30 minutes of music composition (guitar or Ableton Live)
90 minutes of dead tree reading (currently evo. psych. books)
1000 words of writing (not including LW comments etc.)
30 minutes of email and outreach
45 minutes of IA research (following links online, etc.)
barfing as many comments onto Less Wrong as I can (hitting the ‘comment’ button impulsively) so as to get critiques of my writing ability and especially my epistemic rationality, as well as get practice writing in a pseudo-academic setting.
As I build up my mind/body I’ll probably spend less time there and more time on things like keeping up with my email and staying in contact with the Singularitarian community. I’m trying to make the transition from Hufferpuffer to Slytherclaw.
These are mostly activities you already know are worthwhile for you? I’ve done similar and while I think I have a decent chance at understanding what’s helpful without actually trying all subsets (or greedy leave-one-out or add-one-in), I’ve been confused when I periodically ponder what I should keep doing.
It’s interesting that nothing (except 2 miles running and pushups) is less than 30 minutes. I’ve favored 15 minutes but that might be too short.
20 sessions of dual n-back and 1000 words of writing feel like they take a long time but I’d be surprised if they took 30 minutes or more in reality. 300 ab lounger crunches takes less than 10 minutes.
Honestly the highest value thing on that list is probably the 45 minutes of IA research, followed by the 30 minutes of email and outreach. Everything else is more about cultivating the self-image of someone who consistently does things to make themself more awesome. In so doing I hope to gain an aura of competence, after which I’ll be more effective at doing whatever it is I want to do. (Currently, that is to contribute significantly to SIAI’s IA division when I get back to California.)
Nitpick: the default settings in Brainworkshop, one of the more popular DNB implementations, take 72 seconds per session for a minimum of 24 minutes for 20 sessions. Adding in saccading between sessions (20-30 seconds) or tweaking options could add in still more time.
A full 3 days!!! At least, that’s how long it’s been formally written up in a Google Docs spreadsheet. I’d been doing most of this for the past few weeks but not consistently enough (especially not the weight lifting and n-back, both of which my brain seems to accidentally forget more often than the other activities… also some of the exercises I only do every other day if I’m particularly sore). It’s funny how making a simple checklist can make one roughly twice as productive.
This is interesting, because I am also going down the same path: creating a list of things I need to do (daily, every so often, and one in a while). What website do you use for dual n-back task. Let me (and others) know if it’s effect. Is there any good literature/research on it? Does it help?
I’ve also been thinking about social checklists. One of Dale Carnegie’s books
is essentially four checklists already, so I just put them on a small card in my wallet for daily review.
I feel like it’s had an impact, but it’s tough to evaluate. I suppose you could assign yourself a grade and track your progress, but that seems fluffy.
Any thoughts on how to judge the effectiveness of something like this?
I wish I could upvote this comment an extra time. Atul Gawande’s article is great, and applying it to personal life seems highly worth experimenting with. I’d love to hear results from personal experiments with checklists.
I use checklists for website maintenance—I have lists of things that need to go up or change with each update. I find that when I remember to use the checklist, I’m usually paying enough attention that I’ve already remembered everything on it; it’s when I’m doing a sloppy enough job to forget my checklist that it would have been most helpful.
I’ve used spaced repetition to memorize checklists for things for me to do in certain situations and found it to be quite useful. Some of my thinking on this was inspired by The Checklist Manifesto, which I read recently. I’m still figuring out how to make my system work better and have it cover more situations, but an example of one checklist that I’ve gotten a bit of mileage out of is the one I’ve made for accessing my inner anticipation controller.
I use todoist.com to maintain a variety of checklists, from daily and the14thofeachmonth to one time next year, divided into different areas of growth (health, career, science knowledge, social/family, etc.) and non-growth-but-needs-to-be-done.
It has markedly increased my productivity on both small goals and larger life goals, and also stopped 95% of my “oh I was busy with X, so I forgot about you asking me to do Y” that used to happen to me quite a bit at home and at work.
I’m also a big fan of that Gawande article. I use lists in a couple of ways, but one relevant one is a poster I made for my bedroom wall. It’s titled “MORE USEFUL THINGS TO DO than fucking around on the internet,” and is followed by a column and a half of such activities, with room for more as I think of them (there’s a marker on a string nearby). The items on the list are a combination of practical things or chores (“do laundry” “do dishes” “practice guitar/piano”) and unnecessary things that I would like to do more often (“go for a bike ride” “call a friend” “sing”).
