Hacking The Spectrum For Profit (Maybe Fun)

Elek Szid31 Aug 2025 4:49 UTC
7 points
3 comments3 min readLW link

The post is relevant to LW because it is fairly well known many people are on the spectrum here, and also many people are interested in self-improvement or life-improvement. I will investigate here the possibility of using one aspect of the spectrum, namely rigid routines, for good use. After all, routines are probably the same thing as habits (might I be wrong here?) and good habits (habits at least better than others, for most people for most cases) definitely exist.

Rigid routines are a fairly well-known element of the spectrum, they likely come from a place of wanting things predictable, clear and unambiguous (unsure where THAT comes from, perhaps rigid priors?). This is not always a good thing, because sometimes flexibility would be more useful. I have an 1.5 hour morning routine without which I cannot go to work (or elsewhere), so if I have to leave at 4AM to catch an airplane, I am up at 2:30. Clearly it would be desirable to have a simplified version for cases like that. And so on.

On the other hand, good habits, good routines exist, in which case this could come helpful.

So far I am not good at keeping up an exercise habit, likely because I am all chaotic about this particular thing. I do not have a clear goal beyond feeling more vigorous and less old (I am 47, often feeling 70), I go to the gym whenever I feel like going, this means I exercise randomly, whichever muscle was addressed the longest time ago, or whichever equipment is free, I do not keep track of progress (if it exists), because it makes no sense in such circumstances, and so on.

Most fitness advice we get starts with defining goals, and then making a plan. I understand where they come from, I do project management as part of my job, and without a project scope and a plan of how to get there, who does what, when, and what are the deliverables at what milestone, it would not work.

Still, Scott Adams of Dilbert fame proposed that sometimes systems can work better than goals. I can also understand that from work, since I support accountants with their software, and I am a certified accountant as well, and I know accounting is not a project, it has rules instead of goals or deliverables (deliverables like the balance sheet are themselves coming from rules), you just keep doing it as the system is defined basically forever. A routine.

If I remember right, Adams said something like if you treat dieting as a target weight to work for (project goal), yo-yo-ing is inevitable, as you will stop the “work” once the goal is reached. He says it is better to find a good eating system that works for you and just follow that as long as you are alive (recalibrate if necessary, of course).

I have always suspected Adams might be on the spectrum, given his art. And it sounds like a spectrumy advice: you like routines anyway, just use this as a feature.

Going back to exercise, a way to do this would be setting up a rigid system, that Tuesday 7PM it is front squats no matter what, even if the sky is falling. For spectrumy people, the hypothesis is at least, after a while it becomes impossible not to follow.

I cannot test this hypothesis right now, as I am between jobs, and my future schedule is unclear, I am basically asking if anyone ever successfully tested something like this, or is anyone inclined to try?

I would like to have another remark, or rather question. About bad habits or addictions. I am afraid here we spectrumy people at a disadvantage, as the leaning towards rigid routines may make bad habits worse (more ingrained), and easier to catch addictions.

I am drinking really too much alcohol, because my childhood role models considered it natural that between the end of your daily tasks (work + home chores), and sleep, there is nothing to do but to slip some alcoholic drink to unwind and to sleep better.

That is because lacking any other goal than not being poor, time had to be killed somehow. I do not have any other goal either.

The better role models could just take a little sip of wine every 30 minutes, so their intake was not problematic. I started there, too, at 17, but 30 years I must see later the quantities kept creeping up and up to very unhealthy territory.

I do not know at which point did addiction set in, but I am fairly sure that even before it was a bona fide addiction, it was already a spectrumy rigid routine. I hope I make myself clear—rigid routines in such matters make addiction more likely and they might even make addiction deeper.

I suspect people who are more “random” can easier avoid addiction or easier stop it.

I am not sure what to do here, I am not really interested in “seeking help”, because quite honestly I do not think the “help” knows anything I have already learned from 3-4 books and 500 online articles. After all they were written by people who know at least as much as the “help”. As a self-learner, I tend not to fetishize experts, given that the self-learning also comes from reading what generally better experts wrote.

Again I am simply asking if anyone on the spectrum has experience with matters like this. I am thinking about replacing one rigid routine with another (instead of beer, sip non-A beer or green tea all evening).

Elek Szid31 Aug 2025 4:49 UTC
7 points
3 comments3 min readLW link