"things that I expect I will be glad I did once I've done them"
I like this definition because it allows 2 different routes toward improvement, which you'll probably need to mix to get the best results:
Increase time spent on the activities which are already on your "productive things" list. Taking this to the extreme would likely eliminate load-bearing forms of rest, and drastically increase burnout risks.
Improve recovery activities to bring them from "unproductive" to "productive". You hint at this with reading a good book making the "productive" list but reading a disappointing book falling into "unproductive".
The lowest-hanging fruit for me tend to be in (2): When I'm able to give myself an alternative activity that's equally easy but less regrettable compared to an "unproductive" habit, and notice when to do it, I can often get equivalent results for the function that the bad habit was serving.
It certainly is not true on Earth.
Where is it cheaper per item to buy the same food or household good singly rather than in bulk?
Where can you get a single roll of the same toilet paper for less per roll than getting it in a bigger pack? Ok, now what if you need TP and the cash at your disposal at that moment is less than the cost of the bulk pack but more than the cost of the single roll?
When is it cheaper (time + money) to cook one meal at a time versus meal prep for the whole week? OK, now what if you can't afford the whole week's worth of food at once?
We might be talking about poverty at different orders of magnitude, and you might be writing off a lot of failures to purchase efficiently as "skill issue"... but being poor in skills and the capacity to hone them is, itself, a form of poverty.
Invert your thesis, from "the rich are so rich because they spend less money" to "the poor are so poor because they spend more money", and it becomes much more defensible. Boots theory captures the "being poor is expensive" element that's true in Ankh-Morkpork and also true on Earth -- look at the markups on any household item when it's sold individually rather than in bulk, and then consider what happens to people who don't have what it takes to plan ahead and make bulk purchases.
If we're being particularly literal about things, Ankh-Morpork canonically lacked fiat currency until the events of Making Money, so we might want to consider the other ways in which their economics functions differently from our own. They also have magic, and the deities who implement their laws of nature sometimes pop round for a cup of tea. So I wouldn't rule out that Vimes's use of boots theory as a full explanation for economics could be less descriptive than prescriptive -- he lives in a world where enough people believing anything hard enough makes it real.
IMO, excellent blogging happens when people notice connections between ideas while experiencing the world. Good blogging often feels like a side effect of the author's learning process. The author was there when they formed an idea, there when they had experiences with the concept of the idea, there when they revised the idea... so they can report on the experience of making a lasting change to their understanding. Or if not directly reporting on the experience, they can at least generate novel entropy which increases a human reader's odds of following the author to a particular new or interesting concept which might not be directly transmissible through language.
LLMs appear to lack the kind of "background" thought process that causes one to notice connections one isn't explicitly seeking. They aren't really "there" during the processes in which they assimilate information, at least not in the way that I'm still myself while reading a textbook.
I think if we wanted to get blogs out of LLMs that are good in the ways that human blogs are good, the most promising approach would be to try generating blogs as a side effect of their training processes rather than by prompting the finished assistants. But that touches the highly secretive stuff that the stewards of the most powerful models are least inclined to share with the world.
To step back a bit, though, do we need LLMs to be good at blogging? If we model blogs as demonstrations or tutorials of ways you can use a human brain, it doesn't seem at all obvious that they'd keep their benefits when generated without a human in the loop.
Don't people notice the ways that seeing themselves engage in particular behaviors updates their own self-image? The payoff for being polite to language users is that it makes me see myself as the kind of person who is generally polite. The results of being mean and bullying would be that I would come to see myself as the kind of person who is okay with engaging in mean and bullying behavior to get what they want.
Or maybe everybody else has a skill at compartmentalizing which I lack? But I absolutely catch myself applying prompting strategies to human conversation, because the part of me which does that self-concept feedback loop doesn't differentiate between my behaviors toward animate audiences versus my behaviors toward "inanimate" ones.
Yes please, more please!
Your writing is more enjoyable than that of many native English speakers, and I am one.
Will you do a sequence with more stories?
Tell them the way that's fun to tell, like here, and they leak rationality. The "systematized winning" kind, because it's all rooted in finding ways not to die in situations where statistics would suggest you really ought to.
Think, at least a little, before you act in a new or complex way.
Oh. Is this what they meant by "think before you act"? Because thinking before every action goes exactly as well as you, careful author of that sentence, would expect.
There are at most as many gods as people.
why can't we all have unique pantheons?
Intentional symbolism to place the singularity, start of a whole new everything, in the springtime of the second year?
I would try playing it. Will be interesting to see how it plays at a mostly non-rationalist table :)
We put decades of work into getting software to behave less like databases, and then act surprised when it doesn't behave like a database. C'est la vie.
Thank you for sharing this! Does it scale well with varying levels of physical activity for you? Some dietary things tend to be great at higher activity levels and fall apart at lower ones, and vice versa. I'm curious roughly what your current activity level is looking like and whether the boy slop diet thing has worked well at higher/lower levels as well.
Since this post seems a potential gathering place for other extremely easy and nutritionally adequate recipes, I'll also leave my boring-food go-tos here -- these aren't as cheap as yours but they're similarly easy:
Bachelor bowls: can of black beans, rinsed. Can of sweet corn. Optional, tiny can of olives. Optional, thaw some frozen hummus or guac (costco sells single serves fresh, both of which freeze great). Mix, heat if desired, add salsa (canned is fine). I find that 2 cans makes 2 16oz mason jars of food, and one of those jars is a meal for me. A jar of this is my go-to when I have to pack a lunch.
Oatmeal. Put a bit of butter and a cup or so of steel cut oats in a pot, toast them till they smell nice. Add some salt at some point -- start with about a half teaspoon per cup of oats if you like measuring things. Add 3-4 cups water per cup of oats (I add boiling water, because it's easy to make in the electric kettle and parallelizes the "heat water" and "toast oats" steps, but you can add cold water and let it take longer). Optionally, add some amount of dried fruit. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 20-30mins until you like the texture. Refrigerate it right in the pot. When hungry, scoop some into a bowl, add a bit of milk or water, microwave till hot. This is my favorite dish to eat as a brain reset for a couple days when I lose track of the difference between feeling hungry and feeling bored.
The instant pot thing: Put whatever vegetables like being well cooked (potatoes, carrots, etc) into instant pot. Add whatever cut of lean meat was on sale. Dump in a can of enchilada sauce. Cook on the meat cycle. Canned enchilada sauce gets the seasoning right and still tastes good after being exposed to high heats. I've tried it with other canned sauces and some of them are ruined by the heat.
One aspect common to all these easy foods is that they don't require much management of perishables. Your tomatoes are canned; the beef can be frozen; the veggies should be frozen. I think people who talk about healthy eating tend to underestimate the difficulty that some people have managing perishables, especially when cooking for 1, so I appreciate that you've tacitly circumvented the whole problem in your advice :)