PatrickDFarley
Connect to your future selves
Novelty is certainly nice! Hmm, to keep with this analogy of “your past/future are different people”—are there any people in your life whom you find it easier to take instruction from? Or whose preferences you take seriously, even when they differ from your own? What traits would make that person’s ideas matter to you, and does your past self demonstrate those traits?
Connect to your past selves
Thanks for sharing these! The ones that I’ve read, I really liked, which sets a good expectation for the ones I haven’t read.
From my own bookmarks, I’d like to share these:
Your four-dimensional body
The continuous tense is disappearing from your life
No that’s not my answer
But when you ask me to pick a number, aren’t I basically just generating a number onto a “scratchpad” so it’s in my “context”? How do we know I’m doing anything different from the reasoning model?
There are a lot of assumptions baked in here that I think Elon would contest. If you don’t agree on what the government can or should do, you’re not gonna conceive of government efficiency the same way
The tech bro ethos, and the end of my job
This has been my most popular post so far. I’m a little surprised because I’d thought this topic is pretty well trodden on LW when conceptualized as akrasia. What I’d most like to know is which part of this three-solutions model people found most interesting. I hope it’s the “Heroic recovery” (C) because that would fit a pattern I enjoy seeing, where woo-ish “postrationalist” ideas actually fit perfectly into the art of rationality when they’re explained in the right frame.
Anyway I still endorse everything here and I personally experience far fewer laziness death spirals than I used to.
Commentary on SSC’s In the Balance
Lol that would nail it, yeah
That’s a good point about time-to-sleep. I’m one of those lucky fall-asleep-in-5-minutes-anytime people, and it seems my method takes that for granted.
IME sleep inertia hits pretty hard, and I can drag myself out of bed and shower, but otherwise can’t really do any meaningful work for 45-60mins. So avoiding it is more important than saving just the 20 minutes of sleep
Wow, that’s quite a lot of variance for natural wake-ups. Are there any big external variables? Stress before bed, drinking, morning sounds, kids/partner activity in the morning?
Master your sleep cycles
You’re right, I’m assuming the reader belongs to a “real” tribe ie red or blue . I should’ve tweaked it for the LW crosspost
The non-tribal tribes
Great comment, and I will have to think more about this. Your examples do seem to support the utility of self-identity-based motivation.
I think maybe my statement “you can’t lie to yourself if you know it’s a lie” is forcing a frame where self-talk is either a genuine attempt at truth, or a lie. But with “this is easy for me because I’m a fighter” and similar statements, it seems they can be received by the mind in a different way—more like as self-fulfilling prophecy.
I guess it’s an open question for me then, where to use that kind of self-talk. On one end is the danger of becoming miserable in pursuit of an identity that was actually kind of arbitrary, and on the other end you miss out on maybe the most powerful kind of motivation.
Great post, and I love the pushups gimmick. This sounds like the generalist at their strongest / highest impact. Definitely something to aspire to