Raj Thimmiah
What ended up happening to this? seems like an interesting project though site doesn’t load now unfortunately
Just tried the consequences thing and it’s helpful and different from standard pros/cons as you said. I think I internalized from somewhere that lists and process of elimination don’t work which now looks clearly wrong and I want to get into the habit of using more.
make a list of possible consequence-types and your outcome preferences for each type. Maybe rank those preferences.
missed this part on first read, will try that
okay, that was useful and made choice more certain. Thanks for the suggestion.
Do you have a blog? Maybe consider turning this into a blog post, in line with the idea of generalizing instances of problems to benefit more people
[Question] How do you deal with decision paralysis?
Have any of you made an effort to apply expected utility theory to all the things you do? If so, how did you find it?
I’m guessing there are constraints that make routine application difficult but it seems like you could take those into account too
Okay nice, I think this answers half my question: can I do things that make a difference? Where answers seems to be: just think about it, there isn’t a black magic answer
though I still want to get a better idea of what makes GDP/income/wealth of a nation increase
Something that’s bothered me for a while is: how is wealth created and value added to society? If I start a software company which marginally makes some people’s lives better, does this actually contribute to society? How zero sum are our efforts?
I know the answer to this is somewhere in economics but I’m not really sure where and the 1 course I took on macro wasn’t really enough to answer this for me.Any recommendations/people willing to talk me through this?
definition on tag already helping a ton:
Mistake theorists think problems in society are caused by people being bad at achieving common goals.
Conflict theorists think problems in society are caused by adversaries with incompatible goals.
Thanks for pointing me to those, will give them a read!
https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/?ep=028 listened to this episode of the clearer thinking podcast with michael vassar. Mistake theory and conflict theory get thrown around a lot but I don’t really get what they are nor how to figure out what the are. I’m not interested in in depth learning on them, does anyone have suggestions on concise summaries/sources to get a good enough idea of what they are?
I’ve put off making a post on it for a while but something I’ve wanted to offer to anyone interested is free teaching to learn SuperMemo and incremental reading.
A big part of why I put it off is that it’s a pain to explain. Instead of explaining it, I’ll give a top level overview and a link to a video that explains it in more detail.
tl;dr: with SuperMemo/incremental reading, you can manage reading hundreds of articles in parallel (incrementally) without going insane, with long-term retention using spaced repetition. It’s a lot of fun, seriously. Unlike say Anki where you slog through reps, incremental reading intersperses learning making it highly novel and not monotonous.
If you want to try it, check out supermemo.wiki/start, download SuperMemo 18 here (no, you don’t want supermemo.com) and schedule a call with me (I’ve taught 30+ people over the last year, in ~1 hour can get you far enough to be able to start using it enjoyably). Possibly also join the supermemo discord server to ask questions.
FAQ:
Q: I’m on mac/linux/not windows what do I do?
A: Scroll down to mac and linux section here.
Q: SuperMemo UI is terrible!
A: yes. true. at some point though you stop caring and the lack of decent alternatives + fun will pull you through. Unless it doesn’t, in which case you could just not use it. Though I think giving it a try for at least a week is worth it.
Q: if it’s so great why does no one use it?
A: it’s a big pain to start using. it took me 5 months to start incremental reading after buying SM because I couldn’t figure out the documentation. That’s why I’m offering to teach anyone interested: I can get you to being able to use it fine after an hour.
While it’s still smallish, it’s much bigger than it was a year ago with around ~1,200 people on the SM discord server (and some amount of rat adjacent people).
If you have other questions feel free to ask. If you have insane expectations of very quick returns, probably don’t try it. I’ve taught a lot of people and the people who do consistently worst are people with high expectations and no patience for both getting better at learning/getting used to SuperMemo itself. If you don’t have insane expectations, try it and potentially get easy 10%+ long-term boost to life (or at least that’s conservatively what I’ve found. though there are massive benefits for me since ADHD renders me practically incapable of normal modes of declarative learning)
thanks for reading. seriously.
You able to link to it now?
I’ll keep an eye out for any US evening events then, completely understandable to focus on americas/europe since most people there
Unfortunately this is a bit too early for me at 4 am japan time but I’d be interested in similar future events. What’s a good way to be alerted on future discussion events?
You might find some of the writings on supermemo.guru regarding sleep interesting.
SuperMemo is a spaced repetition app (it was the very first in fact) that has a thing called sleepchart built in. It lets you both track sleep for finding interesting patterns alongside getting altertness/cogniti8ve data from correlation of say hour of day vs. average grades:
There are a bunch of confounders (they could be eliminated were I more rigorous) but I think it’s interesting and even without SRS data I get some useful data:
Basically red line is how long sleep episodes are, blue line is how frequent they are around that time. You can see there’s a peak around 6 hours from waking and around 16⁄17 hours from waking. The green line shows breakeven (if I sleep at that time, for the amount of hours on the left, it’ll add up to 24).
