I added intention-to-treat statistics in an addendum.

there might be a common antecedent that both improves your mood and causes you to listen to music. As a silly example, maybe you love shopping for jeans, and clothing stores tend to play music, so your mood will, on average, be better on the days you hear music for this reason alone.

There might be a common antecedent that both worsens my mood and causes me to listen to music. As a silly example, maybe I hate shopping for jeans, but clothing stores tend to play music, which actually improves my mood enough to outweigh the shopping. That is, confounding could go both ways here; the effect could be greater than it appears, rather than less.

An intention-to-treat approach where you make the random booleans the explainatory variable would be better, as in less biased and suffer less from confounding.

I'll reanalyse that way and post results, if I remember.

How was this accomplished, technically?

I made a script run in the background on my PC, something like

while true:
    qt = random(0, INTERVAL)
    while time() % INTERVAL < qt:
        sleep(1)
    announce_interruption()
    mood = popup_input("mood (-1 to 1):")
    earworm = popup_input("song in head (N/D/R/O):")
    save_to_log(time(), mood, earworm)
    sleep(INTERVAL - time() % INTERVAL)

The "constrained by convenience" part means that I recorded data when and only when I was at my PC. More reliable would be to run such a script on a device that's with you most of the time, like a smartphone or smartwatch, but I've no such device.

Haven't tried them.

I figure they're safer than literal bare feet, giving all the objective benefits and some (fewer) of the questionable benefits. I stick with bare feet, sith it's easier -- arguably the default action -- compared to the trivial inconvenience of getting better shoes.

Many small corrections:

Buddha statues on the alter -> altar

Then acquaintenances. -> acquaintances

recipe for Ecstacy -> ecstasy

Lots of mandelas -> mandalas

it was the hard doing math or lifting weights is hard. -> it was hard like doing math or lifting weights is hard.

that had more subjective conscious experience -> that I had

Lovecraftian summing ritual -> summoning

Your criticisms are mostly correct. I wrote the post to justify my actions rather than tell robust truth. Posting it as-is on LessWrong was my mistake.

"Entangled closer with physical reality" was a poor choice of words. I meant something closer to "experience my surroundings in more detail".

Reducing what you need implies broadening what you tolerate, in the same sense that a system with fewer axioms has more models. Interpreting it as twisted greed-avoidance is novel and odd to me. If you get used to walking barefoot, then you can better handle situations where you lack shoes. On further reflection, that broadening is small compared to other methods (as learning a language).

What exactly does "predictable" mean here?

You can infer the toki pona word (phrase) to match a meaning by joining words (standard base concepts) according to meaning-clusters of the base words and rules for adjective order. That is, making a toki pona word-phrase, you only need to understand the intended meaning of the whole phrase and the small set of base words.

Likewise, understanding a word-phrase to a good approximation depends only on the words in it and their arrangement. Understanding it exactly depends on context and conventions that build up around common terms.

If the phrase for "phone" means "speech tool", how do I tell between phone and loudspeaker or cough drop?

You can add more adjectives ("phone" could be "tool of distant speech" and "loudspeaker", "tool of strong speech"), or cope via context.

If I want to say "apricot" do I need to say "small soft orange when ripe nonfuzzy stone deciduous tree fruit"? Or do I just say something shorter like 'orange fruit' and hope the other guy guesses which kind of orange fruit I mean?

The latter is exactly what you do. If context leaves ambiguity, you add as many adjectives as needed, changing "fruit" to "orange fruit" to "small soft orange stone tree fruit".

How would I say "feldspar"? "Rock type #309"? How would I say "acetaminophen"?

Toki pona is less opportune when you need great precision like that. I see three solutions

• mash together lots of adjectives (feldspar = silicon-oxygen crystal + other details = square rock of bodily air and of moderate power movement ...)
• use numbers and symbols according to reductionism and the topic in question (acetaminophen = one-circly two-armed "C8H9NO2")
• bring in a loanword/proper adjective ("misikeke Asitaminopen")

If you call a multi-word phrase a word, we can more appositely claim that the formation of words and their associations to meanings, in toki pona, is very systematic and predictable. However many words it truly has, toki pona remains very easy to learn. The definition of "word" is flexible/arbitrary, but that final observation is most obviously consistent with the few-words view.

• You would wash your hands properly at all the appropriate times.
• You would study with spaced repetition.
• You would stop looking at (mainstream, megacorporate) social media.

The ability to quickly recall what I studied for its application.

I thought that was obvious. Why do you ask? What am I missing?