LESSWRONG
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by Alicorn
1 min read
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60

An exercise:

Name something that you do not do but should/wish you did/are told you ought, or that you do less than is normally recommended.  (For instance, "exercise" or "eat vegetables".)

Make an exhaustive list of your sufficient conditions for avoiding this thing.  (If you suspect that your list may be non-exhaustive, mention that in your comment.)

Precommit that: If someone comes up with a way to do the thing which doesn't have any of your listed problems, you will at least try it.  It counts if you come up with this response yourself upon making your list.

(Based on: Is That Your True Rejection?)

Edit to add: Kindly stick to the spirit of the exercise; if you have no advice in line with the exercise, this is not the place to offer it.  Do not drift into confrontational or abusive demands that people adjust their restrictions to suit your cached suggestion, and do not offer unsolicited other-optimizing.

To alleviate crowding, Armok_GoB has created a second thread for this challenge.

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12Alicorn
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[-]JamesAndrix210

I have two reasons not to use your system:

One: If you're committed to doing the action if you yourself can find a way to avoid the problems, then as you come to such solutions your instinct to flinch away will declare the list 'not done yet' and add more problems, and perhaps problems more unsolvable in style, until the list is an adequate defense against doing the thing.

One way to possibly mitigate this is to try not to think of any solutions until the list is done, and perhaps some scope restrictions on the allowable conditions. Despite this, there is another problem:

Two: The sun is too big.

Reply
5handoflixue
This is my new favourite objection :)
2pwno
It's a good exercise in finding your true objections.
2Normal_Anomaly
I'm afraid I don't get your joke. Does this have anything to do with the system itself, or is it just an example of an insurmountable obstacle?
2jhuffman
It seems like both to me. The system is vulnerable to arbitrary problems that meet only a personal standard; the problems themselves are not subject to scrutiny.
2Alicorn
How big is too big?
3CuSithBell
They say not to eat anything bigger than your head.
[-]Alicorn300

Well, they're missing out on some swell watermelons, then.

Reply
[-]Alicorn120

I do not exercise.

(Caveat: I will refrain from taking any advice that would lead to me starting to significantly exercise until I have a diagnosis and a treatment plan of my apparent heart condition, which doesn't indicate it would be unsafe or otherwise a medically bad idea. I'd be really surprised if my doctor told me not to exercise, but in case she does I want to wait and make sure that my body is really lying to me when it says "don't do that, bad things will happen".)

Reasons (and existing known routes around each):

  • Sweat is horrible, and I overheat too easily. (Swimming gets around these; outdoor exercise in cold weather, interestingly, does not.)

  • Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues). (Anything indoors or at night gets around the sunshine thing. Other environmental issues are mostly limited to smelly gyms and excessively humid indoor pool facilities. Anything outdoors and at night and in nice weather gets around this.)

  • Many forms of it are financially costly (equipment, facility use). (Going for walks does not have this problem.)

  • It is boring. (When I tried jujitsu, it did not have this particular problem. Merely being able to listen to

... (read more)
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[-]Benquo130

It seems to me as if some bodyweight strength training exercises might not trigger any of these problems. I would suggest very small sets of comparatively high-load exercises, e.g. work your way up to one-legged squats, one-armed pushups, and chinups if you have a suitable thing to hang from or are willing to get a chinup bar (I sometimes do chinups on the metro). If you are interested I can give you some details on how to work your way up to these exercises, since many people are not initially strong enough to do them (I sure wasn't!).

Sweat: Short sets don't give you much of an opportunity to overheat or sweat. Also, with bodyweight exercises, you can do them at home and take a cool shower/bath immediately afterwards. (By the way, do you hate sweating, or do you hate being sweaty? I am assuming the latter for now.) You could even do the pushups in a cool bath to get some of the advantages of swimming.

Environmental Issues: You can do this at home and indoors.

Cost: Only the time investment, plus (optionally) the cost of a chinup bar.

Boring: This type of exercise does not take very long, so you won't have much time to be bored. Not very long means 5-10 minutes total, a few times a week. You don't even have to do it all in one session, you can take a minute at a time through the day.

As a bonus, strength training can make other sorts of physical activity less unpleasant, since you will be operating at much less than capacity.

Reply
2MBlume
I would also be interested in learning to work up to effective bodyweight exercises.
0Alicorn
I am near-certain I do not currently have the strength necessary to do anything you have listed. The working up to it must also meet the criteria, but do tell. Both. If the sets are as short as you describe and can be broken up into arbitrarily small pieces, I would expect to be able to work around this, though.
[-]Benquo170

I have tried to be reasonably concise here so as not to drown you in intimidating details and caveats, please let me know if anything is unclear and I can expand on it or try to say it another way. I included common names for some of the more unusual exercises, to aid you in Googling, but am happy to try to explain anything that is not obvious to you.

I hope this helps, but please let me know either way, as it will help me give better and more relevant advice in the future. Especially anything that doesn't work for you.

I am near-certain I do not currently have the strength necessary to do anything you have listed. The working up to it must also meet the criteria, but do tell.

Basically the idea is to do exercises that are less intense versions, and to do negative reps. Try doing the hardest exercise you can do. If at some point in the day you can't do it anymore then move one notch down. Once you can do 5 sets of 5 repetitions each in a day, try the next level up (no reason you shouldn't be ambitious and try it earlier if you feel like it).

Less intense versions of the 1-armed pushups

  • Regular pushups

  • Regular pushups with 1 leg off the ground

  • Ab pushups, sometimes called Superma

... (read more)
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3Alicorn
I wasn't aware there were so many difficulty-altering parameters to mess with. That alone might stave off boredom for a few sets. Thanks!
2Benquo
I was worried that adding that much detail would be intimidating or confusing; I'm glad it was encouraging instead.
2[anonymous]
You recommend doing multiple sets per exercise on multiple days a week. This seems to contradict what Tim Ferriss and others have said, but maybe that doesn't transfer to bodyweight exercises. Right now, I've been doing exercise similar to what you describe (following Convict Conditioning), but only about 3 sets per exercise per week (as the book recommends for beginners). I feel I stagnated somewhat and don't really transition to full push-up and pull-ups (legs and abs are doing fine). Do you think it would be beneficial to move to, say 3-5 sets on 3 days a week for those exercises? Or do I just have to wait it out, given that I'm fairly skinny and never had any serious strength? I'm also trying to be more consistent about my protein intake. Constantly forget to eat enough. I aim at ~150g at 85kg/185cm, but often just get 50-100 because I accidentally skip meals.
2Benquo
The linked Tim Ferriss article mentions one-set-to-failure, and if you're really truly maxing out you probably only need to do it a few times a week. But it's harder to max out with bodyweight than with weights. I was also trying to suggest sets that would accommodate Alicorn's desire not to sweat, which requirement would likely be violated by a true high intensity workout. For workouts that don't leave you feeling totally spent, which is generally the case with bodyweight exercises, you should take into account the total load in a day as well, and the brain-training effect of greasing the groove, for which there is substantial anecdotal evidence. It's a non-trivial skill to be able to be able to use your true maximum strength, we're designed to hold back in normal situations. There is also a difference between training for muscle volume and training for strength. Obviously the two are strongly correlated, but they are not entirely the same thing. My understanding is that you want fewer, more intense reps at a time if you're training for strength. EDIT: Though to be honest, I only do 1-2 sets of high intensity kettlebells and 1 set of the 1-arm pushups in a week. But I've decided that it's worth my time to maintain, but not to materially improve, my level of fitness at this point.
2a363
I also sweat a lot and the best way I've found of dealing with the discomfort is a merino wool baselayer. And not just for sports: I will probably never buy another pair of cotton boxers or socks. Cotton gets wet, then cold and clingy, which can exacerbate blisters (socks). All sorts of high-tech synthetics start to stink real fast (I don't have much experience with silver-treated fabrics though). Wool wicks very well, will not stink even after a week of wear, it retains 50% heat insulation and does not cling against the body even if it is saturated with sweat + merino wool is too fine to be itchy and it stretches back for longer than most fabrics so cuffs etc can stay tight for years. They used to have wool jerseys at the Tour de France up to the 1980's since it beat synthetics for cooling up to that point. Couple of downsides though: merino wool (Ibex, Icebreaker etc) is expensive (but hard wearing), needs delicate detergents and does not like aggressive machine drying. Bottom line: hundreds of millions of years of evolution for keeping warm-blooded animals performing from desert to arctic conditions has not been wasted.
0Alicorn
Wool is itchy. And my dislike of sweat has little if anything to do with what I'm wearing when it happens.
5Alexei
I play DDR at home (all you need is a DDR pad and a computer). It solves all the problems except the sweat. But since it's at home, I would think you wouldn't mind that as much (plus you can have a towel nearby). I find this the most convenient exercise ever, since I can do it at home, any time, and for free.
0Alicorn
I once owned a DDR pad, but either it or the adapter I used to hook it up to my computer had a delay that made it unplayable. So I don't have one anymore, and this therefore fails the expense criterion. You presume incorrectly.
4Alexei
Unless you are playing on high difficulty, you can comfortably play on a cheap pad ($16 + $4 adapter). As for sweat, it seems like there might be two things going on there. One is you overheat, which you can control with a fan or something. Two is the actual sweat, which is annoying, but by no means bad in of itself. If you sincerely dislike it, you can self-modify to find it acceptable (might be worth doing anyway). There are plenty of resource on LW for how to do that.
0Alicorn
Nope. (I overheat strangely. It's like my interior and my surface area aren't connected. Aiming a strong fan at me will prevent exterior but not interior overheating. If I just stay under the fan after I stop exercising, I will get too cold on the outside while still being too hot on the inside.) Not helpful. I may look into the inexpensive pad and adapter, though.
5dspeyer
I can't be sure, but drinking cold water throughout might help.
2Alicorn
You know, it might. I don't like water but that's not among my listed problems, so if I come up with a solution for which overheating (as opposed to sweating, which this wouldn't affect) is the only problem, I will attempt this patch. Thanks!
1pthalo
If you don't like water, but like lemonade (or some other drink that can be served chilled and isn't too expensive), filling a water bottle with it can be nice. If it's too sweet, it'll make you thirsty, but watering it down fixes that. I tend to add just enough syrup/juice/whatever to water to make water palatable. (i dont like water either). i know a person who has a medical condition that gets worse with exercise. they have to avoid it as much as possible because they can feel poorly for weeks afterwards (even moderate amounts of exercise, like walking too much). The condition in question is not a heart condition, but it is possible that there are other conditions that react poorly to exercise for different reasons than the one my friend has. So you should definitely consult with your doctor AND listen to your body. If you feel really crummy after exercise, you should be doing smaller amounts of exercise to build up your strength. If you feel really crummy after a tiny amount of exercise, you probably shouldn't be exercising. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. solution to sweat: deodorant solution to sunshine: a wide brimmed hat and sunscreen, if the problem is sunburn, or a sensitivity to light, or heat. other solutions to sunshine, if you are a night owl: rollerblading at night -- is safer than walking since you can zip by other people. is also less hot and sweaty. bicycling at night. these sorts of things are best done in well lit areas another solution to sunshine: if you are in a building with an elevator, take the stairs at least part way up. if you have a washing machine, hang your clothes up on a clothesline to dry (i have a clothesliine over my bathtub. they're easy to make. i don't have a dryer, and hanging up heavy, wet clothes can be tiring, especially lifting them up over your head. you can also flush toilets with a heavy bucket of water (you dont have to empty the entire bucket, just a little bit will do. this saves quite a bit on the water bill as
3Alicorn
I do like lemonade, but I can only water it down a little before it starts tasting like water. Deodorant does not work well enough and is not properly applied to all relevant locations. I have textural issues with sunscreen, and don't like the directed warmth and brightness of the sun even through it. (I walk outside on a sunny day and it's like I can feel myself crisping up. Or steaming if it's humid.) Hats worsen the sweat problem on the scalp. Skating is unkind to my ankles; skates cost money. Bikes cost money and I don't trust myself to bike safely in traffic. Helmets worsen the sweat problem on the scalp. I take stairs when they're handy most of the time. I don't like the texture my clothes have when they are hung dry. (I know this because sometimes I get a broken dryer and then strew my clothes around my room to dry rather than spending more quarters.) I do mean to learn to bake bread, but can't regularly count on being able to knead it; I routinely have small wounds on my fingers. (Don't say gloves. No form of glove I am aware of both lacks texture issues for me and would be okay to knead bread with.) Audio books have been mentioned. Cans of beans: interesting. May try that and see if it generates noticeable amounts of sweat. Yoga is physically painful to me in ways I am fairly sure are not supposed to happen.
2taryneast
Me too... and I'm Australian (where sunscreen is a necessity). I'm currently loving being in the UK and not needing it. I also don't wear makeup or use moisturiser for much the same reason (and suffer the social penalty for doing so in a business setting). I did eventually find one sunscreen that I could actually use - one put out by the Australian Cancer council (their "everyday sunscreen"). Understandably, however, it's not available anywhere else but Aus... though you might be able to find it (and try it) online if you're not in Aus yourself. It is the only sunscreen in the world (and I've tried very many) that you can't actually feel after you put it on... and I'm the sort of person that can feel the moisturisers that are guaranteed to be unfeelable...
0pthalo
Fair enough. I have textural issues too although mine seem to have different triggers than yours. But it influences what foods I can eat (nothing squidgy, which might be a made up word, but it means mushrooms and anything else that feels like i'm eating a condom), what clothes I can wear (i can only wear nylon tights if i wear thick white socks underneath), even what kind of books I can read (smooth textures are the worst for me, my hands break out in sweat and i get a fight or flight response). i've used cotton gloves before to soak up some of the sweat from my textural problems, but any other type of glove would exacerbate it. i have to be really careful with what kind of socks i buy as well. -- no i'm not suggesting you knead dough in cotton gloves. yeah, i had a feeling the deodorant thing wasn't going to be too helpful -- it's nice for armpits, but you can't slather it on your face or hands or feets or other places. and deodorant does nothing for the heat rash you get under the bra after sweating. it's true, bicycling and rollerblading cost money if you dont already have the equipment (i already have rollerblades, so its cheaper for me to use them than to take a bus -- my rollerblades have saved me a lot more money than their initial cost, but that is only the case if you know you are going to be able to use them for transportation). I think it's probably best to just avoid the sun as much as possible. another thing that is potentially exercise, if you like kids, looking after one for a while. true, you can just stand there and watch, but joining in tends to be a bit of a workout. yoga should not be painful. you may be stretching too far. for example with lotus position (where you twist your legs up like a pretzel), you shouldnt do that until your body is ready to do that. instead, just put your feet together, and try to get the knees as close to the ground as you can without it hurting -- if this means your thighs are at a 45° angle compared to your tors
1Benquo
Seconded. The good kind of stretching is about teaching your muscles to relax (i.e. lengthen) on demand. When you feel pain that means you are putting strain on your connective tissue instead. This can lengthen the tissue over time but that's not good for most people.
4Strange7
Thinking about the overheating... you might try getting some plastic-coated 5-lb hand weights, using them for arm exercises while watching a movie, and storing them in the refridgerator when not in use. Blood vessels are relatively close to the surface in the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, and I remember an experiment in forced thermoregulation which took advantage of that. Of course, it also involved a special suction-glove to increase blood flow, which is probably out of your price range.
0Alicorn
The weights themselves are almost certainly out of my price range. I just don't care enough about getting this done to work around my monetary neuroses. It turned out that my roommate has some 3lb weights (not covered with anything that would respond interestingly to refrigeration) and I was messing with those; my hands were not excessively warm during this process, so cooling something I hold in my hands would be of minimal help.
2Benquo
The thermoregulation experiment suggested that cooling the hands is a relatively efficient way to cool the whole body. I don't think many people feel like their hands get too hot while they exercise, but there are apparently gains in endurance when exercisers keep something cold on their hands. These gains are most likely due to the body taking longer to overheat. You could find out whether this works for you by timing how long something takes to produce noticeable overheating or sweat, then timing the same thing on a later day in very similar conditions, holding ice packs or something like that in your hands. If you don't want to induce extra overheating or sweat for the sake of the experiment, you could try holding something cold while doing something you have to do anyway (e.g. sometimes I have to go outside on a hot day). That way the worst likely outcome is not much worse than before unless you really hate holding cold things.
0Strange7
The weights only need to be made of something with reasonably high thermal mass, and the coating only needs to have thermal conductivity in a range that will allow the transfer of heat from your hands to the weights quickly enough to be useful but not quickly enough to be painful. My theory here is that your core is well-insulated under most of your skin, but that the soles of your feet and palms of your hands are effectively gaps in this insulation. Under this theory, I would not expect your hands to feel hot when you're exercising, since they contain no major heat source and have ready access to a major heat sink (the outside world). Cooling your hands just makes them a better heat sink for the rest of the body, reducing the need to sweat.
0Alicorn
I suppose I'll pop the weights in the fridge and see what happens; couldn't hurt.
-1EvelynM
I also overheat, then get too cold after exercise. For the overheating, I find that if I drink more water, I feel a bit better. I also run cold water over my wrists to cool down quickly after a workout. Cooling down quickly causes me to overshoot, so I need to have a clean, dry shirt to put on, and a sweater or sweatshirt, handy to cope with the chills. I don't like the sweating either, but I try not interpret it in a negative way. "No one cares if look like I'm sweating." "Sweating is a good way of removing toxins in the body. " That sort of thing.
3Richard_Kennaway
I do the Five Tibetans every morning, and they may meet these requirements. * They don't raise a sweat on me, except for the 5th. I can't say whether they will for you. * I do them indoors. * They are free. * They only take 10 minutes -- much less if you're not doing the full 21 reps of each exercise. How long does it take for you to be bored? This isn't the only thing I do for fitness, but it does seem to have a significant effect for me. The other things I do probably don't meet your requirements: using a bicycle for transport whenever practical (sweat and sunshine), running (ditto), taiko drumming (sweat, sweat, and more sweat), lifting weights (my own, bought with money), and taking the stairs, not the lift (sweat?).
4Alicorn
These do not seem to violate any of my listed requirements (possible exception being sweat, but I would have to determine that empirically). So, in accordance with the exercise, I will at least try them once I know what's up with my heart problem. However, I suspect that they will be physically painful (several components of the series look like they will cause or exacerbate the sort of headache I tend to get, and forms of yoga in general that I have tried in the past were distinctly unpleasant).
0NancyLebovitz
Can you go into more detail about what sort of movements are apt to give you headaches?
0Alicorn
I have only an ostensive definition, not an intensional one. The bits that stuck out to me were the spinning (this would worsen an existing headache but probably not cause one), the leg raises (which would not directly cause a headache but would lead to a sort of strain that might), the leaning in the third rite and the head-dangling in the fourth and fifth (it sounds like I'd wind up with my head upside-down or close to it, which could worsen or cause a headache). Sudden sharp head movements (voluntary or otherwise) also do this, and this is one reason, along with worsened kinetosis, that I can no longer ride roller coasters.
0NancyLebovitz
If you're learning the Tibetans, you start with three repetitions of each move, and only add one or two repetitions per week until you're up to 21 reps. If you need to do them slowly, they might require more strength, and that might mean you'd add more repetitions more gradually. I don't know whether your concern with spinning is related to dizziness. If so, I'll note that I've got some evidence that Feldenkrais' theory that dizziness is caused by holding one's breath has something going for it, and the Tibetans are a good way to work on breathing while turning. The fourth involves keeping your head level with the ground. T5T offers leaving your head vertical through the move as an option, or leaving your head and shoulders on the ground. The fifth does involve having your head at about a 45 degree angle facing down, but not dangling. You can do the movements slowly and get the benefits from them.
0Richard_Kennaway
BTW, I'd advise caution with no.2, the straight leg raise, as it demands quite a lot of the abdominals. It can be substantially eased by letting the legs bend at the knees.
0NancyLebovitz
That's interesting. I've never had any problems with #2, and my abdominals aren't in in great shape-- I've never been able to do an unassisted sit-up. Even when I was a kid, I needed to put my feet under something. The fourth Tibetan is the big challenge for me-- my chest and shoulders are very tight, and it took me a while to even realize that was the problem rather than the universe being out to get me. I've managed one rep of #4 that felt right-- like a coherent stretch across the front of my body. One of the good things about T5T was realizing that I didn't have all the possible problems with the Tibetans. Another was one of the warm-ups (hands behind head, circle upper body) which improved my awareness enough that I could realize I was pulling against tightness in #4 rather than just having unspecified difficulty. Some of the material about breathing in that book gave me some sense (no doubt incomplete) of how much I hold my breath. ---------------------------------------- I was going to start the second paragraph with '#4', and that paragraph appeared in large boldface. Markdown, stop helping so much!
1NancyLebovitz
I do the Five Tibetans, too, though not with utter reliability. Notable effects: they get rid of lower back pain for me. They strengthen the muscles around my knees. I believe they're the reason I was able to fall safely when I slipped on some ice the winter before last. (Previously, when I fell on ice, I'd twist something and sprain it.) Normally, I can do at least one of them better than usual. This cheers me up. I'm inclined to think that by doing them slowly and/or doing fewer of them, you could avoid working up a sweat. There's free information about the Tibetans online, but I strongly recommend The 10-Minute Rejuvenation Plan: T5T: The Revolutionary Exercise Program That Restores Your Body and Mind-- it's by a teacher who's taught 700 students, and has a good warm-up set and a lot of advice on modifying the Tibetans if you find them difficult.
2Bagricula
Dance in the shower? Even fairly restrained dancing over an extended period can elevate your heart-rate and trigger many of the benefits of exercise. If you have a shower and live in an area where cold water is provided for free, then there is no cost. Additionally, this should address your sweat issue much like swimming in a pool. It is indoors which eliminates sunlight. Vis-a-vie the boredom constraint. Dancing to music by itself may be a varied enough activity to keep you mentally engaged. If this is insufficient you might consider audiobooks or talk radio. Complications: 1. Safety. If you dance too vigorously then you may slip or injure yourself. You will know better whether this is a very likely issue. If it is, you may be able to mitigate with protective clothing (either purchased such as no slip water-shoes/socks or made from household objects; feasibility depending on your particular budget constraint and safety concerns). 2. You may not have a sufficiently strong set of external speakers to overcome the noise of the shower. If so, you might mitigate by (1) reducing the water flow for your shower, (2) purchasing or building louder speaks (for example, build a cone out of cardboard to amplify and direct the volume.) 3. Just cold water may be too cold for you. To mitigate either (1) add hot water (and possible add cost), (2) exercise outside the shower first to raise your body temperature, (3) acclimate yourself to colder water (this has been done by many people in the past either by necessity or due to a specific purpose such as Channel swimming).
0Alicorn
I doubt I could hear anything with content over the shower itself no matter how good my speakers were, and I have pretty terrible balance in general. (I rarely actually fall, but I have to touch walls a lot to make that not happen.)
1Bagricula
Run the experiment: For entertainment - try different levels of water flow with your existing speaker setup and see if there's any overlap between the range of "audible entertainment" and "acceptable cooling." The experiment is fast and cheap. Edit: You may not be able to find the right level of cooling without first doing some exercise nearby to heat yourself up. For safety - Assuming you've found an optimal level of water flow, try dancing at various levels of intensity with a friend present in the bathroom to catch-you/call-an-ambulance/help in case of severe accident. Not quite as fast as the first experiment, but contingent on it and still free and relatively easy - plus amusing for a friend
3Alicorn
Dancing in the shower with someone to catch me? Okay, to be fair, I didn't mention modesty issues in my original post, but I didn't really think anybody was going to suggest something that involved immodesty... (The shower curtain in my home is transparent.)
0Bagricula
Ha. Here you go just piling on additional constraints! Could you wear a bathing suit that'd provide sufficient modesty?
0Alicorn
I could indeed do that. Hmm. (Not sure if Ade wants to watch me dance in the shower, though.)
2BillyOblivion
* Sweating is going to happen. Exercise hard, take a cool down lap and a cool to cold shower. * Sunshine is (and I'm saying this as someone who spent over a decade in the Goth scene, and still is into the music) absolutely critical. It does wonderful things for your body's chemistry. * Life costs. You may not always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get. Now, before you can build yourself a workout you have to have a reason for doing it. There are many combinations, but they boil down to: 1) Rehab of injuries. if this is the case you need to consult a therapist and work out exactly your regime, but I doubt it. 2) Body re-composition--commonly called "losing weight", but is more accurately called "reshaping this mess". 3) Getting stronger 4) Building Endurance (you could argue that this is a subset of 3, but in practice it's different enough) There are some others, but they are usually either a subset (body building is really an extreme of 2 and some of 3 for example). Once you have your goals clearly defined some of your other objections can be worked around, except possibly for the sweat thing. The one thing "we" can do is keep the workouts of high intensity (meaning short and hard (get your mind out of the gutter)) so that you don't have time to get bored, and you minimize the length of time you sweat. This won't work if your goal is to do the Leadville 100 (http://www.leadvilleraceseries.com/page/show/309879-run-series), but if you just want nicer hips and a little thinner belly, it isn't that hard. One suggestion--and this WILL involve sweat--is to find a 25 or (better) 35 pound kettle bell and do kettle bell swings 3 mornings a week when you first get up. Do as many as you can in 5 minutes, then take a walk around the block to cool down. Shower and go to work. This will work your legs, lower back, shoulders and abs. It won't turn you into super$GENDER but if you currently do nothing, it'll help. As you do these try to do longer and
6Alicorn
Not helpful. You don't have to believe me, I guess, if you think I'm lying about what things are and are not horrible for me, but if you're going to disbelieve me, maybe don't give me advice?
0[anonymous]
Is it completely unthinkable that your aversions to sweat and (especially) sunshine are related to phobias or some other neurological/physiological problems that should perhaps be addressed at some point? Sunshine really is good for you. My wife used to hate it, made nutritional and cognitive-behavioral changes, and now likes it. I know that's not helpful short-term. But long-term, it seems like there's some other problem going on that is causing your surface aversions that you should at least not completely dismiss off-hand.
3Alicorn
The sweat thing is probably autism-related. The sunshine thing is some combination of that and me being ridiculously pale. I take vitamin D, have a family history of skin cancer, and do not experience depression, so I probably shouldn't be working too hard on learning to like sun. Sweat would be more beneficial to learn to like, and if you know of an actual disease that has hating sweat as a symptom, do let me know. But the vague concern that it might be something other than a very strong sensory preference like my other very strong sensory preferences is not actionable.
-3BillyOblivion
It's not a question of belief, it's an issue of presentation. Here is what you wrote: "Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues)." That is not saying "I have medical issues", it's saying (wrist to forehead) I don't LIKE going out in the SUN! There are lots of things in life that just flat out suck. There is no way to make worthwhile gains without struggle, effort and dealing with stuff you don't like. To put my earlier statement a completely different way, you have a choice. On one side is exercise and sweat, on the other side is where you are now. If you are happy the way you are now there is no need to exercise. Otherwise you're going to need to sweat, the choice you then get to make is then a matter of intensity and duration. Physical exercise causes muscles to use either blood sugar or fat to get the muscles to contract. This is an exothermic reaction causing the muscles to heat up. Exercise sufficient to cause physiological changes causes the muscles to heat up enough to cause sweat. You don't notice this when swimming because it's constantly being washed away. There is no big red fucking easy button that gets you magic results. There are shorter paths to a solution, depending on your goals (for example if you PURELY want to lose weight you can do things like intermittent fasting, low carb diets and ice baths), but you asked about exercise. If you have physical issues with sun then the appropriate thing to say is "I have $DISEASE" which prevents me from spending lots of time outside". Being light skinned with a family propensity to Melanoma is not a reason to avoid the sun, being light skinned with a family propensity to Squamous Cell cancer IS a reason to take precautions, especially if that family tendency is towards the cancer going metastatic. Now that we have more information we can work with something. You don't have to completely avoid the sun, you just have to limit your exposure (duration, clothing) to it and do things to minimize th
[-]MixedNuts150

I wish to make the world a place where "Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I'm not taking your advice" elicits the same reaction as "Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I'm not taking your advice", rather than being told to man up and being psychanalyzed by strangers.

