The situation that calls for testing feels like being confused or curious.

The thought that generates a test looks like this: "If X is true, it is (more/less) likely that Y is true. I can examine Y by doing _."

For example, one day my computer was running slowly. There were a bunch of possible explanations, but my room was hot, dusty, and it'd been a long time since I cleaned it out, so I suspected the slowness was because of overheating. "If my computer is slow because of overheating, it is less likely that it will be slow if I remove the case to increase ventilation. I can examine that by removing the case." I pull the case off, and the computer runs normally again.

Most of the examples tend to be banal, though, and so I've forgotten them. (Not quite sure how I remembered that one.)

I do not exercise.

(Caveat: I will refrain from taking any advice that would lead to me starting to significantly exercise until I have a diagnosis and a treatment plan of my apparent heart condition, which doesn't indicate it would be unsafe or otherwise a medically bad idea. I'd be really surprised if my doctor told me not to exercise, but in case she does I want to wait and make sure that my body is really lying to me when it says "don't do that, bad things will happen".)

Reasons (and existing known routes around each):

• Sweat is horrible, and I overheat too easily. (Swimming gets around these; outdoor exercise in cold weather, interestingly, does not.)

• Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues). (Anything indoors or at night gets around the sunshine thing. Other environmental issues are mostly limited to smelly gyms and excessively humid indoor pool facilities. Anything outdoors and at night and in nice weather gets around this.)

• Many forms of it are financially costly (equipment, facility use). (Going for walks does not have this problem.)

• It is boring. (When I tried jujitsu, it did not have this particular problem. Merely being able to listen to music does not solve this, although it could combine with another partial solution. If this problem is solved by simultaneously watching a movie, it has to be in a context where I can turn on subtitles, because I will not be able to reliably hear dialogue over any non-perfectly-silent form of exercise.)

Known route around all of these problems: happening to have free access to an outdoor pool which is open at night and a person who will go with me and chat while we both backstroke laps. This would be great but I don't happen to have access to a free outdoor pool that is open in the dark.

My father used to do work for a company that made him change his password every two weeks and wouldn't let him reuse any of the last ten passwords he used. As a result, he resorted to writing down the password and taping it to his laptop so he could remember what the current password was - and made a point of it to the IT department.

I think I saw that paper before, either on here or on Hacker News, and it was replied to by someone who claimed to be from a data-recovery service that could and did use electron microscopes to retrieve the info, albeit very expensively.

EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511541

and with molecular nanotechnology you could go through the whole vitrified brain atom by atom and do the same sort of information-theoretical tricks that people do to recover hard drive information after "erasure" by any means less extreme than a blowtorch...

As far as I know, the idea that there are organizations capable of reading overwritten data off of a hard drive is an urban legend. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html

In at least some of these cases there's a likely asymmetry between the two Sides of the Chair, which may make it harder to maintain that we shouldn't favour one side's preferences over the other's. Namely, in some cases one of the two states is not sustainable. For instance, it's impossible and/or impractical to be high on (say) heroin for more than a smallish fraction of your life. (I think that's true, but I am not a drug expert. If it happens not to be true about heroin, that probably just means I picked a bad example. [EDIT: as David Nelson points out, that was in fact a bad example, but replacing heroin with hallucinogens fixes it. END OF EDIT]) So doing something that gratifies you-while-high but more severely harms you-while-not-high is likely to be bad for you-on-average.

In some other cases, one state is indefinitely sustainable but only at a cost that both versions might (if they could be convinced that the cost is real) find unacceptable. For instance, one can doubtless stay crazy for ever, but if one could explain to crazy-you that taking the antipsychotic drugs at least most of the time will make it possible to have a job, a partner-of-the-appropriate-sex, a life that doesn't involve being locked up all the time, etc., then I suspect that even crazy-you might agree that the price is worth paying. (Of course, if crazy-you is crazy enough then this is a hopeless project. Too bad; can't win 'em all.) Or: even when you're guzzling chocolate cake, you might well agree that you have to moderate your appetite most of the time because even cake-guzzling-you doesn't want to be a ball of lard six feet in diameter.

I don't claim that this asymmetry makes it obviously definitely right to enforce the wishes of you-in-the-sustainable-state even when you're in the unsustainable state and have very different wishes; but it does seem to offer a better justification for doing so than "simple bias in favour of mental states similar to our own". In some cases, at least.

I am easily distracted while reading long works. That doesn't stop me from reading long comment threads, forum topics, or blog post after blog post, though. As best I can tell, the relevant difference is that the latter are broken up into small, easily processed chunks. Because I know I'll be done with the chunk I'm reading soon, my mind doesn't have reason to wander off. The commitment doesn't feel as large, so I have less reason to subconsciously question it. Just like with food, just one more small chunk won't matter....

My book-reading strategy lately is to discretize the material and be actively involved in the text. I scan each page, and if it looks interesting, I read it. I then try to write a couple lines of notes on the page or section I am considering. Focusing on what is worth writing down also keeps me from wandering off.

This strategy probably wouldn't work as well for fiction, but that usually requires less motivation. I hope my personal observations are of some help.