gnōthi seauton. But how do you know how well you know yourself?
What kind of questions or theories can you test to confirm that your mental model of yourself is accurate?
And please PLEASE, DON’T ALLOW YOURSELF TO GET GASLIGHT!
Here are some off the top of my head:
Anticipating your Reaction:
Green Eggs and Ham Moments: how often have you been reluctantly obligated or involuntarily committed to trying something and are pleasantly surprised by how much you enjoy it?
The reverse: How often have you been excited to read a book, go to a conference, watch a television show and been disappointing? Especially if your anticipation of the contents was accurate but not your reaction?
Confirming your habits:
“I always X”—but do you—what are the last 5 times you did it? Similarly “I’m a great/good X or at [activity]”—what were your last 5 attempts at it like?
”I never Y”—okay, but do you never. And even if that’s a hyperbole, how frequent would it have to be to consistent a habit? Similarly “I’m a hopeless/terrible X or at [activity]”—what were your last 5 attempts at it like?
How often has a loved one, a coworker told you smugly “I knew you’d do that” when you explicitly denied you would?
Measurements—this equally depends on how good our references or yardsticks are:
How often do you get a task done in the time you expected? If you often finish sooner—why? Later—why?
When estimating how long it will take for you to do a task—do you account for Parkinson’s Law (or, do you feel that you’re within a reasonable margin even after accounting for Hofstadter’s Law)?
If you haven’t weighed yourself recently—how accurate do you think your guess would be?
If you don’t use a pedometer—how many steps do you think you’d be doing a day?
If you don’t measure your sleep (and I mean SLEEP—not time in bed) - how many hours of sleep do you think you’d have?
Please make an article out of this (maybe with more ideas and more specific examples). I believe this could be very useful. This is practically a lesson plan for rationality training.
gnōthi seauton. But how do you know how well you know yourself?
What kind of questions or theories can you test to confirm that your mental model of yourself is accurate?
And please PLEASE, DON’T ALLOW YOURSELF TO GET GASLIGHT!
Here are some off the top of my head:
Anticipating your Reaction:
Green Eggs and Ham Moments: how often have you been reluctantly obligated or involuntarily committed to trying something and are pleasantly surprised by how much you enjoy it?
The reverse: How often have you been excited to read a book, go to a conference, watch a television show and been disappointing? Especially if your anticipation of the contents was accurate but not your reaction?
Confirming your habits:
“I always X”—but do you—what are the last 5 times you did it? Similarly “I’m a great/good X or at [activity]”—what were your last 5 attempts at it like?
”I never Y”—okay, but do you never. And even if that’s a hyperbole, how frequent would it have to be to consistent a habit? Similarly “I’m a hopeless/terrible X or at [activity]”—what were your last 5 attempts at it like?
How often has a loved one, a coworker told you smugly “I knew you’d do that” when you explicitly denied you would?
Measurements—this equally depends on how good our references or yardsticks are:
How often do you get a task done in the time you expected? If you often finish sooner—why? Later—why?
When estimating how long it will take for you to do a task—do you account for Parkinson’s Law (or, do you feel that you’re within a reasonable margin even after accounting for Hofstadter’s Law)?
If you haven’t weighed yourself recently—how accurate do you think your guess would be?
If you don’t use a pedometer—how many steps do you think you’d be doing a day?
If you don’t measure your sleep (and I mean SLEEP—not time in bed) - how many hours of sleep do you think you’d have?
Please make an article out of this (maybe with more ideas and more specific examples). I believe this could be very useful. This is practically a lesson plan for rationality training.
I always struggle with such self-evaluation, that’s why I thought of this experiment.
I would be very interested to see how narrow or broad that range is between the groups.