I'm going to start with the subset of the world named Less Wrong.

Reply
4AdeleneDawner
Well put!
3NancyLebovitz
Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight is a very interesting book about sensory defensiveness-- having trouble, sometimes serious trouble, with sensory experiences that don't bother most people. It's correlated with autism, but isn't the same thing, and is sometime misdiagnosed as autism, neuroticism, or lack of willpower. There are people who specialize in helping with sensory defensiveness. They are cleverly camouflaged as occupational therapists, so they are unlikely to be found.
2Risto_Saarelma
Exercise can be fun if your brain is wired in a certain way, but needing to basically pointless busywork for physical maintenance is still stupid. There might be some entertaining flareups of cognitive dissonance from people who like to view being a diligent exerciser as a terminal value once there's technology for keeping the body in excellent working order without doing pointless stuff that makes you sweat. For instance. Also, how come no-one talks about different people probably having quite a bit different endorphin reactions to exercise? It's pretty likely that they exist, but people still act like they are good exercisers because they make better choices as rational actors, not because it gets their brain pumped full of happy juice.
0MixedNuts
Very good idea which we need to test a lot. I'm very afraid it might do bad things later on, build muscle mass but not do anything about fat or many other problems, build too much of a type of muscle and not enough of another, eat something that shouldn't be eaten to build muscle from it, or create weird dietary needs. But let's go test it!
-3zaogao
Downvoted because it is a general argument against any claimed rational action. Why do people who work at existential risk act like they make better rational choices when really they just get a different neurochemical responses? (Hint: Everything we do is for some neurochemical response) For an action to be rational in your mind, does it need to obey some Kantian-esque imperative where the actor can't gain pleasure from it? Are people who loathe exercise but do it anyways more rational?
1Risto_Saarelma
Was wondering why people don't look into differences in neurochemical responses at all, when they seem to be a pretty big factor in this case, different thing than arguing against any rational deliberation on it at all.
1zaogao
" I wish to make the world a place where "Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I'm not taking your advice" elicits the same reaction as "Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I'm not taking your advice" " This would be nice. Now when I undertake this rejection challenge and come up with a reason for why I'm are not doing x-action, I can compare that reason to a hardwired physiological reaction. I will then feel satisfied that I am not doing (x-activity) for a good reason that I cannot change, because one surely cannot be expected to put their hand on a hot stove. In this way I will feel satisfied that I am in my current position for a good reason, and can happily fall back into acceptance.
1zaogao
And Alicorn, I don't know the particular nature of your aversion to sunshine, and maybe it is deeply hardwired like most people's aversion to a hot stove, so I am not speaking to you in particular. All I am saying is that reasons to not do something come in different strengths and in with different amounts of permanence. There are some dislikes that are able to be overcome through repeated effort, such as talking to strangers or eating vegetables. There are dislikes that can be overcome through mindfulness, (I will start this essay because of how it fits into my long term goals), or through environment (I will start this essay at a quiet Starbucks) or, my personal favorite, through chemical means ( I will start this essay once I finish this bottle of Laphroaig.) Maybe I misread MixedNuts statement and he/she was merely saying that for some people, sunshine and pain aversion are essentially the same, which I could buy. All I'm saying is I think there is a need to iterate this exercise through each of your reasons for not doing activity-x in the hope you can either find fundamental issues (putting your hand on a hot stove) or issues that can be resolved (working out in a walk in refrigerator.)
[-]AdeleneDawner120

I think this conversation could use a dose of alternate perspective, and this seems like as good of a spot to drop it as any; zaogao, this is not directed at you personally.

LessWrong as a community makes a point, a lot of the time, of accepting a rather large amount of variance in its members' values. Except, some of us seem to be better than others at noticing when values-variance is relevant to the conversation at hand. It seems to me that a failure to notice that that's relevant is the bulk of the problem, here.

Alicorn has made it pretty clear, as far as I can see: Given the choice between a lifestyle in which she sweats regularly, and a lifestyle where she's less fit and more prone to health problems, she really does prefer the latter - that's what her values specify. She's not in denial about it, she's not complaining about having to make the choice, she's not making drama. All she's doing is describing the situation, pointing out the options she knows about, and asking if anyone knows of options that she's missed. This shouldn't be a problem, as far as I can tell: Looking for third (or fourth, or fifth) options is a very LessWrong kind of thing to do. But even if we collectiv... (read more)

Reply
4NancyLebovitz
How difficult would it be for you to learn how to be gently encouraging? Could it be worth the trouble?
2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Make friends with someone who has a backyard pool and invite yourself to swim laps with them. I don't actually know where you live and what the climate is like there, but even if it's colder, you can at least swim for part of the year. Ask everyone you know if they know anyone who has a backyard pool, and invite yourself. Ideal long-term solution: build your own backyard pool. Probably not financially feasible right now, though.
5Alicorn
I live in North Carolina at the moment and the weather would be fine for swimming. I don't think I know anyone with a pool or have a good way to filter potential new friends for pool ownership (and I live in an apartment complex, so I can't just stroll around the block looking for a pool-having house to turn up at with a plate of cookies). Suggestions? ETA: I fail. I didn't even think of asking the local meetup group if anybody in it has a pool before I posted this. (That said, since I don't drive and I don't think any of them live really close, it'd be more of an imposition than just allowing me to let myself into their backyard, but it's worth a try.)
1Bagricula
What about practicing balance? You don't need to buy a special balance board or exercise ball for it. You can just use any board on a pivot of some sort...say a plywood board on a solid rubber ball (depends on your weight). Balance will protect you well into old age and practicing it should strengthen your leg joints, abdominals, and lower back, as well as forcing you to be more aware of your body's position, movement, breathing, etc. For entertainment, you can listen to music or an audiobook. As for sweating/comfort it is definitely on the less strenuous side of things and can be done indoors with air conditioning (though this may be an expense you don't want to incur).
1Bagricula
Alternative balance activity: Just stand on one foot and try twisting your torso from one side to the other or from from to back. If this is too easy, carry a heavy object like a thick book. If this is unwieldy, try soup cans. Vary your angular momentum by practicing torso twists with your arms out or your arms in or with varying weights. Try the same while standing on the ball of your foot. Try while reaching above your head, to the side, et cetera.
0Alicorn
Interesting prospect. I don't think I've got any boards or rubber balls lying around, but will keep an eye out for something to jury-rig.
0Bagricula
Other options: Board: Old skateboard (I've found these on the street, should be easy to find in a few yard sales), cutting board (if you've a side you don't use for food preparation and are good about cleaning or use a towel to insulate), cut off part of a 2x4 Pivot: Rolling pin, small rocks (though not pebbles)
1DavidNelson
Taking evening walks while listening to audiobooks seems to deal with all of those issues, assuming you aren't like one of my friends who can't stand audiobooks. Audiobooks aren't free, but if you take 3 30 minute walks a week it will take you months to get through a single book.
3Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Audiobooks can be free if you get CDs from a library. (Then if you want, burn them onto your computer.) Also they may be available online as torrents.
0dbaupp
Another source of free audiobooks is LibriVox which is building (i.e. recording) a catalog of free & public domain audiobooks. It is all volunteer work so I'm sure there is varying quality, but the few I have listened to have been quite good. However, the catalog is limited to works out of copyright (or under an appropriately permissive license), so newer material is rare, but many of the "classics" are there.
1Alicorn
My existing iPod does not have any battery life (expense of equipment). Walking is not immune to the sweat problem. I also might not be able to reliably hear the contents of an audiobook over the sound of my own footsteps, nearby traffic, etc., but this part would be worth empirical testing.
3AdeleneDawner
I probably have an mp3 player around somewhere that you can use. (Check in the electronics bin, if you like.) If you don't mind being functionally deaf to anything else, using earplugs and turning the player's volume all the way up will likely solve the problem of hearing it over things. There is still the sweat issue, though.
2Alicorn
Noted, thanks.
1goldrybluzsco
I share many of the problems with exercise that you have, especially the overheating and the boredom. My solution to the sweating problem is to pick out clothes that are 'okay to sweat in', go for a run, then wash the clothes and have a shower immediately. I experience being sweaty as being very unpleasant, but with the attitude of "in these clothes, that doesn't matter", I can get around that. I find that podcasts are much better than audiobooks for exercise -- they give variety and a breadth of topics in the event that I'm not in the mood for a particular audiobook. I subscribe to some news podcasts, anime/movie review, comedy, philosophy, sociology, hacking and short-story podcasts, and if I grow tired of one, I always have something else to distract me. Really bare-bones mp3 players can be bought here for 15 units of local currency, so with rechargable batteries, that isn't a good reason. Most phones can play mp3s, and come with free headsets.
-1Alicorn
It's a textural issue, not an attitudinal one. The object is to get around my reasons, not dismiss them as bad reasons. Also, I don't have a phone.
2[anonymous]
I understand that that's the object, but I hope you aren't excluding the possibility that some of your reasons--or anyone's reasons--might actually be bad reasons. That's a concern I have with this whole post: it could be a net rationality loss if you let your attitude shift from "I will do X if objections W, Y and Z are overcome," to "I will do X if and only if etc."
0Alicorn
It is certainly possible that some reasons are bad. When people have presented options as partial solutions, I am in some cases willing to meet those partial solutions halfway. But "It only costs $X and it's a functionality that comes with $OBJECT so that can't be too much even though I know nothing about your finances or why you want free options" is not a responsive answer to my complaint that things cost money. X ≠ 0 and I don't have $OBJECT already.
1[anonymous]
You know that wasn't me, right?
1Alicorn
Didn't say it was.
0Benquo
Even when it's dark out? I would expect this would be OK at least at some times of year. Other things you could do to fight the boredom problem would be to try to get a friend to walk with you, or have a phone conversation.
0Alicorn
From the original comment:
2Benquo
Sorry if it sounded like I hadn't read the post carefully. I know it annoys me a lot when I have to repeat myself because people don't seem to be listening. But I did in fact notice that and had a possibly incorrect but not actually crazy reason for asking that specific question. My model looked something like this: expected_amount_of_sweat = f(ambient_temperature,exercise_intensity,time) where f() is continuous and monotonically positive in ambient_temperature, exercise_intensity, and time. In other words, a small increase in any of the three inputs yields a small increase in the output. This implies that for a sufficiently small increase in exercise_intensity, there would be some finite decrease in ambient_temperature that would offset it. I interpreted "does not [get around the sweat problem]" as meaning that for a fixed value of exercise_intensity, as ambient_temperature decreases, expected_amount_of_sweat approaches a lower asymptotic bound. It's possible for that to happen (e.g. if you're doing intense enough exercise you will sweat even in a walk-in freezer), but for there still to be an offsetting effect (e.g. carrying something heavy or running will make me sweat sooner on a hot summer day than on a cold winter day). It seems as though either my model is wrong, or my model is right but the transition from resting to walking is not a sufficiently small increase in exercise_intensity. Is one of those the case, or am I missing something else?
1Alicorn
Your model is close to correct, but "ambient temperature" is local to parts of the body, and in some locations cannot normally drop below my actual core body temperature. I'd have to wear ice packs in some mighty weird and highly uncomfortable places to make reality function like a naive version of your model.
0Benquo
OK, though I'm quite surprised if you're saying that the general outside temperature has no effect whatsoever. I'm slightly less surprised if you're saying it has some effect, but that due to localization of heat and the insulation of even light clothing, walking is intense enough to overcome even a chilly autumn or winter night sweatwise.
1Alicorn
General outside temperature has an effect on parts of me that are exposed to air. This doesn't typically include, say, armpits, my scalp under my hair, or certain less G-rated locations - not because of clothes (or rather not entirely because of clothes; they certainly have an effect), but because of other body parts being in the way.
2Benquo
Ah. I was thinking in terms of core body temperature being affected by the external temperature, which seems like it has to happen at least in extreme cases as a simple matter of physics (e.g. if it's so hot or so cold that it overcomes the body's ability to self-regulate temperature), but it might not happen in the majority of less extreme cases for some people. I should just take your word for it that you're one of those people, or close enough for practical purposes. And it's probably a bad idea to induce hypothermia in order to go for a run without sweating, so I withdraw my suggestion.
1Morendil
Why do you think you should, or wish you did?
1Alicorn
Health professionals keep telling me to.
0MatthewBaker
I recently have been trying to exercise more as well, I bought a door hang pullup bar for 20$ and so far in terms of exercising its quite relaxing. You can do assisted chair pullups if your tired, you can do just a few and be done fast, you can do extended sets if you feel like it. All infront of the tv/computer movie of your choice.
0Benquo
Going for walks at night would seem to solve everything except for possibly "boring." You could try to get a friend to walk with you, or call a friend on the phone, or listen to an audiobook.
-2zaogao
The obvious answer: http://movieclips.com/jCdx-rocky-movie-the-meat-locker/
-3Alicorn
Yeah um no, being refrigerated is a) not something I currently have free access to and b) falls into the same category as exercising outdoors in the cold. Minus one reading comprehension point. You will receive only one negative reading comprehension point for this mistake if you choose not to turn this into a thread in which you say abusive things about me or contradict me on the subject of myself and how I work. Yaaaay.
3zaogao
My mistake, I thought the suggestion of slugging slabs of beef in a meat locker would not be taken seriously. To clarify, not a real suggestion.
-2ShardPhoenix
My suggestion is that you learn to get over your fear of sweating. There's nothing objectively harmful about it, so it's merely a preference that can (and probably should) be changed through gradual exposure. Start slowly and work your way up. If you refuse to change your behavior in any substantial way I don't know why you're asking for advice.
8Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
ShardPhoenix, I believe that Alicorn has a form of autism (please correct me if I'm wrong, Alicorn.) Being sensitive to sensory stimuli and having aversions to some of them is common for people who suffer from autism, and I don't think these aversions are particularly easy to overcome. I'm guessing that Alicorn's aversion to sweating is in this category. She isn't just 'being lazy' and refusing to attempt to change a preference. Note to Alicorn: have you ever succeeded in getting rid of a textural or other sensory aversion through gradual exposure?
2Alicorn
My sensory issues do morph over time, but largely outside my control. The closest thing I can think of is that when I was little, I couldn't stand denim, but then I had a pair of very soft stonewashed jeans that I did like, and thereafter I was able to touch all varieties of denim comfortably. Trying to figure out how to not be bothered by such a thing on purpose would be a little like trying to rewire myself to not mind pain: surely a worthy ultimate goal, but not currently within reach for any practical purpose. It's too base-level.
2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
That's what I thought. It's not a simple matter of habituation, although the fact that your liking the one pair of jeans generalized to all denim suggests it might have to do with what category your mind places different textures into, rather than just how they feel. Has this ever happened in reverse: there was a texture/other stimulus that didn't bother you until you encountered a particularly nasty instance of it, and it generalized to all instances?
1Alicorn
The reverse hasn't happened quite that way, no. In general I become more, not less, tolerant over time; sometimes I have temporary episodes where something that's normally neutral is suddenly abhorrent for no obvious reason, but that passes.
-3ShardPhoenix
I don't agree that we should tiptoe around someone's irrationality (and bend over backwards to try to accommodate it!) just because it has a biological cause, or because it's something associated with "our kind of people". If someone with schizophrenia came here and started posting about conspiracy theories, I don't think the schizophrenia would be a good excuse to put up with that either.
8Nick_Tarleton
I think we should recognize real differences in feasibility/difficulty/painfulness of actions and actionability of advice when they exist, for biological reasons or any reasons. (Sort of like how you wouldn't expect basic epistemic rationality advice to make someone with schizophrenia sane.) We should also recognize the predictable effects of our words on people as they are, predicted using empathy and models based on people's actual behavior, rather than what we think people should be or non-truthseeking, habitually-used, constantly-surprised models of people. (Noticing when you're using the latter sort of models is a lot of work, but possible.) This might feel like abandoning all ideas of what people should be and letting them get away with any amount of laziness, and there are potential gains that could be lost that way, but the hard-ass approach loses at least as much (while making you less likable); far better to step back, recognize and (at least temporarily) let go of affective judgments and game-theoretic impulses, and semi-honestly try to figure out what's actually going on and what gains are possible.
7Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
The question I would ask is, does it help Alicorn to phrase your comment the way you did: "If you refuse to change your behavior in any substantial way I don't know why you're asking for advice." That would antagonize anyone, rationalist or not. If you said that to someone with schizophrenia, the last thing it would do is cure their disease. There are medications for that...and unfortunately, I don't think there are any medications for autism yet. And if anyone is bending backwards to accommodate it, it's Alicorn herself; this is something that must be extremely annoying on a day-to-day basis. You, on the other hand, don't have to change your day-to-day life at all. That being said, I think your original suggestion (gradual habituation) was a good one. I don't know if Alicorn's tried exactly that strategy before, and there's a possibility it might work.
1Alicorn
As near as I can tell from the fact that I am sometimes forced into situations where I have to deal with sweat, gradual habituation does... drumroll... nothing.
0Davorak
I am no psychologist. I thought one of the benefits of gradual habituation was that it was in a controlled setting that subject could end at any time with essentially no consequences. This contrasts "sometimes forced in to situations", I also have the impression that these forced situations there is no sequential order of events from the least discomfort to the most, in other words no gradualness(Also perhaps these events start at too high of a stimulus level.) Finding someone capable of setting up a gradual habituation regiem and having the time to follow through with it are the biggest obstacles to experimenting with habituation regiems in my experience.
1Alicorn
I did not submit "help me figure out how to deal with sweat" as a True Rejection Challenge, so this line of advice is neither on-topic nor welcome.
4Alicorn
Your suggestion is not helpful. It relies on false assumptions, doesn't pay attention to the nature of my complaint, violates the spirit of the exercise, and is dismissive of my level of self-knowledge, and that I would respond this way was predictable based on other commenting that has happened in this thread. If you're not going to pay attention to what kind of advice I'm asking for I don't know why you're trying to give me any. (Others' recommendations have already fared better than yours, and not just because that isn't difficult to manage, so my request for advice wasn't fruitless, although it does seem to result in uninformed noise production as a side effect.)
-8ShardPhoenix
[-][anonymous]80

I should play games (of the video, card, or board variety.) I get told this a lot, by very intelligent people.

Reasons I don't:

  1. I already have a hard time getting work done while having a side project, a relationship, and imperfect discipline; I dread adding another hobby.

  2. It actually takes a lot of work to get good at a game, and if I'm putting in work, I want to have something to show for it.

  3. Certain kinds of video games (i.e. Portal) are viscerally unpleasant for me; I'm not used to navigating a 3d virtual environment since I never played video games

... (read more)
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3beoShaffer
For 4 is internet poker an option?
3BenLowell
I see no reason for you to play games unless you wish to discuss games with these people and have something in common with them.
[-]JackEmpty110

Benefits of playing games:

  • Improved hand-eye coordination
  • Strategic puzzle solving skills
  • Decreased stress level
  • By far, more mentally engaging than television or movies, which are passive entertainment
  • introspection in choice-morality games
  • by Playing Like a Designer you can learn how to use gamelike elements in non-game environments (like the classroom) to make them more fun

See also: http://www.tastyhuman.com/10-benefits-of-playing-video-games/

Role-playing games can also have some of the same benefits (albeit much less salient) as improv theater and rejection therapy. Which is more fun, getting rejected by a dozen people you don't know to have a conversation, or having your level eight human rogue get rejected a dozen times in a bar?

For all of the above, however, YMMV.

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2erratio
For number 2 and 3, my gut reaction is to say you haven't found the right kind of games for your aptitudes, if you're experiencing it as work. For computer games, there are genres which don't rely so much on spatial awareness and/or reflexes such as turn-based strategy. For board games and card games, there is an extremely wide range of play styles out there, some of which will appeal to you more than others.
1Halceon
For #1 you can combine games with other activities, mainly the relationship. Playing boardgames together is a delightful experience. Especially games that require direct interaction like Alias. Generally you should look for games with 2 players as the minimum requirement and a low setup/ cleanup time.
0AdeleneDawner
If you specifically want to overcome issue 3, spending some time in Second Life might do the trick. It uses a 3D environment, but it's not really a game per se - there's no time limits or negative repercussions to making mistakes, except looking like a doofus which 1) is expected of newbies and 2) can be mitigated by finding uninhabited places to wander around in, which is easy. Also, your viewpoint can be separated from your avatar if you're not actively moving around, so if you find yourself stuck, you can swing your camera around to get a different perspective on the obstacle, which might help. You can also teleport 'home' to get un-stuck at any time.
0JackEmpty
For number 1, single-instance games. An RPG with 30 hours in the MAIN storyline and 100 more in optional sidequests would probably not be your ideal. But drop-in, drop-out type gaming might be better. TF2 is one I've started playing, especially since it's free. And the learning curve is fairly gentle, especially with tutorials. Find a class you like, play it until you're comfortable. Then find another. The only issue is that it would require a sufficient investment in hardware if you don't have it already. Playing on (and joining, if you're so inclined) Kongregate.com is another option. Some "hardcore" gamers look down on flash gaming as a lesser form, but I've seen some wonderfully crafted games on Kong. They have a rating system and actual submission criteria. They don't accept any crap, so the quality of games are better. There's also a lot of puzzle games, so the whole learning-something-gathering-skills-while-playing area is covered. For number 4... it requires a larger number of people, but it's a decent party game: Liar's Dice. Yes, Liar's Dice as seen in Pirates of the Carribean. All you need is at least 5 dice per player (dollar store in bulk, you can probably spend only a dollar per player) and some dice cups (I cut down and taped up some paper cups.) Deception, strategy, all the elements of poker. Just with some added novelty.
0Halceon
I wouldn't recommend Team Fortress 2 to someone with problems with 3D virtual environments. Nor to someone with discipline problems.
0JackEmpty
I took the specification of Portal to mean more highly visually disorienting games. It's why I didn't recommend Mirror's Edge. Maybe I parsed it incorrectly? If so, yes. Yes you do have a point there. And I didn't really find it all that gripping, in the getting-addicted-to-it sense. I am generalizing from my own personal experiences here though, so I may be an outlier, where the majority of players do get sucked in? My reasoning is more that there's no real plot. You don't need to "finish" the game, you can just play it whenever and it is just as satisfying from an entertainment standpoint. shrugs I will take your dissent as evidence, however. I am quite new to the game.
1Halceon
Well, TF2 doesn't seem like a disorienting game per se, but the generally fast pace of the game can and probably will add to the disorientation. Personally I wouldn't call it addictive either. But from the sample of people I have around me, I'd say that games with instanced gameplay tend to take up a lot more time than expected, especially if the next round is loaded automatically. It's what I like to call the "One more level" problem. Every round is relatively short, but the number of rounds has a slight tendency to get out of hand.
[-]DriveByCommenter60

Procrastination is making me miss a lot of opportunities. Up to and including (in progress): having a chance at anchoring myself in a first-world country vs blowing it and having to return to eastern Europe.

Barriers:

  1. High initial anxiety when sitting down to start a project. Related to #2.

  2. Low confidence in own abilities after so many mediocre last-minute solutions in the past.

  3. No social support - no friends interested in programming.

  4. Additional anxiety due to being behind schedule with 3-4 items - article, internship work, internship report, learning

... (read more)
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4kurokikaze
1, 2, 3 - You can get into opensource social coding like Github or Bitbucket. This will improve your coding skills and make you some coder friends to help with tough questions (worked for me). Time constraint is harder to deal with.
2CuSithBell
Would you mind expanding on this a little? These websites look like version control / project management systems, how does one jump into the "public" projects you're talking about?
2kurokikaze
It's simple. I'll show on one example. I was interested in Sphinx search server, so I've decided to do its protocol implementation in javascript (for node.js). I've created project on github and got remote URL. Then I've created folder on local disk and started coding. Reverse-enginereed PHP Sphinx connector, written some JS code, commited it to local Git repo. Next step: add remote URL to git repo. After this I can push my changes to Github with "git push remote master", where "master" is the branch name. And voila, project is on the Github. Then I write some more code and get first working prototype. I announced it in node.js Google group to attract another developers to project. They watch, comment on commits (not often) and send pull requests for code via Github (more often). Then I decide if I need the patch and apply / modify+apply / decline patch. Someone can fork my project if they feel I won't add some feature they need or I'm too lazy updating the code. Basically, that's it.
2CuSithBell
Awesome, thanks :)
0handoflixue
2) Do small, quick projects to build confidence. Write a calculator to compute Bayesian probabilities, or an alarm clock. Start small! Once you're comfortable with that, pick a simple game (Checkers, TicTacToe), break it down in to "issues", and slowly work on finishing each one. Just focus on "draw a board" first, then "allow player to place marks", then "alternate between two players", and finally "check for victory". If you're feeling comfortable after all of that, feel free to write an AI to play the game, or pick a more complex game like Chess or Go and implement that. This is a lot of how I built up my own skills. I also downloaded open source video games and went through their source code to see how they implemented it. For some games, you'll learn what not to do. For others, you'll see some fairly advanced techniques illustrated. Quality varies :) For #3, after I'd done #2 for a while, I started offering patches to open source games, as well as joining a development team for one that was incomplete. I'm not real sure exactly how you'd go about finding an interesting project; I usually just happen upon them because I want to fix a bug in LessWrong source, or a friend had discovered a new board game and the only computer version isn't finished yet, etc. :) #1 Is probably helped dramatically by addressing the others. Small, manageable chunks help me when I'm running in to this. Having a specific "to do" list that I can go through methodically is also wonderful. "Program TicTacToe" makes me anxious, but "draw a tic tac toe grid" is something I could do in my sleep. As an added bonus, I get to check things off a list, which is a guilty pleasure of mine ^_^ I personally use GoogleCode for storing everything. It's got nice built-in SVN support and issue tracking, which works wonderfully for me. If you're not yet used to using SVN for source control, it's a great way to learn :)
[-]JackEmpty60

Just as an aside and a note to all giving the recommendations and advice... focus on First Order Optimal Strategies.

Sure self-editing to not have your rejections be rejections anymore, by training the habit over the course of a few months to a year or more MAY work, and may work very well. But it's not the strategy that has the lowest skill/effort input to highest power/effect output ratio.