It’s probably really complicated looking but if you want to try it let me know and i’m happy to show you how. Doesn’t take long to learn and takes very little time to add track in a new sleep episode.
(this is from my own data)
Perhaps the proper way to think about this is that if you keep following your plans for ten days, and then fail on one day, those ten days still did something useful, and they also helped to establish a habit… not perfectly, but better than when you started from zero. That is, instead of feeling disappointed, you should focus on the fact that the second start will probably be easier than the first one (unless you needlessly make it difficult for yourself by overly focusing on the failure).
Huh. I forgot this. Over time, I internalized the opposite: if I keep failing to keep up habits, it’ll be harder to get the habit going the next time. But my habits are lasting much longer than they used to and instead of downward spiral, I’m going on an upward one.
focus on the fact that your average day in 2021 is quite productive, and that whatever you did once, you can do again
I used to think this: I had clear time I was productive and I could envision getting back to it. Current system might not be perfect but it is definitely much clearer that I can get back to current state, enjoyably.
One thing you alluded to is that breaks are good. I’ve generally found this confusing because I generally enjoy what I’m doing and aside from tasklists, everything else I’d be happy doing every day. But I checked out some of the posts you linked and they were interesting. I’m gonna go through this meaningful rest post with a friend .
Thanks for the comment
I think you can separate out responses to ‘school is not good’ to:
-school is inherently useful
-school is hard to replace and serves a function (even if not perfect) in current equilibriumI strongly recommend reading:
-The Case Against Education (I liked this summary by Zvi)
-Free to Learn by Peter Gray (unfortunately I don’t know a good summary but shouldn’t be hard to find one)Case against education basically demolishes idea that we go to school for inherent value rather than signaling.
Free to learn demolishes idea that there aren’t good alternatives (you can naggle about specifics of implementation but I think it makes a decent enough case for 80% of things)
Didn’t realize you were the author of that post, read it a few days ago!
So what do all 5 of these oscillation patterns have in common? A lack of congruency. The tendency to ignore some needs in order to focus on others. A sense of inner conflict, instead of alignment.
In each and every case, the solution involves welcoming and acknowledging all parts of yourself, before plotting a way forward. Transitioning from forcing yourself to choosing what you want to do.
Honestly, I could do another 100 tweets on what this looks like in each case. The delicate dance of beliefs, emotions, strategies, behaviors, and tools that can be combined to internalize a new way of being.
But the start is just self acknowledgement. Letting all your feelings, values, desires in, and going from there.
This seems accurate and like my current equilibrium is great because I got lucky enough to have done a few things that ended up aligning things that previously were not aligned without me realizing it.
Do you have a way that you manually worked out your incongruencies and made them congruent? I think it might be useful if you added a hammertime style exercise for practical implementation since idea seems solid but it still seems hard to practice directly.
In general, I like to use the stages of change model when trying to make a change. The research basically says that if people try to change when they’re ready to change, they’ll do it the first time, but if they try to change before they’re ready, it will take multiple attempts.
Oh MAN this makes too much sense. The stuff that’s working now, I’ve tried for like a year plus with incomplete success but now it’s just working, without having to apply extra effort. Could you give a source for this?
Learning to forgive yourself is HUGE here. Research says that people who forgive themselves for procrastinating are less likely to procrastinate in the future, and I’m pretty sure this generalizes. Expect adjustments and forgive yourself for needing to make them.
Any chance I could bother you for source on this? I’d like to read more on it, also seems cool as hell.
I’ve vaguely moved towards this with issue of forgiveness/not forgiveness moving more towards: oh no, have I screwed myself into a downward spiral?? Which is mainly just because I’m not confident yet in my ability to recover from disruptions (not that I have strong evidence of it being a big problem this year but more based on outside view and past data).
MurphyJitsu is a great tool to use here. There’s a bunch of good exanations on LW, but the basic tool is to imagine you failed, ask yourself why, then patch your approach until it’s very surprising that you failed.
Thanks, forgot about this. Will try out the plan-bot
I agree that generally a single miss is alright as long as I get back on track. I’m mainly just worried though about exactly that: how do I make sure I actually start again? Or at least reflect and iterate on whatever system failed?
Right now, I’m generally okay, I’m alright with a miss or two (did nothing over weekend because of Unsong but have been fine today) but I’m thinking more about long-term future me
For those that don’t know it exists, r/slavelabour (not literal slave labour) is a great place to outsource things (https://www.reddit.com/r/slavelabour).
I’ve gotten a virtual assistant through it that has saved me massive amounts of time and sanity (at around 5$ per hour at start and 7$ per hour now with base rate of 5$ per week)
I’ve also gotten scripts made and a translation to Japanese done for my friends thesis
Bountied rationality (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1781724435404945/) also exists but is much more expensive since less efficient market with fewer people clustered in countries with higher wages.
if anyone has a thing they’re thinking of posting there lemme know and I can probably give advice. If you’re interested in getting a virtual assistant, I can point you to the post I made and how you could try to get one too (I offered 5$/hr 4 hours a week and got 20 literally applicants)