff, you need to go through areas like:

Positive Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Animal Cognition (Ethology), Cultural Evolution, Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Primatology, Physical and Biological Anthropology.  

Which I did. 

Dig up a bit and you'll find that those require knowledge from Evolutionary Biology, Neuroeconomics, Basic Neuroscience, Genetics, Proof Theory, Formal Logic, Anthropic Reasoning - And from Anthropic Reasoning, you get a lot of physics requirements, mostly in cosmology and a bit in particle physics. Dig a little further and you can't get a lot of what is up there without grasping Maynard Smith and Trivers thoughts on biology, which come from economics, and by the time you notice you are surrounded by isoquants, comparing stable equilibriums across disciplines and thinking of economic metaphors for how the PreMedial Ventral Cortex settles some decision issues. Which of course requires that you understand metaphors, and you'll have to check some Hofstadter and Pinker on those issues, which will require at least some very basic linguistics, or at least an outlook of philosophy of language. Did I mention that most of this only works if you are rational, and that means you'd better have read the sequences prior to all this stuff?

Then there are the nagging exact sciences people. They come to you at night, haunt you in your dreams, telling you how much you should study math, how math is important for this, for that, and for that. Most disagree which branches of math are important, stats being the most universal like. If I were to learn to all the math I was told to learn, that would be at least 3 years more. Scott Young can do an entire university course (CS) in one year, Nick Bostrom kept that pace for 6 or 7 years. Most people don't get the mix of time, luck, capacity, resources and most importantly, motivation, to pursue such Homeric tasks.

I've never doubted Math is awesome. What I did doubt, and to this day I have seen few who doubt with me, but good examples being Peter Thiel, more strongly, and Jared Diamond and Dan Dennett, less strongly, is that so many young talents should be drawn into physics and math (and chess). Why should we make people who are really smart do the things in which it is easier to detect being smart?  Companies don't ask their best employees to devise ever better and more complicated IQ tests just because IQ tests are good predictors of how good a worker will be. The goal is not to costly signal being near the upper bound in intelligence. The goal is using your intelligence to pursue your goals. Sure, lots of it will be signalling instrumentally, but once the dust settles, don't get fixed in proving the constructibility of enormously large polygons, or beating Kasparov.  

So far I've tried to make two cases: Even with prima facie narrow interests, anyone is bound to be drowning in an ocean of information, and the interconnectedness and requirements to understand narrow interests may be much larger than one's initial expectancy. Secondly the main modulator of what to do with intelligence (your own, or someone else's) should be to tune it with goals and interests, not with easy detectability. 

Swimming Upwards

To avoid drowning in the ocean, I've already mentioned a lot of weight I found I could live without: TV, videogames, celebrity gossip, musical ability, knowledge about bands, or politics, theater classes, dancing classes, handball, tennis, reading fiction, reading parts of Facebook, maintaining contact with groups X and Y of friends, newspapers, magazines and comics. Those were not easy choices, each comes with a cost, a sadness, and a feeling that something valuable has been lost. The richness of flavors of life got somewhat poorer, because at least about minds and evolution, I wanted to keep track of human knowledge. 

It is hard enough not to go after understading Muons better, or knowing if really Brontosaurs had extra little brains throughout their neck, or why is it that vegetables are healthier than a double bacon cheeseburguer. But this tradeoff is knowing X versus knowing Y. It gets messy when it becomes earning X versus knowing Y, loving G versus knowing Y, containing curiosity about facebook update F versus knowing Y, and going to U's party versus knowing Y. 

Keeping a positive information diet helps, but I'm unsure even that stringent criterion is enough to know as much as one would like about one's narrow interests. Thus here I am, surrounded by 400 books I must read, and imagining how often new books that I'd put in the "must read" category are created every month. Probably same goes for amount of pages of scientific and philosophical journal papers. Stephen Hawking points out that you'd have to run faster than a car to read all written knowledge being created. I think the drowning metaphor is better because if books were liquid, you would quite likely not be able to swim even an aquarium of your own interests. I'm even considering moving to cold lowlight areas of the world, just for the purpose of having less (distractions) weight even, so I can swim a little longer. 

Writing, Advocating and Teaching 

Finally, there is the ultimate tradeoff. Being a child versus being a parent. Getting memes versus spreading memes. Learning versus teaching. Exploration versus exploitation. Being directed versus directing. Paying attention versus becoming focus. Riding versus driving. 

Writing takes a ridiculously long time. To write this text so far took me about 2 hours. It is simple, autobiographical, uses mostly folk psychological concepts, and not very theory-laden. My rule of thumb for writing technical stuff is one hour per page. In that time I could read up to 40 times as much. Assuming a publishability of a page per 3, the choice is writing three books or reading the 400 that surround me. Surely a lot of learning requires reprocessing, and one of the best ways to learn is to reconfigure our mental constructs, and use inter-areas knowledge to compose new ideas out of read ones (Pasupathi2012). Writing is learning, but it is still costly learning.

