A disorder would be a description of what the person is reporting, since you can’t scan their brain to establish the diagnosis. An important problem with this approach is that we don’t know whether there’s an impaired processing of the social necessity called self, or whether the person just perceives or describes normal processing differently, or whether they label a different process with the word self than people normally do.
memoridem
It’s not just exploitation by elders in medicine though. Many young doctors work ridiculous hours by choice, and their more reasonable colleagues suffer as a consequence.
It’s terrible that the expertise of doctors should make them fully acknowledge the dangers of sleep deprivation for example, yet some of them wilfully ignore the facts.
Pure signal? Some people actually like their jobs, and perhaps the extra income too.
ETA: are people expected to work extra hours for free in the US?
Could you be a bit more specific about the positive effect?
There are individual differences in metabolism rates of all drugs, so you might want to try some in the 3-5 hour range to see how they affect you. If tolerance worries you consider cycling some drugs or taking days off.
Nicotine could increase the clearance of caffeine as much as 50 %, you could use this to your advantage.
Consider raising your alertness nonpharmacologically, like exercise or cold showers for example. Consider working in an upright position.
In the other comment you said you have problems with sleep. There are several options to improve that side too, so that you might tolerate the stimulants better. This of course makes no sense if the problem doesn’t lie in your waking hours. Melatonin you can probably get OTC. The nervousness induced by stimulants could also be dampened in several ways.
Pharmacokinetics (half-life and other variables) of drugs and their different delivery methods are public knowledge, there are individual differences in metabolism of course.
When it comes to designing drugs there are quite a few things that are done in the delivery mechanism of the drug that can effect half-life.
For most drugs the elimination half-life is so long that a faster route of administration makes minor difference. For caffeine for example it’s about 4.5 hours. You can shorten the absorption from < 1 hour to seconds but that probably won’t matter much in this case.
You can make the absorption slower in a way that makes a difference however, for example there are several timed release versions of methylphenidate.
Have you tried any drugs to fall asleep faster when using stimulants in the evening?
I see, my bad. It’s easy to lose the context by reading recent comments.
That made the picture a lot clearer, thanks. Makes those income figures relevant to me seem a lot less enviable.
Isn’t there anything you already know but wouldn’t like to forget? SRS is for keeping your precious memory storage, not necessarily for learning new stuff. There are probably a lot of things that wouldn’t even cross your mind to google if they were erased by time. Googling could also waste time compared to storing memories if you have to do it often enough (roughly 5 minutes in your lifetime per fact).
What other skills work nicely with spaced repetition?
In my experience anything you can write into brief flashcards. Some simple facts can work as handles for broader concepts once you’ve learned them. You could even record triggers for episodic memories that are important to you.
You could argue the opposite: if you expose yourself indiscriminately to people who don’t share your values, they’ll have a better chance to change them. I think I operate under this assumption. Most people wear some kinds of masks in various situations, and I think some people who insist they shouldn’t just lack basic skills in deception and lie detection. I’m not implying people are more malicious than some people expect, I’m implying deception is generally thought of as a lesser evil than some people think.
If we talk about really hacking your preferences on some deep level, I agree with the danger of unintentionally becoming someone else.
I hadn’t considered trying to counteract the nervousness induced by stimulants. I’ll have to look into various relaxation techniques.
You can do this pharmacologically too, with beta blockers for example. Consider asking your doctor about it.
Have you tried caffeine naps i.e. take a caffeine pill then start taking a nap? The caffeine absorbs while you sleep so when you wake up you could be more alert right away. This could also prevent oversleeping.
In the mornings I sometimes take a few caffeine pills after the alarm and continue sleeping until I wake up spontaneously when the effect peaks. Another way that works for me to increase morning alertness is to time some bright lamps to turn on an hour or so before wake up time.
If everyone was immortal and healthy by default, do you think it would even occur to you suggest death as a harmless alternative?
If someone tried to convince you that a 50 year lifespan is better than what we have now, what would be your reaction? Don’t you find it interesting that your intuitions support a very narrow optimum that just happens to be what you already have?
Do you argue that “death is just the end of your conscious experience” in the case of anyone who dies prematurely? Try to imagine actual deaths in real life and their outcomes.
Have you read this fable by Bostrom?
What about religious people who take vows of celibacy?
Consider that many of them probably fail and some of them probably take the vow after having children. Those who don’t are so rare you might want to consider them defective from the perspective of propagation of genes. People have genetically inherited diseases too.
I think people care more about self-preservation than reproduction
It’s reasonable to assume that the value of self-preservation declines with age and the number of children. Self-preservation in most instances seems to be instrumental to reproduction.
Are you sure you didn’t think you were replying to someone else? You made a lot of false assumptions about my mindstate.
I’d suggest death is a harmless alternative
So what has made you decide to live so far?
Also, I notice you are conflating non-healthyness and mortality
I combined two situations because I thought that would be more acceptable to you. That doesn’t mean I’m conflating them. I do think there are good deaths and bad immortalities.
Most arguments for which exact lifespan is better would seem arbitrary to me.
If I couldn’t think of any interesting long term goals, I would have to agree. If that’s not how you mean it, then I don’t understand what you mean by arbitrary.
Though it is also your intuition, and intuition generally, that opposes (and fears?) death so intensely
It’s a value, and yes it’s programmed by the blind idiot god called evolution, but my core values don’t go away if I just think about them hard enough and why should they?
This death-avoidance intuition exists so that we will be best equipped as vehicles for the replicators we carry. That is all is was designed for
Why exactly does it matter why the value is there? It wasn’t designed for anything or by anything. It just is, and the genes were just selected for and thus they are. Genes have goals no more than they can plan and even if they did I have no reason to privilege them. Evolution is an unplanned process not optimizing anything in particular, how could it possibly glitch and why should I care?
“stay alive at any cost” thinking
Not my thinking.
Can you imagine any scenario, say, a billion years into your life, when you might opt for permanently switching off your consciousness
Any situation where my future could be expected to be net negative. Of course I can’t imagine such a scenario specificly, as I can’t reliably imagine what life is like even 20 years from now, so the extra years add nothing to the scenario. I can think of several situations that would make me end my life right now or a few years from now.
Does it matter really? From my perspective Tim proposes an economical tool for thinking about a system’s goals, but probably won’t lead to much insight and will cause bias compared to more labor intensive methods.
I think this post could clear most of your confusion about the connection between your genes and your goals.
I find the dogmatic-ish acceptance of certain ideas around here reminds me of religion
Did you actually look at the statistics? Whatever dogma you’re seeing isn’t there. It’s more likely you’re thinking some people you’ve had discussions with here are more representative of LW than they actually are.
I’m alive. It is my default state.
Stop eating. Let’s see how default it is.
They have zero to do with one another and should not be combined in this discussion.
If that’s how you want to have your definitions, I can live with that.
Please give me an example of a long term goal that would require 10 Billion years? How about 1 Billion? 1 Million?
No need for that. Just always have plans for tomorrow.
It does affect me quite a bit to know why my instincts and drives exist. Maybe it does nothing for you. Okay. That is interesting.
Why/how they exist and what for are different things. Conflating the two leads just to confusion in this case, because the what for doesn’t exist.
You can migitate the problem by making the investment gradually.