LESSWRONG
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All of William Howard's Comments + Replies

hydrogen tube transport
William Howard*32

Possibly of interest: the fastest rocket sled track uses a similar idea, they put a helium filled tube over the final section of the track:

Just as meteors are burned up by friction in the upper atmosphere, air friction can cause a high-speed sled to burn up, even if made of the toughest steel alloys. An engineering sleight-of-hand is used to increase those "burn-up" limits by reducing the density of the atmosphere around the track. To do this, one needs a safe, non-toxic, low-density gas such as helium. Helium is only one seventh the density of air, signif

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My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia
William Howard30

That was when I took a week off work to do side projects, glad it at least shows up in this graph 😌

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2Algon
Huh, that looks like it had a persistent effect too. Looks to me like you're a lot more productive when you work on your own stuff, now.
My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia
William Howard21

Thanks for the tip... deep down a part of me knows there are ways to get around Freedom, but they're non-obvious enough that I haven't cheated yet

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My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia
William Howard30

Glad to be of help! I was almost put off by the overly rave reviews when I first tried it lol but now I can imagine myself writing one.

I haven't tried Focusmate, although I do do timed work sessions (and did before I used the app) and now use the app to enforce a certain amount of time per day, so this achieves a similar effect.

I registered on forfeit and see that it has pomodoro forfeits in the app, so using it for focusmate may be redundant.

It might be redundant, although one thing that is really great about it is that because screenshots are the univers... (read more)

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My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia
William Howard41

Could you explain more about being coercive towards subagents? I'm not sure I'm picking up exactly what you mean.

Some thoughts related to what I am interpreting you as meaning: I have found that my problems have shifted from not being able to follow through on things, to being almost too able to follow through on things, and thus getting entrenched in a pre-committed plan when I should change it (for instance repeating a time consuming daily habit that isn't doing much for me).

I see this as a good problem to have. When I was less able to execute on things ... (read more)

Reply2
9niplav
A (probably-fake-)framework I'm using is to imagine my mind being made up of subagents with cached heuristics about which actions are good and which aren't. They function in a sort-of-vetocracy—if any one subagent doesn't want to engage in an action, I don't do it. This can be overridden, but doing so carries the cost of the subagent "losing trust" in the rest of the system and next time putting up even more resistance (this is part of how ugh fields develop). The "right" way to solve this is to find some representation of the problem-space in which the subagent can see how its concerns are adressed or not relevant to the situation at hand. But sometimes there's not enough time or mental energy to do this, so the best available solution is to override the concern. Maybe for me the transaction costs are still a bit too high to be using commitment mechanisms, which means I should take a look at making this smoother.
How have you become more hard-working?
William Howard2211

giving him the Four-Hour Work-Week

...

he went from not hard-working at all (barely worked, had no direction) to more ambitious working levels (~50 hour weeks, big ambitions)

This made me chuckle

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