JohnReese

Hmm. Sounds like Open Monitoring (meditation) would have this as a side-benefit. Hypothesis: increasing non-judgmental awareness would lead to increased self-regulatory capacity. Perhaps consistent practice of any discipline that improves awareness would have a spillover effect?

"(A friend has reported an analogous "superpower" where they tend to automatically imagine future scenarios such as how an interpersonal interaction might go, which lets them rapidly iterate on plans using "inner simulator" before taking the comparatively expensive step of trying one out in practice.)"

Hmm...I tend to do this too, and assumed it was a common cognitive ability. Getting accurate sims of the future is nontrivial and hard though...a problem that gets worse if one starts extending the simulation temporally. I agree... (read more)

If I remember correctly, history records Caesar as having been relentlessly successful in that campaign?

I tend to find joy upon *spotting puppy dogs out and about

• befriending said puppy dogs albeit briefly
• digging into fries and mayonnaise after weeks of healthy food
• seeing an elderly couple walk hand in hand (yes, I can be sentimental) completing every singe good workout consuming good tea. Always.

Sure. For mindfulness based approaches anything by Jon Kabat-Zinn should be helpful...I recommend "Full Catastrophe Living". There are some useful hacks in other popular books but I am not keen on recommending stuff that may not live up to the hype. Reading up on the affirmations literature might also help. It is a tool used both in the everyday sense, as well as in hypnotherapy etc. Hope this helps.

Hiya!, Oh ok. Sorry to hear that. I will be attending - yes. That's a great idea, let me post a summary of what it was like and what I learnt from it in Dec. Thanks for the suggestion. All the best with your futurist group. Any themes you find interesting in particular?

Any LWers attending Envision 2016?

Hiya! I am currently a postdoc in the neurosciences, with a computational focus. Dealing with the uncertainties and vicissitudes attendant upon one still plodding on along the path to "nowhere close to tenure-track". My core research interests include decision making, self-control/self-regulation, goal-directed behaviour, RL in the brain etc. I am quite interested in AI research, especially FAI and while I am aware of the broad picture on AI risk, I would describe myself as an optimist. On the social side of things, I am interested in understandi... (read more)

Greetings. Thanks :) Hope at least some of it is useful!!

Greetings**, As someone who was once described as a self-control fetishist by a somewhat hedonistic friend of mine, I can report from experience on personal strategies. As someone whose doctoral work involved attempting to build a connectionist model of self-control, I would probably be inclined to highlight a couple of things from the literature. Let me try both.

1. The psychology literature on self-control/willpower would suggest that regardless of whether the "limited resource" model of Baumeister and colleagues holds

Hmm...immediately brings to mind the Challenger disaster and the story of Feynman's investigation into the disconnect between risk assessments made by engineers (group 1 above) and management (group 2).

In my experience, people appear to have informal, relatively fluid and vague concepts for things that also have formal, precise and rigorous definitions/expressions in systematic thought, shall we say. Truth appears to be one such thing, as I am sure others have noted here. When someone speaks of "my truth" there could be a few things implied or confounded within that declaration

1. What "feels" true to me right here, right now
2. I can see the arguments, but the chain leads to a core belief of mine that simply cannot be wrong given my wor