Hello everyone,

I've been trying to write some essays for friends, designed to introduce them to some rationalist ideas on a personal blog. I thought I might be able to post a few here to get some feedback on what I'm doing right/wrong so I can better get the main ideas across.

This is a new project, so I only have a few essays (in differing levels of completion).

This is one that is completed:

 

" Hello,

Before we start talking about motivational skills, I’d like to set a few fundamentals down so everything makes sense.  Concepts and ideas are often much clearer in our heads than what we actually say *1, so for the this week and the next week I’ll be writing about two building-block ideas, and then we’ll get into a few techniques.

(My apologies if this seems slow– I’d like to make sure everything makes sense for readers new to all this, so if you’ve already been exposed to general rationalist ideas, you can probably just wait until the techniques start showing up for some potentially novel content.)

Today we’re talking about optimization.  This is a term that comes up a lot in both math and economics, but we’re using it here to mean “finding the best way of doing things”.

By “best” I mean faster and better.

Personally, I believe mapping things out, writing things down, and general planning skills are super helpful.  We’ll explore all those ideas eventually, but the point is that I find that these utilizing these skills allows me to optimize my task completion process– not only do I finish in less time, but the quality of work is also improved.

Most of us don’t do this type of breakdown, I don’t think.  Sure, we’ll write down what we have to get done, but I don’t believe most people will consistently assess their goals and break down their tasks, with outlines and mapping.

However, I think we can all benefit from trying to optimize our tasks, be it through planning or finding a better method.

Why try something different, though?  Isn’t it fine that most of us go through life on a more spontaneous basis?  Can’t we do things as we think of them?  

I don’t believe this is too great.  Consider our finite day:

There are lots of things we can do.  We can separate these actions into “fun” actions and “unfun” actions.  We’ll say that “fun” actions are actions we would rather continue than stop and we would prefer doing “fun” actions to “unfun” ones.

Basically, everyday there are things we like doing and things we don’t like doing.

We can also divide actions into things we “have” to do (mandatory actions) and things we “can” do (voluntary actions).  There are actions we have a choice in doing, and actions we may have less of a choice in doing.  There is some overlap with the “fun” and “unfun” categories.  Some mandatory actions are fun, some are unfun.  

Voluntary activities can be fun or unfun, but I think most people would choose to do fun actions over unfun ones.

There’s many more distinctions we could make between actions (like instrumental and terminal values *2), but we’ll stick with fun/unfun and mandatory/voluntary for our purposes.

And this all ties back to the finite day– the number of things you can do is determined by how long it takes for you to do them.  So if you prefer doing fun things, improving how you do things may be to your benefit.  

After all, less time spent on unfun mandatory things = more time spent on fun things, generally speaking.  

Aside from having fun, many of us have long-term goals– things we want to work to achieve.  These could be part of voluntary or mandatory actions; it depends on how badly we want them, our realization of this want, and our resolve to actually put it as a goal.

For different people, however, their definition of “mandatory” actions differs.  There are more localized actions that we can more easily see and relate to– making food, working at a job, and generally securing their short-term survival needs.  

But there are also larger goals that may take more time to achieve–eradicating disease, ameliorating global poverty, and eliminating potential causes of human extinction *3.  And to some, working on these more long-term life-security issues is just as “mandatory” as securing short-term life-security.

Especially in the case of the above really hard problems where the stakes are also really high, it’s in everyone’s best interests if you optimize.  The faster and more effectively we go about dealing with these difficult problems, the better chance we all have of having more time to do fun things and not succumbing to something terrible like cancer or nuclear war.

Now, I’m not expecting us all to immediately decide to dedicate our lives to tackling threats to humanity’s long-term survival (though I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t make me a little more comfortable), but it’s my hope that as we go along exploring thoughts, motivation, and the like that you develop a little more appreciation for the long-term view of things.

It’s very often quite helpful to explore the cause-and-effect relationships of your actions.  This seems really simple, but we’ll come back to build upon this later.  A particularly good question to ask yourself is, “What else could I be doing with this time?  What are the benefits of any of those things over what I’m doing now?”

For example, say we have to choose between watching an interesting television show that spans 7 seasons on Netflix, or we can read more of that Introductory Calculus textbook we just got.  

Intuitively, studying the textbook seems like the “right” option.  This seems even more the case if our goals include pursuing a job that is easiest to get with a degree in math that is easiest to understand with a solid math foundation that includes calculus.

But we also like fun, so we are also considering putting off studying for another day in favor of Netflix.  Of course we’d be trading knowledge points for fun points.

Economists call these sorts of tradeoffs “opportunity costs” *4.  

If we want to stick to our goals and still have fun, we can either effectively study calculus and then “reward” yourself with Netflix later on, or just change our mind into thinking that studying calculus is fun (more on this later on, too).

The point is, in either scenario, we can do more if we optimize.  

If we effectively study calculus, we’ll learn more in less time.  We could then very well find time to watch that Netflix show.

If we are trying very hard to have our actions align to your goals (which seems pretty logical), optimizing our studying allows us to reach our goal in less time.  

Of course, in the case of directly choosing to study calculus over Netflix, it’s easy to see that studying yields greater benefits (with respect to most goals), but just because it’s the better option doesn’t mean it’s easier to do.

No, oftentimes, we do the wrong thing– even when we know better…*5

But that’s also a topic for another day.  

For now, I hope you’ve gotten a basic overview of why striving for better and faster ways of doing things can range from helpful to super beneficial.

*1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_transparency

*2: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l4/terminal_values_and_instrumental_values/

*3: http://global-catastrophic-risks.com/docs/global-catastrophic-risks.pdf

*4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

*5: http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia/ "

So overall, if things are unclear, or this seems ill-fated, I'd appreciate thoughts on how I could improve/make this more accessible to friends.

Thank you!