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0NancyLebovitz
What sort of strategies would you say give the best leverage?
2JackEmpty
I can only really think of specific examples to specific cases, but things that take minimal effort, yet still give fairly high returns when compared to other low-effort strategies. If the task is "eat vegetables" and the restrictions are money, proximity to store, spoils too quickly, and no freezer, then an example of something that is NOT a FOO strategy would be to sell your property, move to or purchase a farm, start growing your own vegetables and eat those ones, while selling the excess to buy a better freezer. Clearly, I'm using hyperbole here, but you get the picture. You can't deny that that that IS a valid method to gain access to vegetables. But it's not first-order optimal. First order optimal would be to buy incrementally as you need the vegetables, when doing other activities in the same day that brings you close to the store. A Non-FOO strategy for "excercise more" would be to drop work and all other activities and begin a olympic-level training regimen. A FOO strategy would be to incorporate excerse into regular daily activities (stairs, biking instead of driving, etc.)
[-]NancyLebovitz60

Suggestion: If you have financial constraints for your solution, be specific.

If there's a known cost for a solution, check financial constraints to make sure the cost doesn't exceed them.

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7NancyLebovitz
This may not have been as good advice as it appears. I posted it because I was annoyed at the suggestion of a Roomba for someone who was very broke, but the result of the suggestion was information that it's possible to borrow a Roomba for one day for free. There may be a general principle to be found, but I don't know what it is.
0MixedNuts
"If many people are giving advice, and your advice is flawed, give it anyway; other people may correct the flaws."?
4NancyLebovitz
The thing is, we want to limit pointlessly annoying advice, and the larger the volume of advice, the heavier the burden of noise,. Perhaps something like "is there a way to get access to whatever?" is a good format.
[-]pthalo60

Things I really need to do but can't seem to make myself do them:

there are clothes rotting in my washing machine. I had a migraine and couldn't hang them up, and the migraine lasted about a week, and now there's fungus growing on them. I've read online that this can be fixed by washing them 3-4 times and then hanging them in the sun to dry. Adding vinegar to the washing machine can help. The washing machine is right next to the bathtub, and I can't bathe properly because the smell is overpowering and makes me dizzy and light headed.

1) I'm still sore and co... (read more)

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[-]jimrandomh230

There are clothes rotting in my washing machine. I had a migraine and couldn't hang them up, and the migraine lasted about a week, and now there's fungus growing on them. I've read online that this can be fixed by washing them 3-4 times and then hanging them in the sun to dry. Adding vinegar to the washing machine can help. The washing machine is right next to the bathtub, and I can't bathe properly because the smell is overpowering and makes me dizzy and light headed.

Do not fuck around with possibly-toxic fungus. The fact that the fumes have immediate negative effects strongly suggests that it's toxic. Do not ignore sudden health problems that coincide with the appearance of mold in your environment, especially not ones as severe as a perpetual migraine. Those clothes are probably not salvageable, but they should be the least of your worries. You need outside help cleaning your apartment, and you need it yesterday. You also need a physical.

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9pthalo
This comment was really helpful to me. Thank you. Googling "toxic fungus" was sufficiently scary to get me out of "what is it about laundry that i'm just not understanding that caused this to happen" mode (answer: there is nothing about laundry that i don't "understand". i also have long been aware of what fungus is and what conditions foster its growth, but was unable to prevent those conditions from occuring because of health problems, which the fungus exacerbated), and made me realise the flaw in my: "wait till i'm feeling better and then deal with it" strategy.
[-]AdeleneDawner100

More information about your situation might be useful here. My first suggestion is to see if you can find someone local to help you with it (friends, family), but that seems like an obvious enough solution that I expect that if it were that simple you'd have done it already. So, what resources do you have available?

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7[anonymous]
Seconded. This looks like a job for another human. Where are you staying at, pthalo?
0pthalo
southern Hungary. A bit of a swim from the location listed in your profile, it seems. :)
4Armok_GoB
Yea. With migraines like that it is unreasonable to expect that you should be able to do anything like this on your own. Please get help before you get sick from the unsanitary conditions.
1pthalo
I will try. I really did think there was some simple answer that I was missing that would enable me to do it on my own, like everyone does, but i wasn't accounting for the fact that the people who manage to stay on top of their laundry dont have disabling migraines.
1pthalo
I have a mother who lives very far away, who would spend money she didnt have to come help me if she knew, but I'd feel very guilty about the whole thing. My best friend is currently at a summer camp like training thing for a new job and following that is moving to Budapest (2 hour train ride away) with her boyfriend (my other friend). So they're very busy right now and currently unavailable, and they've helped me out so much with other things in the past, that I dont want to be a burden on them. I'm ashamed of the condition of the apartment, but I know they would be understanding. i have a religious community, but the last time i was very sick, in 2009, (3 weeks of influenza + 3 weeks of strep throat), I asked for help getting to a doctor (I had a high fever, was sleeping 22 hours a day, could not keep even a small sip of water down, and was terrified that i was going to die of dehydration). They helped me get to a doctor and get antibiotics and medicine to help me keep things down, but while they were here, they took one look at my flat (a mess. i was too busy throwing up to keep things tidy) and wrote my mother a letter saying that i was clearly mentally ill because of disarray I was living in which reflects an inner disarray of mind and emotion and my mother was so worried that she flew out to see me (which she could not afford to do), but by the time she got here I had mostly recovered and I made an effort to show her that I was okay, not having a nervous breakdown, was a little weak after a physical illness which had led to the mess that had been there (all tidied up in a frenzy that i wasn't really well enough to do before my mother arrived), and that i did not need to be taken back to live with her where she could ensure that i find a good psychiatrist, because the antibiotics had cleared up the "mental illness" just fine, thank you. i succeeded. This experience has made me much less willingly to reach out for help from the people involved (and it's a smal
8Bagricula
8-hours to grow fungus on cooked food seems far too fast. I am not an expert on this. You should find an expert on this either here or in your local community to look at conditions in your apartment. My concern is that you may have fungus/mold elsewhere in your apartment (perhaps behind the dry-wall i.e. in the walls) or elsewhere, and that this fungus is releasing spores that're growing in your ramen. As a preliminary measure, I suggest improving the ventilation by keeping the windows open and maybe the front door to create a cross-breeze. Do you have access to a free medical expert like a doctor or clinic? I would go there as soon as possible and tell them about the fungus growing on your clothes, growing on your ramen after 8 hours, as well as your migraines and any other problems. They may be able to contact the correct authorities if there is a public health hazard. Once again, I am not an expert and have little direct knowledge about this; however, in all my experience living in very hot and humid climates I've never seen fungus grow on cooked food left out over 8 hours. I hope the other LWers here can provide better clarity into whether my concern is valid.
1saturn
I'm not an expert either, but I think there's enough evidence to be pretty certain there's a problem. I don't know whether the authorities in Hungary are likely to be helpful, or what kinds of cleaning services are available or how much they cost. It might even be worth moving to a different apartment.
1pthalo
Well, it was food left out of refrigeration as well. I've never really thought of ramen as cooked food -- it was heated in the microwave for the required time, though, so I suppose you're right. Humidity has been around 80-90% recently, and the temperature that day was probably no higher than 30. The amount of growth was small -- just a few clusters less than a centimetre in diametre, but black and definitely fungus. I put it on the opposite side of the room where it wouldn't be near me and let it grow a little longer and it was covered within a few days. The building is made entirely of concrete. If you think of a stereotypical cold war era eastern european apartment building, you'll get the idea, though ours has been prettied up (insulated, new windows put in, painted cheerfully) by the city. The walls in this room are hard to the touch, but in my bedroom, the wall is slightly spongy, but not visibly damaged in any way. The sponginess is uniform throughout and feels like I'm pressing against styrofoam instead of concrete. I assumed it was some sort of insulation. I live on the fifth floor with cats and have no fly screens. There are shutters in the bedroom, so I leave the windows open and the shutters closed, so that air can get in, but cats can't get out. The window in this room leads to a balcony, though, which the cats are scared of because they don't like the noises from the street, so I can open the window in here as well if I keep an eye on them. They really like sitting on windowsills, though, so I'm careful about that. The cats aren't allowed in the kitchen (enforced by a closed door), so I can leave windows open there. I can also air out different rooms alternately with closed doors. This is what the fungus looks like that was on my clothes: http://pics.livejournal.com/pthalogreen/pic/0012sbbx I managed to wash it twice yesterday, which decreased the smell and made the spots go away. I want to wash it a few more times before deciding what to do, and I
4Bagricula
If your health deteriorates further then you will not be able to complete your planned move, much less do something drastic like move now. If your environment has toxic fungus, you cannot live for a year there and expect to be in any condition to move, to apply for a visa, or perhaps to be out of the hospital. I am trying not to be alarmist, and would very much like the opinion of better informed readers on the relative danger/safety of your situation, but you need to examine how much you weigh the inconvenience of moving or doing something about the problem versus your health or existential risks. I've moved four times in the last three years across three continents. I've been lucky enough to not be coping with migraines and to have enough cashflow to make it work. I only mention it to point out that it is eminently feasible. Is there anyone you can stay with for say a week to see if your condition improves vis-a-vie the migraines?
1satt
I don't know whether you can afford it, but it may help to buy a dehumidifier to lower the humidity in & near your kitchen. That should make it harder for mould to grow successfully. A new one costs £100-200 here (which Google's currency converter says is about 30k-60k HUF), but they should last for 3-10 years, so the cost is amortized over quite a long time. The only maintenance they should need is being emptied daily (maybe twice a day in a very humid environment), which only takes a couple of minutes. Edit: of course, before you buy one, it's probably a good idea to borrow one from a friend or hire one so you can test it for a few weeks and see if there's an improvement first.
7Unnamed
Move. It sounds like you're living in a toxic environment which is making you sick. Does that fit your experience (is your history of illness - migraines, etc. - concentrated in the time when you've been living in your current apartment)? So find a new place to live. And be careful what you bring - you don't want to bring the toxic stuff with you. As a trial run, you could try staying someplace else for a week or so to see if you feel better. Bring as little with you as possible (even the clothes you wear should be new/borrowed), and don't go back to your apartment at all during that time.
0pthalo
I am planning to move in about a year's time, to live with my girlfriend who I'm engaged to and live together. I cannot move sooner because to move in with her, I need to apply for a partner visa, and then wait for it to be processed. It is theoretically possible to move somewhere else, in the interim, but it's only a year, and I don't think I have the energy to move right now. Also, I really like my landlady. She's the kindest person I know. My previous apartments were much worse. At the last one, I was attacked and then stalked by a neighbour and the landlady talked to me about the commandment not to commit adultery (neither of I nor the neighbour are married.) Before that things were kinda okay for five months, then the landlady had "new ideas for the apartment" and I had to move into the first place I found. Before that I was living with an aunt would say to me without warning "we're going somewhere in an hour. wash [explicit list of body parts including private ones] but dont wash your hair or [random list of body parts]." and never mind if I already had plans (like a class to go to or something). There was more insanity that that, this is just an example. And before that there was a mother who was worse than the aunt. And before that there were two parents, which was the worst of all. Here, the neighbours say hello in the stairwell and that's it. No one bothers me. I'm not afraid to leave the apartment. My landlady is understanding. So, fungus is a step up. and there will be another step up in a year when I get to live with the girl of my dreams. I have two cats that can't be abandoned for a week, and im not sure where i'd go anyway.
4Unnamed
To summarize your situation, it sounds like your apartment has a serious mold/fungus problem which is causing your health issues. If you're not confident that this is true you could test it to be sure (e.g., by living someplace else for a week), but if you accept that it's true then you can plan the next step. You have a few options: Option 1 is for you to move. It will take some work, but it's something that you know how to do (you've done it before) and it's the surest way to get away from the fungus. You could get other people to help you. Option 2 is to try to rid your apartment of the fungus. That is also going to be a lot of work, and it involves technical knowledge/skills which you don't have (it's not just a matter of some vacuuming and dusting). There is probably information about it online, or you could try to find an expert to help or at least advise you. You also don't know if it will succeed - you might just reduce the amount of fungus, only to have it grow right back. If you go for this option you should get help, probably including the help of the landlady, since it is her apartment (and it sounds like she'll want to help). Option 3 is to do nothing and stay in your apartment for the next year. If you do that, your health probably won't get any better. Migraines, lack of energy, difficulty doing things - those problems will all continue. They might even get worse with continued exposure, or cause more permanent problems (I don't know what the exact risks are - that's something else to look up online or check with experts on). (Unless your health problems have been seasonal - then they might become somewhat less bad in the winter and then blossom again in the spring.) You'd be choosing another year of more of the same, and it will continue to be hard to do the things that you're planning - the visa application, moving, getting married. If you try option 2 and don't do a good enough job of it, it could easily collapse into option 3.
7BillyOblivion
As others have mentioned get help. If you have no friends who can do it look on Craigslist for someone who cleans houses. Explain the situation to them and have them bring their steam cleaner. While the clothes are washing have them steam clean your carpets at least twice. Then when you get done paying this off, go get a good vacuum cleaner, and if you are the sort of person who's always tracking in dirt (I am) get a cheap carpet shampooer. Also--have to comment--the migraine thing really should be your focus. My wife gets these and absolutely refuses to do the food/activity diary thing, is horrible about exercise and the rest. Fortunately for her she only has them for a day or two about once a month.
2pthalo
We don't have Craigslist in Hungary, but we have a newspaper for classified ads that posts the ads online as well. I could search that to see if anyone's advertising something. My landlady has a steam cleaner and has said I can borrow it sometime. I always take off my shoes at the door, but the cats get hairballs (I give them special treats to cut down on hairballs, which seems to help, but not 100%), and accidents happen, so some sort of shampoo might work. I wrote a small program in PHP/MYSQL for keeping track of my migraines. You list what you ate that day, what (and how much) you drank, how much you slept and between what hours, pain levels, other complaints, and a few other things. It keeps track of your menstrual cycle as well (if you're doing it every day, there's a checkbox to check on the first day of the cycle). It then lets you sort by any of those criteria so that you can look back over the data and try to make sense of it. It's not hosted online anywhere (i was never done tinkering with it, and i never added anything like a login form or support for multiple users, so you have to have a server with php and mysql set up on your computer to run it. I kept track of it for a while, but then started forgetting more and more and I had no idea how to analyse the data I'd amassed (and probably would've needed more data anyway). Also, I wasn't sure if I was asking the right questions (or enough of the right questions). A big source of my migraines was the bad mattress I was sleeping on, which wasn't even in that data. Getting a new mattress earlier this year helped a lot, but things have started to get bad again (though now at least, I know I'm sleeping well on a good mattress).
3Unnamed
Maybe the problem was the stuff living on the mattress, rather than the mattress itself. And now it's grown back.
1BillyOblivion
Well, here's one solution that may solve a couple of your problems. Redo your migraine log such that you can have individual logins/tracking, then wrap a social community around it. Crowd source (to use a buzzword) your migraine issue and figure out a way to both help others and have others help you. There will be no simple way to analyze your data other than to sit down and look for patterns. Play with different ways of looking it it. Heck, it COULD be related to your not eating enough. Low blood sugar is one headache trigger (for me), and chronic low blood sugar plus smoking could EASILY be a problem. Looking down thread it very well could ALSO be a mold or other environmental issues. If you're planning on moving out of the country in a year or two, what is the possibility of you just going to live with your mom or sister until your visa/travel arrangements are fixed? This may alleviate your financial problems (you can always pay your mom/sister "rent" but it will be less than you are paying now), get you into a cleaner place (which might clear up some of your health issues) and get you to a point where you focus on quitting the smokes (which is about the toughest thing I've ever done, to include US Marine Corps boot camp and a year in Baghdad).
7saturn
You could use hydrogen peroxide instead of chlorine bleach. It's not as effective as a disinfectant but it's odorless, cheap, and probably a lot more effective than vinegar. If you get 3% concentration (the most common) you'll probably need to pour a whole bottle over the clothes, then wait an hour or two. Depending on what's underneath the carpet, you could consider just removing it.
0pthalo
That's an idea. I'll look for some hydrogen peroxide next time I'm at a store. I would love nothing better than to rip out this carpet. Even if there was nothing but concrete underneath it, I would gladly consider that infinitely better than this mess of crumbs, kitty litter that the cat kicked out of the box, cat hair, human hair, cat vomit, cigarette ash, dust, the microscopic creatures that feed on all of that, and their poo. It's an ugly orange colour that was fashionable when it was installed over 30 years ago. In some places, it's threadbare. It's a nylon carpet, which means it holds onto hair and dust and won't let it go. I'm a renter, though, so it's not my decision. I'm not sure if getting rid of the carpet (and replacing it with nothing but the bare concrete underneath it) would devalue the property ("carpeted" sounds so nice and soft under your feet -- though this the carpet is neither) or increase its value (it really is a terrible carpet). I might bring it up with the landlady, but I'm tempted to just put up with it for the year or so longer that i'll be here before i can move in with my girlfriend.
5Bagricula
I've sent an overview of your situation to all my friends who are doctors or training to be doctors. I will let you know their opinion. (I've also included information from your meat and vegetables post). I strongly suggest you do not wait for them to get back to me and consult with local experts as soon as possible. Also, if anyone in the LW community has medical training or knows someone who does who would be willing to offer an opinion on this, I encourage them to do so.
4Bagricula
So far have gotten back responses from two doctors / doctors-in-training. They both strongly suggest seeing a social worker to find out what resources are available vis-a-vie cleaning your apartment, improving your living situation, etc. They also suggest you might take vitamin B and folate supplements, but you should check with your doctor to see if you have any deficiencies that may be contributing to your chronic pain and tiredness (as you mentioned in the eating vegetables and meat post). Finally, there are a number of follow-up questions. You don't need to answer all of these, and ultimately what matters is that you see your doctor, but if you want here they are. Feel free to respond by PM. 1. Is the chronic pain a recent or long-term problem? 2. Are the migraines a recent or long-term problem? 3. Are you depressed? Do you have a history of depression? 4. Any history of eating disorders?
4[anonymous]
For the unnumbered reason of potentially getting another migraine by having to do the laundry, and just in general to get past this rut/problem: Ask a friend or family member for assistance with the task. Alternately, offer someone money to do your laundry (an amount less than the cost of replacing the clothes). For 4 specifically, maybe try wearing gloves (dishwashing gloves or latex gloves) to avoid touching the mold/fungus directly.
2NancyLebovitz
Could a face mask and nose plugs help with exposure to the fungus?
0BillyOblivion
Google "N95 mask".
0pthalo
I think I could hold some clean cotton underwear to my face as well, which helps when the kitty litter is stinky, though that would leave me one handed, so if i can find some, your solution will probably help.
0pthalo
These are good suggestions. I will try. I've made some progress (girlfriend talked me into running it a few times without opening the drum to touch the scary stuff, and the smell has gone down and the fungus has decreased) since the taking it out is the risky part (it can be fairly loud, but i mostly cant hear it if i close the door to the bathroom and also the one to the hallway), killing some of the fungus, even though i couldnt take it out today, was a useful activity that may buy me more time and will make it safer to handle the clothes when I am feeling well enough to either hang them out or put them in a large trash bag.
2taryneast
Re: vacuuming when you are physically unable. I strongly recommend an iRobot vacuum cleaner (roomba). It will vacuum for you. By the sound of it, your carpet is badly ingrained with dirt, so the vacuum will not get it all out in one day - but if you set it to vacuum every day (which few humans would normally do voluntarily, but the roomba doesn't mind) it is highly likely that over time it will improve until "clean" it a normal state for it.
2Chroma
Another benefit: Having a robo-vacuum on a schedule forces you to get in the habit of picking objects (papers, clothing) up off the floor. But pets, smoking, and moldy clothes? Ick. A robot vacuum isn't going to put a dent in that. pthalo: Think of your pets. They probably don't enjoy living in that environment. You owe it to them to make your home pleasant.
1taryneast
Yes - though I'll admit that I discovered the "floor mess" easily becomes "chair and table mess" without having to actually put the things away... Still - it's a step in the right direction. :)
2AdeleneDawner
Here is someone's solution to that problem. I haven't tried it, so I can't personally vouch for it, but it seems likely to work in most cases.
0taryneast
Looks pretty awesome, actually. Quite a sensible progression, and looks like it would indeed be a good way of keeping up with the most important bits. Though I must say, I have much more than just one laundry-basket of "stuff" to put away - and nowhere to put it away (only one cupboard in my little flat right now). When I get back to Australia and normal-sized apartments, I'll be able to keep up with that part, and will simply adapt it for now. This related one seems good for sorting out mess: the taxonomy of mess I wonder how frequently she goes through this progression, and how long it takes her. It sounds like it's her weekend schedule. Part of what puts me off housework is that there are so many other things I'd rather be doing... I know that's the same for everybody, but still.
2pthalo
woah, that is so totally cool. Expensive -- more than a month's rent and utilities combined, but seriously cool. Also, they sell them in my country -- even in my city, and the webpage says they have a promotion thing where you can borrow it for a night and then take it back the next day for free -- under the idea that a person would be sold on the idea and wouldnt want to go back to their old vacuum cleaner. So, basically, I could get my carpet cleaned for free, and then give it back. If the thing would clean it thoroughly (and I'd be willing to babysit it for a night if it needed to be emptied frequently), it's possible that it could get enough of the ingrained dirt out that i could make reasonable progress with regular vacuuming.
1taryneast
I like that idea. Yes you could do it in a night. It'll seem frustrating if you watch it (because it ha a random walk algorithm)- so don't. Just let it do its thing and empty it every so often. It will clean your floor so thoroughly that you'll be surprised.
2[anonymous]
On 2: What kind of drugs are we talking about that don't help? If you haven't tried triptans, that could be a thing.
0pthalo
drugs that don't help: 1) anything over the counter (aspirin, ibuprofin, acetomenicin (sp?), etc.) do not touch my pain levels. 2) coffee can lower my pain levels by a small amount, but i am sensitive to caffeine and use it sparingly. 3) i have some (expired) tramadol, which gave me rebound headaches, so i stopped taking it. 4) promethazine used to help a lot, but i think my body got used to it, and now it does nothing. 5) Quarelin (metamizol-sodium, caffeine, drotaverin-hidrochlorid), which is available here, but was taken off the market in most western countries because of a few deaths, does help, but i'm wary of taking it too often or too much. it won't make it all better, but it can take me down from a 7-8 to a 3-4 on my pain scale. i can function at a 4, but stlil have to be careful. I'm useless at an 8. 6) i think they tried some antidepressants as well as a teenager, since i was depressed in addition to the migraines back then, and some antidepressants have been found to help with migraine. (I am no longer depressed), but they didn't help (neither with the depression nor with the migraines). 14 different psychiatric medications were tried, most of them were not approved for use in children, all of them caused bad side effects, and i still have facial twitches which started when I was a 12 year old on zoloft. (i am 27 now). this has made me wary of medication, since most meds cause harm even when they do good, but i am willing to try medications with a patient doctor who understands that if there is a rare side effect (lactation, aphasia, sleeping 18 hours a day, extreme paranoia), I will probably get it and deem it worse than the condition it was meant to treat. i've never taken the preventative meds for migraines, just the PRN ones. My access to medical care is somewhat limited by not having insurance (€25 a month), but I know a doctor who is willing to see me even though I don't have a health card and who might be willing to help me access medicatio
-2lavalamp
Watch some episodes of "hoarders". Just a few should provide enough motivation to implement the suggestions of others...
[-]AdeleneDawner50

I eat less fruit and vegetables than I should. This seems to mostly or entirely be because I don't reliably alieve that they're food.

This manifests in a few different ways: When shopping, most fruit or veggies or fruit- or veggie-containing things don't register as things that I might consider buying. When choosing something to eat at home, those things don't register as things that I might want to eat. For most fruit and a few veggies, once they're actually in front of me in a ready-to-eat form (which does not include whole fruit), I'll eat them, but gett... (read more)

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8Benquo
Since you say you're prickly about advice, I will try just giving you the reasons for my suggestions and omit the actual suggestions when possible. Please let me know if that way of phrasing is actually helpful, or just annoyingly indirect. On buying more vegetables I've heard that people buy more food if they shop while hungry. People also are more likely to interpret more things as edible if they are hungry. I find I buy more vegetables when I am somewhere that sells primarily vegetables, like a farmer's market. At the farmer's market, there is also the illusion of scarcity since it's a once-a-week stuff (even though I could buy similar things in the grocery store later), so I stock up a lot. Some friends of mine subscribe to CSA or other vegetable-delivery programs, which takes pretty much all of the effort out of it. On eating the vegetables you've bought It is possible to make a meal or part of a meal that is nearly 100% vegetables. After experimenting with a few methods of preparing them, I found that roasting works for me as a way of preparing solo vegetables; most vegetables taste good to me when coated with olive oil and some light seasoning (and sometimes some grated Romano or Parmagiano cheese), and roasted. It gives them a satisfying, almost meaty/buttery taste. It is also pretty easy and doesn't require a lot of time once I got the timing right and stopped needing to keep peeking into the oven to determine doneness. If you want some more specific roasting suggestions I am happy to provide them. But you may find other preparations are more appealing. Even if you prefer to mix veggies with non-veggies, I suspect you wouldn't be able to eat around veggies in a smooth or fine-textured soup very easily (e.g. cream of broccoli, carrot soup, gazpacho). And you'd have to decompose a sandwich to avoid eating a cross-section of the ingredients. Related question: Vegetables are more easily visually identifiable in some foods than others. For example, in s
1AdeleneDawner
Actually helpful. :) There is a farmer's market here, but it's hard for me to get to - I don't drive, and it's on the other side of town. I will definitely see about getting a ride over there sometime soon, though - I'd actually forgotten that it's that time of the year again. (Om nom nom blueberries. ^.^) Last I checked (over a year ago), there wasn't one of those close enough to deliver to me. Also my impression is that they don't allow their customers to customize their orders very much. I should probably check again, though, anyway. I'll consult Google about this later. This would be hit or miss - there's a very high chance that any soup like that would smell like not-food. (Cream of broccoli soup is one of the contexts in which broccoli smells like not-food, if I remember correctly.) The problem with this is that most traditional sandwich veggies have a short enough shelf life that it'd be silly for me to buy them - they'd go bad before I remembered to use them. Experimenting with non-traditional sandwich veggies might be useful, though. It can, though soup isn't a good test case - if I know that there are veggies in soup, I'll make a point of identifying any chunks of things before I eat them, and if I don't know that there are veggies in the soup, I'll notice in pretty short order in most cases. What does work is things like casseroles where there aren't obvious chunks at all - and especially if it's not obvious in the construction phase of the casserole that something non-food-ish is being added. Casserole is one of the few contexts where I'll eat mushrooms, for example - they're usually clearly not food, but one of my favorite casseroles involves canned cream of mushroom soup, which is fine so long as I don't think about it too hard, even if I end up finding a mushroom chunk or two, because nothing that looks like mushrooms goes into it.
4khafra
You may be out of CSA range, but if you're willing to forgo freshness Amazon.com now lets you subscribe to consumable items like this and receive them on a regular basis, for a 15% discount.
0Benquo
Insofar as remembering is important, this might be relevant: I'm experimenting with actually writing up menus for myself in advance. So far it seems to be helping me remember to use up all my vegetables. There are also veggie-intensive sandwiches. I don't think it would take very many hummus and cucumber sandwiches to use up a small cucumber, for example. A whole red pepper can probably be used up by 2 sandwiches, especially when roasted. Same with avocado (minus the roasting). And wraps can materially increase the veggie-to-bread ratio; you could probably use a whole avocado in a single wrap.
0AdeleneDawner
There is now a box that smells like the yummy bits of a farmer's market sitting on my stove. Yay!
0Benquo
Yay indeed. It makes we very happy to find out I've given advice someone finds usable. Make sure to also let me know if you tried something and it didn't work.
5Armok_GoB
What have you actually tried to train your brain to reclassify them? Example training task: There is a deck containing images of various food items, vegetables/fruits, whatever you currently classify vegetables like (non edible plants maybe?), and completely random objects. Sort it into edible and non-edible piles as fast as possible, without thinking and while maybe listening to an interesting podcast or radio or somehting to distract you. No idea if that'd work, but if you think up 20 exercises like that at least one of them should work.
0NancyLebovitz
Alternate direction: focus in on what's in your mind when you avoid a vegetable. You may be able to discover what's driving the alief that vegetables aren't food.
0AdeleneDawner
It seems to be exactly the same mechanism that's involved in not eating banana peels and bugs, as far as I can tell. It's not that the mechanism itself is broken, it's that it's using a non-optimal data set that doesn't seem inclined to update easily. (Hmm... maybe the mechanism for updating the dataset is broken, or generating bad metadata - if it has vegetables tagged as 'technically food, but not good to eat unless there's a famine', that could have the observed results...)
0Mass_Driver
Are you medically able to fast? Consuming nothing but water for about, oh, 16 hours (including sleep time) tends to make whatever I eat next taste really good, without triggering nausea based on having discontinued my production of digestive enzymes.
[-]Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 50

I should go to more parties and events, and introduce myself to more people, so that I can 'network' and build a base of contacts who might be useful in the future. People who tell me this: my boyfriend.

