When pushed on why Anthony Magnabosco is out interviewing people he responds with, "I like talking to people and finding out what they believe." True enough, but disingenuous. He presents himself as a seeker of the truth and his root goal is he is out to change minds. If the obtaining the truth was your primary motivation, street interviews is an incredibly inefficient method. The interviews come off as incredibly patronising. Questions such as, "If I gave you evidence about a biblical contradiction, and I'm not saying I do, but if I did, would you change your mind?" Of course you have a contradiction up your sleeve.

Honesty and effectiveness appear to be conflicting goals in street epistemology.

To balance the criticism with some praise, in addition to some of the great things you have mentioned, there are two worthwhile things about the Jocko podcast that are not explicit in your post that I want to highlight.

1) Jocko embodies growth mindset.

2) Much of Jocko's discipline comes because he has trained to become comfortable experiencing discomfort. Once you've done many painful things your fear of them falls and your sense of self-efficacy rises making it easier complete future painful goals.

"Discipline is freedom" summarizes the attitude that if you have trained yourself to wake up early, stay on task, exercise regularly, etc., etc., then you now have the freedom to do a variety of things that you would not otherwise be able to do. By having the discipline to exercise, you now have the ability to freely use a more fit body, by waking up early, you have extra hours at your disposal, and so on.

To address your first question, I think Jocko would probably say: "If you form an intention to do something, and you don't do it, then you are mentally weak. The first thing to do is then to decide not to be mentally weak."

In abstruse lesswrongspeak, this would like something like: "It is most important to form a self-governing narrative of the form 'a mentally strong person would execute on their intentions regardless of transient impulses or mental resistance, and I commit with utmost resolution to being a mentally strong person'. Then you must continuously monitor your daily activities for adherence to this commitment and to this narrative-mentality."

Ironically, the Less Wrong deconstructionist approach of breaking the self up into multiple agents and carefully finding a minimum-enthalpy path through wantspace is itself antithetical to forming such a "simplistic" self-governing narrative, even if possessing and maintaining such a narrative were more effective.

...it is valuable to have an example of somebody who reliably executes on his the philosophy of "Decide to do it, then do it." If you find that you didn't do it, then you didn't truly decide to do it. In any case, your own choice or lack thereof is the only factor. "Discipline is freedom." If you adopt this habit as your reality, it become true.

It's possible I'm getting to confused with the language here but I've struggled to apply this advice in my own life. I'll decide that I'm not going to snack at work anymore and then find myself snacking anyway once the time comes. It seems to reflect a naivete in regards to how willpower and habits work.

It sounds good and I've listened to 4 episodes now and Jocko doesn't seem to elaborate on how exactly this process is supposed to work. What is the difference between deciding and truly deciding? What is the habit of 'discipline is freedom' and how does one adopt it as their reality?

I come away from the podcast inspired for a few hours but with no lasting change.

CGP Grey follows a cycle that repeats -> (40 min work - 7 min break - 40 min work - 20 min break). I think he mentions it in here somewhere but I don't know the exact time. It seems probable that the most appropriate length and cycle for an individual should be based on their attention span and recovery.

This seems very useful. Thank you for posting it.

Out of all of the blogs, which ones do you prioritize in reading first? It seems like there are far too many to always read all of them.

Until LessWrong 2.0 comes out, this is how I've been staying in touch with the Rationalist Diaspora. It took about an hour to set up and I can now see almost everything in the one place.

I've been using an RSS reader (I use feedly) to collate RSS feeds from these lists,

Rationist Blogs,

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/List_of_Blogs

https://www.reddit.com/r/RationalistDiaspora/

Effective Altruist Blogs,

http://www.stafforini.com/blog/effective-altruism-blogs/

Rationalist Tumblers,

http://yxoque.tumblr.com/RationalistMasterlist

And using this twitter to RSS tool for these LessWrong Twitters,

http://lesswrong.com/lw/d92/less_wrong_on_twitter/

This system is unsatisfying in a number of ways the two most obvious to me being 1) I don't know of any way to integrate the Rationalists on Facebook into this system and 2) Upvotes from places that use them like LW or r/rational aren't displayed. Nevertheless it is still much simpler for me to be notified of new material. If anyone has suggestions on improvements or wants to share how they follow the Diaspora that'd be most welcome.

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

t;dr how do you cope with death?

My dog has cancer in his liver and spleen, and learning this has strongly exacerbated some kind of predisposition towards being vulnerable to depression. He's an old dog so it probably wouldn't have changed his life expectancy THAT much, but it's still really sad. If you're not a pet person this might be counterintuitive, but to me it's losing a friend, and the things people say to me are mostly unhelpful. Which is why I'm posting it here specifically: the typical coping memes about doggy heaven or death as some profoundly important part of Nature are ruined for me. So I wanted to ask how people here deal with this sort of thing. Especially on the cognitive end of things, what types of frames and self talk you used. I do already know the basics, like exercise and diet and meditation, but I sure wouldn't mind a new insight on getting myself to actually do that stuff when I'm this down.

I've thought about cryopreserving him, but even if that were a good way to use the money I just don't think I can afford it. All I'll have is an increasingly vague and emotionally distant memory, I guess, and it sucks. I've been regretting not valuing him more during his peak health, as well, although maybe I'd always feel guilty for anything short of having been perfect.

I've been thinking a lot about chapter 12 of HPMOR, and trying play with and video and pamper him while I can. I don't want to say "fuck, it's too late" about anything else. It's the best thing I can think of right now.

This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And that was where it all started going wrong.'

And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice...

Wish granted. Now what?

Yes. Sorry for the lack of clarity.

The problem isn't simply clarity. The frame of mind of treating a conversation with your friends as PR is not useful for getting your friends to trust you and positively respond to what you are saying. If you do that, it's no wonder that someone thinks you are a Straw Vulcan because that mindset is communicating that vibe.

That said, let's focus on your message. You aren't telling people that you are using rationality to make you life better. You are telling people that you read about rationality. That doesn't show a person the value of rationality.

If I want to talk about the value of rationality I could take about how I'm making predictions in my daily life and the value that brings me. I can talk about how great it is to play double crux with other rationalists and actually have them change their mind.

If I want to talk about the effect it has on friends, I can talk about how a fellow rationalist who thought he only cared about the people he's interacting with used rationality techniques to discover that he actually cares about rescuing children in the third world from dying from malaria.

If I want to talk about society then I can talk about how the Good Judgement project outperforms CIA analysts who have access to classified information by 30%. I can talk about how better predictions of the CIA before the Iraq war might have stopped the war and therefore really matter a great deal. Superforcasting is a great book for having those war-stories.