Something’s gone terribly wrong with some of your images, you’ve got two-page-long URLs in there (it looks like some nifty way of encoding image data in HTML which failed to work in my browser). You can host images directly on LW, the option is available from the article editor.
Is that better? Sorry, I knew something fishy was going on when I posted it—any time I edited the OP, my graph went away, but I wasn’t showing any problems with the final version in Nightly. When I opened it in Chrome and IE, it had the missing-image-red-X thing twice, and I deleted those.
Since 9/27/2011, I have read up until On Expressing Your Concerns. This is the 204th post. I was previously at the 185th post, Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs which means in the past 6 days I have read 19 posts. This is slightly below my desired average of four posts per day, but I was out of town without internet access for a couple of days this week, which to me serves as an acceptable excuse for being approximately one day behind.
Do you have any sort of rule to determine whether or not your acceptance of excuses is acceptable?
(Said somewhat humorously, but standard advice from things like NaNoWriMo is that excuses have a tendency to spiral if you don’t have a hard and fast limit for them. It’s typical for people to think that they can double down and do better later, which is a manifestation of the planning fallacy, and so it’s typically better to set a goal of, say, 5 posts a day so that when you do only read 3 a day for a week, you’re eating the buffer you made rather than going into debt.)
No, I really don’t, but if you have suggestions, I’ll take them. As I said in the OP, my rate tends to be very inconsistent, and I will read for long periods at a time, perhaps twenty posts or more, and then not read for a week.
Where are these numbers from? I was playing around with the numbers, and there are a few small oddities that I noticed. Are these just your own intuitive guesses at probabilities, or did you derive them in some mathematical way?
They’re completely arbitrary. They’re my best guesses as to what the probabilities are. I knew it would be generally sigmoidal, rapidly declining after I got to 2n posts, where n was the number I had already read.
One problem with this that I am already noticing is that I will feel less let down with myself if I admit that I have assigned a probability of (which I have) .25 to actually meeting my goal. I hope this will not be a significant detracting factor.
In my experience, this is a very legitimate concern. What you might want to do instead is set sub-goals: reach 200 posts by Saturday, 230 by the Saturday after that, etc. That way, you’re giving yourself the chance to see now whether 4 posts per day is too much to expect yourself to handle, while at the same time making progress toward your big goal. And if you do find that that rate is too high, you can give yourself a chance to adjust your goal without just excusing yourself in advance for failing to achieve it.
I also suggest looking for high-rated posts about 10%, 20%, 30% etc. of the way from here to the end of the list, and writing their titles down as milestones. That way, when you reach those posts you’ll get a nice reminder that you’re making progress.
Well the dates are really the best reminder of progress. I can see I’m in a new month, or a new year, etc. Beside that, there’s the list of posts I linked to.
Since 10/21/2011 I have read up until Empty Labels. This is the 258th post. I was previously at the 240th post, Trust in Bayes, and was 40 posts behind at that point. This means that in the past three days, I have read 18 posts, which puts me six posts fewer behind than I was previously, so I am now only 34 posts behind where I originally intended to be.
As an addendum, I no longer intend (nor have I been doing so) to update weekly, as I originally set out. Given that I read in clusters, and this is highly unlikely to change (I read all 18 of these posts in the last two hours) it makes more sense to update each time I read a cluster. So you may also assume that given no updates, I have not made significant progress since my last post.
An interesting side effect of this project has been to notice more exactly how I procrastinate, (Eddie) which has always been a problem for me. Being so far behind discourages me from working on catching up, because doing so is an acknowledgement of how far behind I am already, and I am very much in denial of that.
Since 10/3/2011, I have read up until Trust in Bayes. This is the 240th post. I was previously at the 204th post, On Expressing Your Concerns and was four posts behind at that point. I have done almost all of my reading in the past two or three days, after attempting to catch up (and I have avoided doing the math to see exactly how far behind I am so far, since I know that doing so would discourage me from writing this post) from a very busy two weeks. But having said, that, having read 36 posts in the last 18 days puts me about 40 posts behind in total (ugh), counting how far behind I was previously. Even worse, in catching up this far, I was significantly aided by a series of posts that I had already read, although I expect this to happen relatively frequently as I proceed. If I manage to make the same progress I have over the past few days, however, I will be caught up relatively quickly.
