PatrickDFarley

5mo

When I first read In the Balance on Slate Star Codex I was fascinated in the beginning and middle, and then exhausted as the ideas got progressively harder to think through.

I read it again a few months later, and several times again after that. There was something captivating about it, like there was a big point I was supposed to get, but my mind kept getting too tired to grasp it. It’s been sort of a meditative act, the way I keep returning to it.

Anyway I think I’ve got something now. Summary: this funny essay about demons offering different relationships to order and chaos seems to mirror the progress of human civilization... (read 2397 more words →)

Replying toMaster your sleep cycles

PatrickDFarley5mo

Lol that would nail it, yeah

Replying toMaster your sleep cycles

PatrickDFarley5mo

That's a good point about time-to-sleep. I'm one of those lucky fall-asleep-in-5-minutes-anytime people, and it seems my method takes that for granted.

IME sleep inertia hits pretty hard, and I can drag myself out of bed and shower, but otherwise can't really do any meaningful work for 45-60mins. So avoiding it is more important than saving just the 20 minutes of sleep

Replying toMaster your sleep cycles

PatrickDFarley5mo

Wow, that's quite a lot of variance for natural wake-ups. Are there any big external variables? Stress before bed, drinking, morning sounds, kids/partner activity in the morning?

5mo

I was way too far in life by the time I figured out my sleep cycles. This is one of those personal metrics that’s worth learning and memorizing because once you know it, you’ll use it often—like your daily calorie expenditure, or the exact chemicals you’re allergic to, etc.

It’s a simple way to optimize your sleep, completely free, using only some background scientific knowledge and a little math.

(But this is not any kind of substitute for the basics of sleep optimization: get some exercise, don’t drink too much, don’t eat too late, don’t stare at bright screens too much, etc. etc.)

What are sleep cycles?

When you sleep, your brain activity follows distinct patterns... (read 1534 more words →)

Replying toThe non-tribal tribes

The non-tribal tribes

You're right, I'm assuming the reader belongs to a "real" tribe ie red or blue . I should've tweaked it for the LW crosspost

The non-tribal tribes

Author note: This is basically an Intro to the Grey Tribe for normies, and most people here are already very familiar with a lot of the info herein. I wasn't completely sure I should post it here, and I don't expect it to get much traction, but I'll share it in case anyone's curious.

Introduction

This post is about tribalism in contemporary Western culture, and specifically it’s about the invisible assortment of people who have self-selected out of it.

Maybe the most interesting thing about this post is that it’ll seem weird and esoteric to most of the people I know in real life but completely mundane and obvious to most of the people I... (read 4631 more words →)

Replying toThe present perfect tense is ruining your life

The present perfect tense is ruining your life

Great comment, and I will have to think more about this. Your examples do seem to support the utility of self-identity-based motivation.

I think maybe my statement "you can’t lie to yourself if you know it’s a lie" is forcing a frame where self-talk is either a genuine attempt at truth, or a lie. But with "this is easy for me because I’m a fighter" and similar statements, it seems they can be received by the mind in a different way - more like as self-fulfilling prophecy.

I guess it's an open question for me then, where to use that kind of self-talk. On one end is the danger of becoming miserable in pursuit of an identity that was actually kind of arbitrary, and on the other end you miss out on maybe the most powerful kind of motivation.

The present perfect tense is ruining your life

Book review: Range by David Epstein

Yes I’m talking about grammar. The present perfect tense describes actions that happened in the past but are relevant in the present. You say, “I have seen that movie,” meaning you saw it in the past, but what’s important is that presently you are a person who saw it.

How is a verb tense ruining my life?

There’s a world of difference between wanting to do something and wanting to have done something.

I’m not the first to find this distinction interesting:

I don’t believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don’t want to. That’s something that you just want to take on trust. It’s a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of

... (read 2221 more words →)

Action derivatives: You’re not doing what you think you’re doing

(This is a crosspost from TrueGeneralist.com)

Introduction

Why I read this book

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World is a book about generalists. And it’s pretty much the only book about generalists that’s gotten substantial traction in popular culture. Since I started this whole blog around being a generalist, Range was kind of required reading for me.