Obviously it’s not perfect, since I’m here, but it has taken away any possible excuse I might have to say “I don’t have anything better to do.” I might not have anything I need to do, or much I want to do, but there’s almost always something better I could do.
The only problem is that the poster’s in my bedroom, where I tended to use my laptop a lot at the time I made it. Now that I’m out of that habit (which was one of the waste-less-time-on-the-internet moves), I don’t see the poster at the times I need it most. I suppose I should move it into the office now!
Gwern from here on LW maintains an excellent FAQ about n-back. My personal experiences thus far (though I haven’t done much of it) are actually listed in the FAQ. :D The FAQ is here.
I use Brain Workshop on Jaeggi mode (a harder more test-like mode which you can switch on in the config file).
Isn’t Jaeggi mode the one that ends with a series of the same letter in the center every session to make sure there’s an equal number of matches in each session?
Most of the arguments I could imagine for that being superior are pretty tortured. You should ask Justin for the config file we used. I’m pretty sure we turned Jaeggi on at first but then turned it back off due to that artifact. I certainly found it more stimulating/difficult after Jaeggi was turned back off.
Hm, there don’t seem to be an equal number of matches in each session. Sometimes there are 4, sometimes there are 10. Do I misunderstand? Or perhaps I have a different version of brain workshop?
Can you say what you get from this? I’ve done meditation from time to time, but all I get from sitting for half an hour is having sat for half an hour. I’m familiar with the book you linked to.
I think I got really lucky: after a few days of 30 minutes a day, I was meditating while laying down and over the course of a few minutes slipped into something that is very similar to what is called jhana in the texts I’ve read. It was an incredibly intense ‘body high’ where I could feel my whole body quivering and had an incredibly strong focus on my body (so it wasn’t dissociative in any way). At first I tried to ignore this and keep focusing on my breath but I quickly realized this was silly and just tried to be mindful of my whole body. I became very aware of small muscle tensions and the like. Throughout the experience was an amazing bliss… truly beautiful. I’m normally a very self-critical person, which had previously made meditating a little stressful: I wonder what… no, stop, why must you always wonder what others think of you? Focus on your breath. But in the maybe-jhana sate I became accepting and understanding of my flaws and others’ flaws, and this understanding just made me incredibly happy. I involuntarily laughed out loud several times over the course of 10 minutes. At some point I sat up and tried my best to get into a half-lotus position, and noticed that the ‘images’ of random color and such that I would normally see on the back of my eyelids was completely grey, which was odd. I laughed at that, too. I sang out 108 ’om mani padme hum’s and got up. The effect stayed very strong for about… 10 minutes afterward, during which I managed to play 1 blitz chess game to test my cognition. It wore off over the next 15 minutes. My chess ability was surprisingly a little subpar, which was odd, because I felt like I should have had superpowers. From what I’ve read some students who experience jhana think that they’ve become enlightened: I think that’s very understandable. The sense of compassion and kindness and acceptance and joy I felt was exceptionally strong.
I got into the state after a series of insights about my breath that I’d never noticed before: first, that I could feel the temperature difference of the air as it was inhaled and exhaled. Second, that when I was breathing heavily, inhalation was very slightly painful. There were I think two other things I realized but I’ve now forgotten them. I kept having insights about various things after reaching jhana but I don’t remember them… I think they were just small things that I hadn’t noticed before but weren’t profound or anything.
I have no idea what the neurological effects were. I think there was probably some sort of cascade effect with the opioid receptors: the happier and more peaceful I felt, the better able I was to become happier and more peaceful. My mind was exceptionally clear the whole time.