When thinking whether you should go into research, not only all the different sorts of considerations suggested by the 80000hours community should be looked at, but also how much is that individual driven to sharing knowledge, once acquired. Some people really want to output as much as possible, but many care, by and large, mostly about the input, and given writing one book may cost reading up to 120, they can rest assured there will be very interesting material eager to be read, always jumping ahead their priority list. In the last two years, the Teens and Twenties, a conference for young cryonicists (many of whom lesswrongers) had, out of four personality types, a vast majority of curiosity driven individuals. Much more incentives are needed to get people writing their thesis than to get them reading about their thesis topics. 

The Examined Swim 

From many perspectives, in particular that of technical achievement and development, it is great and fascinating that we live in such accelerated scientific age. In other states of mind, or ways of thinking, it is not that great. Those states of mind are not frequently ones that show up in books, specially not in academic courses. They deal not with the speed or depth of things, but breadth, gravity, resonance, luminance, sacredness. Some books, like The Examined Life, The Guinea Pig Diaries, Mortals and Others, and lots of songs and movies deal with those aspects. 

Wearing the transhumanist technoprogressive hat, what I don't like about drowning is similar to what I don't like about the cosmological constant, it would be really cool if the speed of creation and my speed of absorption were exactly the same, and it would be really cool if the universe was stable instead of getting cold. It's something I can shrug about and move on. 

Wearing the other hat, the surrounding ocean of great books has a more sinister message to tell. It reminds me of the finitude of the human condition, it is a visual reminder of all I'll never know, never see, taste, borrow or steal. More than that, because all aspects of life are in constant dispute of attentional resources, it takes a lot of effort and anguish to choose to go for those books, the plunge is deep, and wearing this hat, I can't help but to think it may not be worth it.

In a recent conversation with one of the enhancement researchers here he pointed out that it may be the case that for the individual Modafinil is not an enhancement, but for society as a whole it is. An individual won't change much due to taking Modafinil, and may pay costs if it has some particularly adverse effects for that person. Society on the other hand will be greatly benefited by the additional capacity of hundreds of thousands of scientists, each a little smarter.

It may well be that society needs you not to drown, and incentivizes you to swim as fast as you can, cost whom it may, it sure is the case in the corporate world. Thinking of yourself as an utility function and wearing the technoprogressive hat sure signal your allegiance to (this) society's cause. Yet wearing the other hat, as I often do, sometimes tempts me to let go and delve into the Siren's songs...  

I looked for Information Diet in Lesswrong search, and found something amazing:

On Lukeprog's Q and A as the new executive director, he was asked:

What is your information diet like? (I mean other than when you engage in focused learning.) Do you regulate it, or do you just let it happen naturally?

By that I mean things like:

• Do you have a reading schedule (e.g. X hours daily)?
• Do you follow the news, or try to avoid information with a short shelf-life?
• Do you significantly limit yourself with certain materials (e.g. fun stuff) to focus on higher priorities?
• In the end, what is the makeup of the diet?
• Etc.

To which he responded:

• I do not regulate my information diet.
• I do not have a reading schedule.
• I do not follow the news.
• I haven't read fiction in years. This is not because I'm avoiding "fun stuff," but because my brain complains when I'm reading fiction. I can't even read HPMOR. I don't need to consciously "limit" my consumption of "fun stuff" because reading scientific review articles on subjects I'm researching and writing about is the fun stuff.
• What I'm trying to learn at this moment almost entirely dictates my reading habits.
• The only thing beyond this scope is my RSS feed, which I skim through in about 15 minutes per day.

Whatever was the case back then, I'll bet is not anymore. No one with assistants and such a workload should be let adrift like that.

Citizen: But Lukeprog's posts are obviously brilliant, his output is great, even very focused readers like Chalmers find Luke to be very bright.

Which doesn't tell much about what they would have been were he under a more stringent diet. Another reasonable suspicion is that he was not actually modelling himself correctly, since he obviously does have an information diet

The Information Diet Challenge is to set yourself an information diet, explicitly, and follow it for a week.  

Many ways of countering biases have been proposed here, but I haven't found a post dealing with this specific, very low hanging fruit one. 

If you want inspiration, Ferriss has some advice here.

... but that is not the Positive Information Diet yet...

