Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/changing-time-zones/

With a few of my new organisation and time management prediction algorithms I have found that I can plan down to a few minutes accurately.  I noticed something today that surprised me.

I wear two watches.  The history of this goes back more than 10 years, but today I wear two watches because one of them is analog and never runs out of battery and the other is digital and tracks heart rate, skin temp, perspiration and other metrics while also being a smart digital watch and telling the time, but only has a 4 day long battery life.

My digital watch updates to whatever time my phone is set to, which updates to global servers etc. so that watch is the right time.  I accidentally set my analog watch fast and then noticed I would get places just on time, or quite very exactly on time instead of 5 minutes late.  I really lucked out with this behaviour, because it took me a while to figure out what is happening.  Or what I think is happening.

When I am running late, I check the time in a system 1 way, which means I glance at my watch and continue about my day.  Then my brain takes the information granted by the visual angle of the hands and converts that into time for me to work out if I am running late or on time.  By having my analog watch fast, I will take actions that involve assumptions that the time is actually faster than it is.  For example, deciding to leave my house because I "should have left already", instead of spending another 5 minutes on whatever I am doing.

If I am planning tasks for the future, or doing other time-checking behaviour, I do it using system 2, I naturally check both my watches so that I get an accurate feel for the time now.

Surprise

Today I was struck by the idea I was suddenly running late.  Which is not a feeling I was expecting given that I was in fact running squarely on time.  Where what actually transpired was that I was looking at computer time when I decided to go in the shower, and when I got out of the shower I looked at analog time.  Which put me squarely past the "running right on time" and into the "definitely running late". In other words I changed time zone on myself.

This whole post is to note that noticing when things surprise you is an excellent habit to have.  This case was pretty cut and dry as I analysed why I was late and concluded that I in fact was not.  But the next thing to surprise me might not be so obvious.

Question: What has surprised you recently?  What happened, how did your map of the world fail to explain what was going to happen?

Meta: this took an hour to write.

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/doing-the-causation-backwards/

About two years ago, when I first got my smart phone (yes, later than most of the other humans).  I was new to apps, and I was new to environments.  When I decided on what apps should be on my home screen, I picked the ones that I thought I would use most often.

My home screen started with:

• google bar (the top of the page)
• calendar
• facebook
• notepad app (half the page)
• ingress (because I play)
• maps
• camera
• torch

My home screen has barely changed.  I don't play ingress very often these days, but that's by choice, however I was seeing the facebook notifications far too often.  Ending up on facebook far too often for what I wanted.

Recently I decided to try out some tracking systems that include 1/0 metrics.  It looks something like this:

I wanted this in a place where I could see it and fill it out every day, and at the same time I began to question why I have my facebook app on my front page.  This link is now on my front page and I easily fill it out once a day (a win for a habit successfully implemented).

The concept that I want to impart today is that the causation goes the wrong way.  Instead of wanting apps that I regularly use on my front page so that I can easily access them - I want apps that I want to use regularly on my front page.  That way I will tend to develop habits of regularly using them instead of the other ones.  

Fridge

This applies to the refrigerator too.  Instead of the things you use and eat all the time being at the front (assuming they might be different), you want the foods that you want to eat most readily accessible and at the front.  If this means healthy foods at the front - do that.  If this means having a fruit bowl on the table - do that.

TV

This applies to TV too.  If you find book-reading more interesting than TV watching but find yourself watching a lot of TV all the same; put the remotes in a harder to reach place and leave really good books lying around.

Computer shortcuts

Want to play less games?  Get to Reddit less?  Maybe put the games in slightly harder to access places.  Buried in other folders.  Delete the auto-fill in your browser that completes to Reddit.  Want to do equations by hand more often than using a calculator (for practicing math purposes) - make the calculator slightly harder to get to, and make sure you have a pen/paper handy around the computer.

Junk food

Do you have a candy cupboard?  Find yourself eating too much of it.  A simple answer would be to empty it, and don't fill it again.  But an alternative that still lets you have candy in the house is to place slightly healthier and tasty food choices in front of the candy.  for example dried fruit - still sweet and bite-sized, in a similar class of choices to Candy, but significantly healthier.  Some days you will reach past the dried fruit for the chocolate, and many more days you will reach for the dried fruits.

The meta strategy

Without creating more examples.  There are often behaviours you want to do better, actions that you want to take instead of other actions, or behaviours that have a "better form" than you might otherwise be doing.  

The strategy is:

1. Take 5 minutes writing out what you usually do on a daily basis
2. For each one, consider if this is the optimum form of the action, (or one that leads to acceptable levels of results) - don't be afraid to dream of the possible optimal actions.
   
3. Make the better option more available in your life.
   
4. Make it easier for yourself to do the better option.
5. Check progress in a month (put a reminder in your diary) and iterate on solutionspace
6. Winning!

We know about System 1 and System 2.  We live some of our life in S1 and some in S2.  S2 know's it's not always going to be "in charge" and making deliberate actions but it does have periods of lucid thought in which to set up S1 with better easiest-path behaviours and actions.  This applies to planning, setting up a workspace, avoiding the pain of paying and many more.

Think: How can I set this up so that I do the better possible path in the future with the least effort?

Meta: this post took 2hrs to write.

With thanks to Paul Christiano

My previous post left one important issue unresolved. Second order logic needed to make use of set theory in order to work its magic, pin down a single copy of the reals and natural numbers, and so on. But set theory is a first order theory, with all the problems that this brings - multiple models, of uncontrollable sizes. How can these two facts be reconciled?

Quite simply, it turns out: for any given model of set theory, the uniqueness proofs still work. Hence the proper statement is:

• For any model of set theory, there is a unique model of reals and natural numbers obeying the second order axioms.

Often, different models of set theory will have the same model of the reals inside them; but not always. Countable models of set theory, for instance, will have a countable model of the reals. So models of the reals can be divided into three categories:

1. The standard model of the reals, the unique field that obeys the second order axioms inside standard models of set theory (and some non-standard models of set theory as well).
2. Non-standard models of the reals, that obey the second order axioms inside non-standard models of set theory.
3. Non-standard models of the reals that obey the first order axioms, but do not obey the second order axioms in any model of set theory.

And similarly for the natural numbers.