Anyway, perhaps the coolest thing about the experience was that now I don’t have to force myself to sit down and meditate: it’s no longer the part of the schedule I put off for later. Now I just want to do it. Since then I’ve meditated twice, and had what appeared to be the fleeting signals of that state: slight numbness-like feeling in the face after strong concentration on breath. Meditation in general has become pleasant and is no longer a chore. For this reason I’d like to figure out how long it takes to achieve something like what I experienced, or how common it is. I feel very lucky that it took less than 4 hours total to reach a mental state so profoundly new to me, and I’d like to tell others to persevere until they experience similar things, but I don’t know at all how common my experience is. Also, I don’t know if my experience was a fluke: I kind of doubt it, as I seemed to get somewhat close the last 2 times I’ve meditated, and I think those were both for about 15 minutes each or so. Another benefit of having the experience was realizing that such a state is possible. I’d heard that those strong in meditation could experience something like a very strong body high akin to smoking cannabis sativa. I discounted such reports because it seemed unlikely such strong effects could come from simply paying attention to one’s breath. I now know better, but I’m still confused as to how it happens.
Even before that experience though, I had a few benefits of meditation: basically, just being mindful in general. I noticed how harshly self-critical I was all the time. I got noticeably better at focusing on one thing (my breath). I was significantly more peaceful and prone-to-compassion after meditating, the effect lasting 10 minutes to an hour, usually. But even so regular meditation reminds me that there’s a higher standard of mindfulness and compassion to aspire to. I don’t like feeling embarrassed of my past self—I try to update on expected dispositions the way I update on expected belief—and it seems that trying my best to be the kind of person I am right after meditating is a salient and moderately effective way to be a better me. That said, I’d rather take a pill or listen to a binaural beat that caused me to act that way all the time. It sounds a lot more feasible than becoming enlightened.
Thank you for that reply. I’ve certainly never experienced anything like that in goodness knows how many hours, although I’ve read theoretical descriptions of the jhanas.
There’s a general convention that one does not ask about another person’s meditation experience, nor speak of one’s own except with one’s instructor. In fact, people attending meditation class are sometimes advised not to discuss their experience with each other, which does not make for epistemic hygiene around the subject. I hope that on LW we need not be constrained by that (nor, of course, obligated to speak of these things).
My list of daily self-improvement activities for while I’m in Tucson (on vacation):
One hundred pushups workout
20 sessions of dual n-back
30 minutes of meditation
2 miles running
30 minutes weight lifting
300 ab lounger crunches
30 minutes of focused online blitz chess
<30 minutes on whitelisted sites.
30 minutes of active binaural beat listening
30 minutes of music composition (guitar or Ableton Live)
90 minutes of dead tree reading (currently evo. psych. books)
1000 words of writing (not including LW comments etc.)
30 minutes of email and outreach
45 minutes of IA research (following links online, etc.)
barfing as many comments onto Less Wrong as I can (hitting the ‘comment’ button impulsively) so as to get critiques of my writing ability and especially my epistemic rationality, as well as get practice writing in a pseudo-academic setting.
As I build up my mind/body I’ll probably spend less time there and more time on things like keeping up with my email and staying in contact with the Singularitarian community. I’m trying to make the transition from Hufferpuffer to Slytherclaw.
Intelligence amplification?
Yup!
These are mostly activities you already know are worthwhile for you? I’ve done similar and while I think I have a decent chance at understanding what’s helpful without actually trying all subsets (or greedy leave-one-out or add-one-in), I’ve been confused when I periodically ponder what I should keep doing.
It’s interesting that nothing (except 2 miles running and pushups) is less than 30 minutes. I’ve favored 15 minutes but that might be too short.
20 sessions of dual n-back and 1000 words of writing feel like they take a long time but I’d be surprised if they took 30 minutes or more in reality. 300 ab lounger crunches takes less than 10 minutes.
Honestly the highest value thing on that list is probably the 45 minutes of IA research, followed by the 30 minutes of email and outreach. Everything else is more about cultivating the self-image of someone who consistently does things to make themself more awesome. In so doing I hope to gain an aura of competence, after which I’ll be more effective at doing whatever it is I want to do. (Currently, that is to contribute significantly to SIAI’s IA division when I get back to California.)
Nitpick: the default settings in Brainworkshop, one of the more popular DNB implementations, take 72 seconds per session for a minimum of 24 minutes for 20 sessions. Adding in saccading between sessions (20-30 seconds) or tweaking options could add in still more time.
24 minutes is pretty close to 30 minutes.
How long have you kept this up?
