shrug I subscribe to Main and not Discussion, but that’s in part because I only subscribe to things that don’t generate more content than I can read or a large proportion of content that I’m not interested in. So Main posts come to me automatically, and then I usually check Discussion manually and just pick out the more interesting-sounding threads
erratio
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Thirded. The most helpful part for me was internalising the idea that even annoying/angry/etc outbursts are the result of people trying to get their needs met. It may not be a need I agree with, but it gives me better intuition for what reaction may be most effective.
Short term: Tell your friend/family/acquaintance/random person in the street that you need someone to escort you into the doctor’s office because you’re having trouble doing it by yourself. Ask them to be that someone. Offer them a small amount of money if need be so that you’re not wasting their time, or buy them lunch or something else for them if they refuse to accept money directly.
Slightly longer term: Repeat the above process to get yourself into a therapist’s office, because you have reached the stage of depression where you need outside insight and accountability to be able to improve, and providing that help is a therapists’ job. (I also second what other people have said about inquiring around for a therapist who charges on a sliding scale, or taking advantage of local residency/intern training programs to get cheaper access to care. In the latter case you’ll also be providing a service for the therapist in training by giving them someone to practise on)
Already in one, sorry :) I suspect that one of the other guys in my party is also a stealth LWer, at least he seems to carry a lot of the local memes.
I use it extensively and it’s been by far the most successful out of all the productivity systems I’ve tried. For one, I’ve stuck with it since February of this year, whereas most of my past attempts have lasted around a month. For another, there’s enough community aspects to it that a couple of times when my productivity has been low I’ve gotten a lot of encouragement from the community to get started again
Nope. It needs to be something with feedback.
the current system forces people to see meetup announcements whether they want to or not, which is rude but good for meetup participation.
Except that my eyes automatically glide over anything that says Meetup: X, which is not an uncommon method of dealing with frequent distractions (also see: internet ads. Some people need to block them, others like me literally don’t notice them most of the time)
I’ve joked that when a philosopher says there’s a philosophical consensus, what he really means is “I talked to a few of my friends about this and they agreed with me.
I came across a term to describe this phenomenon in linguistics regarding grammaticality judgements: Hey Sallys. The idea being, you form some theory about what’s grammatical based on what sounds good to you, you think that you ought to check to make sure you’re not just being idiosyncratic, and so you wander out into the grad room/house/water cooler/etc and say “Hey X, how does this sound to you?”
Having said that, there’s a paper somewhere showing that individual linguists’ grammaticality judgements are just as good as taking a large survey in the vast majority of cases.
But I don’t think it follows that we have a specialized language module—we may be using some more generic part of our cognitive capacity. I’m not sure if we really have the data to settle this yet.
There was an autistic savant, Chris, whose skill was in learning languages, and who was unable to learn a fake language put together by researchers that used easy but non-attested types of rules (eg. reversing the whole sentence to form a question). What do you make of it?
I’ve always thought it was fairly weak evidence in the sense that autistic people often have all kinds of other things potentially going on with them, that it’s a sample size of 1, and so on.
the difficult part was to realize that with online education, one still has to take notes, just like in an offline classroom
Aha. That may be part of what’s been missing in my previous attempts. Well, that and accountability, but I think I’ve solved that one
At the risk of sounding completely vague, your description rings a bell for me. Certain types of plastics, I think? That do that kind of shrinking act as a result of coming into contact with the heat and/or moisture and/or oils on your hand. Hopefully that much information, vague as it is, might help jog someone else’s memory.
I can’t explain why everyone else ignored it, though.
Same experience here. I eventually switched to EmotionSense because TagTime felt like too much bookkeeping. (basically, I have long stretches during the day when I don’t want to be distracted by my phone, which led to me having a bunch of tags to fill in at any given time since it was sampling every 45 minutes on average, and I’m really obsessive about not wanting to leave tags un-filled). EmotionSense bugs me a maximum of 5 times a day and IMO has a more intuitive interface for mood sampling.