Reasons I don't: a) I don't actually have all that much fun at parties, compared to the amount of fun I have, for example, singing in church. b) Parties with people in my age group almost always involve alcohol, and it's extremely boring to be the only sober person at a party, and alcohol is expensive. c) I am a morning person, emphatically not a night per... (read more)

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[-]Alexei150

I think you are thinking about the wrong kinds of parties. In fact, you are solving the wrong problem. If your goal is to network and meet people, there are much much better ways of doing that than going out to parties. Go to local clubs/meet-ups (chess, book, poker, sewing, toast masters, etc...). Meet more people through other people you already know, and through workplace if you have a job. You said you like going to church, do activities with those people. You'll meet new people there. See what fun things they do. Go to those things too.

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[-]Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 110

I probably am solving the wrong problem...in fact, I'm solving someone else's problem. I'm solving the problem that my boyfriend likes going to parties and meeting people, and thinks that networking is an indispensable part of university life, and feels his social status increase if he can bring his girlfriend along, suitably dolled up, and show her off. Except that I consistently mess with his plans by not wanting to dress up and by not enjoying parties all that much. I'm pretty happy with the current rate at which I'm meeting people through work (I work at a pool and know pretty much every member who comes in during mornings), school, church, activities like taekwondo, and LessWrong meetups. Granted, most of them aren't my age, but compared to older people, people my age tend to be less interesting anyway.

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[-]Benquo130

It seems like giving your boyfriend what he wants and spending time in a way that is enjoyable to you are things that could be optimized separately.

For example you could show up briefly, armed with an excuse to leave early, at some time you determine in advance. That way he gets to show you off and you don't have to stick around at a party that bores you.

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3MBlume
I really do not think it's especially likely that this is a good solution to your problem, and I only mention it because it is one that people tend to reliably refrain-from-thinking-of... But it does sound like breaking up with your boyfriend and finding one with social preferences more similar to yours would solve most of the named problems.
1Kevin
b+c: drink caffeine, not alcohol?
0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Have considered that. I probably would have more fun. And be more social. Although I enjoy the sensation of being drunk, I tend to be antisocial.
0TrE
a) What are you doing at parties, then? You seem to do something wrong. b) Go to a party where not everyone drinks, often quite a few persons will drive home so they won't drink. Alternatively, drive other people home. c) You can shift your sleep schedule by going to sleep 15 minutes (or more) later each day. It's a quite simple mechanism, and it works. d) Simple: attend a dancing course! It's a simple yet valuable skill, worth the money and the time. Alternatively, you could watch tutorials on youtube. e) You don't. You don't want to tell me that you're busy with such other things every single evening. If that really is the case, take one of those activities and either let it fall or do it somewhen (I'll just use this word, I don't care whether it's proper English) else. Now, because that was your true rejection, it's party time for you. Let your friend take you to a party, and have a good time.
3Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
I do have fun at some parties, for example pool staff parties with people I've known for years, where all the gossip is relevant to me and I get all the in-jokes. I simply am not extroverted enough to enjoy going to parties where nearly everyone is a stranger, and I have to keep up with my boyfriend's manic introducing-himself-to-people pace. So the real solution is to track down more parties where I'll know the people well, but that reduces the number of people I'll meet, which according to my boyfriend is the point of going to parties. Your dancing comment is very relevant. I should. I'm currently going swing-dancing once a week, and I should really take a couple of hip-hop classes or something. It would help a lot and I might actually enjoy clubbing then. I do like most of the music they play in clubs. And no, I'm not busy with things every single evening, but there are an awful lot of days each week when I leave the house first thing in the morning and don't get home until 9 pm, after having been on my feet or in the pool all day and then biking halfway across the city. Yeah, technically my Saturday nights are free, but I'm exhausted, and when I'm exhausted I get antisocial.
3TrE
So then I was successful at defying d)? That's a start, although I realize that I know your life far worse than you do, which is rather obvious. Your day might be to full, but I can't reliably judge this from afar.
2Alicorn
Shifting sleep schedules around by going to sleep later each day does not work for people who are strongly aligned to certain sleep schedules.
4Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Or for people who work 6 am shifts multiple times per week, and start work at 9 am the rest of the time. I could conceivably stay up til 2 am partying if I stayed up til 2 am every night and didn't have to get up until 10 every morning, but the real problem is that I can't get up at 5 am on a Friday morning and be able to stay up late on a Friday night. I could conceivably change this by working fewer opening shifts and more evening shifts, but I like getting up early and then having my evenings at home.
-5BillyOblivion
[-]NancyLebovitz40

This thread is getting long enough to be a little inconvenient to monitor, though the bright green edges on new comments help a lot.

Maybe it's time for a True Rejection Challenge, part 2.

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2Bagricula
Yes. I'd also love to see follow-ups afterwards to report on what was effective, what wasn't, what form of advice worked best, and what would the relevant known and (at the time) hidden variables. What can I say, I'm a sucker for tracking.
1Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
That's what the bright green edges mean!
2NancyLebovitz
More specifically, the green edge appears on comment that are new since the last time you refreshed the page.
0Dreaded_Anomaly
Procedural Knowledge Gaps had almost three times as many comments. On that note, many props to Alicorn for starting these great instrumental rationality threads.
0Armok_GoB
That thread was made before we had these green border thingies. They change the rules.
0NancyLebovitz
Maybe it's time to bring back Procedural Knowledge Gaps.
0Armok_GoB
good idea! Maybe that should be made a monthly thing or somehting.
0Armok_GoB
Yea. Actually, this meme is great enough that it should become a monthly thing! Some intuition is also telling me there is a "mirror" challenge to this one that would complement it and also should have a thread, but I don't know what this one would be. It feels like some fragmented memory of an idea I forgot or somehting like that. I think it might have somehting to do with finding/formulating problems.
[-]diegocaleiro40

Something I wish I did at least as much as recommended (in Brazil, which is, say, half USA's recommendation): Worry about $$$

I avoid this worry because: 1) Getting $$ seems boring compared to going to the movies, reading less wrong, creating transhumanist charities. 2) It seems to be a lottery, where the few get a lot. Not being motivated for this decreases my odds. So my odds are really low. 3) Grown up as the son of a motivated money-maker, and have seen what it takes to get his share. Not willing in the least to pay the price. 4) Not an ambitious i... (read more)

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5AdeleneDawner
Strategies for dealing with money seem to me to come in two varieties: Have as much income as possible and don't worry much about the outgo, or have as little outgo as possible and don't worry much about the income. It seems to me like you'd prefer the latter, and I don't see anything wrong with that. It is a less popular kind of choice, and one that many people don't really understand, so you might always have to deal with people objecting to it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work, it just means that they don't understand it, or possibly that they're jealous. ;) Googling 'frugality' should get you some good advice about making that kind of lifestyle work. I also suggest testing your assumption in #8 that you can easily make money whenever you need it by doing so in order to set some money aside in case of an emergency as in issue #7. This is actually more about #8 than #7, though - basing your lifestyle on an untested assumption like that isn't wise, and if (as I expect, actually) the assumption turns out to be accurate, having the experience of finding a job (or whatever) when you don't have an emergency will be useful if you have to find one (or whatever) when you do.
4[anonymous]
On: 4&7) How old are you? Is it likely your preference for having kids/living arrangements etc will change over time? Do note that even if your own preferences for living with friends remain constant, they may want to go the traditional family, home route. Also medical emergencies etc are of course rarer for the young than for the elderly. 8) This is a reasonable assumption, but be aware that if you are looking for a 9-5 job with a steady salary later in life you will need to explain the gap years to the recruiter. Also, if the need comes in the form of an emergency, you may not be able to acquire money fast enough. Perhaps you need to investigate ways to monetise your talents instead of thinking about a traditional job that pays you a lot more than you need.
0Armok_GoB
Wait, so why do you want to then?
1diegocaleiro
People keep telling me I should, my current situation would only finance me for about 5 - 8 years and I plan to live a few hundred thousand more, and in the last two years, eating in my city has sky-rocketed to about 30 dollars a meal. It seems unsafe to wait for five years and then worry.
[-]pthalo40

I should stop smoking.

1) I am addicted to nicotine.

2) Nicotine patches are expensive, cigarettes are very cheap.

3) cigarettes supress my appetite and they are cheaper than food. I can smoke 25 cigarettes for the cost of a loaf of bread. it takes me more than a day to smoke that many. if i want to buy things to put on the loaf of bread, we're up to about 3-4 days worth of cigarettes.

4) if i quit smoking i would have more money for food, but not so much more as to make a huge difference.

5) smoking is my only vice and my only luxury.

6) I currently have a 0% c... (read more)

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[-]taryneast130

7) i'm in my mid 20s, so the health risks aren't looming large yet. i can quit later.

Um - I'm afraid I have to tell you that "later health effects" are not caused by smoking later in life. They are caused by smoking early in life... and then getting older (whether or not you quit).

You can improve your chance of recovering from the damage you are doing by quitting right now.

As a frequent health-campaign in Aus tells us "every cigarette is causing you damage"

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2pthalo
This is true, but I've also read studies that within 24 hours of quitting smoking, there are already noticable health benefits and lowered risks of problems, which continue to get better the longer the time has elapsed. I'm not arguing that smoking between the ages of 15-18 & 20-27, as I have done, will have no effect, but if I quit while I'm still young -- I probably have a few years left where one way or the other won't matter too much -- then by the time I reach an age where heart disease, lung disease, cancer, stroke, etc. are more likely dangers for me, my lungs will have had a decade or so to recover and hopefully that will be enough. I've gotten a few grey hairs already, and a few wrinkles, so I know that the time to quit will be soon, but I don't know if I'm ready to do it just yet. The last time I quit (for an entire year, cold turkey), it was because I got tired of the way I smelled and didn't want to smell like that anymore. I only started up again because I had friends who smoked (who have since moved away). I think if I can get into that headspace again, where I really don't want to smoke and am tired of it, then I will be able to quit easily, whereas if I'm just doing it because of knowledge of health risks in the distant future -- that's not immediate enough to make it easy. As far as pregnancy goes, I think that as long as I quit at least a year before I'm planning to get pregnant, the fetus will be okay. My grandmother was encouraged by her doctor to smoke during pregnancy to calm her nerves. (This was in the early 1960,s I believe, and I'm fairly certain the effects of smoking were known to doctors at that time, but i dont know) The kid was born weak and sickly with all sorts of allergies that none of his siblings shared. He survived, and it could have been much worse than allergies, but it was still a bad thing.
4AdeleneDawner
Just because quitting smoking will allow your body to heal some of the damage, doesn't mean it will allow your body to heal all of it, even in 10 or 20 years.
1taryneast
Yes. I agree. I think you (pthalo) have misunderstood what the "over time" thing is all about. You chance of cancer starts out low - you may start out with, say, a 1% chance of getting cancer - but that still means it's possible for you to get cancer with your very first cigarette... over time that chance will go up. It still means that even after you quit - it could be too late. You could already have cancer. After you quit, the chance that you will develop cancer after that point will go down... but if you already have cancer - then you already have it. Even if you quit and stay clean for he rest of your life. On top of that is the other damage that you are causing to yourself. Destruction of the lung tissue, scar-tissue do due heat-damage of the lips and throat. Also - you know those wrinkles you're getting? Your skin is being damaged due to reduced oxygenation. Cigarettes are known to prematurely age the skin... and that damage doesn't grow back either. These may well heal somewhat after you quit (to a certain extent)... but will never go away completely. As AdeleneDawner says - you will never get back to how you were before the cigarettes The best chance for you is to quit immediately.
0BillyOblivion
"but if you already have cancer - then you already have it. " While this is essentially a tautology, it is also not exactly true. Some cancers (last time I checked there were over 200 discrete types) are failures of the autoimmune system (maybe all are) and by "getting healthy" you might trigger and immune response that cleans up a smaller mass. Not that I'd want to bet on it, but I do plan on starting to smoke again when I get to the age where it's good effects now matter more than the bad effects later.
0taryneast
:) Certainly an interesting strategy... I myself wouldn't make that bet - firstly, the probability of a positive effect seems (without me actually bothering to research, mind you) to be orders of magnitude lower than that of a negative outcome (even in late age) - also how old is old enough? But I can see that it might be appealing. Kind of a fire-with-fire strategy.
-1BillyOblivion
First off there are mild stimulant effects to smoking. Also nicotine (IIRC, or one of the other chemicals in smoke) is a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. Finally it is an appetite suppressant (probably a side effect of the stimulant thing) as I age certain injuries (modulo The Singularity) will catch up with me and the arthritis will make my current level of exercise difficult to impossible. And lastly smoking will annoy the living f out of all those nanny state mutherfrs who've been pissing me off for the last 20 years and seem intent on doing so until I die--hopefully with a cigar in one hand, a scotch in the other.
0taryneast
Ah - well that is an entirely different kettle of utility. ;) While (as previous stated) I would not make the same choice... I respect your right to choose to take the risk for your obvious pleasurable returns. I totally grok being contrarian for the fun of it ;)
-1[anonymous]
I know I'm not supposed to upvote contrarianism, but it's just too hard to resist. Please use this comment to downvote my lack of willpower.
7Volndeau
Agreed, Cigarette smoking is usually a frequency habit. For arguments sake, a pack a day is 20 cigarettes in the 16 hours you are awake, that means the smell/taste/sight is always around. 1) Nicotine, while addictive is nowhere near as addictive as the other chemicals put into cigarettes to keep them burning. I smoked cigarettes for 3 years before picking up cigars. While it would take a research team to find what is in a cigarette, I can tell you what is in my cigars, aged tobacco leaves. I smoked less and less cigarettes as time went on (about 3 weeks). I have been without cigarettes for a year and currently smoke cigars once to twice a week. 2) Cigars, while some can be stupidly expensive, are relatively cheap. One of my favorite cigars is about $5 a stick, at 3 sticks, that's $15 a week. I am sure that is cheaper than your current cost. You can also find "mistakes" for as low as $1.(I do realize that is my current cost, and while weening myself off of cigarettes, it was more expensive.) 3) I thought that as well, though I found that once I proved to myself that I had willpower to quit cigarettes, it was much easier to maintain, and even lose weight. 4) Don't spend more on food if you don't need more, put it towards savings. 5) I love smoking cigars. Sitting down after a long day with your favorite drink and a cigar is incredibly relaxing. The best part is, it is not addicting. I have gone weeks without needing to smoke. 6) I think this is an excellent alternative. It makes smoking a true luxury, not an addiction. When the time comes, you can stop for 9 months and pick it back up if you want to, not because you need to. 7) The human body is incredibly resilient. Although, anything in excess will destroy it. 20 cigarettes in a 16 hour period for 10 years, killer. 150 cigars a year (slightly more than the number of cigarettes consumed in a week) is not excess. While I can't say it is helping my health, I can say I am still able to hike, climb, run and swim.
5lsparrish
If you want to use it as a nootropic, unflavored nicotine is pretty cheap. For example, you can get 60 ml at 25 mg/ml for 8.75 plus shipping. Only about 1mg is absorbed from a typical cigarette due to combustion, so this is the equivalent of 1500 cigarettes.
2Waffle_Iron
Have you considered electronic cigarettes?
2Manfred
Sounds like you need more luxuries :D One of the things my brother did near the end of when he smoked and during while he was quitting was getting into really good scotch. He'd take a little glass of very expensive scotch and nurse it for an hour or so.
2taryneast
chew on the end of your pen. of get a ring and twirl it around your finger. or take up knitting or some other hand-crafty activity to quell your fidget-cravings (which I get too).
3pthalo
i've started crocheting semirecently. i actually started with "smoke less" in my mind. my first project is a hyperbolic möbius strip (directions: chain as many as you want, sc to end of chain, repeat for a few rows, crochet it together into a möbius strip, then continue sc increasing one every three stitches). perfect for mastering single crochet stich. Maybe I'll do the next with double crochet stitches to work on those. im slow at it and not very good yet, but that is because i am a newbie. and i do have a ring to play with. i'll try to use it more. :)
0taryneast
Cool. I've heard of a few different funky math-objects that are crochetable. Gaussian planes ad other surfaces - even klein bottles - all on teh interwebs if you google, and surprisingly simple instructions (like your möbius strip).
2Dreaded_Anomaly
In this vein, I have known people who replaced the hand/mouth activity of cigarettes with candy canes. If you don't want all the sugar, flavored toothpicks are another option often recommended to help with quitting.
2Alicorn
I think you should put separate things into separate comments so the threading makes more sense.
1pthalo
okay. that's a good idea. I put two into separate comments and then edited this one so it only contained the last one.
1lavalamp
Switch to chewing tobacco. It's less harmful*. Also, it's much more disgusting, so you will have more motivation to quit. [*] IIRC from when I read about it years ago. Do your own research.
[-]beriukay30

I've been told that I ought to visit out-of-state more often than I do. My preference is to do it about 0 times a year, but I end up doing something or another about once a year. Now I've got family and friends asking me to go to about a dozen various locations for various visits and vacations.

Reasons for not doing this thing:

  1. I really don't like having to deal with airport security, or the various other hassles that come with airports.
  2. I don't appreciate the cost associated with flights, especially since I feel like I'm getting no lasting value out of th
... (read more)
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[-]Alicorn110

Invite others to come visit you.

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5Armok_GoB
Sounds like the only reason you're even considering travel is social pressure. I'd recommend doing somehting to pre commit to not travelling instead, so you can just point at that to get people to stop nagging you.
5handoflixue
I would think #12, that you don't actually gain anything from this travel, would be pretty fundamental. Most people spend thousands of dollars on plane tickets because they value seeing family / being social / the actual experience. You don't seem to value any of those things, so why are you doing this?
2Dreaded_Anomaly
A smart phone, netbook, or tablet are all lightweight ways to maintain the Internet connection as much as possible (i.e. always, except for when the plane is in the air). Personally, I found myself much more willing to travel after purchasing a smart phone ~1.5 years ago.
0novalis
For #10, rent your house out while you're gone via airbnb. And when you travel, rent rooms via airbnb, which is apparently significantly cheaper than traditional hotels, at least where I live (NYC).
0beoShaffer
@ 1,2&9 are trains a viable method of transport in your area?
[-]pthalo30

I don't eat enough vegetables or protein.

1) Vegetables and meat are expensive and are generally not in my budget.

2) I don't like the way I feel after eating meat. I find my thoughts are slower and my stomach feels slightly queasy.

3) Beans take forever to cook. Even if I soak them overnight. Canned beans are expensive.

4) When I buy food, I tend to try to eat as little of it as possible to make it last longer. When I do this with vegetables, they go off and have to be thrown away. But it's so hard to make myself eat now when I could eat later. I know that I'... (read more)

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[-]saturn100

most ingredients for cooking don't keep for more than a day or two, even in the fridge. milk, bread, veggies, leftovers, they all go bad

If milk goes bad after a day or two no matter when you open it, you might have a malfunctioning refrigerator.

If milk is OK until a day or two after you open it, you might have a dangerously elevated level of airborne microorganisms.

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2NancyLebovitz
I've noticed that cheaper food doesn't keep as long after it's bought-- this is a casual observation, not careful research. It seems plausible that cheaper food hasn't been given as good care and/or isn't as fresh to start with. It's plausible that the refrigerator is malfunctioning. It's also plausible that its temperature is set too high, so that should be checked. Look for a dial inside the refrigerator. A pressure cooker might be helpful with getting beans to cook faster. I don't know whether one can be found cheap enough and whether an unusually small one would be needed because of portion size/arm strength issues.
2taryneast
You can sometimes buy these second-hand from thrift stores. Alternatively you can often buy a "slow cooker" from the same places - and they are also good for cooking beans (you set the up in the morning and leave them to run during the day while you're at work/whatever and dinner is done when you get home).
0pthalo
i'll look around. it sounds like a nice way of cooking.
-1pthalo
some cheaper food is cheaper because it is about to expire and the store wants to make at least some profit off of it. other cheaper food is just cheap because it's cheaper to produce. the dial on the fridge is labeled in Russian. My Russian is not very good (i can read most of the letters and get a basic idea of what i'm reading, but more than 50% of the words are unknown to me), but i can easily make out МИН "minimum", ВЬКЛ "medium", and МАКС "maximum" and have it set to medium. i have no idea what actual temperature this refers to. i have a thermometer but it is only for measuring human body temperatures. i will have to see if i can find a cheap thermometer that could measure the fridge, because I am curious. i may look into the cost of pressure cookers down the track.
4D_Alex
My Russian is pretty good... ВЬКЛ = выключить = turn off, not "medium". Why do you have a Russian fridge anyway??
1pthalo
Because I live in a former eastern bloc country (Hungary). My only guess is the fridge is that old. (It's not mine, but it came with the apartment I live in. The building I live in is Russian built too. :) I will look again it, to make sure I got the letters right and to make sure it is pointing at what I thought it was. Since my Russian is so bad, when i checked last time what the words said, I was repeating "V soft sign K L" to myself so i wouldnt forget it before i got back to the keyboard. (I was confident i could remember min and maks) so it may have stood out in my head enough that i forgot what it was set to. But it's definitely cold in fridge, so it cannot be set to "turn off." This time, I take my camera with me :) .... and discover that it is set to maximum (МАКС). Here is a picture http://pics.livejournal.com/pthalogreen/pic/0012rat7 . It also has another setting "НОРМ" which im going to assume is the "normal" or "medium" that i was remembering that it had. I think I set it to maks some time ago in attempt to solve the food spoilage problem. It's really hard for me to remember выключить because my knowledge of Slavic languages (and understanding of Russian via cognates) comes mostly from southern slavic languages which I have studied, like Serbian, and uključiti in Serbian means "to turn on".
4Vladimir_M
Haha, you've run into some of the most confusing false friends between any languages there. The Russian cognate of Serbian (and Bosnian/Croatian) uključiti is включить, which if I'm not mistaken means the same thing -- not выключить, which means the exact opposite. To make things even more confusing, the BCS verbal prefix u- normally denotes arrival/entering, whereas in Russian it generally denotes leaving. So you get false friends like ući "to enter" vs. уйти "to go away," or uletjeti "to fly in" vs. улететь "to fly away." Generally, if there exists a Russian cognate of a BCS verb with the u- prefix, it will have the prefix в- or во-, not у- or вы-. The former are real etymological cognates, while the latter are not despite the similarity, and often in fact convey the opposite meaning. Such false friends are even more fun when you see Serbian spelled in Cyrillic, making the false similarities even more prominent. (The first prize, I think, goes to this one, though my great favorite is also право, which is "straight" in Serbian but "right" in Russian when you give directions.)
2Eugine_Nier
Native Russian speaker here. That is correct. btw. ь and ы are distinct letters.
0pthalo
Спасибо for the correction.
0pthalo
oh, this is helpful information. I didn't realise there was a difference. It seems to be the latter case. Things are fine unopened until their expiration date. Things that are opened need to be used very quickly. There are things growing in certain dishes in the fridge (another problem I'm not really up to tackling) but I have had this problem since I moved into this apartment, even during long stretches of time when there were not things growing in the fridge (because I was using the fridge less -- wasn't cooking as much as didn't have leftovers). It doesn't seem to matter whether I buy UHT milk or regular. They keep okay unopened most of the time, but opening them means I have to use them quickly. I've swtitched to powdered milk, which I wont drink, but a teaspoon of the powder with a little extra water works well for sauces that call for milk. When I do get round to throwing out things that are growing in dishes (the current ones are covered in plastic wrap), i also take the opportunity to wash the fridge with cleaning supplies and vinegar, in case any of the scary stuff escaped. in winter, i've had some success using the balcony as a fridge/freezer. but it's summer now.
[-]Alicorn100

  1. Get protein from non-meat sources. Consider, in particular, eggs. Monitor the sales at your grocer of choice; if they have a free loyalty program fill out their form and take their junk mail to get in on that.

  2. See above

  3. Buy canned beans in large amounts when they are on sale. Or, consider trying to make a deal with a friend or neighbor where you split batches of beans and only have to do cooking some of the time.

  4. This should admit of self-modification. If you know your food will go off if not eaten, there is no waste or "not lasting longer" associated with eating it before that time. But perhaps you need to work around it instead...

  5. Heartburn can be medicated. If you can't afford to get that checked out or afford the meds, eat around it...

  6. I really do recommend eating, but would need to know more about the etiology of the habit before I offered advice on breaking it.

