this is why a community that shares your values is so important. I mean a physical community and not just a virtual one. Having others there to point out low hanging fruit and then positively reinforcing your attempts to reach out and grasp it is essential.
I agree. Actually, I do have at least two close friends who I would consider “very rational,” but we have known each other for so long that we can be blind even to one another’s irrationalities. You get used to your friends in the same way you get used to yourself. I think you need not just a community, you also need to meet new people who can look at things from new angles.
All this programming exercise really did was enable me to see various aspects of my life on paper, in a clinical and detached fashion, as if I were looking at the life of a stranger. From that perspective, what I needed to do seemed obvious, just as the solutions to other people’s problems are usually more obvious than the solutions to our own problems.
this is why a community that shares your values is so important. I mean a physical community and not just a virtual one. Having others there to point out low hanging fruit and then positively reinforcing your attempts to reach out and grasp it is essential.
There should be a LessWrong Seastead.
I agree. Actually, I do have at least two close friends who I would consider “very rational,” but we have known each other for so long that we can be blind even to one another’s irrationalities. You get used to your friends in the same way you get used to yourself. I think you need not just a community, you also need to meet new people who can look at things from new angles.
All this programming exercise really did was enable me to see various aspects of my life on paper, in a clinical and detached fashion, as if I were looking at the life of a stranger. From that perspective, what I needed to do seemed obvious, just as the solutions to other people’s problems are usually more obvious than the solutions to our own problems.