If any idiot ever tells you that life would be meaningless without death, Hyperion corporation recommends killing them.
--Borderlands 2
If any idiot ever tells you that life would be meaningless without death, Hyperion corporation recommends killing them.
--Borderlands 2
Spend more money/time on optimizing boring things you use a lot:
Shoes
socks/underwear
Mattress
Tailored clothes
Hygiene products that work well for you
Kitchen accessories (part of the reason you don’t cook healthy meals for yourself might be because your kitchen work flow sucks)
Ergonomic setup at computer
Learn to cook at least a handful of simple, cheap, fast meals. This will have more effect on your resolutions to “eat healthy” than temporary spurts of mega-motivation.
(also recognizing that spurts of motivation are temporary in general, do not rely on them for lasting change)
In a truly perverted twist, I now start doing things I’m supposed to as a means of avoiding setting a pomodoro.
everyone needs to stop being such a cunt about it.
“there are differences that are demarcated by ethnicity” and “it sucks when people suffer” seem orthogonal to me.
HI WE’RE AN INTERNET MEETUP GROUP!
The internet is low status due to the low barriers to entry. Mention higher status things than the internet.
Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford (Hey I’ve heard of Oxford)
Vinge (a published author many have heard of)
Center for Applied Rationality which does real things in real life with real people
Talk about cognitive science. Talk about economics. Talk about anything but the internet. LessWrong? Oh it’s just for coordinating all the interesting people who are interested in these interesting things.
The parent post shouldn’t have made you sad.
You don’t need to carry them in your head. Having a collection of recommendations for everyday tasks is highly valuable as the signal to noise ratio here will be through the roof compared to google. You might consider it a waste of time, but many of us do this kind of research when we decide to optimize some corner of our lives. Sharing it doesn’t take that much additional time and saves everyone else quite a bit of time. If lots of people do it we collectively save huge amounts of time.
I’ve thought a “shit your brain says” might be a good way of compactly presenting some cognitive biases.
Voting for a new CEO is dramatically more effective than the board trying to micromanage the current CEO with rules. Find a reasonable person and let them be flexibly reasonable.
It seems to me that, unless one is already a powerful person, the best thing one can do to gain optimization power is building relationships with people more powerful than oneself. To the extant that this easily trumps the vast majority of other failings (epistemic rationality wise) as discussed on LW. So why aren’t we discussing how to do better at this regularly? A couple explanations immediately leap to mind:
Not a core competency of the sort of people LW attracts.
Rewards not as immediate as the sort of epiphany porn that some of LW generates.
Ugh fields. Especially in regard to things that are considered manipulative when reasoned about explicitly, even though we all do them all the time anyway.
Timeless decision theory: If you choose not to improve now, you’ll choose not to improve in all similar circumstances. You certainly don’t want to be trying to make dietary and exercise changes at the age of 65 trying to undo decades of a sedentary lifestyle. Future you will always wish that they had started earlier.
Most things in general are broken to a degree that the average reasonable person would find completely shocking. There are absolutely comic book levels of incompetence, grift, discrimination, and vice, within most bureaucratic organizations if you know where to look.
I don’t think these are quite in the original spirit of the thread but seem related to several of the discussions that developed. I would like to have discussions about all of these points merely in the hope that I can be convinced to update away from them.
Things I REALLY hope aren’t true and suspect might be. Honestly don’t read this if you’re already depressed right now.
Human beings WANT maximally brutal leaders up to the limit of being able to plausibly signal that they don’t want maximally brutal leaders.
People can be tortured to create a lower set point on the hedonic treadmill. This allows for far more overall utility.
Male/female sexual relationships are fundamentally adversarial due to the differences in dominant mating strategies.
There is a large class of violent people for whom no current treatment is available who simply need to be put down.
Humans don’t care about torture.
We could create a virtual utopia fairly trivially by investing in lucid dream research but nobody actually cares because:
Anyone with the ability to make the world better almost by definition has a vested stake in the current fucked up one.
P.S. throium reactors. God damn it humans.
