Are you serious? What exactly is the positive emotion of berating yourself? If you really mean it, I guess you simply have no idea about what a positive emotion feels like.
I worded that poorly. The idea I was trying to convey was that you can either work to strengthen a certain trait, or work to remove whatever is preventing you from having that trait. I'm going to retract that idea, since the more I think about it, the less sense it makes.
...Also, chocolate cakes don't exist; there is simply the absence of non-chocolate non-cakes. And it feels really go
Last time I posted on one of these rationality journals it was about 9 months ago. I said I was going to go on a couple month long bike trip. I'd been having a lot of trouble setting and meeting goals, and after failing so many important goals ended up pretty depressed, so I decided to just not set goals anymore and just peddle my bike for a while.
My bike trip ended up being just three days, as I got bored rather quickly. It turns out that just biking all day was not as mentally stimulating as I had hoped it would be. The bike trip wasn't a complete waste;...
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the quotes thread.
...At home there was a game that all the parents played with their children. It was called, What Did You See? Mara was about Dann’s age when she was first called into her father’s room one evening, where he sat in his big carved and coloured chair. He said to her, ‘And now we are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?’
At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with Shera in the garden . . . I made a stone house.’ And then he had said, ‘Tell me about
I used to think that making failure more costly might be a good source of motivation as well. I ended up failing out of college and spending several months in a haze of depression and total apathy about life.
I'm doing a lot better now, but I've learned my lesson, and no longer use negative incentives as sources of motivation. For a person of my mindset, there is no such thing as "failure so costly one can't help but succeed."
For theft: Everything I own that is expensive stays in my backpack, which never leaves my back. I have full weatherproof gear, so I'm not worried about rain either. If anyone enquires about my job history gap, I'll tell them I was traveling.
If you want to change some aspect of your life, like ditching everything you own and walking off into the sunset, all I can say is that you have to want it, and want it bad. At some point I got so depressed and fed up with my life that walking away became easy, because nothing I was leaving behind was worth it. I wa...
Things I currently enjoy doing include modding video games, playing video games, reading books, and writing books (the last has been on hold for a while.) I'd like to try and expand on these interests. For example, read books I wouldn't normally read, and instead of fiddling with other people's programming, make more of my own. I majored in computer science, and I really enjoyed many of my early classes, so I know there is still plenty for me to explore there. The internship I had last summer was OK as well. Same with writing; I wrote roughly half a ...
My current life plan, which revolved around graduating college, failed miserably, so I ditched it. I'm going to bike about a 1000 miles, then reassess why what happened happened, and what I'm going to do next.
My current thoughts are as follows; It was a mistake to go to school when I did. I went because I was scared, and didn't really know what to do with my life. I thought college was a good idea because it would buy me time to figure myself out a bit more. Sadly, this only works out if school doesn't make you depressed and apathetic about life. Whil...
For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a lack of motivation. Trying to understand and fix this aspect of myself has been my project for the past several years. The following are my attempts to find a source of motivation.
Fear: Doesn't work. At first, the fear of getting a C in a class was enough to get me to study. Then it was the fear of failing the class. Then it was the fear of failing out of college entirely, which nearly happened. I gave up on this strategy two years ago.
Creating an environment that encourages productivity: I am sev...
Done it twice so far, using this as a guide. Fell asleep both times. That said, it was a positive experience, and I plan to make it a habit. Really helped be more aware of how easily distracted I am, and how often my minds runs in tracks, thinking the same thoughts again and again.
Oh. I feel a little silly now.
The Moral of the Story seems to be Harry finding an answer to the weakness, stupidity, and evil of others besides >hating them and destroying them.
EY has made it his life goal to creating an artificial intelligence that is friendly to humans. A mind that transcends us without hating us. Harry MUST triumph over Quirrel, and he must do so by being more moral, not more intelligent. Because if Harry wins by being smarter, then EY would be conceding that morality is a weakness, or at the very least that strength and strength alone will determine which ...
then EY would be conceding that morality is a weakness, or at the very least that strength and strength alone will determine which AI will win.
I'm pretty sure that he does believe that if an AI goes FOOM, it's going to win, period, moral or no. The idea that an AI would not simply be more preferable, but actually win over another AI on account of being more moral strikes me as, well, rather silly, and not at all in accordance with what I think Eliezer actually believes.
Harry MUST triumph over Quirrel, and he must do so by being more moral, not more intelligent.
That doesn't sound right. If you're looking for ways Harry could win, why not take Harry's advice and draw up a list of his relative advantages? He does have them - knowledge of superrationality, knowledge of science, ability to empathize with non-psychopaths, to name three - and they're likely to be part of the solution.
Chapter 79 is out!
My first thought was that Quirrell is behind this, and he is trying to strip away Harry's friends and isolate him. It's pretty clear that Mr. Hat and Cloak is Quirrell (I can argue this elsewhere if you disagree), and we know that Mr H&C is behind Hermione's recent brainwashing.
The problem is that this plot ends with Quirrell blowing his cover. We can guess that Quirrell cast those spells protecting Draco in chapter 40, after learning that Lord Malfoy had threatened to give his entire game away as revenge against Harry should his so...
The study had just 27 participants, and wasn't double blind. While it was an interesting experiment, I certainly wouldn't act on it, except perhaps to read another, similar experiment.
Oftentimes, if I need to fall asleep I'll pick a really peaceful one. When I was younger, I had one where I was a full sized person in a world made entirely of legos, including tiny living lego people. I'd fall asleep, dreaming of building secret tunnels under the ocean, vast cities with towers a mile high, train tracks for the lego people that climbed mountains that rose above breathable atmosphere to reach secret veins of special legos. It was only during the day that floods, earthquakes and rival lego people threatened.
On a related note, I have such awesome ideas for a Minecraft mod.
I'm a very visual person. When I read books, my mind creates mental images and associates emotions with those images. If it's a really good book, the experience is very similar to dreaming. My conscious self is utterly submerged, and I live vicariously through the character. Six hours later (I'm a fast reader), the dream ends and I set the book down, and become myself again, and find I have visual slideshow of the entire book. I have never noticed a typo in a book. I remember virtually every fact about every book I've ever read, so long as it has so...
The first time I read the sequences, they were earth-shattering revelations that upset my entire life. The second time I read them, I could only make it few a few posts, because everything they said was obvious. So one gain for me is that existential/religious questions no longer bother me. I got answers that satisfied me, and I've moved on with my life. I suppose you could argue that I could have found the same answers somewhere else, but honestly, I doubt it.
Another big change is how I argue with people. One of my favorite Less Wrong ideas is the Taboo ... (read more)