Something’s gone terribly wrong with some of your images, you’ve got two-page-long URLs in there (it looks like some nifty way of encoding image data in HTML which failed to work in my browser). You can host images directly on LW, the option is available from the article editor.
Is that better? Sorry, I knew something fishy was going on when I posted it—any time I edited the OP, my graph went away, but I wasn’t showing any problems with the final version in Nightly. When I opened it in Chrome and IE, it had the missing-image-red-X thing twice, and I deleted those.
Since 9/27/2011, I have read up until On Expressing Your Concerns. This is the 204th post. I was previously at the 185th post, Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs which means in the past 6 days I have read 19 posts. This is slightly below my desired average of four posts per day, but I was out of town without internet access for a couple of days this week, which to me serves as an acceptable excuse for being approximately one day behind.
Do you have any sort of rule to determine whether or not your acceptance of excuses is acceptable?
(Said somewhat humorously, but standard advice from things like NaNoWriMo is that excuses have a tendency to spiral if you don’t have a hard and fast limit for them. It’s typical for people to think that they can double down and do better later, which is a manifestation of the planning fallacy, and so it’s typically better to set a goal of, say, 5 posts a day so that when you do only read 3 a day for a week, you’re eating the buffer you made rather than going into debt.)
No, I really don’t, but if you have suggestions, I’ll take them. As I said in the OP, my rate tends to be very inconsistent, and I will read for long periods at a time, perhaps twenty posts or more, and then not read for a week.
Where are these numbers from? I was playing around with the numbers, and there are a few small oddities that I noticed. Are these just your own intuitive guesses at probabilities, or did you derive them in some mathematical way?
They’re completely arbitrary. They’re my best guesses as to what the probabilities are. I knew it would be generally sigmoidal, rapidly declining after I got to 2n posts, where n was the number I had already read.
In my experience, this is a very legitimate concern. What you might want to do instead is set sub-goals: reach 200 posts by Saturday, 230 by the Saturday after that, etc. That way, you’re giving yourself the chance to see now whether 4 posts per day is too much to expect yourself to handle, while at the same time making progress toward your big goal. And if you do find that that rate is too high, you can give yourself a chance to adjust your goal without just excusing yourself in advance for failing to achieve it.
I also suggest looking for high-rated posts about 10%, 20%, 30% etc. of the way from here to the end of the list, and writing their titles down as milestones. That way, when you reach those posts you’ll get a nice reminder that you’re making progress.
Well the dates are really the best reminder of progress. I can see I’m in a new month, or a new year, etc. Beside that, there’s the list of posts I linked to.
Since 10/21/2011 I have read up until Empty Labels. This is the 258th post. I was previously at the 240th post, Trust in Bayes, and was 40 posts behind at that point. This means that in the past three days, I have read 18 posts, which puts me six posts fewer behind than I was previously, so I am now only 34 posts behind where I originally intended to be.
As an addendum, I no longer intend (nor have I been doing so) to update weekly, as I originally set out. Given that I read in clusters, and this is highly unlikely to change (I read all 18 of these posts in the last two hours) it makes more sense to update each time I read a cluster. So you may also assume that given no updates, I have not made significant progress since my last post.
An interesting side effect of this project has been to notice more exactly how I procrastinate, (Eddie) which has always been a problem for me. Being so far behind discourages me from working on catching up, because doing so is an acknowledgement of how far behind I am already, and I am very much in denial of that.
Since 10/3/2011, I have read up until Trust in Bayes. This is the 240th post. I was previously at the 204th post, On Expressing Your Concerns and was four posts behind at that point. I have done almost all of my reading in the past two or three days, after attempting to catch up (and I have avoided doing the math to see exactly how far behind I am so far, since I know that doing so would discourage me from writing this post) from a very busy two weeks. But having said, that, having read 36 posts in the last 18 days puts me about 40 posts behind in total (ugh), counting how far behind I was previously. Even worse, in catching up this far, I was significantly aided by a series of posts that I had already read, although I expect this to happen relatively frequently as I proceed. If I manage to make the same progress I have over the past few days, however, I will be caught up relatively quickly.