I have to confess I hate introspection, it’s one of those things I’d rather be doing pretty much anything than.
More or less like exercise, I only engage in it because I self-consciously know it’s good for me and I will eventually be glad I did it. I’ve had to develop some specific introspection-akrasia techniques, for instance doing it conversationally (as when someone “asks a luminous question” around here) lowers my resistance to it quite a bit.
I’ve often been advised to keep a journal or diary, and I periodically try it and eventually quit. So instead, I jump at the chance to answer questions like the above, and often try to save my writing to a local hard disk. I’ll often reread what I wrote some years back, and assess what kind of progress I’ve made.
Sadly I was a poor recordkeeper prior to 1997, there are some conversations I had with creationists on BBSes in the early 90′s that I dearly wish I could find now. I have a pretty much complete and continuous record of my email archives from 1997 onwards; in 2004 I started freewriting as an alternative to journaling and have saved all such snippets since; and of course now that we live in the Google age there are cases when I use Google to ask my past self what it thought about X.
Recent techniques I’ve picked up include Dual-n-backing to track WM progress, I’m waiting for the right time to try and use some of pjeby’s stuff, I’ve used some PUA tricks as suggestions on what to look at in myself. I’m getting interested in this “status” thing though, so far, mostly confused at what people say about it.
My experience with MBTI seems to track Alicorn’s, I use it mostly as a “foil” to construct a richer picture of who I am. One thing that it’s helped me with is notice that some times I just don’t feel like being with people, on such occasions I’ll just tell whoever I’m around that “I need some cave time” and that helps me be OK with it. That’s supposed to be an Introvert thing, although I’ve also noticed that my thinking tends to be Extroverted, that is, I think better in conversation, and tend to know things more solidly after I’ve explained them out loud. (Writing helps, but not quite as much as conversation. OTOH after some conversations I lose interest in writing stuff up.)
I wonder if my scoring as an F on the online MBTI might be as a result of explicitly concentrating on expressing my feelings in recent years. (Of course it could also be that MBTI has low reliability.) If so, I probably should work on the Sensing vs Intuitive distinction, but I have no clue how to do that; it already feels as if I’m paying as much attention to data as I can.
I measure my “real” progress by how successful I feel my life is, and I can’t complain: for a while now I’ve felt like I should take more risks because I’m not failing often enough. I’m aiming at increasing my income a fair bit in the coming years, by moving into a more entrepreneurial position now that I’m comfortable freelancing. (I guess “perceived rate of success or failure” is a C-category observation.)
“Saturate” is good advice, many little things help a little, there are few big things that seem to help a lot.
Curious how you use your own mail logs. I’ve never found them helpful other than showing people that yes, they really did say that possibly stupid thing.
WM performance seem generally important but it’s largely just a tool that helps many activities and does not seem in the same category as Alicorn’s series. Did I miss something?
Which PUAs did you find helpful—I am married with 3 and not interested in reading their literature for its intended purpose (though I read the Game, it was interesting and well-written). I’m willing to read them for the articles ;)
BTW, since you mentioned tools I think I can bootstrap myself to singularity with just my iphone ;) (The statement is more about the iphone than me). Between audiobooks, ITunes EDU-type stuff, instapaper and full wiki (I use trunk) not a minute goes to waste. We should have a “tools for thought” thread!
They show me whether or how I’ve changed my mind. When I started participating here heavily, I used Spotlight to ask my past selves how they’d felt over time about “rationality”, because my initial reaction was that LW was a strange place to find myself in, for a critic of rationality—as I then (2009) thought of myself.
I was led for instance to a 2001 email conversation about the definition Rawls gives of rationality in his Theory of Justice, to this 2004 blog entry, shortly followed by a book proposal to my editor in an IT-related journal about rational processes in software engineering (very brief excerpt: “rational behavior is that which achieves our ends; rational behavior fits the world as it really is”). Then my email records show me dropping the term altogether—I didn’t use it on a single occasion until very recently. (The book didn’t pan out.)
This little look in the rearview mirror was useful in assessing my motivations in participating here. “Rationality” is too easy an applause light, calling people “irrational” too much of an accusation, for me not to question why I should take an interest in Less Wrong. Spotting the words I quote above showed me that my definition of the term tracked with how it’s used here, and my recollection of previous thinking, such as the 2004 blog entry, told me that what I’d been objecting to all this while is the oversimplifying (e.g. Cartesian) connotations of the term, and so I made peace with my past selves as I walked into this rationalist trap. ;)
(ETA: In a sense these records are just part of my outboard brain, same as the iPhone. I’m with you in thinking this is one of the things Stross gets right about the future, the self gets more distributed in space.)
