This week, my therapist and I talked about the nature and subtleties of my major forms of akrasia, and have begun the conversation that I hope will help me change or break them. After years of trying to deal with these problems by myself, it's oddly freeing to be beholden to someone else and also to have someone who is committed but not emotionally bound to me and my success.
My focus this week is to think of possible mantras that I could use to stay on task and begin (if not complete) tasks I know I need to do but I don't want to do. Lots of rereading of the anti-akrasia threads here.
follow them all and you can't use words wrongly.
I don't understand. I thought the purpose was to develop rules for writing definitions of words, not for using words. What have I missed? Or maybe, how would this list look were it to be written as maxims for writing?
Even SpaceChem? Note, I haven't played Deadly Rooms of Death, but SpaceChem is currently the most difficult "puzzle" game I've ever played.
Oh, how close to me! (I'm in Hartford.)
I'll find out my next week's work schedule today, and then edit this post, but hopefully I can make this work!
Nevermind, I have work. Hopefully I'll be free next time.
I'd love to hear more about the bot. How does it work? Where is it run? Can others access it too?
I worked top-to-bottom, without change. If a new branch grew higher than my previous cuts, I focused it immediately. I know there's an optimal way, but I'm not quite clever enough to think of it.
670? Lucky. I finally bested it after 1750-ish, yesterday. Once I hit 1000, I thought, "Why am I doing this? What am I proving?" and then I started clicking again.
Oh, I see. Okay, this all makes a lot more sense now. Thanks for the clarification.
Well, "gwern" a name I'd only seen associated with our fellow poster, and from what I've read (related to his adventures with The Silk Road), it seems like he's tried to stay relatively detached from his real-life identity, so I didn't assume that this Gwern is also our gwern. Makes sense, though.
Is it the same gwern?
Or if you're not rich enough for Judgment under Uncertainty, try his latest work: Thinking, Fast and Slow. I found it to be just as informative, and more engaging than the classic.
I took the survey, and did all of the extra credit work too!
That IQ test seemed really silly, but I've never taken one before, so who knows?
Wow, I hadn't heard of Nozbe before. That looks very nice.
I also really like your beginning of the day checklists, because I find myself floundering a lot with getting started on my lists, and having them set up like you have them might just do the trick. Thanks for the brightening of what needs to be done.
If you could specially mark interbook links and internet links so that they're visually different, that'd be nice. I'm working my way through an unofficial epub of the sequences, and I'm never sure if the blue link will take me to another chapter, or open the browser and ruin my reading experience.
Thanks for the link!
Nice, I like that.
More compactly this is called "Hitler Ate Sugar".
But what needs to be done? Maybe what needs to be done requires three times your life savings, and you must produce it or fail.
The whole post, I kept thinking, "But what's the difference? What's it actually look like?" And then I got to this line, and it crystallized. Brutal.
I've dropped out of college twice, and had considered that I would never go back (financial reasons, motivation reasons, doing "work" things with my life now). I decided with the new year that I would try to break into a new field, one which historically hasn't required a college degree but one definite helps (software development), and have found that businesses in my area look for one.
In talking with a friend in the field and one of the employers who turned me down, I went to the local community college and found that their course-work, their p... (read more)