Part one of what will hopefully become the aspirant sequence. Content note: Possibly a difficult read for some people. You are encouraged to just stop reading the post if you are the kind of person who isn’t going to find it useful. Somewhat intended to be read alongside various more-reassuring...
Huh, yeah, this is basically the opposite of how things work for me?
I get into spirals a lot. I can have a positive spiral: I sleep well, get out of bed feeling rested, start the day with a small easy task, get a feeling of accomplishment, feel more confident about starting a bigger task, eventually get into flow, have a very productive day, by 7pm I'm satisfied and decide to start cooking dinner, so I'm ready to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and have another great day tomorrow.
I also get into negative spirals: I wake up feeling tired because I had a nightmare, pick up my phone and scroll social... (read more)
I'm surprised you decided not to prioritise exercise!
I realised reading this comment that when I ask myself, "How have I become more hardworking?" I don't think about exercise at all. But if I asked myself the mirror question - "How have I become less hardworking?" - I think about the time when I accidentally stopped exercising (because I moved further away from a dojo and couldn't handle the public transit - and then, some years later, because of confining myself to my apartment during the pandemic) and it was basically like taking a sledgehammer to my mental health. I can't recommend exercise strongly enough; it helps with sleep, mood, motivation, energy, everything. (Not everyone experiences this, but enough people do that it seems very much worth trying!)
Okay, I'm not opposed to the project of inventing fun games with no one winner - I mean, I enjoy Dungeons & Dragons - but I think games with one winner are awesome. I like the discipline imposed by them.
I'm not sure I can put into words what I mean by discipline; it's related to the nameless virtue. But, for example, sometimes in a computer game I find myself thinking, "wow this game is badly designed; it'd be more fun and realistic if it rewarded a good balance of archers and spearmen and cavalry, but I'm pretty sure the archer unit is so cheap and high ground is so accessible that I... (read 397 more words →)
I think answering "how should you behave when you're sharing resources with people with different values?" is one of the projects of contractarian ethics, which is why I'm a fan.
A known problem in contractarian ethics is how people with more altruistic preferences can get screwed over by egalitarian procedures that give everyone's preferences equal weight (like simple majority votes). For example, imagine the options in the poll were "A: give one ice cream to everyone" and "B: give two ice creams, only to the people whose names begin with consonants". If Selfish Sally is in the minority, she'll probably defect because she wants ice cream. When Altruistic Ally is in the minority,... (read more)
OK, "top level post on the biology of sexual dimorphism in primates" added to my todo list (though it might be a while since I'm working on another sequence). Now that I know you're a bacteria person, this makes more sense! I'm a human evolution person, so you wrote it very differently to how I would've. (If you'd like an introductory textbook, I always recommend Laland and Brown's Sense and Nonsense.) I don't know as much about the very earliest origins in bacteria, so that was super interesting to read about!
The stuff about adding a third sex reminded me somewhat of the principle that it's unstable to have an imbalance between the... (read more)
it appears there is no heart react on LessWrong, which is sad because I want to give this comment a lil <3
Well, yes. The correct response to noticing "it's really convenient to believe X, so I might be biased towards X" isn't to immediately believe not-X. It's to be extra careful to use evidence and good reasoning to figure out whether you believe X or not-X.
I'm the kind of person who seems to do really badly in typical office environments. I also found that while working on my attempt at a startup, I was very easily able to regularly put in 16-hour days and wasn't really bothered by it at all. But then my startup attempt totally failed, so maybe I wasn't actually doing very good work?
Regardless, what works for me is basically all based on lots of tested self-knowledge.
For example, I like making my environment hyper-comfy. I do better work in my pyjamas, on my laptop in bed, with a mug of coffee in hand. I also do great work curled up under a tree in... (read 898 more words →)
If I could work extremely hard doing things I don't like, without any burnouts, eat only healthy food without binge eating spirals, honestly enjoy doing exercises, have only meaningful rest without exausting my will power and generally be fully intellectually and emotionally consistent, completely subjugating my urges to my values... but ONLY by being really mean and cruel and careless to myself...
Man, that would suck! That would be a really inconvenient world! That would be a world where I'm forced to choose either "I don't want to be mean to myself, even if I could save lots of people's lives by doing that, so I'm just going to deliberately leave all those... (read more)
This is a very tiny thing, but I really don't like using "Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave/Dan, Eve/Erin, Frank" as the generic characters in parables/dialogues/problems. Why are we alternating binary genders?? Even leaving aside nonbinary inclusivity, it's literally just clearer and easier to write if I've got a he, a she, and a zie (rather than it being ambiguous whether "she" refers to Alice or Carol). I'm not always consistent with it, but generally my imaginary characters are more like Alice, Bob, Charlie, Delilah, Ethan, Fern, etc, and Charlie and Fern use gender-neutral pronouns like they/them or xe/xir. (Though I've also been contemplating the idea that it's better to cycle the names and use different ones per post, so you can refer back to the ideas using the names as a handle: Alice, Bob, Charlie, Delilah, Ethan, Fern, Georgia, Hassan, Indie, Julie, Kasimir, Lei...)
(edited for brevity)
Part one of what will hopefully become the aspirant sequence.
Content note: Possibly a difficult read for some people. You are encouraged to just stop reading the post if you are the kind of person who isn’t going to find it useful. Somewhat intended to be read alongside various more-reassuring posts, some of which it links to, as a counterpoint in dialogue with them. Pushes in a direction along a spectrum, and whether this is good for you will depend on where you currently are on that spectrum. Many thanks to Keller and Ozy for insightful and helpful feedback; all remaining errors are my own.
Alice is a rationalist and Effective Altruist who is... (read 2470 more words →)
I have a nightmare disorder which can absolutely ruin my week, but I wouldn't really call myself "literally brain damaged".