The lesson I learned most effectively from Go was to acknowledge mistakes; when I was a weak player one of my worst faults was being unwilling to admit to my opponent that they had outplayed me. This is particularly clear when compared to chess.
In chess, if you fall behind in material or tempo the correct thing (in my experience; I am a weak chess player) is almost always to see what you gained in exchange and try to exploit that. If you gained nothing in exchange and the loss was significant, your play is typically irrelevant because you lost. This encourages you to search for justifications for your moves: I lost that piece as part of this attack, or that sacrifice improved my position in this way, or so forth.
In contrast, if you are outplayed in Go the correct thing (in my experience; I am about 10k, which is slightly better than I am at chess but still quite weak) is almost always to recognize that you have been outplayed. My original problem was to reason, “If I cannot beat my opponent in this fight, then he is better than me” and then continue a lost fight, or perhaps to assume that the stones would eventually serve some other function (which they typically would not). Eventually I realized that a game of Go consists of many fights, and that you are severely handicapping yourself if you lose the game whenever one of them goes badly. Sometimes, even in deterministic games of perfect information, you will win most but not all fights. The only way I can now win games is by frequently recognizing that my previous moves were errors and abandoning whatever rationalization for those moves I may be tempted to construct.
The difficulty of internalizing this lesson leads me to suspect that I make the same mistake in my life. I am constantly tempted to justify my decisions; the temptation is even greater when I am forced to justify myself to people around me, and the only alternative is to explicitly admit that I made a mistake.
I am an undergraduate mathematician currently headed towards a life of doing theoretical computer science research. Several unrelated friends mentioned LW to me at one point or another in my life, so I read an arbitrary well-liked post every so often for a while. Eventually I concluded that visiting the site somewhat regularly would make me happy (although I have thought enough about how I think, and am easily arrogant enough, to doubt that I will become a better person or learn too much about myself) and so here I am.
I am an (almost) Bayesian utility maximizer when I manage to do what I think I should. My utility is the expected quality of a uniformly random instant of conscious experience (although less flagrantly ill-defined than suggested by such a summary). In practice I am fairly selfish and lazy, but also good at accepting unpalatable arguments.
I am interested mostly in solving problems whose solutions I think would reduce suffering significantly compared to their difficulty, but I also spend a little time thinking about more philosophical issues and questioning my current decision making procedure. I guess a more precise picture of my interests will emerge as I make more comments, if I do, and will be irrelevant, if I don’t.