Over the last year I have become dramatically better at instilling habits in myself. I posit two main reasons for this. The first is understanding the habit formation process, as summarized by Kaj Sotala here. The second is learning to create plans that are more robust against random failure. I used to model myself as a coherent agent with some set amount of willpower to expend on the various things I found unpleasant. More recently, I model myself as a bunch of sub-agents with different goals. The subagent that tends to make plans for what I’m going to do this week is NOT the same sub-agent that will actually have to do these things. So now I make plans that can take into account a low motivation sub-agent being in charge. Sometimes this is as simple as a part of your plan that says “IF you don’t want to go to the gym THEN you will go to the gym anyway.” Yes, seriously. Sometimes it is making the activation costs of a particular action easier by removing friction from your process. Sometimes it is modeling my future self as an idiot who can’t stop eating cookies and doing things like preemptively throwing cookies away.
How would I actually go about forming a new habit? Let’s use flossing as an example. Trying to remember to floss after I brushed didn’t work. At all. So I had to start strategizing. My sub-agents didn’t have sufficient motivation to care. So I started reading up on the benefits of flossing and looking at images of flossed vs unflossed surfaces in a mouth. This created enough of an emotional connection that I started feeling like I really needed to floss. But I still forgot. Remembering to floss after I brushed was still not working, so I changed it. I put the floss in my room. That way it was available over a much longer period of time in the evening. IF I forgot to floss THEN I would floss in the morning. I thought about positive things while flossing, longevity and building effective habits and having clean teeth. After a few weeks, flossing was finally a habit. I didn’t have to think about it anymore and was able to start working on a new habit.
Type 4 problems have a wrinkle I’ve found interesting/useful once I identified it. Successfully executing on the strategy mentioned for Type 4 requires what I call self-trust. That is, the system breaks down if you form these agreements with yourself and then have a pattern of breaking them. This can happen regardless of the content of the conversation between System 1 and 2 you have at the time. It is not automatic to ask yourself a question like “what is my track record with this sort of agreement” and much more common to just model your future self as being more virtuous than your present self. Fortunately, I think this problem is amenable to a general counter-strategy that had positive spillover effects elsewhere in my life. Building self-trust can be done with offline training.
For those not familiar with the technique: Let’s say you want to stop pressing the snooze button on your alarm clock, but like clockwork every morning you do. Instead of trying to train in the actual scenario you need the skill in you try training in an artificial situation. You lie down, set your alarm and practice getting up as soon as it goes off. You do this multiple times per training session until you have built a mental circuit for “getting up when alarm goes off.” If all goes well you then find online execution easier.
So to circle back to building self-trust. You practice lots of pre-commitments in low stakes situations and make sure to reward yourself a lot (could just be internal rewards) when you succeed and don’t punish yourself when you fail. You are building the mental circuits associated with “I do what I say I will do.” After sufficient practice many things start becoming easier. The biggest spillover effect for me was that my internal selves started getting along much better when I could tell a sub-agent that I would attend to their needs later and have them actually believe it and calm down about the current situation. Eventually sub-agents stopped being so “grabby” about my attention.
BTW can we get Anna a time turner so she can post more? This is an excellent post.
Over the last few years I’ve found that
1) I notice this problem in myself and others more and more
2) Reminding myself of it helps keep my identity small
3) People strongly resist not doing it, people are mistrustful of experts
My formulation: Oh, so you’ve overturned decades of investigation by professionals with your 30 seconds of poorly worded thoughts, watchout we have a badass over here. (note: I only use one this caustic on myself)
OTOH: there are areas where a cursory investigation reveals that no one has been doing much rigorous work and it’s easy to disregard established opinion.
Get in the habit of not turning off alarms unless you’re doing the thing you’re supposed to do. This sounds impossible for some people I know. I used to be one of those people that would set 10 snoozes. But simply doing what the alarm says immediately IS a trainable skill. Every time you set the snooze you’re reinforcing setting the snooze.
A major mental change that allowed me to own less things was someone mentioning “treat craigslist as free storage.” The idea being that if you ever really need X you can get it fairly easily. But this extends to retail goods as well. I now keep in mind that everything that costs<(.1)(paycheck) is already mine and I only go pick it up if I really, actually, need it.