Instead of hoping to find the one Super Cool Trick that’ll let you become a superhuman overnight, read five or so (scientifically minded) self-help books addressing the biggest problem area in your life, make a moderate to large amount of effort to implement the knowledge in your life, and then repeat for your other problem areas, until in a year or two you become a superhuman.
This worked for me for productivity and depression, next is social skills/social anxiety.
Let your body occupy little space in order to feel less confident and signal lack of status, thus compensating for typical but unfortunate human tendencies to think much more highly of their opinions than is actually justifiable and to prop up ubiquitous and costly signaling games. Harness the power of negative thinking!
It’s not informative to send different signals than other people would send in your situation. You are proposing sending dishonest signals, which is uncooperative.
(I’ve thought about that, but the consideration that seemed more salient to me at the time was: If you send different signals than expected then those who can notice subtlety will notice a discrepancy given, say, a few hours of interaction. Yes you’ll be oft-discounted (and you will have incurred this cost yourself and I don’t deny that this is indeed a cost worth considering), but the people who falsely present themselves as more important than they are so vastly outweigh the people who falsely present themselves as less important than they are that causing someone to update their estimate of your importance upwards is more likely to make a (justifiable) positive impression than the alternative case which involves someone having to eventually update their estimate of your importance downwards. It’s like the inverse of “don’t throw pearls before swine”. (I’m drunk, I apologize if I’m stating the obvious.))
Of course, if you’ve gone through the trouble of thinking it through that far, you probably don’t want to decrease your confidence too much, or you may wind up deferring to those expansive, confident fools who didn’t think it through at all :P
Well there has to be some advantage to these behaviors people say are bad for us. Like fearing rejection, being submissive, bad body language, not being confident, etc. Otherwise why do we naturally feel such strong instincts to do those things if there is such advantage to be had in doing otherwise?
Behaving low-status has the advantage of avoiding status fights in your tribe… by giving up. At the proper moment in the ancient environment it could save your life.
That does not necessarily mean the cost-benefit analysis would have the same outcome today.
Right. This is the “evolutionary optimality challenge” of Bostrom and Sandberg, which is “If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?”
Gwern’s excellent article on that lists some ways to escape the challenge; I’m not sure which are at play here, but I think dominance is generally a good idea.
Not everyone feels the need to submit, even in the same situations. I’m sceptical of the idea that the genetic component of the idea is the main thing at play here.
I would recommend for productivity Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Halverson and Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. The Procrastination by Piers Steel is also pretty good but lukeprog’s summary of it on this site basically contains all the useful information.
For depression, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns. I can’t recommend this book enough.
Instead of hoping to find the one Super Cool Trick that’ll let you become a superhuman overnight, read five or so (scientifically minded) self-help books addressing the biggest problem area in your life, make a moderate to large amount of effort to implement the knowledge in your life, and then repeat for your other problem areas, until in a year or two you become a superhuman.
This worked for me for productivity and depression, next is social skills/social anxiety.
Also, let your body occupy a lot of space in order to feel more relaxed, feel confident, and signal status.
Let your body occupy little space in order to feel less confident and signal lack of status, thus compensating for typical but unfortunate human tendencies to think much more highly of their opinions than is actually justifiable and to prop up ubiquitous and costly signaling games. Harness the power of negative thinking!
It’s not informative to send different signals than other people would send in your situation. You are proposing sending dishonest signals, which is uncooperative.
(I’ve thought about that, but the consideration that seemed more salient to me at the time was: If you send different signals than expected then those who can notice subtlety will notice a discrepancy given, say, a few hours of interaction. Yes you’ll be oft-discounted (and you will have incurred this cost yourself and I don’t deny that this is indeed a cost worth considering), but the people who falsely present themselves as more important than they are so vastly outweigh the people who falsely present themselves as less important than they are that causing someone to update their estimate of your importance upwards is more likely to make a (justifiable) positive impression than the alternative case which involves someone having to eventually update their estimate of your importance downwards. It’s like the inverse of “don’t throw pearls before swine”. (I’m drunk, I apologize if I’m stating the obvious.))
Of course, if you’ve gone through the trouble of thinking it through that far, you probably don’t want to decrease your confidence too much, or you may wind up deferring to those expansive, confident fools who didn’t think it through at all :P
Well there has to be some advantage to these behaviors people say are bad for us. Like fearing rejection, being submissive, bad body language, not being confident, etc. Otherwise why do we naturally feel such strong instincts to do those things if there is such advantage to be had in doing otherwise?
Behaving low-status has the advantage of avoiding status fights in your tribe… by giving up. At the proper moment in the ancient environment it could save your life.
That does not necessarily mean the cost-benefit analysis would have the same outcome today.
Right. This is the “evolutionary optimality challenge” of Bostrom and Sandberg, which is “If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?”
Gwern’s excellent article on that lists some ways to escape the challenge; I’m not sure which are at play here, but I think dominance is generally a good idea.
Not everyone feels the need to submit, even in the same situations. I’m sceptical of the idea that the genetic component of the idea is the main thing at play here.
Can you share which books worked best for you regarding productivity and depression?
I would recommend for productivity Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Halverson and Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. The Procrastination by Piers Steel is also pretty good but lukeprog’s summary of it on this site basically contains all the useful information.
For depression, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns. I can’t recommend this book enough.