I’ve started consulting the I Ching in the morning. (Today was “difficulty at the beginning,” with a side of “abundance,” if I remember correctly.)
Reasons why:
I’ve been trying to read at least the foundational works of Chinese culture (I read the Analects and Dao de Jing a while back, and am reading through the Romance of the Three Kingdoms now), and this is one of them. But simply reading through the structure seems less instructive than actually engaging with the book as intended. (Compare reading the Hail Mary once, versus actually procuring a rosary and going through the motions.)
A while back, someone made a “rationalist horoscope,” with the premise that there were a bunch of generally useful things you could remind someone of, and systematically reminding people of those things (and scoring the horoscopes based on helpfulness) is a useful thing to spend attention on. (As I recall, they didn’t have that large of a stable of advice, and so fairly quickly had to resort to repeating themselves.)
A similar venture is Ben Franklin’s virtues, which I’ve attempted to track at least once but didn’t find particularly helpful. The I Ching operates on a slightly different level—instead of operating on modes of behavior / reactions, it operates on perceptions of situations.
I’ve kept a diary for at least a year now, but have rarely managed to work a solid reflection component into it and will often go weeks without entering anything. By consulting the I Ching, I’m provided with a constantly changing perspective to apply to my day, and then at the end of the day can record what that made me notice and how I reacted.
I will also note that up until recently I was primarily familiar with the numerological component of this particular form of divination (consult the RNG for wisdom!) but not the philosophical component. That is, the best advice is designed with its particular listener in mind, but there is value in a library of advice (that one learns how and when to apply by trying it through continually changing circumstances). Indeed, one might see this sort of divination, at its heart, as randomized trials applied to life!
(Incidentally, I immediately thought of three parts of my life where the situation was as described by the lot I cast, and a fourth on the drive to work. I also would not have applied one of the pieces of advice in the baseline history, but on considering why not it seemed like the reason was insufficient relative to the potential benefit.)
Generate your random hexagrams with a computer. (You probably already do.)
At the end of each day, indicate which of the things the computer told you turned out to be useful (or harmful) that day.
Have the computer keep track of which hexagrams are most frequently useful.
(Perhaps allowing for some time-varying component—e.g., varying with day of week or season of year.)
Have it generate more-frequently-useful ones more often. (Not to the exclusion of others. Though this might be a self-correcting problem—if you hear something too often, being reminded may be useful to you less often.)
Generate your random hexagrams with a computer. (You probably already do.)
I considered this, and I probably will if I do it long-term (though, really, it’ll need to be a phone app since I don’t boot up my home computer until the late afternoon anyway), but for now I’m flipping coins.
I will note, though, that my translation has slightly more structure than just rolling a d64; two hexagrams uniquely specify the relevant reading. (It’s rolling 6d8, but doesn’t have the full 8^6 potential outcomes; it’s actually only 4^6.) This means the Birthday Problem happens over a much longer timescale. I might get the same primary hexagram tomorrow, which is the same general problem/situation/perspective, but the actual advice may change. (Because the fourth line was generated in the 1/4th case instead of the 3/4ths case, I was advised to seek union, which I interpreted by seeking a meeting with a mentor that I wouldn’t otherwise have sought, and he in turn advised me to set up other meetings that I otherwise wouldn’t have sought.)
So it may be the case that I can figure out that the fourth line should be more yang than yin, or more likely to be reversed than 1⁄4, or so on, but I think if I model at the level of individual hexagrams it’ll be a long, long time before I’ve shifted the priors enough to have an effect. (Of course, one could set up a hierarchical model that takes all this into account, and with more people using such a system the time required for data collection would decrease.)
Ah, OK, that would indeed make a difference. My apologies for my ignorance. Still, if you have a primary and a secondary hexagram, maybe it suffices to look at the “effectiveness” of the primary hexagram only.
I’ve started consulting the I Ching in the morning. (Today was “difficulty at the beginning,” with a side of “abundance,” if I remember correctly.)
Reasons why:
I’ve been trying to read at least the foundational works of Chinese culture (I read the Analects and Dao de Jing a while back, and am reading through the Romance of the Three Kingdoms now), and this is one of them. But simply reading through the structure seems less instructive than actually engaging with the book as intended. (Compare reading the Hail Mary once, versus actually procuring a rosary and going through the motions.)
A while back, someone made a “rationalist horoscope,” with the premise that there were a bunch of generally useful things you could remind someone of, and systematically reminding people of those things (and scoring the horoscopes based on helpfulness) is a useful thing to spend attention on. (As I recall, they didn’t have that large of a stable of advice, and so fairly quickly had to resort to repeating themselves.)
A similar venture is Ben Franklin’s virtues, which I’ve attempted to track at least once but didn’t find particularly helpful. The I Ching operates on a slightly different level—instead of operating on modes of behavior / reactions, it operates on perceptions of situations.
I’ve kept a diary for at least a year now, but have rarely managed to work a solid reflection component into it and will often go weeks without entering anything. By consulting the I Ching, I’m provided with a constantly changing perspective to apply to my day, and then at the end of the day can record what that made me notice and how I reacted.
I will also note that up until recently I was primarily familiar with the numerological component of this particular form of divination (consult the RNG for wisdom!) but not the philosophical component. That is, the best advice is designed with its particular listener in mind, but there is value in a library of advice (that one learns how and when to apply by trying it through continually changing circumstances). Indeed, one might see this sort of divination, at its heart, as randomized trials applied to life!
(Incidentally, I immediately thought of three parts of my life where the situation was as described by the lot I cast, and a fourth on the drive to work. I also would not have applied one of the pieces of advice in the baseline history, but on considering why not it seemed like the reason was insufficient relative to the potential benefit.)
Proposal:
Generate your random hexagrams with a computer. (You probably already do.)
At the end of each day, indicate which of the things the computer told you turned out to be useful (or harmful) that day.
Have the computer keep track of which hexagrams are most frequently useful.
(Perhaps allowing for some time-varying component—e.g., varying with day of week or season of year.)
Have it generate more-frequently-useful ones more often. (Not to the exclusion of others. Though this might be a self-correcting problem—if you hear something too often, being reminded may be useful to you less often.)
I considered this, and I probably will if I do it long-term (though, really, it’ll need to be a phone app since I don’t boot up my home computer until the late afternoon anyway), but for now I’m flipping coins.
I will note, though, that my translation has slightly more structure than just rolling a d64; two hexagrams uniquely specify the relevant reading. (It’s rolling 6d8, but doesn’t have the full 8^6 potential outcomes; it’s actually only 4^6.) This means the Birthday Problem happens over a much longer timescale. I might get the same primary hexagram tomorrow, which is the same general problem/situation/perspective, but the actual advice may change. (Because the fourth line was generated in the 1/4th case instead of the 3/4ths case, I was advised to seek union, which I interpreted by seeking a meeting with a mentor that I wouldn’t otherwise have sought, and he in turn advised me to set up other meetings that I otherwise wouldn’t have sought.)
So it may be the case that I can figure out that the fourth line should be more yang than yin, or more likely to be reversed than 1⁄4, or so on, but I think if I model at the level of individual hexagrams it’ll be a long, long time before I’ve shifted the priors enough to have an effect. (Of course, one could set up a hierarchical model that takes all this into account, and with more people using such a system the time required for data collection would decrease.)
Ah, OK, that would indeed make a difference. My apologies for my ignorance. Still, if you have a primary and a secondary hexagram, maybe it suffices to look at the “effectiveness” of the primary hexagram only.