  7. Consider sharing meals with friends/neighbors. Or, get a freezer. Freezers are really useful.

  8. If you can't get a freezer, buy your veggies canned. Many veggies come that way. Cans are smallish.

  9. Consider disposable dishes, or covering your dishes with something like plastic wrap and being ca

... (read more)
Reply
8Wei Dai
Also consider protein powder. On a per gram of protein basis, whey protein powder is only slightly more expensive than eggs, but much easier to prepare. (Assuming $25 for 5 pounds of whey protein powder, and $1 for a dozen large eggs, I get $0.0156 per gram of protein for whey, and $0.0132 per gram of protein for eggs.)
0pthalo
I will have a look at one of the health shops that sells protein powder to see what it costs, and will look online to see what I can slip it into without noticing the taste.
1AdeleneDawner
Also worth consideration: Layering a single-ply paper plate over a non-disposable plate. This helps stretch your paper plate supply (most paper plates are something like 3 or 4 ply, for strength; break them apart into 3 or 4 individual ones), allows you to use paper plates for things that are too heavy or wet to usually use them for, and should at least cut down on the amount of effort that it takes to wash the non-disposable plate afterward. (I almost always manage to get sauce or something on the edge of the non-disposable plate when I do this, but cleaning that is a matter of a 5-10 second rinse rather than a full scrub.)
0pthalo
that's a really good idea. I will have to see where I can buy paper plates. Most places seem to only sell plastic, but they must be available somewhere. This would probably work for paper bowls as well, placed inside a regular one.
0pthalo
i am lukewarm on eggs. I like them enough to eat a few of them, and you can stir certain vegetables into them and add cheese if you have some and salt and pepper and they can taste nice, maybe every few days but then I have to get creative to use the last few eggs in the carton before they go off. if i make a concerted effort, I can eat a carton of 10 eggs in 3 batches spread over 9 days, and they do last longer than that. maybe I could make every day divisible by 3 egg day. Today's the 179th day of the year (well, now that it's 2am, it is), so if I went out tomorrow (which will still be the 179th, but it's tomorrow because i'll have slept between now and then) to pick some eggs up, I could start tomorrow. If not, I could start on the 182nd. there's a store that's only 1km walk and a bus ride away where I can buy many things very cheaply and the quality is better than anything else in the town. Cans of soup for €1 a piece instead of €4 (hmm, i wonder what their canned beans are priced like. If it were €1 it might be worth it, though when you can get an entire kilogram of dried beans for less, it feels like a waste to spend €1 on one meal). sometimes when I go there I buy sausages. These are more expensive, about €3, but cheaper than I can find elsewhere and the quantity will last me about a week, since I use them sparingly to make them last longer. I shop there when I can, but most days I don't have the energy to spend a couple hours taking busses and walking with a heavy load (the savings in buying their products vastly outweigh the cost of the bus tickets), so I also shop at places that are nearer to me, where the selection is poorer and the prices are higher. at these stores, i'm careful what I buy and tend to buy things where the price difference is smaller The cheapest source of vegetables isn't these foreign stores. It's the market across the street where the farmers from neighbouring villages come in the morning with carrots that look like they've just been
2Alicorn
Websites explaining produce seasons totally exist. I don't know where you live, but I'm sure you can find the info. If you leave soapy water standing in your dishes, the soap should cut down on slime growing on them. Spinach is available canned! Get it that way and season doesn't matter. Kale is not like cabbage. It's a leafy green, sort of like turnip greens or mustard greens. Celeriac is good roasted and then put in soup. Find smaller roots of it, and when you cut the ugly off, cut a little deeper; if you don't put much in the soup besides celeriac you should be able to eat it in as little as two sittings. Turnips don't look anything like carrots; do you mean parsnips? Wikipedia says you can eat parsnips raw. Yellow squash comes small. I usually have it with fish, and use half of one in a meal; if I'm having only squash for a meal I can definitely eat a whole one. I like to slice them up thin and then roast them (line pan with foil, coat with olive oil, pop in the oven at 425º for 15-20 minutes). Leeks are not as much food as they look like. You can roast them (it's wise to parboil first though), or put them in soup. Broccoli is amazing roasted, in soup, or with pasta. Cauliflower is good in soups, curries, or casseroles. You really need to find out why your fridge won't let you keep leftovers for a normal amount of time and fix that; I can easily eat a batch of cream of cauliflower soup that contains an entire head of cauliflower over a few days, but if you can't keep soup around for a few days you may be in trouble. Cauliflower and broccoli are also edible raw, optionally with dip. Many but perhaps not most vegetables go well with others. My brain isn't generating a useful algorithm here but I can give you my best guess/experience regarding any combinations you think look likely. There is a lot of information available about substitutions online. I am an improvisational cook and can probably help you out if you're missing something for a recipe (I have
1AdeleneDawner
There exists a book about this. I wouldn't be surprised if there existed a genre of books about it, even.
0pthalo
neat
0pthalo
googling "when is ripe" in hungarian gave me a site with a chart (but not all the fruits and veggies i could think of) as the first link. im sure further links down the google results page would include the missing ones. i will try making the water soapier. also, evaporation plays a problem if i leave it too long. but i want to get in the habit of cooking often enough that i wont have to worry about that. i remember i used to wash any stray dishes while waiting for water to boil. i have lots of tricks like that i seem to have to rediscover again and again. a couple years ago, i had an epiphany that soapy water made things clean, not soapy, and that helped for a while, until i forgot again. i mean, i never stopped using soap, and i used soap before that point, but there was a moment when i understood at an intrinsic level that the soap applied to a dish could be removed from that dish, and the dirt would be removed along with it, through the application of water, and that all dirty things could be made clean, that nothing was dirty beyond repair. whereas othertimes i remember that i don't like the taste of soap and i sink into a vague suspicion that i'm just adding soap to the dirt and making soapy dirt and wonder what makes me so sure that adding soap to a spoon will make the food that later comes onto that spoon more edible. The manner in which I wash dishes doesn't really change, but by mental approach to it changes from disgust at the wrongness on the dishes to delight at the opportunity to right a wrong. Spinach canned. Hm, so it does. I'll keep an eye out for it. My mental image of the aisle in the store that sells canned food mostly contains corn, peas, and beans, along with a few types of soup (mostly goulash soup, the one i like best), but googling in hungarian tells me there is indeed such a thing as canned spinach. i've seen it frozen, too, in small enough quantities that it could conceivably be eaten in one sitting. and i think frozen spinach would keep
4Alicorn
Capers are pickled flowerbuds, and can probably be safely left out of virtually anything. Parmigiano-reggiano is a cheese; you can sub parmesan or another hard grated/shredded cheese if you can't find it. Radicchio and swiss chard are both leaf vegetables and could probably be reasonably substituted for others in that reference class. Cheez whiz is an abomination. Also, now I want to try parsley root, but Wikipedia indicates it will be hard to find here! Rar!
1pthalo
Thanks for the information. :) I suppose that in general, then, "unheard of leaf vegetable that's being suggested for a salad" can be replaced with "regular salad leaves" and "unheard of vegetable being suggested for pasta" can be replaced with "vegetable i like in pasta" and "some cheese that i dont know what it tastes like" can be replaced with gouda, which is good on everything. I wonder if leaf parsley's roots taste the same as root parsley's. Wikipedia says they are smaller, since they're not being grown for the root, but I think since it's pretty much the same plant, it should taste at least similar. I don't know if you garden, but if so, you might plant some regular parsley and when the time comes to dig them up see how much root there is. Otherwise, if you shop at farmer's markets, you might ask the parsley-seller about the roots. Types of carrots (in Hungarian anyway) are sugar beets (called sugar carrot), parsley (called white carrot), and carrot (called orange carrot)
2Alicorn
Yes, this.
1AdeleneDawner
If you tell us where you are, one of us will almost certainly track this down. Most of us like researching things, and this sounds like a fun challenge. You should do the actual math to see how much you will (or won't) save by having a freezer - it might pay for itself quicker than you think. You don't have to get a full-sized refrigerator/freezer unit. I've seen small freezers here for less than $100 that would handle one person's food pretty well, and you might be able to get one for less than half that, secondhand. (Does Craigslist have listings in your area? How about freecycle?)
0pthalo
Anyway, a quick googling of "mikor érik" (when is ripe) got me to this page: http://www.hazipatika.com/topics/zoldseg_gyumolcs/seasonality (warning, not in english) although it doesn't list strawberries. for july, it says: sweet cherries, gooseberries, black currant, watermelon, sour cherry, peach, currant, apricot, plum. the ones that are in the middle of their season will be cheapest. the ones just starting or just ending will be expensive. so my bet is that sour cherry is cheapest. for vegetables: zucchini (meh), kohlrabi, lentils, sunflowers, capsicum (bell pepper), tomato, pattypan squash, pumpkin, green peas, and horseradish. If I can figure out what's wrong with the fridge (and whether it has an easy solution), I could make cherry soup http://www.chew.hu/meggyleves.html (recipe in English) i dont know if they have vanila sugar where you are, but it's equivalent to a tsp or tbsp (but definitely not a cup) of a vanilla i think. you could just keep adding small amounts of it until it tastes good. :) on the veggies list, the only things on that list that i've cooked with before and would know how to make something edible are: lentils, tomato and capsicum (Both of whom are just starting their season and arent at their cheapest yet) but there may be other fruits and vegetables not on this list.
0NancyLebovitz
In English, capsicum is what makes hot peppers hot. The large peppers that aren't hot are called peppers, sweet peppers or bell peppers.
0gjm
There's a divergence between American English and British English here; in BrE "capsicum" can mean a bell pepper, but in AmE it only means a chilli pepper. (In neither does "capsicum" mean the substance that gives the hot peppers their hotness; that's called capsaicin, capsicin, or capsicine.)
0Alicorn
Capsaicin is the chemical that makes peppers hot; capsicum is a genus.
0pthalo
Hungary (southern plains, specifically, but it's a small enough country that it doesn't matter. My city is the one that gets an average of 2000 of sunlight a year, the highest in the country.). I noticed a while ago when strawberry prices stopped going down and started going up that strawberry season must be ending, but I didn't attach a date to this noticing in my mind, so when next year rolls around, I still won't know. (Though I remember they never went below 665 HUF/kg (about $3. I would've bought if they went down to 565. This information may or may not be useful next year due to inflation) Just checked Freecycle. There are three in the country, but none in this city. Deliapro (southern classified ads) has people selling stuff used. currently, someone's selling a gigantic one (230 litres) for about $75, someone else says they're selling various kitchen appliances for $40 and up. i dont want a large one. I wouldnt have space for it anyway. But I could fit a 30-60L one somewhere. I live in a 1.5 room apartment, and the kitchen is tiny, but there is a space in the pantry where I could fit a small freezer. The fridge I have is a bar fridge. There is a freezer compartment, but the door broke, so I fixed it with duct tape (which means I can't open it). Before the door broke, it would fill with snow on a weekly basis and was tiny anyway (it would fit one frozen pizza.) so I gave up on it and just use the fridge.
0NancyLebovitz
In re carrying a heavy load: do you have a backpack? In re kale: I wouldn't say it tastes like cabbage, but when raw, it does have a flavor which is hard too describe but too bitter for some people. Squash and turnip can be baked. I can't remember whether you have an oven. What you describe about food is what I call poverty-based anorexia-- I've heard of one other case. I'd be surprised if there aren't a fairly large number of people who have it.
3saturn
A handheld steam cleaner like this can remove food from dishes with almost no effort, and costs a lot less than a dishwasher.
3[anonymous]
Specifically regarding protein: You are probably underestimating how much protein is in many foods. Here is a brief list of foods which, if you got all of your calories from them, would give you enough protein: * Any sort of bean, including fast cooking beans such as lentils, lima beans, and peas. * Most nuts * Many dark green vegetables (e.g spinach, kale, broccoli, green cabbage) * Bread. Yes, really - there's lots of gluten in there. * Pasta. Again, lots of gluten. * Potatoes, so long as you eat the skins. Get red ones, they're easier to clean and the skins are more tender. * Quinoa (a grain). Brown rice is close, but not quite there. So you should not worry about eating meat, it's unnecessary. One specific dish you should consider is dal. Cooked lentils with spices. Popular in India. Lots of other things you can throw in, too, including onion, tomato, garlic. carrots, and corn. In small quantities the tomato and onion should be less likely to cause heartburn. To keep the cost of the spices down, buy from the bulk section - it can be as little as 1/10 the price of bottled spices, and you can get only however much you need. Dried lentils and spices keep for quite a long time, and it only takes 45min to prepare, in one pot (or two if you make a tarka). When you store vegetables in the fridge, do you keep them in plastic bags? I find that helps for many green veggies in particular. I just use the bags I get them in from the store or my farmshare. Consider shopping more like a European - buy fresh ingredients every day or every other day instead of doing one big shopping trip once a week. This will minimize your food spoilage problems. I agree with everyone else that you should check that your fridge is functioning properly. Measure the temperature. It should be between 33 and 38 degrees F. Above 38 and I'd expect fairly high rates of spoilage.
0pthalo
I love indian food amd I like lentils and beans. And lentils are supposed to be quicker to cook (I have some really old lentils. I should get newer ones. They aren't expensive.) The trick seems to be getting them soft but not mush. I used to cook indian more often, but I always made too much. It's amazing how much food one carrot, one onion, one tomato, and some lentils turns into. I have some spices -- one year for my birthday, I told my mother to get me spices. And small quantities of spies are available quite cheaply - packets containing only a few grams can last me over a year, since I'm only using a pinch of one, a pinch of another. I have most of the common european spices (salt, black pepper, sweet paprika, rosemary, thyme, oregano, dill, basil, sage, etc.) and also I have some curry and garam masala, ground and whole cardamom (which I never knew what to do with). i have chili powder as well, which i add in small quantities to various things for health reasons -- i dont like very spicy, but i dont mind it a little.) I live in Hungary, and I've been trying to shop less European, because if I don't have emergency supplies on hand and I can't leave the house, then I'm stuck. I try to keep foods on hand that won't spoil to use as emergency foods (some days I have a migraine and don't make it outside), but on the days I can go out, I should be a good European and visit the market across the street in the mornings where there's fresh seaonal produce from surrounding villages, and the bakery just down the street where I can buy 1/2 kg of bread for 115 forints (about $0.57). Lately, though, I haven't been making it outside very often and so I eat into my supplies until I have to buy more.
0Alicorn
I don't know what kind of lentils you're using, but green or French lentils become less mushy than red ones. (I happen to like them mushy, but if you don't...)
0pthalo
My preference is a happy medium between the two. My experience vascillates between "chewing little rocks" or "i'm eating baby food" yet I like lentils, despite these problems. My lentils are labeled in greek (ПΟΛΕМИΔΙΩТНΕ КΥПИАКХ ΦАКН), and my greek is worse than my russian (i can recognise about half of the letters and only those words which English stole and didn't change very much) but they look red to me and definitely not green. I got them when a friend was moving home to Cyprus and didnt want to lug her pantry back with her. That must have been five years ago. She gave me several bags, and a little lentils go a long way.
2novalis
If your beans are taking forever to cook, are you adding salt? Adding salt will keep beans hard -- wait to add it until the beans are fully cooked. Also, I second the suggestion to either make your fridge colder, or replace it.
1pthalo
the fridge isn't mine -- came with the apartment. and it's a communist era fridge (complete with Russian labeled dials), so it probably dates back to before the wall came down. i have it on medium setting and will look at acquiring a thermoter to see if that means <5°C like it should or, something ridiculous like 10°C (i think i'd notice if it was warmer than that. it feels cold to me.) I think the beans in question are just old beans. I add salt to taste at the end.
2lavalamp
Based on #2 and #5, if I were you I would experiment to see if you have hypochlorhydria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochlorhydria). Symptoms are (ironically) basically the same as GERD. (Note: I'm not a doctor!)
1pthalo
hm, that's interesting. That doesn't seem like something I could easily test for at home, but I may ask a doctor the next time I see one. The symptoms I have are really weird... not like what I've seen in adverts about heartburn (no burning pain in the chest, no stomach pains), but they come after eating acidic foods, so I try to avoid those foods. After eating something like chili or pizza, I feel like there's something 'stuck' in my esophagus (the feeling is like when you swallow a pill, and it gets stuck on the way down), but there's nothing really there. It is accompanied with burping and/or hiccups which last for hours. it hurts to lie down, so i have to stay seated. and it's a recent development. I never had problems like this before a few months ago. I thought that until I could see a doctor I should just avoid foods that make me feel like this, and googled "alkaline foods" to see what foods might calm my stomach when it does that, if it's reacting badly somehow to acidic foods. unfortunately, there's a big pseudoscience diet called alkaline foods which lists foods like "lemon" as being alkaline, not acidic, because of some sort of reasoning that i couldnt quite follow. the signal to noise ratio was so bad that i gave up on googling for this information.
1lavalamp
To test: obtain some HCL pills (they're pretty cheap). Have some regular, calcium type antiacid on hand when you're ready to experiment. Take an HCL with food that would typically give you symptoms. If you get massive heartburn within 20 minutes or so, then you do not need HCL (and take the antiacid to restore your stomach's pH to normal). If nothing happens or your symptoms are slightly better, then you probably do have low stomach acid. You can experiment further to find the correct dose. My understanding is that the valve that allows the contents of the stomach to proceed through the system is triggered by acidity in the stomach. Hence, if the stomach is not acidic enough, food will just hang out there-- and will still be plenty acidic to cause heartburn. Also, I understand that as people age, they produce less HCL. Generally, doctors will give people with those symptoms acid reducers, which will indeed fix the heartburn by lowing acid to almost nothing-- an undesirable state of affairs, as you lose some of the sterilization properties of the stomach. Since an acid reducer fixes the symptoms no matter the root cause, it's obviously a good thing to test it with some variation of the above method. Once again, I am not a doctor. I do recommend you go see a doctor if something about your body changes unexpectedly; there are less common and less harmless other things that can cause such symptoms. But I will also add that your description of the sensation is pretty much how I would describe it, esp. the "stuck" feeling. I also think the "alkaline foods" thing is probably mostly bogus. Everything above is my opinion, based off of reading lots of anecdotal data from lots of different places on the internet, plus someone I met IRL once. I'm sparing you the conspiracy theories as to why doctors don't generally seem to perform this test; I think it's pretty easy to explain as a failure of rationality. You can google around if you want to read those. Since I don't have t
0saturn
Here's a list of food pH values.
2jasticE
10) eggs: can be kept uncooled for a while, very long shelf life hard-boiled, easy to prepare in small portions. milk: do you get UHT milk? It has an uncooled shelf life of months and tends to be cheaper than fresher variants. meat: consider smoked or dried meats (bacon, salami). pasta: reasonably easy to prepare in smaller portions Out of interest, where do you live that cigarettes are so much cheaper than food? One pack of cigerattes here (Germany) will buy me 2 days worth of (cheap) food.
0pthalo
i think if i ate eggs once every 3 days ( to keep from getting tired of them. i tire easily of eggs) I could get through a carton (10 eggs) with time to spare before they expire. milk: i've mostly switched to powdered milk (which i wont drink, but can use in cooking and it doesnt go bad). When I want drink milk, I've started to buy a half litre of it that I will drink as soon as I get home. The problem with UHT is that once I open it, I have to drink the whole litre in a couple days. I need to figure out what's wrong with my fridge. I was more using milk as an example of something that I can't buy and use in the way normal people do because it spoils quicker than it should. meat: i do like those, and a little can go a long way. There's a store here (Aldi) that sells 300g Nürnburger Rostbratwurst for ~€3. 300 grams can last me quite a while. -- These don't seem to go bad in the fridge actually, as long as I use them in a week. I keep them in the original package which I don't open very far and also wrap that in plastic. I can buy a small amount of minced meat for 1€ and make a stir fry with it that serves one person, but I don't do this very often. pasta - yeah, I live off of pasta. Ungarn :) I live south of Budapest, so food is cheaper here than it is there. The price of tobacco is set at a national level, however. A box of cigarettes costs 560 forints, about €2. However, I have found it is cheaper to buy tobacco directly. A 40g packet of tobacco also costs €2 and will make 50 cigarettes. A box of 200 empty cigarette tubes costs €1. So, the price of 200 cigarettes made by hand is €9. The device that puts the tobacco in the tubes costed €5 and has lasted me over a year so far. It paid for itself very quickly. I smoke about a pack a day, so €0.90. 1 kg of bread costs €1. 10 eggs is a little more than €1. At Aldi I can buy a can of Gulyás soup for €1, but it is €3-4 in stores close to me.
2jasticE
About expiration dates: For many foods (not fresh meats though), these may not be actual expiration dates but generously calculated minimum shelf lives. For me at least, eggs and milk will stay good for weeks beyond their labels. Eggs are very versatile. Scrambled eggs can be combined with any number of spices, fried vegetables, milk, meats. Before I got into cooking this used to be a staple food of mine. You may also add eggs to soup, noodles, rice. If you are worried about expiry you can hardboil the otherwise uneaten eggs. These can be kept a long time and eaten alone, on bread, in salads. Another good source of protein with long shelf life may be parmesan, but perhaps too expensive. Hol Magyarországon élsz? Tanulok magyarul és megyek augusztusban Pécsen ;)
1pthalo
For practice: Akkor rossz a tojás, ha miután feltörtem, furcsán néz ki (homályos, valami nő benne, piros pöttyöket látok), illetve rossz szagú. A tojásokat mindig külön pohárban töröm fel, nehogy az egész ételt rontsam el vele. Miután megnéztem és megszagoltam, nyugodtan beletehetem a serpenyőbe. A barátnőm azt mondja, hogy amelyik úszik a vízben, az már nem jó, de ez csak azt jelenti, hogy már nem a legfrissebb és óvatosan kell bánni vele. Szeretem a rántott tojást és a töltött tojást és a tükör tojást is de az utolsót csak pirított kenyérrel. Szegeden élek. Ez körülbelül 4 óra busszal Pécstől. Vonattal még hosszabb az út, mert Budapestre kell utazni és ott átszállni. Így Szegedről Pécsre 180 km-t kell utaznom északra, ahhoz hogy délnyugatra menjek. :D A busz egyenesebb útvonalon megy. Eggs have gone bad if, after opening one, it looks strange (cloudy, something growing in it, I see red spots), or if it has a bad smell. I always break eggs in a separate cup, lest I ruin the whole meal with one. After I've looked at it and smelled it, I can safely put it into the frying pan. My girlfriend says that the ones that floatin water are bad, but it just means that they aren't so fresh any more and need to be treated with care. I like scrambled eggs, deviled eggs, and over easy eggs but the those I only like with toast. I live in Szeged. It is about 4 hours by bus from Pécs. It is much longer by train, because you have to travel to Budapest and change trains there. So from Szeged to Pécs I have to travel 180 km north in order to go south west. :D The bus goes on a straighter path.
[-]KPier30

I am not signed up for cryonics.

1) I think I can save more lives by being an organ donor. 2) I can't afford it, even with life insurance. 3) If there is a Singularity, I expect it will happen before I die anyway.

I can't actually sign up until I'm 18 even if all these are refuted, but I will precommit to signing up when I'm old enough.

Reply
7Alexei
1) Calculate how many lives you can save with your organs. Pre-commit to donate enough money to save as many lives, on top of what you would normally want to donate. 2) Since you are under 18, I can see your problem. Your chances of dying where cryonics would be an option (read: not in an accident) are so tiny, it's probably OK to wait. But you can always take out a loan (maybe?) or borrow from someone. 3) Do you want to take that chance? I also believe that the Singularity will happen within my lifetime, but I am totally willing to pay ~$80 a month to increase the chance of my brain existing when it happens (even if it's only 1%).
3bentarm
I'm afraid 1. just doesn't work, at all - if you can save more lives by being an organ donor, and you think this is the right thing to do, this is an entirely separate question from how many lives you can save by giving money to VillageReach, and I don't see how the answer to one can have a bearing on the other. If you save thousands of lives by giving away money during your lifetime, then on the day you die, the relevant question is still: can I save more lives at the margin by being cryogenically preserved or by donating my organs? Unless you think of saving lives as some sort of competition, rather than as intrinsically a good thing to do, the answer to this question is completely unaffected by how much money you gave away when you were alive. Edit I now realise the suggestion is to give away extra money when you die, but this just has exactly the same problem. You don't get extra money by freezing your body. NB - I'm not saying I really believe the objection is valid, I'm just saying that your proposed solution really doesn't work.
[-]Normal_Anomaly110

Another thing to think about here: if you save lives by donating your organs, the organs will probably go to elderly people who are not signed up for cryonics, and will probably die in the next few decades regardless. So you will have saved a few decades of infirmity. On the other hand, if you are revived from cryopreservation, you will probably be revived to immortal, healthy life. So, if the Singularity/some other form of immortality does not happen until more than a few decades after your death, you can save more years, with greater average quality of life, by cryopreserving yourself.

ETA: Also, if the people your organs go to are signed up for cryonics, then getting your organs still wouldn't make that much difference to the total number of years they live.

