Are you aware of anything you've done lately that would make you more likely to have this sort of realization?

I have been rereading HPMOR and come up with an elegant hypothesis that I found to be ever more fitting as I continued to read. However, I just realized that I have been looking only for tests that confirm my hypothesis, and not looking for things that would cause my hypothesis to be wrong. This is not the sort of realization that I often have.

Yes; apology is an underrated consequentialist tool among nerds.

Some of the social function of apology can be understood game theoretically: Apology explicitly disavows a past action, allowing the one to whom the apology was made to leverage that confession in future: If someone apologises for something then does it again, then response can escalate because we have evidence that they are doing it even knowing that it's 'wrong'. The person who apologised knows this, and often the implicit threat of escalation if they do the same thing checks their future behaviour. Therefore apology is (possibly among other things) a signal, where the cost to apologising is the greater susceptibility to escalation in future cases.

Apology falls into a class--along with other things such as forgiving misdeeds, forgetting misdeeds, retribution, punishing an agent against its will, compensation for misdeeds--of things that would make no sense among sufficiently advanced and cooperative rationalists. Some things in that class (e.g. forgiveness) might already have been transcended by LW, and others (e.g. apology) are probably not possible to transcend even on LW, because the knowledge of other participants (e.g. confidence of their cooperativeness) required to transcend apology is probably too high for an online community of this size.

I would guess that the Bay Area rationalist set and its associates--which as far as I can tell is by far the most advanced community in the world in terms of how consummately instrumental x-rationality is forged into their swords--apologizes way, way, way more than the average LW'er, just like they talk about/express their feelings way more than people on LW typically do, and win because they're willing to confront that prospect of 'being vulnerable'.

HPMoR status:

"Well," said the boy. His eyes had not wavered from the Defense Professor's. "I certainly regret hurting you, Professor. But I do not think the situation calls for me to submit to you. I never really did understand the concept of apology, still less as it applies to a situation like this; if you have my regrets, but not my submission, does that count as saying sorry?"

Again that cold, cold laugh, darker than the void between the stars.

"I wouldn't know," said the Defense Professor, "I, too, never understood the concept of apology. That ploy would be futile between us, it seems, with both of us knowing it for a lie. Let us speak no more of it, then. Debts will be settled between us in time."

Two mistakes in thinking that my past self made a lot and others might also:

(1) Refusing to apologize if another party was 'more wrong'. Even if you're 99.9% right/innocent/blameless, you still have to make a choice between apologizing and not apologizing to the other person. If you refuse to apologize, things will probably get worse, because the other person thinks you're more wrong than you think you are, and they will see you not apologizing as defecting. If you apologize in a smart way, you can give an apology (which shouldn't make a difference but has the actual consequence where the other person is more probable to also apologise) without tying yourself down with too broad a commitment on your future behaviour, and without lying that you thought something was a mistake that wasn't.

(2) Using the fact that, in the limit as rationality and cooperation become arbitrarily great, apology is meaningless, as a rationalization for not apologising, when in fact you just feel embarrassed/are generally untrained and therefore not fit enough to apologise, and you're therefore avoiding the exertion of doing so.

I want to point out the difference between completely fake apologies for things one does not think were mistakes, and apologising for things that were mistakes even if the other person's mistakes were much greater. The former is less often the smart thing to do, and the latter is a lot more often than one might think. Once you get fairly strong, you can sometimes even win free points by apologising in front of a big group of people for something that everyone but the other disputant think is completely outweighed by the other disputant's actions.

E.g. 'I'm sorry I used such an abrupt tone in asking you to desist from stealing my food; it probably put you on the defensive.' If you really mean it (and you should, because you're almost certainly not a perfect communicator and there were probably things you could have done better), then often onlookers will think you're awesome and think the other person sucks for 'making you' apologise when you'd 'done nothing wrong'. Sometimes even the other disputant will be so disarmed by your unwavering 'politeness' that they will realise the ridiculousness of the situation and realise that you're being genuine and that they made a mistake, whereas when they thought you were a hostile opponent, it was much easier for them to rationalise that mistake.

Notice than in that example, your apology has not even constrained your future actions; everyone was so distracted by the ridiculousness of you apologising when you were innocent and the contrast it made between yourself and your opponent, that nobody will think to escalate against you in future the next time somebody steals your food.

That's why it's so important to know how to lose--so that you can win! Just like how the best things you could do to decrease your personal risk from fights are things like practising conflict defusion techniques, learning how to walk away from conflict, being less tempestuous, being situationally aware, or even just learning how to play dead/fake a seizure/panic attack, rather than something that just looks like winning, like practising flashy kicks.

I pretty rarely wrestle with people (or otherwise have such close physical contact), so if someone I have a crush on is literally sitting on top of me pinning me on my back, I have trouble staying calm. (I'm thinking of a particular time this happened to me. I felt about like Taylor does in your Worm quote.)

So I've been reading Worm ( parahumans.wordpress.com ), and there's this tiny thing that's been growing ever-more annoying, and I can't hold off asking about it any longer.

I keep seeing passages like this: "Realizing the position he had me in, feeling the pressure of his thighs against my hips, his weight resting partially on my lower body, I must’ve blown a synapse. My thought process ground to a halt. It didn’t help that the first place my mind went was interpreting his ‘start’ as being this position leading to something else."

Do people actually think like this? Seems like it would be really inconvenient.

I'm having trouble reading your footnote. What am I supposed to make of the numbers 12 and 13?

I do have a bit of a problem saying no, largely, I think because I 'respect' authority too much. For example, right now I am the only person working on a series of projects, the sort of which an entire team normally handles. But now everyone's depending on me, so it's too late to back out.

However, I say no a lot more than I used to, and it is amazing.

1. A while ago, I found myself working 12-14 hour days for a week due to training. I spent the evenings working on a research paper for class. The Monday after this week, there was going to be a completely voluntary oral test. Passing this gets you nothing but shinyness for your record. The list of topics it covered was very long and vague. We learned about it about ten days in advance.

I, being an idiot who says volunteers for everything, volunteered for it despite everything else going on. After two days, I managed to cram the first three subjects out of 20 or so, truly comprehending very little of it. At that point, I realized that it just wasn't going to happen and told my boss that I wished to withdraw. His response was something along the lines of "That's probably a good idea." It didn't really feel like anything.

As a second, quick, example. Someone just asked me to critique a lengthy excerpt of her novel. This was very easy to say no to, as it was erotica, which I cannot stand.

1. Estimate how long it will take, tack on 25% to account for planning fallacy, compare to current schedule and priorities. Another recent thing I said no to would have required at least 4 hours a week for two months, in addition to at least $500.

2. Both? Thinking about other people suffering is one of my main motivators, but I have trouble feeling anything for people on an individual level.

3. Yes. Without going into detail, I said 'yes' a few too many times and reaped horrible consequences. Also, it's a lot easier to say no when you primarily associate with people you don't like.

Interesting, would you be willing to say more about your experience? That definitely sounds to me like something that would be an interesting and difficult challenge.

What types of things have y'all successfully beeminded?

I tried increasing the number of consecutive push-ups I could do, eventually got sick and failed. Beeminder isn't very forgiving in such situations. I tried forcing myself to write every day and managed to fail that despite putting up an actual pledge and setting a really low bar for what counts as writing. I love the idea of beeminder and it has actually helped me in the sense that it worked for a while in each previous attempt, which is better than not working at all. I've even read Nick Winter's The Motivation Hacker yet I can't seem to find goals in my life that it makes sense to beemind.

So, to return to the question, what things have you successfully beeminded?

What's your MOS (or equivalent)?