The conversation is more than 6 months old. How did you draw that conclusion? Did you have a set of possible problems? Did you narrow them down? Did you consider anything along the way? How did you rule them out?

LW spoilt me. I now watch The Mickey Mouse Club as a story of an all-powerful, all-knowing AI and knowledge sent back from the future...

I find that I do not want to eat until at least an hour after waking up in the morning, and if I do anyway, it doesn't settle properly in my stomach or something and I feel sort of nauseated until midafternoon.

How likely is it that polls on happiness, subjective well-being, self-worth, subjective productivity etc. are influenced by the position of the date of the poll relative to school year? (School has dictated my plans for sixteen years, and with my kid enrolled in the kindergarten we enter the same pattern. That's half my life, optimistically speaking.)

I suppose in people whose work is built upon different seasonalities (like seashore resort employees, or long-distance delivery workers, probably?), ratings should differ from the rest of the population.

One thing I personally found useful is to train yourself to check upon the kid more often then I would say were necessary if asked. Starting with sudden peaks in temperature and ending, so far, with ruined wallpaper. Just do it:)

acted to prevent, what he thought to be, the global catastrophic risk?

That makes it all OK, right?

Hooray! I can be sociopathically self-centered as long as I describe it in a politically-correct way!

All this sounds interesting, but without more resources (or biology background) I'm not sure I'm getting this.

I like the difference between single points and frontlines of influence.

Is the frontline (as you mean it) only considered in time (not e.g. physical space)? I.e. it's just a different way of saying "something exerts influence for a period of time" vs "something changes suddenly"?

And, also from veg.sc., the notion of (scaled) phytosociological relevés.

I think I get what the process looks like, but does it mean as a concept? E.g. what else would you use it to describe?

And lastly, the Image of the Species, which is the image of something you have encountered many times and recognize "directly", which might differ from such shaped by a different set of observations.

Do you mean the observation that human brains represent categories by remembering "typical examples" of items in that category?

I like the difference between single points and frontlines of influence. It comes up in vegetation science, where there is the Eternal Question of the Continuity of Communities; and some events and environments in my life felt like approaching lines, like the marriage, and some like points, like the wedding.

And, also from veg.sc., the notion of (scaled) phytosociological relevés. When you do that, you have to "edit" the picture of "grass and shrubbery" you see so that you can estimate the % of soil covered by different species, and not be distracted by flowers & dead plants, and probably recognize levels within the "grass", etc., and look for patchiness, etc., and find a way to express it all. I have known people compiling relevés in ten minutes flat; a colleague wave a hand at a spot of Erythronium caucasicum, half-screened by the rain, and remark "Huh, no clones here"... It just becomes a way of seeing stuff, with practice. Wiki

And lastly, the Image of the Species, which is the image of something you have encountered many times and recognize "directly", which might differ from such shaped by a different set of observations.

At the moments when you are happy with your life, the desire to escape from reality reduces dramatically. So I guess a high-level approach might be to optimize your life to be more happy, even if it seems like it would reduce your productivity, because you may get the side effect of procrastinating less.

This article was about the low-level approach, when your life already kinda sucks and you cannot fix it at the moment, only try to reduce the damage.

In your case, the obvious question seems to be: "Can you arrange things so you would tutor more, and do whatever is the other thing less? And perhaps hire some babysitter to help with the kid." Alternatively, could you somehow optimize your environment (or more precisely, your kid's environment) so that less of your attention is needed?

(My high-level approach is to change my frustrating job, and I am already doing some interviews. Also, some other frustrating things will go away in the future; unfortunately the changes take time that I can't speed up, so it's approximately two more months.)

No...Voldemort isn't altruistic, and considers the "global community" too disorganized to be an ally worth seeking favor with.