Based on the branding, I assume most people who read it suspect themselves to be generalists and are hoping to receive some validation and encouragement toward that identity. I myself went in already knowing that I’m a generalist, not really caring whether the book’s contents validate that, because it’s a core part of myself that I’m not willing... (read 4220 more words →)

I want to look at a category of weird mental tricks that we sometimes play on ourselves—you might be familiar with the individual examples, but when considered together they reveal a pattern that I think deserves more attention. I’m going to do the Scott Alexander thing and list a bunch examples in hopes that you’ll sense the common concept they all point at.

Action derivatives index

Here they are:

Meta-preferences: This is when you say you want something, but your actions don’t reflect that wanting, so really we would say you’re wanting to want that thing. If you say, “I want to get stronger,” but you never go to the gym, and it’s totally possible for you

... (read 844 more words →)

Replying toLaziness death spirals

Laziness death spirals

I agree, but I'd lump all of that into "Analyze the circumstances that caused it". Maybe I should've included more external examples like these

Replying toLaziness death spirals

Laziness death spirals

This method is interesting to me and I'd like to get into it someday. Personally I keep finding that whenever I decline to write something down, that one thing will come back to bite me a few days later (because I'd forgotten it). Do you find that you're able to mentally keep track of things better than before, even if they're just vaguely in the back of your mind?

Laziness death spirals

How do you know you are right when debating? Calculate your AmIRight score.

I’ve claimed that Willpower compounds and that small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future. Unfortunately, procrastination and laziness compound, too.

You’re stressed out for some reason, so you take the evening off for a YouTube binge. You end up staying awake a little later than usual and sleeping poorly. So the next morning you feel especially tired; you snooze a few extra times. In your rushed morning routine you don’t have time to prepare for the work meeting as much as you’d planned to. So you have little to contribute during the meeting. You feel bad about your performance. You escape from the bad feelings... (read 2392 more words →)

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Replying toHow do you know you are right when debating? Calculate your AmIRight score.

PatrickDFarley2y

Why pay mind to what's correlated with being right, when you have the option of just seeing who's right?

I'm arguing that being right is the same as "holding greater predictive power", so any conversation that's not geared toward "what's the difference in our predictions?" is not about being right, but rather about something else, like "Do I fit the profile of someone who would be right" / "Am I generally intelligent" / "Am I arguing in good faith" etc.

Replying toHow do you know you are right when debating? Calculate your AmIRight score.

PatrickDFarley2y

How do you know you are right when debating? Calculate your AmIRight score.

These things are indeed correlated with being right, but aren't you risking Goodharting? What does it really mean to "be right" about things? If you're native to LessWrong you'll probably answer something like, "to accurately anticipate future sensory experiences". Isn't that all you need? Find an opportunity for you and your friend to predict measurably different futures, then see who wins. All the rest is distraction.

And if you predict all the same things, then you have no real disagreement, just semantic differences

My scorched-earth policy on New Year’s resolutions

Choosing battles (on the Internet)

(forgive me if these concepts are too basic; this was originally written for normies)

Welp, at this time of year everyone either writes a “How to set and keep your New Year’s resolution” article, or a “Why you shouldn’t set New Year’s resolutions” article.

This is the latter.

a forest fire

Letting your dreams be memes

New Year’s resolutions are a meme. They’re a “thing” in our culture. We all know how it goes. Everyone sets an ambitious goal that starts on January 1^st. And the second part of the meme is that almost no one sticks to it. That’s just what “New Year’s resolution” means to us: you set a goal in January and you don’t stick to... (read 1148 more words →)

Book Review: Denial of Death

A couple years ago, I noticed that I'd been holding onto a mindset that was counterproductive, and I've often seen this same mindset in some of the online communities I visit. I like talking with people who believe in the truth-seeking power of good-faith disagreements, but some of these people have a tendency to overestimate the value of argument, which causes them to engage in conversations they shouldn't. And I think I have good heuristics for avoiding that without giving up on the project of rational discourse entirely.

The warm fuzzy hope of good-faith conversations

There's this optimistic belief that careful, rational arguments, even between strongly opposed people, will always lead to truth. How... (read 1143 more words →)