A full 3 days!!! At least, that’s how long it’s been formally written up in a Google Docs spreadsheet. I’d been doing most of this for the past few weeks but not consistently enough (especially not the weight lifting and n-back, both of which my brain seems to accidentally forget more often than the other activities… also some of the exercises I only do every other day if I’m particularly sore). It’s funny how making a simple checklist can make one roughly twice as productive.
This is interesting, because I am also going down the same path: creating a list of things I need to do (daily, every so often, and one in a while). What website do you use for dual n-back task. Let me (and others) know if it’s effect. Is there any good literature/research on it? Does it help?
Hey, me too! I guess we all read this.
I’ve also been thinking about social checklists. One of Dale Carnegie’s books is essentially four checklists already, so I just put them on a small card in my wallet for daily review.
I feel like it’s had an impact, but it’s tough to evaluate. I suppose you could assign yourself a grade and track your progress, but that seems fluffy.
Any thoughts on how to judge the effectiveness of something like this?
I wish I could upvote this comment an extra time. Atul Gawande’s article is great, and applying it to personal life seems highly worth experimenting with. I’d love to hear results from personal experiments with checklists.
I use checklists for website maintenance—I have lists of things that need to go up or change with each update. I find that when I remember to use the checklist, I’m usually paying enough attention that I’ve already remembered everything on it; it’s when I’m doing a sloppy enough job to forget my checklist that it would have been most helpful.
I’ve used spaced repetition to memorize checklists for things for me to do in certain situations and found it to be quite useful. Some of my thinking on this was inspired by The Checklist Manifesto, which I read recently. I’m still figuring out how to make my system work better and have it cover more situations, but an example of one checklist that I’ve gotten a bit of mileage out of is the one I’ve made for accessing my inner anticipation controller.
I use todoist.com to maintain a variety of checklists, from daily and the14thofeachmonth to one time next year, divided into different areas of growth (health, career, science knowledge, social/family, etc.) and non-growth-but-needs-to-be-done.
It has markedly increased my productivity on both small goals and larger life goals, and also stopped 95% of my “oh I was busy with X, so I forgot about you asking me to do Y” that used to happen to me quite a bit at home and at work.
I’m also a big fan of that Gawande article. I use lists in a couple of ways, but one relevant one is a poster I made for my bedroom wall. It’s titled “MORE USEFUL THINGS TO DO than fucking around on the internet,” and is followed by a column and a half of such activities, with room for more as I think of them (there’s a marker on a string nearby). The items on the list are a combination of practical things or chores (“do laundry” “do dishes” “practice guitar/piano”) and unnecessary things that I would like to do more often (“go for a bike ride” “call a friend” “sing”).
Obviously it’s not perfect, since I’m here, but it has taken away any possible excuse I might have to say “I don’t have anything better to do.” I might not have anything I need to do, or much I want to do, but there’s almost always something better I could do.
The only problem is that the poster’s in my bedroom, where I tended to use my laptop a lot at the time I made it. Now that I’m out of that habit (which was one of the waste-less-time-on-the-internet moves), I don’t see the poster at the times I need it most. I suppose I should move it into the office now!
Gwern from here on LW maintains an excellent FAQ about n-back. My personal experiences thus far (though I haven’t done much of it) are actually listed in the FAQ. :D The FAQ is here.
I use Brain Workshop on Jaeggi mode (a harder more test-like mode which you can switch on in the config file).
Isn’t Jaeggi mode the one that ends with a series of the same letter in the center every session to make sure there’s an equal number of matches in each session?
Most of the arguments I could imagine for that being superior are pretty tortured. You should ask Justin for the config file we used. I’m pretty sure we turned Jaeggi on at first but then turned it back off due to that artifact. I certainly found it more stimulating/difficult after Jaeggi was turned back off.
Hm, there don’t seem to be an equal number of matches in each session. Sometimes there are 4, sometimes there are 10. Do I misunderstand? Or perhaps I have a different version of brain workshop?
Can you say what you get from this? I’ve done meditation from time to time, but all I get from sitting for half an hour is having sat for half an hour. I’m familiar with the book you linked to.