Reply
0taryneast
So... sign up for the "head only" cryonics. All your organs get donated to others, and you still get cryonics, because nobody gets a donor brain. You could still even donate your corneas... Edit and have just read further down the comments to see why this is not optimal...
0Strange7
Doesn't sound like a good fix to me. Isn't the donated money necessarily taking away from some other (presumably also life-saving or otherwise valued) endeavor? Instead I'd point out that it's possible to have it both ways: freeze the brain and donate the rest. Not much demand for brain-donors, compared to kidneys or corneas.
3MixedNuts
Currently, it's not possible to do both. Factor that into your analysis of cryonics: if enough people sign up, organ donation can be integrated into the vitrification protocol.
0KPier
1) Statistics on this are almost impossible to find, with lots of websites declaring that you can save 100 lives without any substantiation. If there are any studies of average lives saved per donor, I haven't been able to find them. Saving 100 people another way would be prohibitively expensive, but I'm not convinced those numbers are right. 2) This is my biggest hang-up. It's hard to get a loan without a steady job, and most people I know won't loan me money for something they think is crazy. At least for the next 30 years, my chances of dying where cryonics would be an option are pretty small. When does it stop being OK to wait? 3) Now that you point it out, this is more a excuse-to-stop-thinking than an answer. It's easier not to worry about whether I could sign up for cryonics when I can downsize the expected impact by a factor of 100, but you're right - even a 1% chance would still be worth it.
2Alexei
1) Look at GiveWell. This is precisely the kind of analysis they do. 2) It's stops being OK to wait when you are not OK with dying right now. Since you are young, you can get life insurance for dirt cheap, $1-$10 a month. (Still probably have to wait until you are 18, unless your parents are supportive.) That would be Term Life insurance, which means it'll be for something like 30 years. Then you'll have to renew it at a much higher cost, since you'll be older. So it won't be the most cost efficient (or may be it will be) way to spend money, but it will serve its purpose. There is no harm in finding out exactly how much it will cost for you. I would recommend talking to Rudi Hoffman, cryonics life insurance is his specialty.
1KPier
1) I find GiveWell's analysis very convincing on the question of which charity to donate to; they estimate it costs between $500 and $1000 to save a life with Village Reach. What I can't seem to find is how many lives I would save by becoming an organ donor - if GiveWell has reported on this, I can't find it (and it seems outside their scope). 2) I'm taking a look at this. It appears to be nearly impossible to buy life insurance when under 18, but I'll keep looking.
1Cyan
With a little research online you'll probably be able to figure out the average number of lives saved per organ donor and the probability that you will become one before you age to the point when your organs aren't wanted.
0Larks
But not necessarily the marginal number of lives saved, which is the important thing.
0Cyan
My quick Googling prior to making posting the grandparent seemed to show that the demand for donor organs goes unfilled -- people die on the waiting list.
4lsparrish
The singularity (or the technological state we roughly mean by it) could easily depend on centuries of continued incremental research. Moore's Law is coming up against some fundamental barriers. Furthermore, it may be advisable to slow the approach of the singularity for precautionary reasons (e.g. by restricting access to the most powerful hardware), as a bad singularity is to be avoided pretty much at all costs. Cryonics also doesn't depend directly on a singularity, just either very good (compared to today) scan/emulate tech or very good cell repair tech. These involve progress in different areas of science, so one might be a dead end whereas the other turns out to work. Supporting cryonics as a younger person (whether by signing up or by supporting it from the sidelines) could result in earlier development of hypothermia and other related biochemical alternatives, eliminating the need for cryonics as we know it. Instead you could conceivably enter a state of hibernation as you near old age, for a few years at a time, until a cure for aging is developed.
1KPier
So you would recommend signing up at 16, even if my personal odds of dying now are pretty small? What would you estimate as the probability of developing technology that will make cryonics work without a singularity?
0lsparrish
I haven't signed up myself yet, and I'm 28, so it would be suspicious if I recommended this. (My reasons for not doing so are somewhere between financial and "ugh, paperwork.") But I do recommend becoming actively involved in the cryonics specific subset of the transhumanism community and making long-term financial plans with this expense in mind. I assign perhaps 65% likelihood to that, assuming we rule out long-range as well as short-range singularities, and assuming something like today's best cryonics quality levels. The added risk is because a) the ceiling for non-singularity tech might be lower (it sort of rule out matrioshka brain kind of stuff, if that is relevant), and b) non-singularity tech could take longer to reach high enough levels (even as compared to distant singularities) which increases storage-time associated risks. The latter kind can be mitigated to some degree by increasing storage security -- but it would have to be very close to arbitrarily low to survive for multiple thousands of years. The likelihood of it working climbs to closer to 100% (or at least towards the chances of curing aging, which I think are in the high 90%'s in the long run, even without a singularity) if the cryostasis technology improves during our lifetimes, as the problems of cooling can then be resolved sooner and with less chance of being inherently unsolvable (for any given technological ceiling).
4[anonymous]
1: If cryonics is appealing because it potentially saving your life, then not signing up once you have the money is effectively suicide / voluntary euthanasia. The fact that other people could be saved by your organs is true whether or not you are signed up for cryonics -- so if your life is worth less to you than 4 or 8 strangers' lives, you should commit suicide and donate your organs. If you don't want to commit suicide to donate organs, you shouldn't want to avoid cryonics to donate organs. 2: This is not a reason not to do it, it's a reason you literally currently can't. So make more money (there are lots of other better sources of how to do this; if you want to delve down this road, reply or PM and I'll provide more resources). 3: How confident are you that it will happen before you die? Given the number of years of additional life you are buying a chance at by signing up for cryonics, the extra chance at preserving your identity and 'coming back' via cryonics may still be worth the extra cash. But that depends on the probabilities you assign to the various relevant factors (chance of singularity during lifetime & chance of cryonics resulting in extended life, mainly).
3KPier
1) I value my life more than the lives of 4-8 strangers, as demonstrated by the fact I haven't committed suicide to donate my organs. Based on the reading I have done so far, I can't realistically assign cryonics a greater than 10% chance of actually working, so the question is whether I value my life (discounted by a factor of 10) more than the lives of 4-8 strangers, which I don't. If Omega told me cryonics was guaranteed to work, I would sign up. 2) Making money without a high school degree, special skills, or Eliezer-level intelligence is more difficult than I think most highly-trained people realize. I'll PM you, though. 3) I would assign a very high probability to a Singularity within my lifetime; I would also say I am 85% confident that if the Singularity does not happen in my lifetime, it will not happen. If the 21st century closes without any of the advances we anticipate, that would dramatically increase my estimate that they are impossible.But I've conceded to Alexai that even discounting for all this, it is probably still worth it; if I can resolve the other issues I will sign up.
1handoflixue
The cost of a life insurance policy that covers cryonics is, I think, much less expensive than most people realize. I did the math myself recently and I think it came out to, conservatively, $500/year, which I could easily afford on a retail / call center paycheck. It is definitely worth your time to at least look in to the exact cost for you personally. You're young so you're probably looking at significantly less than me. Disclaimer: I'm not signed up either; I'm currently trying to sort out why. Discovering it was that cheap has removed a very major obstacle that I wasn't aware of, however.
4KPier
Doing this exercise has really forced me to clarify my thinking on this - you should try it. I did a little research and it looks like it would be less than $15 a month for me, which removes that objection - except for the fact I can't buy life insurance until I'm 18.
3handoflixue
There were about 6 thousand people last year in Canada who needed an organ transplant [1] and around 247 thousand deaths [2]. Of those deaths, about 1/3rd were prevented by existing donors. We'd be preventing less than 2% of all deaths in Canada if everyone got the donations they needed. Donation is only viable in cases of brain death (~49% odds) [1], and I couldn't find any statistics on how often a donor body is actually usable (but I'd assume vastly less than 100% of those cases, since you have to die of brain death in a hospital and still have cardiac activity) All in all, there's a deficit of donors, so it's probably still helpful (unless you're a man who has had sex with another man, in which case you might not even be legally eligible; it's banned in Canada). I think you're probably saving less than 1 life on average by being a donor. You'd probably do better to convince some friends and co-workers to sign up with, since organ donation is "low hanging fruit" (free, socially acceptable), and sign yourself up for cryonics (you can claim you've gone with the more complex "donate body to medical science" if you need a social excuse for why you're not an organ donor yourself) If you're not doing cryonics, there's no excuse for not being an organ donor, of course, so don't use this as an excuse to wiggle out of doing one or the other! :) [1] http://www.transplant.ca/pubinfo_orgtiss.htm [2] http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/demo07a-eng.htm
3MixedNuts
Do you mean a man who has sex with men, or do they allow bisexual men? (The incidence of e.g. HIV might be different in these populations.) (Full disclosure: I am so fucking tired of bisexual erasure I will use thread derailment and other acts of terrorism^W mildannoyanceism.)
3handoflixue
Men who have had sex with another man. Thanks for calling me on it; I was mimicking the standard language I see there. Unfortunately the trans/queer-erasure remains, because the legal system tries desperately to pretend everyone fits in the nice binary boxes.
0MixedNuts
Oddly enough, here in France I see more and more mentions of transpeople, and fewer and fewer mentions of bisexual people, both in the mainstream and in LGBT media.
3handoflixue
I've noticed the same, actually. However, the question of "can a trans-person legally donate blood/organs" is... well, not answered at all, to my knowledge, because they don't fit the expected binary box of "are you a male who has had sex with another male?"
0KPier
U.S. websites tend toward overblown claims (100 lives saved per donor...) that have made it nearly impossible for me to figure this out. It appears there are 15,000 donors per year here, and around 28,000 lives saved, implying it's more than 1 life per donor (but not 5 or 10, as I had assumed). I am currently signed up to be a donor, and I'm not really trying to wiggle out so much as figure out which option is better.
2handoflixue
nods I tried looking at U.S. websites and found a pretty consistent "up to 8 lives saved" and anywhere from 40-100 that benefit from tissue donation. The big missing factor in my research was how often an organ donor actually ends up donating. Everything I read hinted at less than 50%, but I never found a firm figure. Google needs a "-Propaganda" or "+Science" tag :)
2Scott Alexander
If number one is part of your true rejection, look to see if there are head-only cryonics available in your area.
7orthonormal
I'd thought that signing up for both organ donation and even head-only cryonics leads to battles over one's body- the necessary preparations are quite different. I'd be happy to find I'm mistaken, though.
1handoflixue
My research via CI and Alcor suggests you are correct. I don't have sources offhand, but should be easy to find on their websites.
3MBlume
What orthonormal said -- I was told that the circulatory system was used to get the crypopreservant into the brain and this rendered the other organs unusable.
0BillyOblivion
You're under 18. If you avoid cigarettes, meth and drunk drivers you should be able to live damn near forever, unless we completely f* up and lose our drive or our ability to continue to advance technologically. By the time you're in your late 30s or early 40s you'll have a much better idea. If you're still typing on the Internets (in whatever form it is 20 years from now) you'll be able to make a MUCH better informed decision. If you're sleeping in a rough shelter and hunting/gathering for food with what's left of civilization, well the cryonics wouldn't have helped anyway (the corpsicles will have been thawed and eaten with the rest of the stored food).
[-]erratio20

I don't blog as much as I would like to. I would like to blog more because I think it would make me a better writer, because I sometimes have sufficiently interesting thoughts such that I would like to flesh them out in writing and/or be able to share them with others, and because it's a low risk method of decreasing my self-consciousness. Oh and also because sometimes keeping records of what I thought/did at particular times in the past is extremely useful.

Barriers:

1) It feels egotistical/arrogant to think that anyone wants to hear about what I did today ... (read more)

Reply
1handoflixue
Keep a public blog under a psuedonymn, where you post the ramblings, daily life, and so forth. Your friends might enjoy reading it, and it lets you practice writing. Whenever you write something particularly interesting on your personal blog, do a second draft that cuts down on the rambling and post it on your main blog.
0erratio
This is largely what I already do (keep a pseudonymous public blog) but as I said, my self-consciousness about posting material there has increased over time. I have 'daily life' posts on it from years back that would make me cringe hard if I were to go and look at them. Come to think of it, my self-consciousness is strongly correlated with the number of people that I'm not close friends with who follow my blog. So starting a new secondary blog would remove that barrier. Alright, I'm going to commit to trying to keep a primary and secondary blog for at least a month, and see how it goes.
1AdeleneDawner
If your blog has gained readers, that seems like a pretty good sign to me that you're not just wasting peoples' time.
0erratio
Good point, and one I should remind myself of more often
1Armok_GoB
Write suggestion-driven fiction.
4Perplexed
What is "suggestion-driven fiction"? Googling was unhelpful. What it sounds like is fiction in which the author has no particular story in mind as (s)he begins the narration, but rather the author generates plot and characters in response to reader suggestions as each chapter is published. If that is the kind of thing you are talking about, it sounds very intriguing. But I wonder how a beginner captures enough initial readers to generate the suggestions. Reciprocity? If someone wants to organize a circle of three or four novice writers producing serialized fiction on their blogs and providing suggestions to each other, I would like to join the group.
1Armok_GoB
Yea, that's basically it, or at least that falls squarely into the category together with some other things. The most common by far is a sort of communal roleplaying where the actions of the protagonist are determined by the community but you do everything else. There are a lot of sites with communities that do these things, usually the games/roleplaying section of various forums or image boards. There are also sites that specialize in them, in which case it's usually some specific type of them such as illustrated ( http://www.mspaforums.com/forumdisplay.php?85-Forum-Adventures ), branching+anonymous+collaborative ( http://www.epicsplosion.com/epicsploitation/adventures ), etc. If you wait a week or so, the lesswrong forums will probably be a good place for you to start a tradition of them, in case you don't want to learn the culture of some existing place. You could also run it on that biog you already have and rely on the comments functionality. I follow a lot of these things, in a lot of places, and know a fair bit about how to make one successful, so if you're ever in doubt or interest or inspiration is inexplicably dying feel free to ask me. Oh, and please post a link here whenever you start so I can read it and suggest things.
0AdeleneDawner
You can also write stories set in a collaboratively-created world. I think this is commonly called 'conworlding', but I don't know enough about it to know if I'm actually using the term correctly. Here are two examples of the kind of thing I'm talking about. (If you sign up for the former, which has a rather high proportion of transhumanists playing, let them know that Adelene sent you - I get imaginary currency for recruiting.)
0erratio
Not the kind of writing I was talking about, unfortunately. Fiction is another area where I would like to eventually put in some work but it's not even close to a priority at the moment.
1Morendil
Keep a private blog, and consider posting to a public one those essays that you're particularly proud of.
1erratio
See 3), I have an ugh field around looking at my writing that means if I waited until I felt proud of something I wrote I would never publish anything. My current workaround, which I've used for academic coursework, involves pre-committing to aiming for a minimum level of quality rather than trying to be happy with my work. After sufficient time has passed since writing, I can usually look at it more objectively. Which suggests that I should commit to posting privately and then revisiting posts a week or two later after the ugh field has faded
0Strange7
Maybe set things up so that, once you write something for the blog, it's automatically released to the public three weeks later unless you come back at least one week after initially writing it and manually keep it private? That way, the embarrassment acts as a reminder to review and revise.
[-][anonymous]20

I would someday like to be a writer. In no particular order, the reasons I don't typically write.

  • I'm currently a graduate student, and while my research/teaching isn't all-consuming yet, it does take considerable amounts of time.
  • When I do sit down and try to write something, it is usually not very original. For example, a couple weeks ago I wrote "A crow shook down on me". I also tend to overwrite things, as evidenced in that writeup.
  • I have a history of starting large projects and giving up after a day or two -- for example, I've tried NaNoWr
... (read more)
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8[anonymous]
In accordance with my commitment below, here are the ten ideas I came up with. 1. An introduction to real analysis using Python. 2. Gurren Lagann fanfiction where characters die left and right for being idiots. (Thanks chelz!) 3. Semi-realistic Solar System space opera. Moral horizon-hopping protagonist reclaims humanity's drive toward space. 4. An argument against mathematical platonism. 5. An explanation of the taxonomy of birds. 6. A follow-up to the quantum physics sequence. 7. A type theory-based explanation of tensor analysis and differential geometry. 8. An argument against the usefulness of Rawls' "veil of ignorance". 9. An essay on romantic aesthetics, using Rand as a starting point but blowing away her chaff. 10. A review/update of Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path.
0[anonymous]
Yes please.
7Alicorn
When you do write, what prompts it? Find out what the impetus is and then arrange to have lots of it. (Fo instance, mine is attention, so I have lots of beta readers and publish everything I write on the Internet.) NaNoWriMo isn't the ideal writing environment for everyone. Write down ideas for things to write about as you have them. Pick the best/most original/etc. the next time you have an opportunity to write. If you are short on time and find that you tend not to be pleased with the ideas you use, this is probably more workable than just writing about everything you think of. Do one pass of editing on each thing you write, after letting it sit without looking at it for at least a few days. This will give you practice at drawing your attention to things you find "overwritten" after the fact; hopefully you'll eventually nip those patterns in the bud before they make it into your writing. Generic advice that doesn't address anything specific you said: Do not delete things you write, ever. If you are tempted to do this, bury them somewhere in the deepest recesses of your computer, but never delete.
1[anonymous]
I'm impressed by your honesty wrt motivations. I pre-commit to writing down tomorrow (because right now drunk and sleepy) a list of ten ideas about things to write about, and within a week follow up and write about the best. The first step should take at most a couple hours; the second probably a day for a first draft. That seems reasonable given my current workflow.
2Alicorn
I'm not sure what there is to be impressed about... perhaps you interpreted me as saying that I write to get attention? That's not why; attention is merely what allows me to write for other reasons (which are mostly: because it is itchy to have ideas unrealized). Without anyone paying attention to me I will still be itchy but won't actually write anything before going off and doing something else.
1[anonymous]
Oh. Nevermind then.
0MixedNuts
Why? (I currently delete most of my writing.)
4Halceon
The idea is that by deleting something you condemn everything that was in it as useless. Even that incredibly catchy metaphor about cats and trash compactors. Or the perfectly good first page that is followed by 10 pages of dross. It's useful to keep a backlog of things you've done and discarded. When you have distanced enough from the work enough, you can return and analyse, and learn not only from your mistakes, but also from the gems that may be found among them.If you delete your writing, you retain only the feeling of not being satisfied with it, unless you have perfect memory. Alternatively, a backlog of truly horrible writing attempts gives you a chance to compare your various efforts and see how you've grown and, possibly, where you've gone wrong recently. Personally I keep most of my things on my laptop, including seperate files for various versions of the same story, ideas that never went past a single paragraph, various abandoned-in-progress things and stories that I felt were excellent at time of writing, but are actually weak. It won't directly motivate to write, but it does help improve over time, and quality tends to contribute to motivation somewhat.
6MixedNuts
"But surely it's better to delete what you do nothing but cringe at, while keeping writing that's mostly bad but has a couple good points! When you come back..." "Stop. What you're defending is what you already do. [wordless] Faced with a choice either to change one's mind or to prove there's no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. Domain experts are telling you you're wrong. [/wordless] Change your mind." "I changed my mind! I'm such a good rationalist! Can I go brag on LW?" "Knock yourself out. Maybe you can rationalize it by saying you need to show agreement more, and promoting a norm of publicly changing one's mind in response to evidence, or something." "Yay!"
0Halceon
I wouldn't necessarily call "Why?" as presenting a choice, but point taken. I guess my real reason why I began not deleting everything is that I've lost a lot of my early writing and regret doing so. What I wrote above still occasionally applies. Why do you delete everything?
1MixedNuts
Huh, I might have been unclear. I was explaining why I changed my mind to agree with you, not criticizing you! I deleted everything because after working on something for long enough, I start hating it and seeing the flaws in it and being ashamed of it and hating my past self for wanting to show it to everyone. I hear this is normal, so when in doubt I wait a few months then reread... and it looks even worse.
[-]Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 20

I should learn to drive and get my license.

Reasons I don't:

  1. I originally took driving lessons in grade 12, when they were competing for my time with homework, working at the pool, scholarship applications, and actual sleep. Being in control of a large, potentially dangerous vehicle, and being clumsy with slow reaction times, was already stressful for me to begin with, and I think I developed a "driving=stress" association that causes mild anxiety every time I think about it, and major anxiety when I actually get in a car.

  2. I don't live at hom

... (read more)
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4handoflixue
Long-winded address to #1 and #3: I'm currently learning to drive, and I've found breaking it down in to steps has helped a lot. "Learn to drive" is a crazy insane task that I could never do, after all :) I started by addressing your #3, since the only person I had available to teach me was a friend with a manual. We spent a couple hours in an empty lot, braking and turning off the car any time someone drove even vaguely near me, just starting and stopping the car and getting used to the clutch. Once that was done, we found a corporate lot, where we could wind around buildings and generally do things slightly more dynamic than "start and stop" while still not having any traffic to worry about (we did this on a weekend evening). That got me more comfortable with steering, handling the shift between 1st and 2nd gear, and more experience with the clutch. Since it was mostly 10-20 MPH, and a fairly empty lot, there wasn't a lot of risk. I also didn't hesitate to just slam the break and stop the car if I ever got uncomfortable. Between these two, I had an environment where I could safely freak out while still learning the skill. Once I was actually on the road, I was a lot more comfortable because I knew I could at least do the basics, and about the worst I'd generally result in is another driver being a few minutes late to wherever they were going. Practicing on weekend evenings also helps, because generally people aren't in a hurry then, and traffic is lighter. ---------------------------------------- 2) This one solves itself come Autumn and you don't seem to be particularly eager. Wait until then :) 4) Can your parents or a friend spend a couple hours a week teaching you? I will say that a calm instructor is very useful in helping to dissolve the "driving = stress" reaction. I only practice an hour or two each week, and it works fine for me. Generally we drive until I get exhausted or over-stressed, and then I hand the keys over and she drives us back :) 5) M
2Barry_Cotter
tl;dr You can overcome stress, multitasking and a manual transmission, given sufficient time and lessons. Consider just not doing anything about it til the fall, but making firm, detailed plans for once you get home. If you feel you should learn to drive it's probably worth the money, just for the extra possibilities it opens up to you. 1. It sounds like you still have a ton of competing demands on your time. You need to prioritise learning to drive so that you practice regularly. As far as clumsy with slow reaction times goes, I'm 27, I have Asperger Syndrome with mild sensory processing difficulties and high base stress levels and I have less than four months driving experience, definitely under 70 hours driving experience and I may have my licence by Friday and will within two months barring epic failure. 2. Just wait until the fall. 3. Get a good driving instructor and you can do it. If you can automatise the sequences of involved, complicated motions involved in competitive swimming you can learn to drive a manual transmission. Your description of lifeguarding competitively, particularly how you were well below average when beginning but became competent over time also strongly suggests to me that you can get past getting freaked out. 4. How much do you have saved? How much is being able to drive worth to you? What's the just better use of the funds, the just worse use and the current best use? 5. Ditto, but, um, I'm not under the impression that most Canadian cities are much friendlier to pedestrians, cyclists or public transport users than in the US. If you ever want to live in the suburbs, ever, it'd be worth it
1[anonymous]
Note that a driving instructor provides you with a practice car. I don't drive much now, and I'm so clumsy that I've wondered if it's pathological... but I learned to drive over the summer I was 18, paid for my own lessons, and got my license. I would have thought I could never do it, but it's very possible. Spending money isn't really awful, I've learned over time. Spending more than you can afford is awful. But if you have a cushion of savings that you haven't been using, and you spend it down a little for a one-time investment in your human capital, it's not actually that bad. Attaching an emotional valence to how many dollars you have in the bank gets in the way of living.
1AdeleneDawner
With regards to the stress, enjoyment, and environmental issues: Consider that knowing how to drive doesn't obligate you to have a lifestyle where you do so regularly. This also covers some of the financial objection, too: I've heard that it's cheaper to have a generally non-driving lifestyle and rent a car (possibly through a car-sharing program) when you need to than to have a lifestyle that involves driving on a regular basis.
0beriukay
Addressing 1 and 5, I honestly think you're a better person if you don't get comfortable with driving. Ever. One of the main points of the book Traffic was that being comfortable is often more dangerous than being at high alert. Granted, you can't always be in panic mode, but once you have learned to drive, just use the car as a tool to get things you want done, and embrace your fear. Make habits that contribute to being a better driver, like always looking at your blind spot, always go the speed limit, don't brake so hard that a person's head would jerk forward (unless you have to!). And maybe set challenges for yourself, both for fun and to keep you paying attention to the road. I like to pretend that I'm in a space ship with very limited fuel, so I accelerate and brake as infrequently as I can. As for 2 and 4, maybe you can get help learning from the parent of a friend. It will be awkward, but it will help to limit emotional issues clouding the learning process because you are on your dealing-with-strangers behavior mode. Finally, I don't have a lot to say about manual cars. They are indeed a pain in the ass, and if you don't think you can handle them now, then maybe you shouldn't start with them. But if you care about Black Swan events, it might be a good idea to learn how to use one after you've learned automatic, just in case you're on a road trip with a friend, who is driving a manual, and the friend has an emergency, and you need to get them to the hospital. Or whatever.
[-]diegocaleiro20

I do not allocate enough time in making the world a better place. In particular, and I will stress only this most important particular, I do not get around doing the bureocratic things that precede execution. I plan, and stop after planning. Ex: I wrote a book but am not getting it published Everyone who meets me think I am awesome and wants to join my project, but my projects don't last enough time before the next project takes over my mind I can't pay with my money for loads of utilitarian stuff because I don't feel safe donating so I'm not actually ou... (read more)

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4Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Wow. I had a surprisingly strong emotional response against that. I'm still trying to parse why, and it probably says more about my psychology than about yours. I think it boils down to the following beliefs that I seem to have: a) everyone should try their best to be self-sufficient, otherwise the weight of freeloaders will drag the rest of society down, b) anything can happen to anyone at any time and if you're not trying your best to be prepared, you're an idiot. Etc. Again, I'm not trying to attack you in any way. Your system sounds reasonably healthy, as long as you can afford it financially. (I know people who are similar but who really can't afford it, and that may be coloring my perception.) That probably means that my mind works sufficiently differently from yours that my suggestions may not work, but I'll try my best. a) Focus on the good feeling of having gotten something done, rather than the negative feeling of starting something that seems like harder work than the 'better experiential options'. Over time, you might find that the satisfaction of having accomplished something is so addictive that it bleeds through into 'I want to start more projects and finish them, so I can have the fulfillment of having finished them.' Of course there are things that are easier than finishing difficult projects, but you might find that after a while, they aren't as fun because you become conscious of how little you've accomplished at the end of doing them. That being said, that's how my psychology works. Yours may require other tactics to get it to cooperate. b) Your life may have been great for the past 25 years. Don't focus on your life. Making the whole world a better place is not about you. In fact, plenty of people who've tried to make the world a better place, and sometimes succeeded, have suffered in the process. It's not about you. According to utilitarian moral theories, every person's happiness is of equal weight. If the stress of putting off spontaneous,
1diegocaleiro
NOTE: This is not bragging, I really really want to change many of my ways and think part of this info is relevant to that. Trying to give you a bit more precision about my intentions and perceptions. 1) I'm very good at finishing stuff if it is social/sexual/friendship stuff, or reading, or writing essays. 2) What I am not good is what requires feedback, things like finding an agent for book publishing, writing a good paper even though I am from Brazil and no one would revise it, or pretending to be interested in a low-impact master thesis. Now, to your comments: Sure man, having gotten something done is great, now the kinds of things that really make me shine inside for having done them: Creating new friendships between two similiar people, giving presentations on transhumanism or philosophy and being high regarded, seducing women whom I'm likely to love, winning in intelectual games, and more than everything, being regarded, after planning an event, as a person who really takes the fact that we only live once and thus ought to savour every moment seriously. I've been told that I'm the person who most changed their lives by at least five people. I've optimized for being considered awesome by those who know me little. These things, I like the feeling of having done. Now if you ask me about how good I feel about having written a book on Dan Dennett, about having writen three unpublished philosophical articles, or about having caused 5 people to take immensely seriously the possibility of dedicating themselves to transhumanism/singularity/utilitarianism, I would be ridiculously lying to say that it makes me happier than, say, reading less wrong replies about my comments.
2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
So basically, what you're saying is that you get satisfaction from doing things that give you fairly immediate rewards (being considered awesome) from people. If I guess correctly, you are probably quite extroverted and like being around people. (This is fairly rare on LessWrong, and it isn't the case for me.) A possible solution would be to try to tie those things you don't get as much satisfaction from (writing a book, writing philosophy articles, etc) to getting respect and having people think you are awesome. If you can think of a way to do that, I'm guessing it would help. Like I said. Making the world a 'better place' is not necessarily about making just yourself happier. (Though I haven't done a huge amount on that front either.)
[-]falenas10820

Working slower to avoid mistakes. (I don't want to, I'm just told I should.)

