I have this huge text file that lists all kinds of activities, rules, problems that need to be solved and things I want to accomplish etc.
There is a category of activities that’s labeled ‘necessary’. One of those activities in the necessary category is ‘having fun’ which links to another category of things I labeled ‘beautiful’. The activities in the ‘beautiful’ category depend on the the item ‘having fun’ in the ‘necessary’ category. And ‘having fun’ is called whether I want. Yes, you read that correctly, when I want it. Because after countless burnouts that made me to want to abandon any rational behavior I noticed that it just doesn’t work not to do what I want when I want it. So I just do it and hope for the best. Most of the time I can quickly return to follow activities that I deem important on a more reflective level.
And regarding the rules, here is how the rules and heuristics section starts, followed by about a hundred other items:
Rules and Heuristics
// Priority (most important).
Doing my best → Reflective Equilibrium of Level #1,2,3,4
Level 1: Rationality (doing the right thing (conscious, reflective high-level cognition)).
Level 2: Instinct, intuition and gut feeling (doing my best (emotionally)).
Level 3: Satisfaction of elementary needs (doing what needs to be done because its necessary (this includes having fun); recognize what you can cope with, recognize your limits;).
Level 4: Doing what I want based on naive introspection.
...
The list of rules continues with items like ‘concentrate on important things and ignore everything under a certain threshold’ or ‘ask yourself what’s the best you can do right now’...
Do you have more examples? Have you burned out?
What’s mainly pushing me towards the risk of burning out are problems loosely associated with expected utility maximization. I always had those problems long before I knew what ‘rationality’ even means. Most of those problems seem to be computationally and conceptually intractable. At least for me.
It simply seems impossible to even decide when it is adequate to use computationally expensive decision procedures and when to trust my intuition. If I think too much about that, e.g. if it is worth it to go out or play a game or if it is either too risky or other actions have a higher expected utility, I am on the road towards a burnout.
I can really empathize with the last two paragraphs—I tend to not emotionally feel so well when I’m trying to optimize hard, because I won’t know for a while whether I’m optimizing hard enough. Maybe this is where the whole ‘goals’ thing comes in—it seems to be setting up a feeling of ‘I will be satisfied if I achieve X’, where X is something that you know whether you accomplished.
I’m interested in the structure of your file, as well as the contents of your ‘Rules and Heuristics’ section—can you give any more detail on this?
Wrote a post about this topic before.
I have this huge text file that lists all kinds of activities, rules, problems that need to be solved and things I want to accomplish etc.
There is a category of activities that’s labeled ‘necessary’. One of those activities in the necessary category is ‘having fun’ which links to another category of things I labeled ‘beautiful’. The activities in the ‘beautiful’ category depend on the the item ‘having fun’ in the ‘necessary’ category. And ‘having fun’ is called whether I want. Yes, you read that correctly, when I want it. Because after countless burnouts that made me to want to abandon any rational behavior I noticed that it just doesn’t work not to do what I want when I want it. So I just do it and hope for the best. Most of the time I can quickly return to follow activities that I deem important on a more reflective level.
And regarding the rules, here is how the rules and heuristics section starts, followed by about a hundred other items:
Rules and Heuristics
Doing my best → Reflective Equilibrium of Level #1,2,3,4
Level 1: Rationality (doing the right thing (conscious, reflective high-level cognition)).
Level 2: Instinct, intuition and gut feeling (doing my best (emotionally)).
Level 3: Satisfaction of elementary needs (doing what needs to be done because its necessary (this includes having fun); recognize what you can cope with, recognize your limits;).
Level 4: Doing what I want based on naive introspection.
...
The list of rules continues with items like ‘concentrate on important things and ignore everything under a certain threshold’ or ‘ask yourself what’s the best you can do right now’...
What’s mainly pushing me towards the risk of burning out are problems loosely associated with expected utility maximization. I always had those problems long before I knew what ‘rationality’ even means. Most of those problems seem to be computationally and conceptually intractable. At least for me.
It simply seems impossible to even decide when it is adequate to use computationally expensive decision procedures and when to trust my intuition. If I think too much about that, e.g. if it is worth it to go out or play a game or if it is either too risky or other actions have a higher expected utility, I am on the road towards a burnout.
I can really empathize with the last two paragraphs—I tend to not emotionally feel so well when I’m trying to optimize hard, because I won’t know for a while whether I’m optimizing hard enough. Maybe this is where the whole ‘goals’ thing comes in—it seems to be setting up a feeling of ‘I will be satisfied if I achieve X’, where X is something that you know whether you accomplished.
I’m interested in the structure of your file, as well as the contents of your ‘Rules and Heuristics’ section—can you give any more detail on this?