erratio
There is correlation between “being highly successful in real life” and “being able to avoid wasting time chattering away on the ’net”.
Quoting this because IMO it’s the most important of the lot. Almost all the people I think of as ‘old guard’ barely post anymore because they’re too busy working at CFAR and/or working on personal projects
Thanks! Downloaded it, will report back after trying for a bit
Anyone have a good recommendation for an app/timer that goes off at pseudo-random (not too short—maybe every 15 min to an hour?) intervals? Someone suggested to me today that I would benefit from a luminosity-style exercise of noting my emotions at intervals throughout the day, and it seems like something I ought to automate as much as possible
I’ve been using HabitRPG for a couple of months and I don’t have freakishly great self-motivation (although I do have a friend who’s in my party, so there is some peer pressure/accountability to keep me on track). So far I’ve found that it’s good for habit formation for the kinds of things that are more about remembering to do them than about negative motivation. It’s also reasonably good in a GTD sort of way, in the sense that I’ll put a big task on my to-do list, and then when it comes time to actually start on the task I break it up into much smaller subtasks to provide myself with incremental rewards towards completion.
Fixed my broken link, thanks for pointing it out :)
Last month I started using HabitRPG, and Boomeranged myself to post about it again in a month’s time. So here are my experiences so far:
The positive: At 2nd or 3rd level you get to form a party with other people, so now my best friend and I can see each other’s health, XP and gear. Being in a party doesn’t do anything else, but it does add a little extra accountability/competitiveness/gear envy. The gear you can buy with your rewards looks pretty cool. The system gently encourages you via the XP mechanic to break stuff up into subtasks so you can get more xp and regularly review habits that you’re not getting done (since not doing them makes you lose health).
The negative: A few showstopping bugs: when I have it open it regularly disconnects from the server until I reload the page, which often results in me losing task completions/new tasks that I’d added. On my (Android) tablet browser, trying to complete a task causes the browser to crash, every time. Leaving the tab open in the browser often slows my netbook down due to some kind of memory leak. Also, customising tasks so that they only trigger on certain days or give more or less xp or whatever is kind of fiddly and not really worth doing most of the time IMO.
Overall: The fact that I can’t use my tablet to complete tasks anymore is kind of a dealbreaker for me. I’m still using it at the moment but unless the tablet issue gets fixed I’ll probably try to find some other method of tracking and forming habits. It’s a pity because the main part of the app is very effective.
Anyone have a good suggestion about what a lactose-intolerant person could potentially replace the milk with?
Theory off the top of my head: The causation is in the wrong direction. People who are rational are far more likely to be very systems-oriented, have limited social experiences as children (by having different interests and/or being too dang smart), be highly introverted, and other factors that correlate with being around other people a lot less than your typical person. There’s nothing wrong with our hardware per se, it’s just that we missed out on critical training data during the learning period,
Anecdotal: I have mild prosopagnosia. I have a lot of trouble recognising people outside their expected context, I make heavy use of non-facial cues. I’m pretty good at putting specific names to specific faces on demand when it feels important enough, although see prev point about expected context. I don’t feel like I use anything resembling Bayesian reasoning, I feel like I have the same sense of recognition that I imagine most people have, it’s just less dependent on seeing their face and more on other traits (most typically voice and manner of movement).
Gamification of productivity:https://habitrpg.com/splash.html
I haven’t signed up yet because I’m still assessing whether the overhead of filling it out is going to be too much of a trivial inconvenience, but thought some others might be interested. From poking around, it looks like it has a lot of potential but is still a little raw. It has the core game elements firmly in place but lacks the public status/accountability elements of good games (through acheivements/badges) and Fitocracy (through community/public accountability).
UPDATE: signed up, will report back next month
I have chosen not to Google something that I was warned would involve seeing particularly horrific images. I imagine that if said topic was put in blog post form with a trigger warning up the top, I would probably choose not to read it.
EDIT: It’s probably worth adding that I adopted this policy after discovering the hard way that there are things out there I would really prefer not to see/hear about.
Brief data point: I am female and I don’t have a problem with the tone as such. I don’t post much because I am put off by the high standards of thinking and argumentation required, but in general I approve of those standards being there and would hate to read the warm-fuzzy version of LW where bad/boring threads proliferate because people are worried about coming across as cold.
A semi-related point is that I like the general air of emotional detachment around here because in in the real world I often see expression of negative emotional reactions used as a relatively cheap form of manipulation, and I worry that encouraging open expression of emotions here (which is definitely a component of ‘warmness’ as I understand it) would cause a slippery slope effect where that kind of manipulation would become much more common.
I’m relatively certain (>95%) that Dymitry/Private_messaging gets special treatment (ie. deletion) because the admins consider him a troll. The point of deleting even his reasonable comments would be to get him to stop commenting at all. I’m not aware of any other LessWrong users who are considered trolls by the site admins.
flyers around your university? Still not really representative but it would get you the standard WEIRD group
That’s a good point—I’ve noticed a similar effect. I just need to work on making the idea of going outside as attractive as actually doing it. Sounds like it’s time for some positive reinforcement!
I’ve started a ‘don’t break the chain’ style of habit formation for 3 habits I’m trying to work on—taking various supplerments every morning rather than haphazardly whenever I remember, exercising, and going outside every day. A tick in the relevant box indicates that I did the task, a blank indicates not doing the task, a line indicates I did the bare minimum that could technically qualify as doing the task (eg. if I forgot to exercise and so spent 5 minutes in bed doing ankle strengthening exercises before going to sleep, I haven’t really exercised in the meaning I originally intended but it’s better than nothing). So far I’ve noticed that it makes me a lot more conscious both of whether I’ve done the tasks but also how I feel about the task. For example, I’m considering removing or modifying ‘go outside’ because it turns out that I don’t really care very much about whether I get it done or not, whereas with the other two I get warm fuzzies from ticking the boxes.
Nope, it’s a regular checking account which came with 3 free checks. I wasn’t sure if there are generally fees involved; I think that in Australia there’s some kind of ongoing cost to have a checkbook, but that’s fine since virtually none of us use checks there anyway.
I have a similar taste issue, and after a year and a half of deliberate practice every time I go out with colleagues I’m finally starting to find the taste more tolerable, and even to enjoy a very small subset of alcoholic drinks. That said, I find wine to be the most disgusting in taste and I suspect that even with a lot of practice I’ll never enjoy it enough to voluntarily drink a full glass of it at any time, let alone every day.
How does one get a checkbook in the US? Are there usually costs associated with them? In the year and a half I’ve been in the US so far I’ve needed/wanted a check at most 5 times, most of them in the last few months, so is there a cheaper way to get a small supply I can use as needed?
It’s very much how I operate as well. Talking it out also works, but it needs to be the right kind of person at the right time, whereas writing pretty much always works.