All of Harri Besceli's Comments + Replies

My own observation is that while my dreams are not infrequently quite unpleasant and nightmarish in content, a corresponding emotional reaction is not there

 

My best guess is that I experience as intense emotions in dreams as in waking life. Mostly this is informed by personal experience/ introspection. I kept a dream journal for a while a long time ago, and at one point also rated how good or bad the most recent dream bit was after waking. I can't remember exactly what my scores were, but seem to remember it being consistent with dream experiences fee... (read more)

Happy to hear - this link should enable you to duplicate the base, if you click the dropdown menu next to 'Form Examples' at the top (it might ask you to sign up to airtable first). If that doesn't work I can dm you a different link.

One of the main reasons I prefer airtable to eg. google sheets is that I find it much easier to categorise and analyse the data. A lot of the functionality is fairly intuitive, and requires a lot less formula knowledge than eg. google sheets.

For example with my time tracking data it's fairly easy to creat... (read more)

1Eshvy
I registered here to say that your idea seems very exciting and I'm eager to try it! Also, I would like to ask for a of copy your templates too. Would you mind elaborating on whether (and if so, how) you use airtable to aggregate your forms into information (eg how many tasks you completed in week, how much a recurring task takes you on average)? When I first saw your post I assumed you would be aggregating your forms in excel or google sheets. How is airtable different?

Thinking and Communicating as Separate Processes

I recently finished a major work project and wrote a review of the project to be shared with my colleagues. The main questions I wanted to answer were a) Was this worth doing? b) How could it be done better next time.

Towards the end of writing the review I noticed that despite having written a bunch of words on these questions, I felt like I hadn't actually answered them. It felt like I was writing a review of the project, as distinct from actually reviewing the project. I started a fresh page, aiming ... (read more)

The best and worst experiences you had last week probably happened when you were dreaming.

tl;dr - Compared to waking life, dreams are pretty wild and emotionally intense. Example - in a dream last week all my teeth fell out which was pretty distressing, and nothing as interesting happened to me in waking life. How emotional/ extreme an experience is seems like a good proxy for how good or bad it is. So probably the best and worse experiences you've had last week were whilst you were dreaming.

Why might this be true?

  • Dreams are extreme. In my recent dre
... (read more)
gwern*242

though plausibly a minute of dream experience feels longer than a minute of waking experience, eg. sometimes I go to sleep for 15 minutes and it feels like it's been hours

The argument from LaBerge and other psychologists is that when it 'feels like it's been hours', it's just an illusion or narrative fiction, which you can't detect because the critical thinking has been disabled, and no more real than when in a play, the curtain drops and then rises 'hours later'.

"You may be wondering, then, how you could have a dream that seems to last for years or

... (read more)
3Dagon
There is a missing factor from this, which is anticipation and retrospection, in terms of weighting the relative value/importance of experiences. Personally, I heavily discount the importance of imaginary experiences. A real papercut is hundreds of times more impactful in my decision-making and valuation than a dreamed amputation.

Gratitude Emailing

I've recently started 'gratitude emailing' - emailing a friend with things that I'm grateful for, who emails back with things they are grateful for, and then I email back etc.

I've found it hard to create a habit of gratitude journalling in the past, but this has been pretty easy and fun. I think this is because:

  • There's a social expectation to keep doing it
  • Things that are in my email inbox feel more urgent
  • I feel like I'm helping my friend by doing it
  • It's nice to hear about what someone else is gra
... (read more)