  1. I've only had one person who was able to legitimately judge my work (at an internship), and my work/mistake ratio was not unreasonably high.
  2. There is evidence to suggest that the person giving this advice trying to justify to herself how I can get the work done far faster than she could, although my opinion on that could be personal bias.
  3. There is someone checking over all my work, so even when I do make a mistake it is caught without becoming a serious issue.
  4. The only way I would be working slower is checking over all my entries before I submit them, which would just be duplicating the job mentioned in 3.
Reply
2AdeleneDawner
Unless the person complaining is the person who checks your work, or there's some reason to believe that they'd have more information about the ideal speed to mistakes ratio than you do, I suggest just ignoring it. If one or the other of my caveats is true, I suggest asking the person who checks your work for more information about the issue, so that you can see why you should want to work slower and avoid more mistakes.
0handoflixue
I used to think I needed to learn this. Then I was given unsupervised access to do accounting entries, and discovered I could double-check my work quite well when there was an actual nee. I just can't stand wasting time on it normally, for the #1 and #4 reasons you listed.
[-]Fergus_Mackinnon20

I really need to get far more strenuous exercise than I currently do, but I can be very uncomfortable exposing myself to any criticism from people I don't already know. I live on the edge of a village nearby to a woods which I currently walk in occasionally. Other people use it regularly, and as a teenager, I often get the impression they think I'm there to drink or do drugs if I'm there at any time other than approximately three o'clock, when my school gets out, although in fairness drunken teens do litter the area regularly. I often find myself lacking ... (read more)

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[-]Alicorn180

If you can afford it, you may be able to nonverbally signal to onlookers that you are there for Serious Running by showing up in a Serious Running outfit with corresponding accessories.

Reply
5Fergus_Mackinnon
Thanks, that would be a simple solution. It seems rather obvious now, I just nod, mutter 'good morning/afternoon' and run on... which they accept as a response without question because I'm there for Serious Running! My family's relatively well off, and my birthday is coming up, so the cost isn't likely to be a problem unless it's very expensive. I'll check out the sports store next time I'm in town and see what sort of kit they have available. Thanks again.
5Desrtopa
You don't really need much by way of accessories to signal that you're running for exercise, just some clothes that are clearly more appropriate for accommodating sweat than for fashion, and probably a water bottle if you're running long distances.
0Fergus_Mackinnon
That is also a valid point. I don't currently have any exercise clothes beyond old shirts though, so I need to buy some anyway. My wardrobe primarily consists of 'fade into the background' gear, and school uniforms, with an old suit jacket kicking around somewhere.
2BillyOblivion
"serious" runners wear whatever they want. This http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9aDJfjBApI is Anton Krupicka. He runs ultra-marathons. 100 mile of trail, all of it over 9200 feet in just over 16 hours. That serious enough? He runs in shorts and running shoes, often shoes he's "modified" himself. You wanna run, run. If people think you're getting high, you are. It's ok, it's legal. We all worry about what other think about us, and if we knew what other thought we'd often be offended, hurt, amused, or turned on, but if we let that get in the way of what we know we ought to be doing, well, that's not exactly smart, is it?
4JackEmpty
I agree with the "you shouldn't HAVE to worry about what people think about you" mode of thought, but the point of this excercise is to treat these things as if they were the person's true rejections. And if they are their true rejections (which they very well may be), then how is it possible to still excecute X action that they desire to, while circumventing the previously stated rejection. Assume the LCPW where I implanted a device inside Fergus' head, which will explode if he worries about what he's signalling/what others are thinking about him/getting criticism, when he runs. Then propose solutions that let him both run, and not have his head explode. Concrete advice, not just, "Well, if you didn't think that way, your head wouldn't explode. So don't think that way."
3BillyOblivion
I am treating it as if it's a blocker to him acting on a goal. And I never said "you shouldn't have to worry...", all I said was that letting what other people think get in the way of doing the right thing isn't very smart. Sometimes the best way to overcome a block is to just accept that things are like that and push on. The opinions of strangers is one thing that you cannot (much) influence. You should consider how you appearance and actions look to them because of things like them calling the police because you're wandering around at 2 in the morning howling along to Norwegian Death Metal, but if you just want to go trail running in a place where other kids like to pour cheap booze down their throats and start on the next generation, then just keep running.
6JackEmpty
Again, I agree... outside the bounds of this excercise. I have absolutely no objection to any of your advice, whatsoever. It's all pretty good advice, if presented a little forcefully. But I get that sort of "tough titties, now do the work" methodology. Nor would I be making any noise if this was only an article about aspiring rationalists giving advice to other aspiring rationalists. But it isn't. The point is to figure out a strategy to AVOID the obstacles presented, not insist that the obstacles be removed. That way the obstacles can no longer be used as an EXCUSE not to do the thing. The point of the Rejection Challenge is to excise excuses not excise obstacles. The one: "I can't get from point A to point B because there is a wall in the way." The other (1): "Walk around the wall. Get a ladder and climb over it. Get someone to boost you over. Etc., etc." The other (2): "Break the wall down, and walk straight from A to B." We want to take path 1, not path 2. ETA: If you disagree with the core point of the excercise, I don't think anyone would object to you commenting and saying so, while explaining precisely WHY.
1Fergus_Mackinnon
... Running through the woods half naked wouldn't make things any easier, you know. I see what you're saying, but it's more about keeping my 'slate' clean and not getting into trouble for some reason.
1BillyOblivion
If you're running a 6 or 7 minute mile they won't bother you. And if they decide they want to bother you they have to catch you.
5taryneast
...and I recommend getting an iPod and noise-dampening earphones. Even if you don't listen to music, they're good so you don't have to deal with hearing people and can ignore them more easily.
[-]AdeleneDawner150

If you just want to have an excuse to ignore people, the player is superfluous; the earphones are the signaling part.

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2taryneast
Yeah, but they have a useful clip to hold the other end of the earphones steady :)
2AdeleneDawner
Darn expensive for a clip, though. ;)
1zntneo
Pfft i listen to something on my ipod quite a lot and people still seem to try to talk to me.
0AdeleneDawner
There seems to also be a body language component, but the presence or absence of a functional music player won't help with that, either. (I can't really give advice on the body language bit; my natural body language apparently communicates that I want to be left alone without any effort on my part, and I haven't investigated what it would take to change that.)
2zntneo
you are a lucky bastard then. I might even have my eyes closed with my headphones on and people will talk to me.
1AdeleneDawner
It occurs to me that you could try clothing-based signaling. On further reflection I remembered one period where I did pretty regularly have people approaching me, which involved a particularly nice winter jacket, and ended when I took the (faux, I think) fur-lined hood off of it. For the opposite effect, I assume one would aim for 'frumpy', or at least 'generic'. My usual wardrobe is fairly boring; I actively avoid anything with a logo on it, and mostly wear plain single-color pants and shirts with uninteresting patterns (subtle all-over paisleys or florals, mostly; I'm not sure what the male equivalent would be). I also picked up a habit a few years ago of wearing a baseball cap whenever I'm out of the house; the incongruity (baseball caps are unusual for females to wear, and I make little to no effort to match my cap with my outfit) might be signaling something useful, but people were already approaching me infrequently enough before I picked the habit up that I can't really tell if it's made a difference.
1beriukay
I also seldom get bothered when I'm out and about. I wear single-color, logo-free shirts (though often bright red or green), with black or grey carhartt pants (which are pretty normal here), and a backpack. I often wear a jacket, even when it is warm, to hold my stuff and because I work in a climate-controlled room. Furthermore, I pay almost no attention to my head or facial hair. So about once a year, I shave off all my hair, and maybe thrice a year do I shave my beard. Needless to say, I exude "don't bother me!" when I'm walking or shopping. What is rather strange is that one of my closest friends dresses similarly, but is often harassed by strangers. Even to the point that he is sometimes stopped by cops to ask why he's walking. The biggest difference between his and my dispositions is that I flatly don't give a crap about most of the people I see, or what they think of me, whereas he is always thinking about how he is perceived. It seems that by worrying that he might look like a child molester sends off social cues that he is guilty about something, which then makes him a target for more harassment. It is true that I don't go walking as often as he does, so my sample size is smaller. Nor do I go to as weird places, because he would often stop at wifi hotspots to write emails. It could also be that my backpack sent social cues that being unencumbered doesn't.
0zntneo
I am someone who generally throws a pair of whatever seems will be appropriate for the weather (pants or shorts) and a random t-shirt on. I am not even sure if i match most of the time. I have a beard which is quite uncommon for men in our society(which to me is mildly sad)
0zntneo
I am someone who generally throws a pair of whatever seems will be appropriate for the weather (pants or shorts) and a random t-shirt on. I am not even sure if i match most of the time. I have a beard which is quite umcommon for men in our society(which to me is mildly sad)
0AdeleneDawner
Are the t-shirts plain, or do they have designs (text, images) on them? What are the designs? Do they signal affiliation in any way? What's your usual context?
0beoShaffer
I wonder are these people you know, and if so is there anything about your reputation that might encourage them?
0zntneo
No these are bus drivers and random people on the bus.
1taryneast
...oh and I should also point out that to make proper noise-canceling headphones work they do need to actually be plugged in and active. If you're going to be walking through noisy places and want quiet, you'll need the iPod too. ... not that this should at all get in the way of your excellent riposte ;)
2Fergus_Mackinnon
Normally I'd take the advice, but the woods is owned by the forestry commission. They're subsidised by the government on condition that they let the public, e.g. me, have access, but they run a forestry college there. With all the heavy machinery and chainsaws that implies appearing every so often. I didn't mention it, so you weren't to know, but I'd prefer to be a little safer in exchange for the added boredom and exposure to noise.
2taryneast
Yes - extremely good point. I also recommend allowing yourself to hear if wandering around near traffic. Being able to hear "watch out for that bus!" has very high utility.
2AngryParsley
I run a decent amount and I used to be self-conscious about it. Eventually I realized: What does it matter what random strangers think? Their opinion of you has no effect on your life. They won't even know your name or remember your face. Now it doesn't feel the least bit unusual when I ignore people. I'm breathing hard. In a few minutes I'll be half a mile away from this person. Why spend the effort to make eye contact and nod?
0handoflixue
You could always exercise at home. Pushups, squats, and crunches are all easy muscle building exercises there. I personally love "DDR" (video game) for this - a used copy of the game, a cheap dance mat, and a used PS/2 can be had for under $100 pretty easily. I also occasionally just jog or walk especially fast during my normal day. I've never had anyone comment on it, even when I do this downtown. Amongst other things, I'm moving faster than them ;) I would second the suggestion of "self modify so you don't mind if people think you're high", but I don't think that's the simplest way to get exercise :)
[-]magfrump20

I too have the seeming common problem of not eating enough vegetables. However I seem to have different reasons from what others have posted.

First, I don't have a car so I tend to need to shop in spurts, vegetables tend not to stay good long enough to get loads of fresh ones. I buy some frozen vegetables but I don't think it's sufficient (or as delicious as I'd like).

Second, I tend to put off preparing vegetables or have only one way of preparing them. Learning to cook new ways, and even cooking things in ways I know, tends to take more time than what I... (read more)

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2Mass_Driver
Vegetables that stay fresh for a long time without being frozen, and can be eaten raw or with a dip or dressing (i.e, no recipe needed): Whole carrots, snow peas, romaine lettuce (look for a plastic bag with three fronds in it), spring mix lettuce, basil, zucchini Potential sources of vegetable phytonutrients that come as ready-to-eat preserved snack foods: Terra Chips, V-8, Bloody Mary Mix, Roasted Nori (Seaweed)
3magfrump
I enjoy carrots but recently they've given me a terrible feeling in the back of my throat when I eat them, so I need to chop them up to put them in something. I keep frozen peas and romaine around; that's about the extent of my success. Spring mix is a bit bitter for my taste and I don't like the flavor of raw zucchini. I'll try out basil. I don't like chips in general and definitely not seaweed; perhaps I'll give V8 a try though.
2novalis
A fix for bitterness in vegetables is to add salt. I always salt my spring mix (after dressing it with oil and vinegar). Most non-chefs don't use enough salt in their cooking for optimal flavor. That said, salt depends heavily on the individual, so in many cases it's OK to salt at the table.
0NancyLebovitz
Have you tried grating carrots? My impression is that grating will reduce them to smaller pieces faster than chopping does.
0magfrump
A little bit, but I hate cleaning graters and grating with a peeler is much slower than chopping. Perhaps I'll try it again though.
0beriukay
Maybe a cheap food processor? I got one at a salvation army-type place for $5. Though getting a more expensive one would make cleaning a lot easier.
[-]kurokikaze10

I want to lower my "off-topic" Internet usage when I'm on work.

What do I have now:

  1. No penalties for surfing Reddit if the work is done on time
  2. RescueTime for counting hours I spend on work and hours I spend on various lolcats (right now my efficiency is 0.5, which mean ~ 1 hour of reddit per 1.6 hours of work)

Why I want to do that? To have more time for my own projects and work.

What's keeping me from doing that:

  1. I'm afraid to burn out doing only the programming-related stuff.
  2. Some sites are just addictive (yes, Reddit, I'm looking at you).
  3. I'm slightly tired from two years long project (I'm going to vacation in less than 1 month).
Reply
2Armok_GoB
Ask someone to look over your shoulder at random times but maybe once per 10min on average.
1kurokikaze
Hm, I don't want to distract even more people from their duties, but this may work. I'll see what I can do. Still, more ideas are welcome.
2Armok_GoB
You could set a timer/scrip to remind you to look over your own shoulder.
1handoflixue
It's entirely possible you have at least one co-worker with the same issue, who is also interested in fixing it. You could thus offer a mutual benefit :)
1beoShaffer
I know someone IRL who was having that problem. They modified their computer so that they were simply unable to access certain sites. I believe it involved having the browser block certain IP addresses but I can't really remember. It was possible to undo this but it took far to much work for a stalling activity.
2AdeleneDawner
Leechblock, yo.
0Nornagest
Leechblock's never worked for me. It prevents me from visiting the sites I normally use to procrastinate, but it doesn't actually decrease procrastination; it just makes it more tedious and frustrating.
0AdeleneDawner
The point of it isn't exactly to stop you from procrastinating, as I see it. The point of it is to remove specific temptations that you have particular trouble overcoming. You still have to actually decide to do the work, even if you block everything and have to decide to do the work rather than, say, going for a walk or something. (That, and you can use 'I'll turn leechblock off when I've accomplished X' as a motivation source, which is pretty useful for me at least.) If you're not in a mindset like 'I want to do X, but my habit of doing Y instead is getting in the way of that and annoying me', it's probably not going to help much.
1kurokikaze
Ha, I've written delaying proxy for this just like in xkcd.
[-]Bagricula10

I would like to go to grad school for physics and philosophy.

The Situation:

  1. I did my bachelors in Economics at a very good American university, but I only did moderately well.

  2. I took mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and wave phenomena. I also took theoretical multi-var, linear algebra, and abstract algebra, basic statistics, econometrics. In philosophy I've only taken a course on Kant's ethics.

The Constraints:

  1. I have not taken quantum mechanics, statistical thermodynamics, or any science-relevant philosophy (i.e. metaphysics, epistemology, philo

... (read more)
Reply
4Dreaded_Anomaly
Yes, that will be necessary to do well on the test. You should also be prepared to review classical mechanics and E&M. Having a good set of freshman-level physics textbooks is helpful, because many of the problems are at that level. I recommend the two-volume set by Resnick, Halliday, and Krane. You should check out the physicsgre.com forums. You will be able to find a fair amount of advice threads for people in similar situations (lacking the full complement of upper-level physics courses, in need of research experience, etc.), as well as a lot of general advice about the physics GRE test. You can also try starting your own thread on that forum to solicit more advice. The consensus is that going to grad school in physics without the undergrad in physics is difficult and requires a lot of effort, but it's not impossible if one is dedicated and takes the initiative. In general, a career in physics is going to require a lot of self-study. Grad students often end up working on such specialized research problems that the only way to learn about the topic is to read lots of published papers, which are often much more difficult to understand than textbooks. For quantum mechanics, I recommend Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. I am not sure why you haven't been working problems all the way through, but if it's because you don't have the correct solutions against which to check your answers, the manual for Griffith's textbook is easy to find. Unfortunately, I really don't know of a good undergraduate-level thermodynamics textbook. For the general GRE test, buy a commercial test-prep book (personally, I prefer Barron's) and go through it cover to cover. Take the diagnostic test, figure out where your areas of weakness are, study them by working through the sections in the book that address them, and then take more practice tests. (Repeat if necessary.) I think you would have an easier time finding a professor who would let you work in eir research group, or a
0Bagricula
Many thanks. Good advice all. The resources you're suggesting are particularly helpful. I will hopefully have many of those books in the next few weeks depending on shipping to Beijing. I am hoping that I can get into a program before leaving the country, but regardless I am committed to resigning and moving by middle of next spring. I am also looking at the terminal masters programs in the U.K. I know Cambridge has some.
0Dreaded_Anomaly
That is a good option to get experience with research and coursework. Also, I think European schools tend to place less emphasis on the physics GRE than US schools, although there's some variation in that.
[-]MatthewBaker10

I cannot wake up on time for things more than 80% of the time even once my circadian rhythm is set in place. Ive tried alarm clock in the closet>two alarms everything my body always seems to bypass the issue. Does anyone have some methods i may not have tried yet?

Reply
5taryneast
I don't have this problem, but I'm told this article is excellent: How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off
4Simon Fischer
Tried it: Works!
0MatthewBaker
This seems very useful, i shall try it. EDIT: I haven't been more than 3 minutes late for two weeks so far. By tricking yourself out of bed and moving faster it really makes it easier to get up.. Thank you so much Taryneast :)
3Kaj_Sotala
If the clocks are enough to make you wake up even for a brief moment (but not enough to keep you awake), try having a supply of caffeine pills next to your bed, and take one when the first alarm rings. Then sleep for half an hour more and get up. That's worked for me for several years, though my difficulties in getting up were nowhere as serious as yours.
2Unnamed
Part of the problem could be that your alarm is waking you up at a bad part of your sleep cycle. The times when you wake up more smoothly could be times when your alarm happens to sound during a phase when you are less deeply asleep. There are apps (like Sleep Cycle on the iPhone) and devices that track your sleep cycle and make the alarm go off at the appropriate part of your sleep cycle.
0beriukay
Have you got friends or roomies who would be willing to help? Every time I ask someone to ensure I'm awake at a specific time, I wake up before my alarm AND before the friend wakes me up. Though it is only a trick I use for important occasions, it has a perfect success rate for me. If you can't get someone to help, and you are capable of receiving phone calls, depending on time zone and time of day, I would be willing to give you the occasional wake-up call.
0MatthewBaker
I use friends sometimes, but they have to remember or i can sleep through the alarm.
0BillyOblivion
There is a device called a "zeos" (http://www.amazon.com/Zeo-ZEOBP01-Personal-Sleep-Coach/dp/B002IY65V4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309340321&sr=8-1) that is basically a low-rent EEG that can do the math and wake you at the optimal part of your sleep cycle. Yeah, it's kinda expensive, but I'm trying to talk myself into buying one. Beyond just waking you at the appropriate part of your sleep cycle you can also use it in conjunction with a food/sleep diary to track how changes in your life patterns effect your sleep. I just finished reading 4 hour body (Tim Ferriss) where he mentioned this, and one thing he mentioned was that eating a high-protein snack (he recommended tablespoons (or was it teaspoons?)) of almond butter right before bed lead to better sleep, and less problems waking up (he attributed this to low blood sugar in the AM, which might be). (I also learned about the zeos in his book).
0MatthewBaker
When i am no longer a poor college student i will try this. As for the food, ive never noticed how certain foods affect my sleep probably because ive never held all operational variables except it steady while ive tested it. I will try to take an almond butter celery snack when waking up is more imperative.
0JackEmpty
I have the same issue. My current patch is to have ten alarms set on my phone and one on my alarm clock at ten minute intervals starting from the half hour or so before I have to wake up. Even still, it's a struggle. Now, is it a matter of not getting a sufficient amount or sufficiently restful sleep? Or is it inability to wake on time regardless of how much sleep you get?
0MatthewBaker
Regardless of how much sleep i get. Sometimes its easier to get up on 4 or 6 hours of sleep and harder on 8-10, but as you said it's a struggle.
2AdeleneDawner
I read somewhere, several years ago, that for most people, getting up after less than 3 hours of sleep is fairly easy, and getting up after more than 6 hours of sleep is fairly easy, but getting up after more three but less than six hours of sleep is very hard - the model was something along the lines of 'after three hours of sleep, human brains assume that there's time for a full night's worth of sleep rather than just a nap'. I don't have any references, nor any significant amount of evidence that this is the case (though it seems to work for me), but the idea that if you get more than X amount of sleep you need to get X+Y amount of sleep in order to wake up easily seems like a potentially useful theory at least.
2JackEmpty
I'll propose an experiment: Try falling asleep at different times, and recording your difficuly-to-get-up on some arbitrary scale. Record (approximately) how much time asleep you get along with this. The "recommended" 8 hours may not be optimal for your physiology. Disclaimer: Not a doctor, nor an expert in sleep, in any way... This is just from anecdotal evidence. (Girlfriend sleeps about 5-6 hours a night, and is functional. Friend can't function without sleeping 9.) If you find an amount of sleep that is testably better than the alternatives, at least this might help.
2handoflixue
Oddly, I find 8 hours of sleep is the worst for me. I do vastly better on 6 or 10 hours of sleep. So there may be multiple optimums, and not necessarily following an intuitive pattern.
0falenas108
I personally set 5 alarms :) If that sort of thing isn't working, try opening a window to get sunlight in, or if possible have a friend call you when you want to get up.
3AdeleneDawner
Or have the internet call you.
0MatthewBaker
Sunlight helps a bit, but my phone doesn't wake me up and 5 alarms is a bit too much for my roommates at this point in time, i will inevitably leave one or two on and they will be bothered :( Right now i just use two, 1 for still have time to shower, 1 for must wake up now.
0Alex_Altair
When I was attempting to transition to polyphasic sleep, I set 9 alarms. This was not overkill. In case you don't want to buy 9 alarm clocks, I used my cell phone, iPod, and computer for alarm functions.
0MatthewBaker
How was polyphasic sleep?
2Alex_Altair
The most difficult thing I've ever tried, extremely fun, and overall a failure. I tried it four times, each time noting the possible failures of my attempt, and improving them the next try. By the end I was pretty sure it was impossible (for me).
0MatthewBaker
How far did you get/ Are you a vegetarian or vegan/ Have you tried biphasic sleep?
0Alex_Altair
"How far" seems hard to measure. I was able to (with a friend) wake up every time, but I wasn't able to stay awake 100% at night. Micro sleeps are virtually impossible to eliminate. My friend hallucinated. During the day though, we felt normal after a few weeks. This was deceptively promising. Eventually, we had to concede, and just sleep regular, if we ever wanted to attend classes or a job. I am not any special diet. I have not tried biphasic, because it doesn't really give you that many extra hours. Any more questions are welcome!
0JackEmpty
What schedule did you use? Because "polyphasic" is a catchall term for sleeping in more than one interval over the course of a 24 hour period. Uberman, everyman, and dymaxion are the most commonly spoken of, in my experience.
0Alex_Altair
Thirty minute naps every six hours. That one didn't have too much data behind it, either.
1JackEmpty
That's the dymaxion. I've never tried it myself (School/work being inflexible in hours to the degree that I wouldn't be able to nap.), but of what I've read, it's one of the most difficult to acclimate to. One of the easier ones (or at least easier than dymaxion, maybe not as easy as biphasic, but it gets more wake-hours) is the Everyman. It's a three-hour core nap with three evenly spaced 20-minute naps during the day, with some room for flexibility. And the basic rule from that three-and-thre model (which can get you down to biphasic, or up to the uberman) is for every hour of core you add, remove one nap. And every hour of core you remove, add a nap.
[-]JackEmpty10

I am mildly malnourished. I am far too thin for my height/age and I do not eat in sufficient volume or sufficiently healthily.

Cost is the major prohibiting factor. I live at home, but I pay for most of what I consume. (Breakfast/lunch.) I am working full time, saving for college.

Food preparation in advance is an option, but I tell myself I don't have the time to do so. Plus buying pre-prepared food is easier and I lack the motivation to make food if I can just buy it.