Information diets are supposed to constrain not everything you intake, but only what you intake instrumentally. If you just love reading about tensors and fairy tales, don't include them in what you won't avoid. What matters is to know that you'll avoid trying to learn programming by reading a programmer's tweet feed, avoid becoming a top researcher in psychology by reading popular magazines on it, and avoid reading random feeds on Facebook that don't relate to your goals in appropriate ways.

General form: I will Avoid spending my time reading/commenting things of kind (A)(Avoid), because I know that to reach my set of goals (G), the most productive learning time is doing (P) (Positve/Productive). 

So here is an attempt:

(G): Interact fruitfully with people at Oxford

(A): Facebook feeds that are not by them; News of any kind; Emails I can Postpone; Gossip; Books/articles not on Evolution of Morals, enhancement, AI; Wikidrifting; Family meal small talk; SMBC; 9gag; Tropes .... and a bunch of other stuff I don't have time or patience to list.

(P): Google scholar on the intersection between my research topic and theirs. Reading their papers by day, watching their videos by night. Re-read what I might help them with that was read before, list topics per person, write what to say about each topic.

What is wrong with this attempt is that (A) ends up being a negative list. A list of what what I do not want to intake. Since possibilities are infinite, this will give me ridiculous cognitive load, and that is a problem. So here is simple solution, which I used for a food diet before, and worked great:  Name not what you cannot do, but what you are allowed to do. Way fewer bits, way easier to check! 

Food example: I'll eat only plants, lean fish and chicken, nuts, fruits, whole pasta, beans and Chai Lattes.

We are better at checking for category inclusion than exclusion. There are so many available categories to exclude from that we don't feel bad that we "forgot" to check for that one. Then after you let yourself indulge in a tiny one, a small one doesn't seem that bad, and snowball effect does the rest. We sneak in connotations to make categories smaller, so our actions stay safely outside the scope of prohibition. Theoretically, we could do the reverse, but it is psychologically much harder. Just try to convince yourself that beef is "lean chicken" to see it.

So let us forget completely about (A). There is no kind or class of kinds to avoid. there is only G and P, and now there is also T, the time during which P is in force, since escape valves might be necessary to avoid "screw that" all-or-nothing effects.

An Improved attempt:

G: Interact fruitfully with people in Oxford

P: Google scholar on the intersection between my research topic and theirs. Reading their papers by day, watching their videos by night. Re-read what I might help them with that was read before, list topics per person, write what to say about each topic. Only Facebook them. 

T: 02:00-23:59 daily.

This is only for "computer use", where I'm most likely to do the wrong thing.

Now there is a simple to check list of things I want to do, I could be doing, and I'll try to do until G arrives. I can only do those. If x doesn't belong, don't do it, that simple. I'm free from midnight to two to do whatever, thus I don't feel enslaved by my past self.  No heavy cognitive load is burning my willpower candle (Shawn Achor 2010) by trying set theory gimmicks to get me to do the wrong thing. 

So please, take the:

          Positive Information Diet Challenge

Write your G's (goals) P's (positives) and T's (times), and forget about your A's (Avoids)  

I have encountered personally in conversations, and also observed in the media over the past couple of decades, a great deal of skepticism, scorn, and ridicule, if not merely indifference or dismissal, from many people in reaction to the est training, which I completed in 1983, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator tool, which I first took in 1993 or 1994. I would like to share some concrete examples from my own life where information and perspective that I gained from these two sources have improved my life, both in my own way of conceptualizing and approaching things, and also in my relationships with others. I do this with the hope and intention of showing that est and MBTI have positive value, and encouraging people to explore these and other tools for personal growth.

One important insight that I gained from the est training is an understanding and the experience that I am not my opinions, and my opinions are not me. Opinions are neutral things, and they may be something I hold, or agree with, but I can separate my self from them, and I can discuss them, and I can change or discard them, but I am still the same "me". I am not more or less "myself" in relation to what I think or believe. Before I did the est training, whenever someone would question an opinion I held, I felt personally attacked. I identified my self with my opinion or belief. My emotional response to attack, like for many other people, is to defend and/or to retreat, so when I perceived of my "self" being "attacked", I gave in to the standard fight or flight response, and therefore I did not get the opportunity to explore the opinion in question to see if the person who questioned me had some important new information or a perspective that I had not previously considered. It is not that I always remember this or that it is my first response, but once I notice myself responding in the old way, I can then take that step back and remember the separation between self and opinion. That choice is now available to me, where it wasn't before. When I find myself in conversations with another person or people who disagree with me, my response now is to draw them out, to ask them about what they believe and why they believe it. I regard myself as if I were a reporter on a fact-finding mission. I step back and I do not feel attacked. I learn sometimes from this, and other times I do not, but I no longer feel attacked, and I find that I can more easily become friends with people even if we have disagreements. That was not the case for me prior to doing est.

