Comment author: Pastafarianist 15 February 2015 10:11:55AM *  0 points [-]

I tried this. My main problems were: 1) straying away from the exercise, 2) visualizing the parade (for some reason, my reaction to "visualizing a parade of soldiers" produces tiny 8-bit crude square drawings of soldiers on a black background, not marching but walking towards me in South Park style, which does not exactly correspond to the whole idea of "meditation, acceptance and mindfulness") and 3) quickly forgetting which soldier carries what, so I rapidly fall in anxiety mode, add that anxiety to the list of soldiers, which, of course, doesn't solve the problem of forgetting; then I take a short-cut and literally fill the view with hundreds of soldiers, each of whom corresponds to "anxiety, forgetting who carries what".

On the other hand, the two ideas stated at the beginning of the article can probably be summarized in a single one: detach from yourself and observe whatever happens to you as if you were a visitor from the future who relives a recording of yourself.

Gotta work on this more, I guess.

Comment author: djcb 28 March 2011 11:08:27AM *  5 points [-]

I've mentioned it in earlier posts, but I like to emphasize once more the use of audio books; as they allow you to fill a lot of your otherwise-idle time (say, commuting, running, shopping etc.), you can effectively get a lot more 'reading' done.

Obviously, audio books are not very good (unfortunately) for really technical expositions, but one can use them to read a lot of fiction, popular science, history, that kind of thing. I've been doing that for a few years and I got more 'reading' done than I ever thought possible.

Another little 'trick' for reading more is to read PDFs and the like with 'autoscroll' turned on (at least Evince and Acrobat support this). Using autoscroll forces me to really concentrate and also allows we to sit back and 'experience' the book. Again, this does not work well for highly technical books, but quite well for more 'prosaic' material.

Comment author: Pastafarianist 10 September 2014 05:23:11PM 0 points [-]

My experience with audiobooks is completely different. I found myself unable to get into the flow of listening, constantly getting distracted and losing track of what's going on. Besides, given that I already put myself under much cognitive load (reading, MOOCs, university), I decided to dedicate the time when I cannot read to reassessing and recalling everything in diffuse mode of thinking. So far, seems like there is no better option.

Comment author: Pastafarianist 14 August 2014 08:28:24PM *  0 points [-]

Hello.

I am a beginner rationalist (slowly making my way through How to Actually Change Your Mind), I haven't read any field-specific books yet, but I happen to be in Helsinki on Aug 16th. As far as I understand, the event is specifically about exchanging reading recommendations. Would visiting be premature? Will I find anything interesting for me there?

Also, judging by the description, the attached map seems to be slightly off. OSM gives a better location: http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/110713493