PatrickDFarley
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?
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:
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
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.
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?
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
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.
I agree, but I’d lump all of that into “Analyze the circumstances that caused it”. Maybe I should’ve included more external examples like these
This method is interesting to me and I’d like to get into it someday. Personally I keep finding that whenever I decline to write something down, that one thing will come back to bite me a few days later (because I’d forgotten it). Do you find that you’re able to mentally keep track of things better than before, even if they’re just vaguely in the back of your mind?
Why pay mind to what’s correlated with being right, when you have the option of just seeing who’s right?
I’m arguing that being right is the same as “holding greater predictive power”, so any conversation that’s not geared toward “what’s the difference in our predictions?” is not about being right, but rather about something else, like “Do I fit the profile of someone who would be right” / “Am I generally intelligent” / “Am I arguing in good faith” etc.
These things are indeed correlated with being right, but aren’t you risking Goodharting? What does it really mean to “be right” about things? If you’re native to LessWrong you’ll probably answer something like, “to accurately anticipate future sensory experiences”. Isn’t that all you need? Find an opportunity for you and your friend to predict measurably different futures, then see who wins. All the rest is distraction.
And if you predict all the same things, then you have no real disagreement, just semantic differences
Fun to do with names. Patrick—English version of a Latin name, Patricius, which means “noble”, referring to the Roman nobility, which was originally composed of the paterfamiliae, the heads of large families. From pater (father), which is Latin but goes back to proto-indo-european. From proto-indo-european pah which means “to protect/shepherd”
Is this an epistemology?
I have experiences, and some interpretations of those experiences allow me to predict future experiences.
I didn’t say it was the answer to everything. The original phrasing was “more truthful.”
These are tautologies. What is the point you’re getting at?
Great post, and I love the pushups gimmick. This sounds like the generalist at their strongest / highest impact. Definitely something to aspire to