Yeah, I think it would make more sense to just have a project match-making thread—people can say what they’re working on, and others who want to help/make it easier for the runner of the project (even in ways not directly related to the project, which seems to be what the side-kicking thing is about) can offer said help.
free_rip
Karma: 240
Pretty much this.
Focus on what you are doing, and who you are helping, not who you aren’t. This is a broader problem than just EA too—you could think of all the possible achievements or research or inventions or friendships you could make in your life, and thus any particular string of them is irrelevant. But if you don’t focus on that infinity of great things you could do, you’re able to realize this particular life is pretty great too. Think of it in terms of ‘if I wasn’t here, these particular people would be worse off’ (usually quite a long list, even for non-EAs—friends, family, colleagues you help out etc.) and your contribution seems a lot more important :-) After all, you’re only one person of that infinity, so if you help more than one person considerably you’ve actually made a big (relative to you) contribution.
How many hours is your coding job? If it’s 10+ and they’ll allow you to reduce them, you could go for that—you’ll still get to list having x months of experience there on your CV, will still get that experience and network from it, but will have a bit more time.
Don’t cut into the basic time you need for the essentials of life—being stressed or sleep deprived etc. will only make you less productive and exacerbate the problem. You also don’t mention any hobbies—do you get regular exercise? I know this means more time spent, but if you don’t get much already even 20mins every other day will make you more alert and productive.
There are easier courses and harder courses—try to take easier ones (still meeting requirements) as long as they don’t conflict with your interests. You can ask classmates about which are easier/have better lecturers.
Prep for your classes in the holidays—before each year I’ll look at the syllabus of the courses I’m taking and look up each of the terms there, spending maybe 30mins on each getting a general idea of what’s involved. This means you’re not seeing it for the first time in class, which makes it way easier to learn and retain (less overall effort).
Also ask why is the work harder now? I often find work hard for one of a few reasons: either I don’t have the background, I’m tuning out of the lectures (because the lecturer is boring, because I already know most of it, or because I feel like I don’t know enough to understand it even if I tune in), the work is actually time-consuming but not hard and this registers as ‘hard’ because I don’t want to start it, or I have just a few problems/knowledge gaps and don’t have the resources (friends, lecturers, example problems) to turn to to fix them. Each one of these has a different way of fixing it—for example the last one, having friends in that class helps with immensely, because you can each fill in those little gaps for eachother. I find it useful in math particularly.
Finally, there will be people at your college that also hate partying/drinking/etc. I’ve been lucky, having a solid group of 7 friends pretty much since I started college, all of whom aren’t interesting in drinking or partying, have similar majors (a lot in IT) and are happy to just hang out between classes and chat/study with eachother. I’m not entirely sure how you can find these people other then persistence—if you’re looking to go flatting, perhaps look at flats that say they are ‘quiet’, if you’re doing group projects try to group up with the harder working members of your class etc. and then follow up with this—ask where they hang out when they’re not in class and if you can join them. If you find one or two people with similar outlook to you, you’ll tend to find a whole bunch, because their friends will be similar to them.
I use a joint iron/B12 supplement every couple days (I’m vegetarian). I started taking it a few years ago because I was very pale and low in energy, and it’s helped a fair bit on those counts.
I used to rate my happiness and productivity on 1-10 scales at the end of each day, and this was my experience too. I’ve since dropped that part of my diary routine, instead focusing on just writing the three best things and three things to improve/do more/do next. I still have an idea if I look back later of trends of happiness and productivity, since I can see some good things are better than others, but I don’t have that feeling of disappointment in myself every time I don’t make an 8+ for both.
That said, the only way I can analyze this is looking back over it, I can’t input it to make informative graphs or the like.
HabitRPG is completely open-source, and has very little actual staff (I think about 3 currently). Contributing to HabitRPG has more info (scroll down to ‘Coders: Web and Mobile’) - basically the philosophy is ‘if you want something changed, go in and change it’. I thought you might like the app in general, and by adding that feature be able to get everything out of it you do with your own app, while helping lots of other people at the same time.
Fair enough—it does require more testing, and if you’ve got one going that works for you that’s great :-)
Yep, although it hasn’t yet implemented losing health if you don’t meet it by a deadline—it’s on the list of improvements to come, though. @Florian_Dietz, if you were interested in using what HabitRPG already has and implementing that functionality there, I’m sure a lot of people would be very grateful!
Sounds similar to HabitRPG—missing out on daily/weekly habits there lose you ‘health’ and doing them/doing your to-dos/habits such as a certain amount of work you get experience, which lets you level up.
Never worked for them in particular, but my experience with such online tutoring businesses hasn’t been great: generally don’t get many hours, are expected to commit fully to being available at certain times every week (which when in uni, with tests etc. at unexpected times, isn’t too possible—might be possible for you in your situation) and they take a fair chunk of your earnings. On one occasion I put a lot of time into signing up, getting documents etc. to verify myself, and then never got a single student. On the other hand, signing up for services such as www.firsttutors.com has been great (not sure if this is international, I’ve been using the NZ site, but think it is). Basically it’s a repository of tutors, people come and leave messages for you to see if you’d be a good fit and if you have times you could both make it, and then you each pay a small one-off fee (usually <$20 for the tutor) for the website providing the interface and get eachother’s contact details. I’ve set up both online and in-person tutoring through this, online being about a fifth of all requests. The first year I used it I got about 3 or 4 students through it (each of whom I met for one or two hours a week and lasted on average ~6 months). Nowadays, with a few good reviews on there, I’ve put up my fees to double what they used to be and still get about 15 requests a year, each of which is good for about 2 hours tutoring a week—I don’t take them all, but I could. And the fee the website charges is nothing in comparison to the hours I get out of it, usually it’s less than an hour’s work to make it back.