Another valuable tool that I got from est and still use in my life is the ability to accept responsibility without attaching blame to it, even if someone is trying to heap blame upon me. This is similar to what I said above about basically not identifying my self with what I think. I do not have to feel or think of myself as a "bad person" because I made a mistake. I have come to the belief that guilt is an emotion that I need not wallow in. If I feel guilt about doing or not doing something, saying or not saying something, I take that feeling of guilt as a sign that I either need to take some action to rectify the situation, and/or I need to apologize to someone about it, and/or I need to learn from the situation so that hopefully I will not repeat it, and then forgive myself, and move on. Hanging on to guilt is something I see many people doing, and it not only holds them up and blocks them off from taking action, they often pull that feeling in and create a scenario or self-definition that involves beating themselves up about it, or they wallow around in feeling guilty in a way that serves as a self-indulgent excuse for not improving things. "I'm so awful, I'm such a screw-up, I can't do anything right." That kind of negative self-esteem can affect a person for their entire life if they allow it to. There are many ways to come to these realizations, and I make no claim that est is some kind of "cure-all". One of the characters on the tv show "SOAP" called est "The McDonald's of Psychiatry". That's amusing, but it denigrates a very useful and powerful experience. I believe in an eclectic approach to life. I look at many things, explore many ideas and experiences, and I take what works and leave the rest. est is only one of many helpful experiences I have had in my 49 years.

I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Index at a science fiction convention in the early years of my marriage, when I was living in Alexandria, VA, in 1993 and 1994. It was given as part of a panel, and I also took it again when I read "Do What You Are", which is a book about finding employment/a profession based on your MBTI personality type. The basics, if you have not encountered MBTI before are: There are 4 "continuums" in how people tend to interact with the world. Most people use both sides of each continuum, but are most comfortable on one side. The traits are Extrovert/Introvert, Sensing/Intuiting, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. (The use of these words in the MBTI context is not exactly the same as their dictionary definitions). I am a strong ENFP. My husband was an ISTP. Understanding the differences between how we approached the world was very helpful to me in learning why we were so different about socializing with other people, and about our communication style with each other. As an "I", John (as they put it in the book), "got his batteries charged" by mostly being alone. I, as an "E", got mine charged by being with other people. We went to conventions and parties, but he often wanted to leave well before I felt ready to go. Once we had two cars, we would each take our own to events. Even though I felt it wasted gas, it gave him the opportunity to "flee" once he had had enough of being with others, while I could then come home at my leisure, and neither of us had to give up on what made us happier and more comfortable. It also explained why he would not always respond immediately to a question. "I "people tend to figure out in their own mind first what they want to say before they say anything aloud. "E" people often start talking right away, and as they speak, what they think becomes clearer to them. This is also a very useful data point for teachers. If they know about it, they can realize that the "I" kids need more time to come up with their answers, while the "E" kids put their hands in the air more immediately. They can then allow the "I" kids the time they need to respond to questions without thinking they are not good students, or are not as intelligent or knowledgeable as they "E" kids are.

My boyfriend is an ENTJ. The source of some of the friction in our relationship became clear to me after I asked him to find out his Myers-Briggs type, which he had never done before. Gerry often asks me to give him a list of what I want to do in the course of my day, and how much time things will take. These are reasonable requests. However, the rub comes from the fact that as a "J", he is uncomfortable not knowing the answer to these things. I, as a "P", am uncomfortable stating these things in advance, in nailing things down. I prefer to leave things open-ended. He regarded what I said as more concrete, whereas I regarded it more as a guideline, but not a definite plan or promise. In addition, I have always had a hard time judging how long things will take, and as a person with ADD, I also get distracted easily, so it was making me upset when he would come home and ask me what I'd gotten done, and then he would get upset when I hadn't done what I had said I wanted to, or if things took longer than I said they would. Understanding the differences in our types has helped me to understand more about why this has been an area of friction. That leaves room for us to discuss it without feeling the need to blame each other for our preferred method of dealing with things. I feel clearer about stating goals for the day, but not necessarily promising to do specific things, and working on figuring out how to allocate enough time for things. He understands that just because I tell him what I would like to do, it is not necessarily what I will end up doing. It's still a work in progress.

I want to be clear that I am not talking about using the types as excuses to get out of doing things, or for taking what other people feel is "too long" to get things done. It's merely another "tool in my tool box" that helps me to process how I and my loved ones function, and to figure out how to improve.

I am curious to know how other people feel about their experiences, if they have done a personal growth seminar such as est and/or taken the MBTI, if they feel that they have also taken tools from those experiences that have had an ongoing positive impact on their lives and relationships. I look forward to hearing what people have to say in response to this article.