I’ll try to dig up the paper later if I can, but if I remember correctly there’s a disturbingly large number of Turkers who use it as their primary source of income. Those people are not going to be anywhere close to your intended audience for EA stuff—people who are living well below the poverty line are going to think completely differently about helping others than people who are living comfortable and/or have disposable income.
oooh, that’s much closer to what I was originally looking for. Thanks!
I wonder why addiction is common among celebrities—they aren’t living in a deprived environment
I’m not so sure that’s true. Being scrutinised 24⁄7 sounds like one hell of a constraint on my possible actions to me.
I uninstalled TagTime from my phone, after using it for about a month to track my emotional states. Uninstalled because I don’t have my phone on me 24⁄7 and filling in a bunch of tags a few times a day felt too much like a chore and too granular to really provide me with useful information. That said, I got a lot of useful information out of using it during the first couple of weeks, so if anyone wants to try mood tracking, I think TagTime is useful in short bursts.
HabitRPG continues to be my most awesome productivity tool. I’ve now been using it for around 6 months and the devs recently fixed the site so that it loads much faster and almost never crashes. If anyone tried it and gave up because of the bugginess, I highly recommend trying it again now
In the process of trying to change the way I interact with my housemates. I’ve been able to change my expectations of their actions, but I’m still getting a lot of emotional crud that indicates that I alieve something different to those expectations.
I had my first instance this morning of a semi-lucid dream, and I have a couple of questions about the experience.
First, I dream in a very ‘conceptual’ mode, for lack of a better term—my dreams don’t give me detailed sensory data, usually I get concepts (eg. ‘I am now standing on a balcony’) and then a brief flash of an image supplied from one or more memories. I almost never get sound or smell, and I don’t remember ever having gotten touch or taste. I also don’t usually get much in the way of emotions. Does anyone know how to get more immediate sensory data? It seems like most of the benefits that people talk about from lucid dreaming come from feeling like they’re fully embodied in the dream.
Secondly, in hindsight it felt like my conscious and subconscious were duking it out, and I’d be interested in techniques for increasing conscious control/awareness. I realised I was dreaming and thought that I should try flying, and my dream obligingly teleported me up onto a balcony/rooftop so that I could take off, but then my subconscious kept trying to add extra elements—it tried to put a railing on the balcony, it made the weather change to rain, that sort of thing.
I’ve been using TagTime for over a month now on my Android phone as a way to become more conscious of my emotions (ie. my tags are all feeling words). Pros: It’s made me conscious that I use certain activities as a method of self-distraction and to fill time rather than because I’m actually enjoying them. I feel like my ability to quickly gauge how I’m feeling has improved a lot. It gives me a rough snapshot of how my overall mood varies, since I can flick through the timestamps and see which tags predominate. Cons: The app occasionally freezes. When the app pings me multiple times less than a minute apart, it’s annoying and jerks me out of whatever I was doing. It took me a few weeks to get over any and all pings jerking me out of whatever I was doing. Conclusion: I’m leaving it installed for now, but I’m not entirely sure that I’m getting a lot of benefit out of it at this point
I reviewed what has and hasn’t worked for me in the past wrt therapy, and have noticed a pattern which I’ll be bringing up at my next appointment.
Relatedly, succeeded in changing my emotions wrt some of my self-destructive impulses, with the result that those particular impulses have almost entirely disappeared
Failed to complete my second Coursera course within the space of a few months. I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on there. My current theory is that it’s a mixture of trivial inconveniences (my desktop doesn’t have internal speakers so I have to locate and plug in my earbuds before I listen to anything, the individual lectures are often long enough that I have to consciously make time for them) and general lack of motivation due to current depression.
To me, that just means that God is fractal
Based on recommendations here by PJEby, I’m trying to work through Byron Katie’s Loving what is
So far, I’m really enjoying the concreteness of the approach—she focuses a lot on how to address your problems. For comparison, another book I read recently talked about ‘reparenting’ and ‘setting respectful limits’ and when I’d finished reading it I had more insight into my issues but no idea what ‘reparenting’ looks like, and so no foothold on addressing them. I’ve also found myself spontaneously starting to use her framework to think about some current problems I’m dealing with, which I take as a good sign. I’ll report back in when I’ve finished reading it and/or I’ve tried applying the techniques for a month or so.