This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for May 16-31.
It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
- Established a useful new habit
- Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
- Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
- Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
- Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
- Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
- Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
- Tried doing any of the above and failed
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!
Next diary: June 1-30
Immediate past diary: May 1-15
I just received my first performance evaluation in my current job. It occurred to me, just after reading it, that I should consider, for each statement in it, whether that information was surprising. From that, I obtained two plausible and relevant conclusions about where I am miscalibrated about my own performance.
The next step could be to estimate which criteria seem to be valued most, and optimize for them. Make list of things you could do, estimate their costs, and based on your evaluation try to estimate the benefit. Choose the ones with the best ratio.
Sometimes you are miscalibrated about your own performance. But sometimes the management is not aware of what you do. Part of success is to make all your good work known. Mathematically speaking, your work is w, how it appears to management is a×w, and your reward is r(a×w), not r(w). It is good to increase w, bu... (read more)