Exactly my experience—it helps with making little decisions throughout the day and staying productive, but when it comes to ones I’m reluctant to make… no matter how many times the little people in my head go ‘this one!’ the issue isn’t cleared.
Yep, pretty much, it’s a rallying cry type of thing
An even more recent study has failed to replicate the glucose effect entirely, too: Lange, F., & Eggert, F. (2014). Sweet delusion. Glucose drinks fail to counteract ego depletion. Appetite, 75, 54-63 <-- This one also has an interesting survey of the methodological flaws in similar studies.
Also, there’s some evidence (still preliminary) that ego depletion effects decline with age: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026351 <-- free access paper if anyone wants to read it. It basically looks at a meta-analysis by Hagger done about 2010? I think, and shows a significantly higher effect for younger people (which, being psyc and reliant on college students most of the time, is most of them) - then conducted their own study and found the same (using groups of <25 vs. 40-65). Since 25 is approximately when the pre-frontal cortex is fully finished maturing, maybe the effect has something to do with that.
Also, in terms of the ‘out of willpower’ and giving up thing… several studies have shown that with sufficient incentive (money, being told the research will help develop Alzheimer’s therapies) the ego depletion effect goes away (but then comes back triple-fold on a third non-motivated task). Also, people tend to conserve willpower when they expect to need it later. So you don’t have to give up, it might just be a bit harder—but if a few dollars (literally what it was) can motivate someone out of it then you can probably motivate yourself out of it for anything important. This is where the muscle analogy comes into play, like an athlete resting for a big match then pushing through discomfort during it.
^Ref for the last paragraph: Muraven, M., Slessareva, E. (2003). Mechanisms of Self-Control Failure: Motivation and Limited Resources. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(7), 894-906
All in all, I’m not convinced one of those things is going on, because there’s no explanation there as to why they would happen more for a task that requires self-control than one that doesn’t. Most ego-depletion studies match up tasks to make them the same domain, often the same length and tediousness. Why would a task requiring more self-control give you more physical discomfort, hunger, thirst or indignation? The anxiety about willpower depletion I can get behind, but that’s only for people who know what they’re being tested on.
Cool, be good to have you there :-)
One of the ways of building intimacy or closeness, which is a key component of companionate love (the type you seem to be going for here, have a look at the research on passionate vs. companionate love if you’re interested) is self-disclosure that is responded to by one’s partner with warmth, understanding and supportiveness.
You can spend a lot of time doing things together without having this self-disclosure: to get it, you need to want to disclose/hear more about the other person, and preferably have dates etc. where you spend some time just talking about whatever, in private, about your pasts or your thoughts—things that might lead to self-disclosure.
So first step, set up these situations. Second step, talk about your past and your thoughts and try to be open—be trusting. Relate random conversations to things you hold close to you. Third step, if your partner opens up to you, make sure to respond supportively and engage with it, and not brush it off or turn the conversation to less close topics.
Which is not to say you should do this all the time, fun dates and silliness and dancing in a club way too loud to talk in are good too. But with any luck, adding a bit more of this in will help you feel that connection and intimacy.
I completed my statistics internship, and got strong all-around compliments from the audience on my presentation, and my adviser on my report.
I succeeded in being selected for a consulting job after a long interview/testing process, and taught myself how to do competitor research, to good feedback from my team.
I asked two people to be references (this doesn’t sound like a big one, but it was probably the hardest thing on this list for me—I’ve always felt really uncomfortable about asking for this) and they both said yes, they’d love to.
I integrated HabitRPG into my everyday life, and since doing so (about a week ago) have achieved all the daily habits I’d previously been inconsistently working on for months (including habits about when to turn screens off, when to go to bed and get up, exercise and other health things) at least 5⁄7 of the time, and have been feeling much more productive in general.
My stats tutee went from failing her course to getting 80% in her most recent test.
I’ll head in soon; will have internet there so if you get lost, feel free to PM me. Anyone is welcome to come, see you all there :-)
I’ve been reading about maximizers and satisficers, and I’m interested to see where LessWrong people fall on the scale. I predict it’ll be signficantly on the maximizer side of things.
A maximizer is someone who always tries to make the best choice possible, and as a result often takes a long time to make choices and feels regret for the choice they do make (‘could I have made a better one?‘). However, their choices tend to be judged as better, eg. maximizers tend to get jobs with higher incomes and better working conditions, but to be less happy with them anyway. A satisficer is someone who tries to make a ‘good enough’ choice—they tend to make choices faster and be happier with them, despite the choices being judged (generally) as worse than those of maximizers.
If you want, take this quiz
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Indeed, be good to have you there. I don’t think many of us will have attended one before, but if this goes well it will hopefully become a regular thing
Hmm… perhaps How to be Happy—I can bring along my positive psyc textbook to supplement it and it’s something everyone should be able to contribute to whether they’ve read the article or not. No need to stick too closely to it though, I think for the first meetup fairly free discussion could be more fun, to see what everyone’s interests are.
I’d guess it will go about 3 hours, but we’ll end when things naturally close, and if anyone needs to go earlier that’s fine.
You could use an intermediate step, like Charity Science’s fundraisers (I’m sure there are plenty of other places that allow you to do this if Christmas/Birthday/Event doesn’t fit your needs) so you can see how much is being donated. Then when you donate the whole lot to Givewell etc. at the end you can ask for a receipt/show it on your bank statement.