I think I got really lucky: after a few days of 30 minutes a day, I was meditating while laying down and over the course of a few minutes slipped into something that is very similar to what is called jhana in the texts I’ve read. It was an incredibly intense ‘body high’ where I could feel my whole body quivering and had an incredibly strong focus on my body (so it wasn’t dissociative in any way). At first I tried to ignore this and keep focusing on my breath but I quickly realized this was silly and just tried to be mindful of my whole body. I became very aware of small muscle tensions and the like. Throughout the experience was an amazing bliss… truly beautiful. I’m normally a very self-critical person, which had previously made meditating a little stressful: I wonder what… no, stop, why must you always wonder what others think of you? Focus on your breath. But in the maybe-jhana sate I became accepting and understanding of my flaws and others’ flaws, and this understanding just made me incredibly happy. I involuntarily laughed out loud several times over the course of 10 minutes. At some point I sat up and tried my best to get into a half-lotus position, and noticed that the ‘images’ of random color and such that I would normally see on the back of my eyelids was completely grey, which was odd. I laughed at that, too. I sang out 108 ’om mani padme hum’s and got up. The effect stayed very strong for about… 10 minutes afterward, during which I managed to play 1 blitz chess game to test my cognition. It wore off over the next 15 minutes. My chess ability was surprisingly a little subpar, which was odd, because I felt like I should have had superpowers. From what I’ve read some students who experience jhana think that they’ve become enlightened: I think that’s very understandable. The sense of compassion and kindness and acceptance and joy I felt was exceptionally strong.
I got into the state after a series of insights about my breath that I’d never noticed before: first, that I could feel the temperature difference of the air as it was inhaled and exhaled. Second, that when I was breathing heavily, inhalation was very slightly painful. There were I think two other things I realized but I’ve now forgotten them. I kept having insights about various things after reaching jhana but I don’t remember them… I think they were just small things that I hadn’t noticed before but weren’t profound or anything.
I have no idea what the neurological effects were. I think there was probably some sort of cascade effect with the opioid receptors: the happier and more peaceful I felt, the better able I was to become happier and more peaceful. My mind was exceptionally clear the whole time.
Anyway, perhaps the coolest thing about the experience was that now I don’t have to force myself to sit down and meditate: it’s no longer the part of the schedule I put off for later. Now I just want to do it. Since then I’ve meditated twice, and had what appeared to be the fleeting signals of that state: slight numbness-like feeling in the face after strong concentration on breath. Meditation in general has become pleasant and is no longer a chore. For this reason I’d like to figure out how long it takes to achieve something like what I experienced, or how common it is. I feel very lucky that it took less than 4 hours total to reach a mental state so profoundly new to me, and I’d like to tell others to persevere until they experience similar things, but I don’t know at all how common my experience is. Also, I don’t know if my experience was a fluke: I kind of doubt it, as I seemed to get somewhat close the last 2 times I’ve meditated, and I think those were both for about 15 minutes each or so. Another benefit of having the experience was realizing that such a state is possible. I’d heard that those strong in meditation could experience something like a very strong body high akin to smoking cannabis sativa. I discounted such reports because it seemed unlikely such strong effects could come from simply paying attention to one’s breath. I now know better, but I’m still confused as to how it happens.
Even before that experience though, I had a few benefits of meditation: basically, just being mindful in general. I noticed how harshly self-critical I was all the time. I got noticeably better at focusing on one thing (my breath). I was significantly more peaceful and prone-to-compassion after meditating, the effect lasting 10 minutes to an hour, usually. But even so regular meditation reminds me that there’s a higher standard of mindfulness and compassion to aspire to. I don’t like feeling embarrassed of my past self—I try to update on expected dispositions the way I update on expected belief—and it seems that trying my best to be the kind of person I am right after meditating is a salient and moderately effective way to be a better me. That said, I’d rather take a pill or listen to a binaural beat that caused me to act that way all the time. It sounds a lot more feasible than becoming enlightened.
Thank you for that reply. I’ve certainly never experienced anything like that in goodness knows how many hours, although I’ve read theoretical descriptions of the jhanas.
There’s a general convention that one does not ask about another person’s meditation experience, nor speak of one’s own except with one’s instructor. In fact, people attending meditation class are sometimes advised not to discuss their experience with each other, which does not make for epistemic hygiene around the subject. I hope that on LW we need not be constrained by that (nor, of course, obligated to speak of these things).
Nice :). Now that sounds like conscious application to tasks and goals!