All of ryan wong's Comments + Replies

Primarily biographies(to see how the world looks like from someone whom you admire), business, and psychology books. These tend to provide techniques that seem unusually enlightening at the start, but require conscious application over the long term for one to reap real benefits.

Good question. I used to read for the love of books and building a fictional world in my head. I do enjoy that from time to time now, but the nature of the value I derive from reading has shifted.

Using your analogy, it's just that instead of frequenting art museums like I had before, now I have expanded my interests to business presentations, hackathons. Both generally provide audiovisual material, but we go to each of them for very different reasons.

Yes that does sound like a promising system for retaining useful techniques. Will try it out.

That, sir, might just have saved me ~10 years of work. Let me try to understand this better.


I took all of the tools that had been effective for overcoming procrastination, put them into the array, and then went to interview people to find the parts of the array that I was missing:

Are the text in the Experimental Array image a template for inputing these tools/"putting the pieces in place"? Could you point me to the source where the Array was formulated so as to better understand specifically how to fill in the text with my particular internal vo... (read more)

2Matt Goldenberg
  Yes, essentially was taking the different tools and slotting them into multiple arrays, allowing me to break up each "ability" related to overcoming procrastination into it's component parts. The 90's looking website that hosts the two books on the experiential array is here:  http://expandyourworld.net/ Yes, that was just the tutorial for the Virtual Habit Coach.  
To go back to the metaphor of this post, forcing myself to close every tab that is not directly in use is one of the best productivity hack I learned.

I fully agree with this, and that is where my problem lies. I find it difficult to re-create the 'inspired' state of mind when I first conceived about the idea just by reading the notes I took down at that time. I have this nagging suspicion that I'm missing something important. The best solution I have for now is to work on those ideas to re-create as much context as I can through association, but that doesn't work as often as I'd like.

3adamShimi
I think the collection part of GTD addresses exactly this problem. There's two part: * You want to free your brain by writing what you want to do * You want to stop feeling like you forgot writing something down The way proposed by GTD is to collect EVERYTHING. The goal is really to not have any commitment or desire stored internally, but collect everything outside of your brain. This solves the first problem if you give enough details, and the second problem when your brain learns that it can always find what it needs from your notes. Anecdotically, it works for me.

That looks like an extremely well-thought out model, and I'm curious as to how it can be adapted from person to person?

I have had experience working with NLP and sports psychology techniques to set goals and change states. These techniques involve mental shifts similar to the system listed above. While I had bursts of insight and behavioral changes at first, these changes were more often than not short-lived, and I find that introspective techniques tend to have diminishing benefits, because there are no 'tangible' results I can point to ma... (read more)

4Matt Goldenberg
  This was my experience for the last ~10 years trying to overcome my procrastination as well.  I tried lots of different techniques, they would work for a short period of time, and then I would return to baseline.  I tried NLP techniques, I tried changing my biochemistry, I tried various checklist and todo systems, and everything was short lived.   It's only in the last 1.5 years or so that I've come to a place where this stuff sticks, and I'm just getting more and more focused/motivated/productive every day.   Here's what I found work for actually internalizing these things: The initial breakthrough was discovering the Experiential Array.  This gave me a template for "the changes I need to string together to internalize things."  I took all of the tools that had been effective for overcoming procrastination, put them into the array, and then went to interview people to find the parts of the array that I was missing: This was great because instead of just blindly trying to use the tool during the initial burst of "this is working!" I could instead use that initial burst to instead make sure that all of the pieces of the Experiential Array were in place.  I created a number of tools to ensure that I made the necessary belief, emotion, strategy, and behavior changes, such as the Virtual Habit Coach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d901U693d The next big breakthrough was using Thinking at the Edge to try to understand the deeper structure of procrastination. This was when I started doing things like incorporating resistance into my vision, figuring out the relationships between techniques, and changing the parts of techniques that were unsustainable.  For instance, NLP state change techniques  and sports psychology techniques didn't take into account your current state, which is fine for a short burst of energy during a sports match, but is fundamentally unsustainable. This led me to developing the "Nearest Meaningful State" and "Nearest Playful State" techniq
3ChristianKl
Standard NLP resource work seems to me more about artifically adding state changes then mr-hire's model. "What value I can focus on to make this meaningful" is a qualitatively different way to change state then to fire off an anchor that's loaded with the feeling of meaning from another experience. 

Yes, I've tried meditation but it doesn't lead to the marked increase in energy I'm looking for, just less emotional reactivity and a certain level of cognitive detachment that's useful in thinking within conversations. Both useful, but serves different purposes in my experience.

I've heard of Yerba mate but haven't actually tried it before. Curious to see how it compares to other teas, especially black/higher-caffeine ones.

Something that has always puzzled me about high school, is why students are required to memorize very specific definitions of terms in the physical sciences. Why is such a high percentage of marks rewarded for being able to recite, word-for-word, that electric potential, refers, specifically, to the work done per unit charge by an external force in bringing a small positive charge from infinity to a point in a E-field without a change in kinetic energy? There are five italicized keywords/terms there which will result in an entire lost mark if missed out.

I ... (read more)

Ah, now I've got what you mean. Thanks for referring me to that thought experiment, I don't have much prior knowledge on the field of AI so that was definitely a new insight for me.

I see now that my original shortform did not explicitly state that my terminal value was indeed the fulfillment of important goals. I was reflecting more on the distinction between pleasurable feelings that led to distraction & bad habits, vs ones that led to the actual fulfillment of goals. It was a personal reminder to experience the latter in place of the forme... (read more)

As an add-on, I found this LW article today that captures the essence of "first pleasure"

clippy interjects from the balcony: like number of paperclips created!

I'm not quite sure I got this part, could you please elaborate on it?

why seek pleasure at all? Wouldn't it be better to measure success directly based on meeting long-term goals

Here, I would argue that the feeling of the second pleasure is essential to meeting long-term goals. Feeling good about accomplishing sub-tasks will keep someone working towards an important goal, especi... (read more)

3Dagon
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer is the canonical example of over-simplified goal optimization. I bring it up mostly as a reminder that getting your motivational model wrong can lead to undesirable actions and results. Which leads to my main point. You're recommending one type of pleasure over another, based on it being more aligned with your non-pleasure-measured goals. I'm wondering why you are arguing for this, as opposed to just pursuing the goals directly, without consideration of pleasure.

There are two kinds of pleasurable feelings. The first one is a self-reinforcing loop, where the in-the-moment pleasure leads to craving for more pleasure, such as mindlessly scrolling through social media, or eating highly-processed, highly-palatable food. The second is pleasure gained through either thoughtfully consuming good content, like listening to good music or reading good books, or the fulfillment of a task that's meaningful, such as getting good grades or getting a promotion for sustained conscientious effort.

The first is pleasure for its o... (read more)

2Dagon
There's a large piece missing from your model - why seek pleasure at all? Wouldn't it be better to measure success directly based on meeting long-term goals (clippy interjects from the balcony: like number of paperclips created!).

How would "within reach" be defined? One of the themes of HPMOR is Harry using the scientific method to come up with solutions that the non-scientific wizarding crowd haven't came up with. If the Laws of Thermodynamics can be transgressed in this world, solving death might not be that far-fetched of an idea.