If I try to prohibit myself from spending (leaving my money/debit card in my car or at hom... (read more)

Reply
8Alicorn
Can you eat grapes, or do the stems give you trouble? Consider keeping canned fruit around (peaches, pears, mandarin oranges, pineapple, &c) or dried fruit (raisins, dates, craisins, papaya, whatever) as a way to get fruit that does not include non-food parts. Similar options exist with vegetables. Frozen also works - frozen cherries are already pitted for you just like canned ones. Keep simple stuff around: for instance, buy hummus, spreadable cheese, guacamole, cold cuts, etc., and keep a sliced loaf of bread in the freezer. At will, break off an arbitrary number of slices, toast bread, put stuff on it, nom. Hardboil eggs - you can do an entire layer of eggs (how many that is depends on pot size) in half an hour, during most of which time you don't have to be doing anything, and they keep really well. (Put eggs in a single layer in pot. Cover with cold water, plus an inch above the top of the eggs. Bring to a rolling boil, then remove from heat, cover, time 15 minutes, and then drain them and put them in cold water with some ice to bring the temperature down. Store in fridge. To eat, peel (thereby removing all nonedible parts) and take a bite; good with salt, better with salt and also other spices.)
1JackEmpty
Grapes are fine if I pick them off the stems and discard first. Canned fruit is actually a good idea. Those single-serving Dole fruit cups also come to mind as something I can toss in a bag with a spoon, no preparation necessary. And actually, the hardboiled eggs all-at-once thing seems like a good idea. I think it'd be easier to prepare in advance if it's a one-time investment of an hour total prep/cook time every week rather than 15 minutes the night before every day. Even building a half dozen sandwhiches Sunday evening seems like less of an investment than making one an evening. Any other ideas for batch food-making?
5Benquo
I give this exact advice often enough that I should just put it on a website. Bean soup/stew Buy a bag of dried beans, put them in a pot with as much water as the instructions on the bag suggest, bring to a boil, then simmer until the beans are soft. You will probably want to add some salt at some point. Ways to add some variety to this dish, all of them optional: * Use different kinds of beans * Before putting in the beans and water, sautee some stew/soup-type veggies in the same pot pot (e.g. chopped onion, carrot, celery, chopped tomato). Then add the beans and water. * When the beans are almost done, add some leafy greens (kale, chard, etc.) or chopped scallions/chives/&c to the pot. * Before adding the beans and water, cook a little bit of chopped garlic or other spices in the pot with a little bit of oil. * Before adding the beans and water, fry up some chopped bacon or turkey bacon, chopped sausage, or anchovies (use low heat for anchovies). * After adding the beans, add a little bit of cured meat (e.g. prosciutto, bresaola, etc.). * Add a couple of bay leaves with the beans and water. For the meats, a little bit goes a long way and you may not need extra salt. Pasta Follow the instructions on the box (but remember to salt the water heavily, at least a full teaspoon, probably more) to cook the pasta. When it's done, drain it in a colander. Optional: You can stir in a little bit of grated Parmagiano or other hard cheese for added flavor and protein/fat; if you don't want a "cheesy" pasta just stop adding cheese when it doesn't seem to be absorbed into the pasta anymore. For sauce, here are some options (add spices to any of them if/when it seems like it might be a good idea): * Use pre-made pasta sauce * Brown some garlic in a little olive oil or butter, add anchovies at a low heat, then once they dissolve in the heat add some chopped tomatoes. * Sautee some subset of (chopped onion, chopped carrot, chopped celery) then add either ch
0Fergus_Mackinnon
I can vouch for the Pasta recipes with great enthusiasm. Another food I'd recommend for ease of eating and cheapness, is Shepherdess pie, Shepherd's pie with the meat replaced with vegetables, which I personally prefer. Linkage! http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/5397/shepherdess-pie.aspx I did a google search for 'batch cooking', and this result may be of interest to you. http://www.netmums.com/food/Batch_cooking_and_freezing.721/
0Benquo
I suspect that the most useful component of advice may often be mentioning the relevant search term or the name of the relevant field. Cf. Lukeprog's point about not being able to find good resources about the neuroscience of desire until he found the term "neuroeconomics." I should give advice like that more often, e.g. "google 'batch cooking'." There are often implementation details available elsewhere.
2Alicorn
Soup is easy to make in batches; legume-based soups freeze well and others freeze at least tolerably. Measure out servings into (well-sealed) tupperwares and freeze them; chuck one into your backpack come morning. Pasta salad, potato salad, egg salad, or tuna salad can also be made in large amounts - they won't freeze as nicely, so you'd want to put them next to your frozen soup or one of those things that you put in lunchboxes to keep stuff cold.
1randombit
The last time I made lasagna, I made 5 of them - one we baked and ate that night (and as leftovers over the next few days), and the others we wrapped and froze. This requires you to have several Pyrex baking pans (currently 10-15 US$ each), and substantial freezer space (both of which we already had), but the work required for making 5 pans was perhaps 2x making a single pan, and if we are hungry and don't want to cook we can just take a pan out and bake it, dinner in 30 minutes with no effort. Baked and refrigerated they last several days, enough to eat over several lunches and dinners. Enchiladas also work well for this. Both make a nice alternative to the classic frozen stews, soups, and chilis.
2AdeleneDawner
I'm assuming that by 'pre-prepared' you mean something like TV dinners or pizza from a restaurant. If that's the case, you can look for things that are close to pre-prepared without being as expensive as that. My go-to meal solution in that vein is microwavable rice or pasta (example), possibly with things added to it. A packet of cheddar-broccoli rice or pasta with a can of tuna mixed in makes a nice casserole-type thing, for example, or a packet of pasta alfredo with a can of chicken mixed in. You can also mix in veggies (canned or frozen are probably most convenient) in addition to the small amount that most of those packets have. This takes less than 5 minutes to put together, cooks in 10-15, and even with added things shouldn't come to more than $3 or so per instance - $1 or less per instance if you look for sales on the packets and don't add anything. If you don't mind bland food or taking the time to add spices by hand, you can do something similar even less expensively by buying large boxes of instant mashed potatoes or instant rice, or instant oatmeal for breakfast.
1BillyOblivion
On Sunday night cook for your family. Cook them chicken breasts, or steak, or pork loins. Cook 6 extra (or, if your mom is willing have her cook these with sunday's dinner). This is your lunch the rest of the week. Before the meat is even cool put it in ziplocks and put it in the refridgerator. At the same time buy a bunch of carrots, celery, bell peppers and green beans. Buy a bunch of cans of various kinds of beans--go to the Save-A-Lot or whatever store the poor folks in your city go to. Kidney Beans, Black Beans, whatever. Cut up the celery, carrots and bell peppers and put it in baggies with a bit of water to keep it fresh. Green beans you can cook or not as you want. Get two gallons of WHOLE milk, a big tub of Protein powder and some way to mix it, and a dozen eggs. While you're cooking the meat and cutting the vegetables Sunday night, hard boil the eggs. You can find protein powder on the internet delivered much cheaper than you can buy it from GNC. Oh, get Whey protein, not Soy. Unless you want tits of your very own. Breakfast is 2 hard boiled eggs and a 16 ounce protein powder milkshake. There is a phenomenal amount of nutrition in that. Lots of calories too. Lunch is whatever meat is left over from Sunday dinner and a couple bags of fresh vegetables. (I would suggest varying the type of meat to cover more bases nutrient wise, but chicken seems to generally be the cheapest per pound). I'm assuming you eat dinner with your family? This will fill in enough of the other micronutrients you need that you should be ok. This should take about 1 hour on Sunday to do the prep and cooking, and about 10 minutes a day to mix the shake and pull stuff out of the fridge. If you have extra money you can do stuff like squash (cook one on Sunday, eat it all week) etc. Chili and stew are other things you can make in bulk on your one day and eat the rest of the time Aim for getting about 200 grams of protein a day (that's grams of protein, not grams of meat use www.nutri
1JackEmpty
This doesn't address the "minimal effort" issue as much as I'd like (driving to stores and buying counts as much as preparing food, as well as searching online and doing online ordering), though it is admittedly very akratic. But you seem to be of the "just balls up and do it" persuasion, so I won't object there. Having pre-prepared eggs in the morning (instead of at lunch as others suggested), along with better meals instead at lunch seems like, well, a better idea. I think I'll start a routine of that this Sunday. Oh, and there's a Costco in town, so bulk purchases aren't that difficult. As per the excercise: a year or two ago when I was sailing for 6 hours a day, every day of the week for 4-5 weeks of the sumer, I was the thinnest I've been in some time. But I was FIT. I'm not sure of the science of it all, but I'm not a weakling. I can do a dozen pullups... fairly successfully. Building an excessive amount of muscle mass isn't something I'm too into (being weightlifter-buff is unappealing, but being martial-artist strong is more ideal, if that makes any sense). I just want to eat healthier and not waste away entirely :/ Oh, but semi-related, my cardio is utter garbage. I can sprint faster than most people I know who run regularly, but I'm coughing and wheezing ten times quicker. And no, I don't smoke nor live with smokers.
0handoflixue
Could be exercise induced asthma. I got an inhaler for that, used it a few times, and it let me push myself to the point where I could develop actual muscles there. I can job a couple miles without problem now, and haven't used the inhaler in months. I have no clue how typical this result is, mind. I still occasionally find it implausibly successful >.>
[-]Armok_GoB10

Donating to chairty*: My mum says I'll need the money myself later, and I heuristicaly don't trust myself to make financial decisions due to mental health issues. On one hand, I don't trust her to know the value of efficient charity thou, and I don't really have any good grasp of what I'd need money for, on the other hand I don't really have any good grasp of what I'd need money for and she seems to and come with all these things about survival and education and debts and stuff when I ask.

*Given that I donate to charity I'll donate all of it to SIAI, but that's not obviusly relevant here.

Reply
8saturn
I don't think you should donate if you don't understand your own financial situation.
0Armok_GoB
That's how I reason as well... but there's a lot at stake.
2BillyOblivion
You keep coming back to your mental health issues. Before you donate to charity you should try to make sure you don't wind up in a position to need charity (and yes, this is not something one has full control over, but an F4 shattering your house to toothpicks is a very different thing from getting thrown out of your apartment because you were incapacitated for a couple months and got reduced/no pay). Save your money or spend it on specialists/treatments likely to reduce your problems. This will wind up cascading into other areas of your life.
0Armok_GoB
That's roughly what mum says to, based on less rationality but a lot more info. So I guess I'll just continue trusting her then.
1BillyOblivion
Has your mom ever given you a good reason to distrust her motives?
1Armok_GoB
No. But she have given me reason to distrust her rationality and understanding when it comes to efficient charity.
-2MatthewBaker
My advice is give money to charity up to your tax deduction level as a starting point, then use the rest of your money according to your personal utility function ;)
0Armok_GoB
Someone from LW saying that dosn't add any new information.
1MatthewBaker
I'm sorry, i didn't fully understand your living situation at first :( I hope you work out your mental health issues, the only advice i can offer is to remember the days your mental state is optimal and crystallize that feeling in your memory possibly linking it with a hand movement like tapping your leg in a specific place. Every day you have a good day add to the memory and the Neuro-Lingustic Programming should allow you to fall into that state of calmness and focus when you need it by repeating the hand movement. This takes at least a week of effort before you notice the effects, but it helped me out alot at a tough time in my life.
0Armok_GoB
Neurotypicals can just remember entire mental states like that and just restore from backup?
0MatthewBaker
Its more like a feeling that washes over your mind. The most memorable moment i had was sitting in Physics class unable to focus on what my teacher was saying because of distracting high school drama that i knew i shouldn't focus on because we were reviewing for the AP exam. I tapped my leg with two fingers which was my one for "calm" and the mental urge to check my phone for text messages faded and i was able switched my focus back to the lecture. I wouldn't say its entire mental states as much as partial emotional states.
0Armok_GoB
that honestly sounds like gibberish to me.
4AdeleneDawner
Translation attempt: Not entire mental states, but emotional states, and the states aren't consciously remembered, but triggered like reflex behaviors. The suggested exercise is basically classical conditioning, except that one doesn't have to figure out what the unconditioned stimulus is in order to associate the response (the emotional state) with the conditioned stimulus (tapping oneself with a finger).
0Armok_GoB
Ah. Not sure what could be used as a baseline or how to detect it thou. And extinction would be a huge problem.
0MatthewBaker
Sorry, i thought the anecdote would be more explanatory then the old Pascal's one that i grew up with :( Extinction is best prevented by reinforcing the stimuli randomly, its like in a casino, a random reward is much more enticing then a pattern reinforcement. Basically, you just pick a random day that went well and run your mental macro/hand motion while relishing in the memory/emotion of the day. As for baseline, if you don't notice it after about 5-7 times worth of training your brain on different memory's over the course of about a week then it probably wont work for you. Just remember to use variable interval reinforcement to prevent extinction and pick a hand motion that feels simple, but unobtrusive to do in public.
0Armok_GoB
The "pick a random day that went well and ... relishing in the memory/emotion of the day" part is problematic for multiple reasons. (also, does that kind of conditioning really work with that kind of thing?)
0MatthewBaker
The majority of the literature on it debunks it as not very useful.. but i noticed positive effects when i self tested the theory. If you have an inspiring or happy moment come up feel free to start testing it, i just felt like the majority of my other suggestions weren't very useful because i didn't know your living situation and this was my personal psychotherapy tool for a while.
0Armok_GoB
Sounds like placebo.
0MatthewBaker
I feel like the majority of our emotions are heavily influenced by the placebo effect, but some people do require the occasional SSRI as well. Relationships are the best example of this, one word can have an immeasurable emotional effect if mentally misconstrued incorrectly.
1Armok_GoB
If it's the placebo effect, and I start out believing it's only the placebo effect and it's not gonna work on me, it's not gonna work on me. If I didn't have the problem I could just cure everything to the maximal ability of any placebo effect to handle by tying my mind in a knot and then blinking.
[-]Armok_GoB10

EDIT: decided i had revealed a lot more abaut myself in this thread and since it's no longer active I'm redacting a lot of stuff.

I should have more IRL social contact, especially in some larger group.

1) (this is the main one) There is none to have any social contact WITH. If not for the very low prior I might think there simply isn't a single interesting person within a 100 mile radius from here. I don't think I could say I live in the middle of nowhere, but it certainly feels like it. Maybe it's unreasonable to expect the same quality as online in a much... (read more)

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5handoflixue
It would help to know approximately where, geographically, you are. I hear people in west coast US say that all the time, because it's just plain difficult to figure out how to find interesting people if you're not a natural extrovert. I don't really know any other portion of the world, but I'd assume that it's very rarely true that there really aren't any interesting people around. Speaking from my own personal experience, with my own personal issues, which are totally not your issues: There are really cool people out there who are safe to be yourself around. If you can find them, then (a) you have someone you don't need to worry about being strange around and (b) they can then help you navigate larger groups. If you live in the right city, you can probably find groups of 10-20 people that don't mind you. I've found a few gatherings of 100+ where I can get away with being myself, but those are usually annual music festivals, geeky conventions, etc.. Depending on the issues, it may also be more likely than you think that you can learn to function socially despite it. I've developed high-functioning abilities despite three different psychological issues that can impair me. Part of it is just recognizing my good days and having people close enough to make impulsive plans with. Part of it has been finding weekly gatherings where I can flake out as needed and no one minds, because the group is large. Part of it is a lot of practice. And, unfortunately, part of it is just being privileged to have been dealt a higher-functioning hand in the first place, which not everyone gets. But if you can handle online social, I'd guess there's good odds you can learn to handle face-to-face :)
3Armok_GoB
Sweden. Anyone who live anywhere in the US have it EASY. I'm not sure what my extroversion stat is, I think it might be context sensitive. #REDACTED# I don't live in any city. And I don't live even remotely near the right city. #REDACTED#
9MixedNuts
Herre gud, du bor hundra mil från civilisationen! I'm moving to Stockholm in a few months. How long does it take to go from Stockholm to where you live? (I don't have a car, but I'm willing to take a ridiculously convoluted series of trains then walk for a couple hours (more if not snowy).) Given your issues, I recommend associating with other neuroatypical people and various weirdos. We're better at handling unusual problems, won't despise you for ridiculous reasons (in particular, will handle murderous tendencies as a danger that needs routing around, not a reason to shun you), are used to questioning everything, and benefit from helping each other.
0Armok_GoB
Sent you my address. Please don't come at night and stab me. Or share it anywhere public. Also, the murderous part was a joke guess I should have made that a bit clearer...
3Bagricula
You've provided a lot of useful information towards coming to possible paths to the goal you've posed. I've a few more questions mainly around the strictness of your constraints that I hope will clarify the space of reasonable solutions. I'm also trying to point towards a profile for what you consider the boundaries of an interesting person as well as easy heuristics for filtering to find these people. Regarding (1): Can you provide some elaboration around what you mean by an "interesting person?" What heuristics do you currently use to determine whether a person is interesting? Generally how long does your evaluation period last? Regarding (2): In the past, what kind of traits unify people that know you well and whom you would feel comfortable pulling you out if you were acting strangely? In the past, have any of these people not stand out in a crowd? If so, do these people share traits that are different from the larger group of people who've known you well above? Regarding (3): How strict is this constraint i.e. how far would you be willing and able to travel on a regular (say weekly?) basis for face-to-face social interaction? The answer could be 0...in which case all social counter-parts would have to travel to you. Is it possible to get into town via public transit such as a bus or train? Do you know anyone (apart from your mom) nearby who might be willing to drive you into town? For those people who are on the margin in your belief of their willingness, have you tried asking them to test the proposition? How strict a constraint is your psychological problem with breaking routine? Are we talking no behavior modification on your part, and so simplifying the question to finding people who're willing to come to you / alter their behavior for you? Or are you open to exploring routine breaking as a means towards this end?
0Armok_GoB
1) Heuristics: It correlates a LOT with reading LW, and also in general sharing interests and internet-cultural background with me, as well as being generally smart/nice/artistic/a formidable specialist at some specific field. I don't know what you mean by evaluation process. It's more like a hidden property I collect evidence for or against, so I'll hopefully eventually become fairly certain but new evidence can always change my mind. Also the interestingness of people can change as they learn more or I learn more etc. It's not rally a very high grade concept that probably doesn't correspond well to any natural category or predict anything other than my attitude towards someone. 2) #REDACTED# 3) #REDACTED# I'm getting unconformable with how much I'm revealing about myself.
0Bagricula
If you're uncomfortable, then you can stop here, right now...also, later. No one should feel they need to reveal more than they want. I will not be hurt if you decide you want to stop. I'm trying to build a profile so that I can think of ways you can find interesting people nearby. By evaluation process what I mean is...how long do you take to decide whether you want to continue or discontinue talking to someone. In other words, if you meet someone for the first time, when do you know whether they are interesting. By adjusting this process you might be able to increase the number of interesting people you find. I don't want to pry into your relationship with your family, and so if you don't want to talk further about them that is fine. It seems that a lot of stress and a high cost to failure would be major factors to consider in any recommendation. Questions you definitely don't need to answer: 1. How openly can you talk with your family? 2. Are they in favor or opposed to you socializing with people face-to-face? 3. If they are in favor, do they have the time / means to help you socialize?
0Armok_GoB
1. about most stuff verily so, although I can't count on them to be rational. Think sort of like rationalist!Harry's situation from MoR. 2. very much in favor 3. yes. I don't have any standardised "evaluation process", it depends on the opportunity cost and probabilities of various outcomes for the particular case.
1Bagricula
Three suggestions then: 1. Enlist the help of your family to ferry you to population centers, friends, or wouldbe friends; eventually you'll have non-family relationships that are strong enough that these new friends can come pick you up on the way elsewhere thus reducing the burden on your family. 2. Look into activities, hobbies, etc. that involve other people. People often gather around crafting something, music, political activism. You may also find some public debating societies interesting. There are also some public speaking clubs like Toastmasters which should draw people who have something to say and who are interested in meeting people and self-improvement. 3. Spend some serious time reflecting on and understanding what your criteria for an interesting person is. If you are more "luminous" about this, then you may be able to more efficiently find people nearby who you are interested in. I will keep thinking on this and see if I can come up with other immediately actionable suggestions.
0Armok_GoB
1. is already my default solution, but there are no friends or wolfbe friends to be shipped TO, and "population centre" is way to vague 2. Don't find things like that interesting and don't have the time for a hobby like that. 3. I don't really think there is anything to know. The word was never made to stand up to any serious scrutiny and is just a kludged pointer in a general direction.
0Bagricula
Yes. Asking them to drop you on a street-corner with a lot of people probably won't go over too well. How is your time currently distributed? Is there anything you're currently using your time for that you would be willing to and have the ability to redistribute towards social activities? Obviously, this is going to subject to cost-benefit considerations, but some sense of how much flexibility you have here will help point towards realizable social activities.
0Armok_GoB
it's complicated, but the end result is equivalent to "yes, but not much"
3EvelynM
I've noticed that some varieties of interesting people (programmers, writers, painters, composers) like to get away from their regular routine to work on projects. They sometimes get invited to retreat centers, which are in remote areas, where they work on their projects, and get housing and regular meals. Do you have the resources to invite interesting house guests for brief project visits?
0Armok_GoB
Nope. Even if I did, inviting a stranger to live with me sounds questionable. And also I don't see what kind of project could possibly happen here.
3handoflixue
Invite people you know from online. Bayesian updating should give you a decent baseline for whether it's plausible that this person is just scamming you. It's a bit of a trust leap, but I've done it plenty and no one has taken advantage of me. It also helps to remind myself that traveling all that way just to rob me is a pretty big financial waste, and rapists probably aren't going to spend weeks getting to know me online (nor are either group likely to be people I find fun to talk to online to begin with!) Programming can happen anyplace I can plug in my laptop, and a change of scenery often helps, as does having someone interesting around to fill the rest of my day. Writing can happen even without electricity. Drawing, world building, sketching out plans for other projects and soliciting feedback, bouncing ideas off of you. Most any craft skill (sewing, wood carving, knitting), and those also presumably are a lot more fun to do around someone else. You could also just go on random wandering adventures if you live in a nice neighborhood or near some interesting wilderness. Requires a car or a proclivity for walking, of course. I get the impression you don't have a car, but your visitors might.
1Armok_GoB
Yea, that'd work obviously, but it limits the pool to people I know personally online. The probability of that AND them being close enough AND them wanting to do a visit/project like that is low enough that it seems unlikely to ever happen. And what about any of those things can't they do at home? Perhaps you're operating under the assumption that I am interesting or useful in any way?
7handoflixue
Humans are social animals. They like being around other humans. Ook ook. That's really all that's necessary, aside from being socially compatible. Unless you have some condition that makes you significantly worse at face-to-face interactions, people who like you online will probably like you face-to-face.
2Armok_GoB
This is highly counterintuitive to me, but it's worth a shot and asking shouldn't hurt. Thanks. Still have no idea how to find anyone who lives close enough and might be interested thou.
0AdeleneDawner
Extraverts are weird like that. It's generally counter-intuitive to introverts, but observably true in many (possibly most, depending on how you account for selection bias) cases anyway.
0Armok_GoB
I don't see quite how introversion or extroversion is relevant to this. I don't see why they'd expect the quality of social interaction to be higher quality than some random neighbour within walking distance.
2handoflixue
The same reason you'd prefer to talk to them online, rather than some random person off AOL - you're someone who shares interests and has the intelligence required to follow what they're talking about.
2Armok_GoB
... Ooooooooh, NOW I get it. And feel like an idiot.
1taryneast
Have a look around to see if there's a social/support group for the particular psychological issue that you are dealing with. Then meet with them. they will understand the issues you are facing and may even have new ways to help you deal with them... but most of all they will at least understand what you are going through. Can't guarantee that they won't be tools, of course, but I've often found I have to get different needs fulfilled by different groups of people. For the "being interesting" need look into groups that have similar interests to you. Meetup.com is a good place to look for groups nearby to you - they have groups for just about anything you can imagine and you can find the closest one to you that way... and if there isn't one... consider starting one up. If you register a group with meetup - other people near to you that are interested in the same thing will be notified - especially if you tag it appropriately (people watch, say, "meetups in my area that are to do with futurism" or whatever...)
0Armok_GoB
No, just... no. #REDACTED# I'll check out the meetup site. I've always assumed that if there was a meetup for any of the things I'm involved in I'd find out about it through ordinary forums and blogs and such for it, but &&ing a lot of different more minor interests or organizing one on a site like that might work. Edit: nope, checked every group in my entire COUNTRY, which was not all that many, and not a single one of them sound even remotely interesting. Maybe I really do live more in the middle of nowhere than I thought. I wont even bother registering and trying to start a group.
0taryneast
where do you live? ...and have you made it to (or started) any of the LessWrong meetups?
0Armok_GoB
Southern Sweden. And yea I've checked the possibility of starting an LW meetup, there's nobody to come.
2taryneast
Correction: there's nobody that's said they want to come. If you start up a meetup - some people may come out of the woodwork. I know of at least one very cool programmer-dude in Sweden (stockholm) - there must be other cool geek-types about too. have you considered getting into programming (if you're not already). AFAICT, there's a high crossover rate with LW-types there... and certainly you'll find people interesting to talk to.
0Armok_GoB
I'm already into programming. I dabble in several languages, have top grades in it, and love the art form. Unfortunately I don't have time to practice and get good enough to do anything useful in a reasonable amount of time.
1taryneast
You don't have to be "good" to go to meetups or hackdays. Just go. If you need to learn anything - you can use the meetup/hackday to actually learn what it is you don't know... or just to have fun.
0MatthewBaker
You can always move :( but as handoflixue said knowing your approximate location would be useful.
0Armok_GoB
Nope, I can't actually. Again the mental helth stuff and related red tape.
[-]jsalvatier10

I'll try this at the Seattle Meetup.

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[-]Dorikka10

I think this should be discussion level.

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[-]Kevin370

Disagree! Less Wrong needs more meme-y posts like this. Longness is not an inherent virtue.

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2AmagicalFishy
I agree with you, Kevin.
[-]rabidchicken00

I think I should be less secretive and try to let other people know about problems before coming up with a solution on my own more often. All of my attempts to come up with a specific scenario to mention in this post already violates the tendency which I am trying to eliminate. It is a vicious cycle. I suspect this post may have been pointless...

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[-]rabidchicken00

I think I should be less secretive and try to let other people know about problems before coming up with a solution on my own more often. All of my attempts to come up with a specific scenario to mention in this post already violate the tendency which I am trying to eliminate. It is a vicious cycle. I suspect this post may have been pointless...

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0AdeleneDawner
It's not clear to me how the two parts of your issue are related - noticing a problem, brainstorming solutions on my own, and then telling other people about it so that they can either make new suggestions or critique my ideas works well for me. Also, 'be less secretive' is rather broad - did you have some class of situations in mind?
[-]falenas10800

Duplicate, with a suggestion for the next set of changes: Have what is written in the comment disappear after it is submitted.

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0NancyLebovitz
I agree with the suggestion
[-]AdeleneDawner00

Triplicate.

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[-]AdeleneDawner00

Duplicate.

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[-][anonymous]00

Double post.

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[-]XiXiDu-10

Name something that you do not do but should be told you ought...

Nada, I am already told enough, more than I can handle.

Name something that you do not do but wish you would be told you ought...

I wish more people would just tell me to relax and have some fun (people with arguments in favor of doing so).

Name something that you do not do but should do...

Existential risk mitigation. I don't do it because of uncertainty and psychological distress caused by the fear of having no more time to do what I would like to do based on naive introspection. And... (read more)

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4atucker
Would you be happy if someone told you to do something fun in a way which, in your eyes, is likely to reduce existential risk?
1XiXiDu
Yes. That would probably mean that I could either learn something by reducing existential risks or that it wouldn't eat up all too much resources.
6atucker
Try starting a German meetup group. You can learn things with them, and do other fun things. If you get people into the group who haven't been exposed to ideas, but would be interested in existential risk mitigation then you have a non-zero impact. If you work with them to try to make money and donate some of that, then you will donate without eating up too much resources. (That being said, I do think that your sending letters to AI researchers is providing probably-helpful information)
2Alexei
After talking to jsalvatier offline for a bit about the issue of wanting to do AI research, but being afraid to fail, I've came to realization that I haven't fully analyzed why I am afraid of it. I'll need to take more time to break it down, but my first guess is simply lost time. But it's very likely that if I try to do the research, I'll realize really fast if I am at all capable of doing it, so the time wasted would be a year or two, which is not too bad IMO. You said you are interested in existential-risk reduction. I don't know if you mean specifically AI research by it, but if you do, we should try to solve this problem together. I am sure there are other people in similar situation (and there will be even more in the future), so it makes sense to create some kind of standard way of answer the question "am I cut out for this".
2Alexei
I have the same problem with knowing I should work on existential risk mitigation, but I don't. (Not directly, at least. Ideally I would do FAI related research.) My fear is that I won't be good at it and/or I won't like it. It'll end up as a waste of my time and money, and I won't contribute very much, or may be even worse, I'll waste other people's time and resources.
4AdeleneDawner
My impression - and admittedly this is just an impression - is that there are few enough x-risk workers that someone doesn't have to be especially good at doing x-risk work to be able to do more good on the margin as an x-risk worker compared to doing other things. This seems to be especially true for people who are good at motivating themselves (so that they don't need a lot of managerial support) and who are willing to do things that aren't particularly glamorous (but it's probably true even when neither of those is the case, so don't use that as an excuse). "I might not like it" sounds like a fully general argument to me, and there are cheap tests you can do on the other issues. I suggest sending a resume to SIAI or someplace similar; if they think you wouldn't be useful there, you're at least no worse off than you are now.
0Alexei
Thanks, that's the point I've also been considering, but I don't know how true it is. I am going to (and already started to) talk to people at SIAI and see if they could use my help for anything.
0jsalvatier
Is this not working preventing you from doing anything to reduce existential risk mitigation (donation etc.)?
0Alexei
No, I still donate and I am doing my best to raise the sanity waterline. But I think AdeleneDawner brought up a good point: there might not be enough x-risk workers to justify not doing it if I can.
0CuSithBell
You should relax and have some fun. It could perhaps be justified by increased productivity and motivation on other tasks, but the real reason is so that you can enjoy yourself. Recursive functions need base cases, maximizing the value of action needs to be balanced by acting. You have needs, and one (subgroup) is the need to relax and have some fun. If you would like more specifics, please let me know.
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