I have to confess I hate introspection, it’s one of those things I’d rather be doing pretty much anything than.
More or less like exercise, I only engage in it because I self-consciously know it’s good for me and I will eventually be glad I did it. I’ve had to develop some specific introspection-akrasia techniques, for instance doing it conversationally (as when someone “asks a luminous question” around here) lowers my resistance to it quite a bit.
I’ve often been advised to keep a journal or diary, and I periodically try it and eventually quit. So instead, I jump at the chance to answer questions like the above, and often try to save my writing to a local hard disk. I’ll often reread what I wrote some years back, and assess what kind of progress I’ve made.
Sadly I was a poor recordkeeper prior to 1997, there are some conversations I had with creationists on BBSes in the early 90′s that I dearly wish I could find now. I have a pretty much complete and continuous record of my email archives from 1997 onwards; in 2004 I started freewriting as an alternative to journaling and have saved all such snippets since; and of course now that we live in the Google age there are cases when I use Google to ask my past self what it thought about X.
Recent techniques I’ve picked up include Dual-n-backing to track WM progress, I’m waiting for the right time to try and use some of pjeby’s stuff, I’ve used some PUA tricks as suggestions on what to look at in myself. I’m getting interested in this “status” thing though, so far, mostly confused at what people say about it.
My experience with MBTI seems to track Alicorn’s, I use it mostly as a “foil” to construct a richer picture of who I am. One thing that it’s helped me with is notice that some times I just don’t feel like being with people, on such occasions I’ll just tell whoever I’m around that “I need some cave time” and that helps me be OK with it. That’s supposed to be an Introvert thing, although I’ve also noticed that my thinking tends to be Extroverted, that is, I think better in conversation, and tend to know things more solidly after I’ve explained them out loud. (Writing helps, but not quite as much as conversation. OTOH after some conversations I lose interest in writing stuff up.)
I wonder if my scoring as an F on the online MBTI might be as a result of explicitly concentrating on expressing my feelings in recent years. (Of course it could also be that MBTI has low reliability.) If so, I probably should work on the Sensing vs Intuitive distinction, but I have no clue how to do that; it already feels as if I’m paying as much attention to data as I can.
I measure my “real” progress by how successful I feel my life is, and I can’t complain: for a while now I’ve felt like I should take more risks because I’m not failing often enough. I’m aiming at increasing my income a fair bit in the coming years, by moving into a more entrepreneurial position now that I’m comfortable freelancing. (I guess “perceived rate of success or failure” is a C-category observation.)
“Saturate” is good advice, many little things help a little, there are few big things that seem to help a lot.
Thanks, helpful.
Curious how you use your own mail logs. I’ve never found them helpful other than showing people that yes, they really did say that possibly stupid thing.
WM performance seem generally important but it’s largely just a tool that helps many activities and does not seem in the same category as Alicorn’s series. Did I miss something?
Which PUAs did you find helpful—I am married with 3 and not interested in reading their literature for its intended purpose (though I read the Game, it was interesting and well-written). I’m willing to read them for the articles ;)
BTW, since you mentioned tools I think I can bootstrap myself to singularity with just my iphone ;) (The statement is more about the iphone than me). Between audiobooks, ITunes EDU-type stuff, instapaper and full wiki (I use trunk) not a minute goes to waste. We should have a “tools for thought” thread!
They show me whether or how I’ve changed my mind. When I started participating here heavily, I used Spotlight to ask my past selves how they’d felt over time about “rationality”, because my initial reaction was that LW was a strange place to find myself in, for a critic of rationality—as I then (2009) thought of myself.
I was led for instance to a 2001 email conversation about the definition Rawls gives of rationality in his Theory of Justice, to this 2004 blog entry, shortly followed by a book proposal to my editor in an IT-related journal about rational processes in software engineering (very brief excerpt: “rational behavior is that which achieves our ends; rational behavior fits the world as it really is”). Then my email records show me dropping the term altogether—I didn’t use it on a single occasion until very recently. (The book didn’t pan out.)
This little look in the rearview mirror was useful in assessing my motivations in participating here. “Rationality” is too easy an applause light, calling people “irrational” too much of an accusation, for me not to question why I should take an interest in Less Wrong. Spotting the words I quote above showed me that my definition of the term tracked with how it’s used here, and my recollection of previous thinking, such as the 2004 blog entry, told me that what I’d been objecting to all this while is the oversimplifying (e.g. Cartesian) connotations of the term, and so I made peace with my past selves as I walked into this rationalist trap. ;)
(ETA: In a sense these records are just part of my outboard brain, same as the iPhone. I’m with you in thinking this is one of the things Stross gets right about the future, the self gets more distributed in space.)