Agreed that there’s a lot of mostly-untapped potential in checklists and generally in the area of “deliberately, consciously applying advice from system 2”. I often feel like there’s a big gap between reading some bit of wisdom on LW and actually applying it in real life. And not just because of akrasia. For instance, I read Gwern’s page on melatonin probably at least a year ago, but only a few months ago did I actually get around to buying some. This wasn’t because of akrasia—I just read the page, went “good points, this is definitely worth doing” and then completely ignored my own carefully-gathered advice. I think this is partly due to general forgetfulness (for which: Anki), and partly due to the fact that I don’t actually really take ideas seriously enough, perhaps because I’m not used to my decisions actually leading to big real-life consequences (I’ve never had to make big grownup decisions about employment, where to live, etc.), which I’m still trying to fix.
I’ve lately been trying out running my life more on what my conscious thought processes output. Specifically, by using checklists that I refine by making them SRS cards and then think about and optimize and memorize every time they come up for review (and fail if I forgot them or made significant changes). I now have quite a lot of checklists, including a checklist for making checklists. Most of them are pretty trite or me-specific, so I’ll just put a few good ones here.
For conversations:
Look at their eyes.
Ensure you’re fully present, ie not thinking about what to say next. (So you don’t interrupt, so you pause before speaking, and so your facial expressions update quicker.)
Unobtrusively mirror body language.
Match tone and speed of voice.
This is from thisbook, which I skimmed a few months ago. It’s pretty useful.
The book has more tips, intended mainly for male executives who want to convey an impression of power and charisma.
When my motivation’s flagging (on a timescale of days, not minutes):
Do a few hours on a stationary bike while listening to angry rap or dance music.
If I’m unable to do that, try disconnecting whatever distraction’s sapping my energy. (The internet, for instance. My short-term subagent is too dumb to realize that it should object to my going into /sbin and doing sudo rm if* iw*.)
If all else fails, take some caffeine. This’ll only work if you haven’t built up a tolerance. I haven’t had to resort to this since discovering the wonder of cardio exercise.
Now of course these all require motivation to start, but I find them to be pretty self-sustaining, in that once started they generate enough willpower for me to keep going. About disconnecting distraction: I strongly advocate a program of active warfare against your akrasia-inducing subagent. I don’t have internet on my main computer, for example. I’ve sabotaged the power plugs in my bedroom so I can’t lie down while working on my laptop (for longer than the 30min it takes for my pathetic battery to run out). I have to sit on the stationary bike, even if I don’t cycle, and that makes it a lot easier to start actually cycling. That’s enough to get me cycling, but if it wasn’t I could get someone to hide my laptop battery and only give it back when I really need it (so I have to run the laptop directly from the power plug). When I tell people this, they think I’m silly and eccentric until they realize I’m burning 2000 kcal a day and they’re not :)
Other things that seem to boost willpower:
Shaking off sleep debt with a bottle of melatonin and a week of ten-hour nights.
If male, not masturbating may help.
Fasting seems to help, though this may be more because I’m feeling powerful because I’m disciplined enough to not eat.
At the start of every hour, when my watch beeps:
Do a quick reality check to see whether I’m dreaming. (If so, use the chance at a lucid dream.)
Visualize that every person on earth is a p-zombie, except me. Doing this well is an instant boost to motivation and confidence for me, and it creates the right munchkinly mindset. It’s easy to do things if the only things watching you are heaps of atoms.
Apply mental contrasting (which I learned about from here) for increased motivation and more focus on higher-order bits. This nicely complements the p-zombie visualization.
I think there’s a lot more in this. For instance, I think I can usefully model myself as having only four or five emotional states, each useful for different things. There are some things I can do deliberately to shift myself into some of these states. I think it would be productive to experiment with different mental procedures to see which are most effective for what. So I’ve been writing lists of mental procedures I can try out, and I intend to start systematically working through the list and noting successes and failures. (This is how I came up with the idea of considering everyone else p-zombies.) I’m planning to make a topic about this here, and we can share our ideas and experimental results (but it’ll take me a month, so if someone wants to beat me to it, go ahead).
I used it to shift back my sleep schedule from something like 10pm-6am to more like 7pm-4am. I tried this several times unsuccessfully prior to starting on melatonin. I like having an early sleep schedule because it makes it easier to recover sleep debt (sleeping one hour longer is easier than going to sleep an hour earlier). It also allows me to not waste the prime morning hours on school things, which is also good for motivation. Taking melatonin also seems to boost my mood and focus the next day if I used it to sleep long (10 hours, say) the previous night. It helps me self-enforce a time to fall asleep, as you say in your article. It also seems to have slightly mind-altering effects starting around half an hour after I take it, but I may have been primed by reading Tim Tyler saying it has effects like that. I take one 3mg cap around 6pm. I may experiment with decreasing the dosage sometime.
One thing I’m a bit worried about is that some of the lifestyle changes I’ve been making lately have led to seemingly-lasting improvements in mood. In particular, I’m worried about happiness causing contentment causing complacency causing suckage. I’m pretty sure happiness isn’t an unalloyed good.
If male it is also often found that not getting laid an enormous amount can also help when it comes to goal focused motivation. To resolve the ambiguity, that does not mean “frequently or for an extended duration do not have sex” but rather “do not be in a position of getting an overabundance of sex or sexual variety”. I am not aware of any studies, but anecdotal observation and expert testimony is at least somewhat credible, particularly given that this is what I would expect the influence of satiation to be in general.
It is alleged that Bertrand Russell was once asked why he’d stopped devoting much of his energy to philosophy, and replied “Because I discovered fucking”. (This is one of those stories that would be much funnier if actually true, but I haven’t yet been able to find any good evidence for whether it is or not.)
I am also confused by this. I’ve heard from many different places, and experienced myself I think, that fasting seems to make all your senses sharper and generally makes it easier to focus. And I’ve heard that this is because when you’re hungry it’s important in the EEA to get food, and focusing helps towards that.
But then why doesn’t evolution just make your senses sharp all the time? The best hypothesis I can come up with is that having such sharp senses is bad or unsustainable over the long term.
In which case you probably shouldn’t fast just for the heightened focus. Or maybe not much more than people in the EEA did.
(Another hypothesis is that people were hungry enough in the EEA to basically be in this state of heightened focus all the time. But then why turn it off as soon as you get food in your stomach?)
Another possibility is that heightened focus wasn’t an unalloyed good in the EEA.
I can’t focus on everything at once, after all; the whole point of focus is that I’m focused on one thing at a time (as in this example, food). If the universe of things other than food that I might notice were I not focused on food-gathering, and thereby be able to exploit or defend against, has a sufficiently high expected value, then relaxing my focus and increasing my peripheral awareness of that universe of things has a high payoff relative to focusing more exclusively on food… at least, when I’m not really hungry.
Here is an excellent FAQ about lucid dreaming. It says:
Carry some text with you or wear a digital watch throughout the day. To do a reality test, read the words or the numbers on the watch. Then, look away and look back, observing the letters or numbers to see if they change. Try to make them change while watching them. Research shows that text changes 75% of the time it is re-read once and changes 95% it is re-read twice. If the characters do change, or are not normal, or do not make sense, then you are most probably dreaming. Enjoy! If the characters are normal, stable, and sensible, then you probably aren’t dreaming. Go on to step 2.
(I know, there’s lots of new age bullshit at that link, and in lucid dreaming generally. But no matter how much you cringe at the word “dreamsign”, lucid dreaming is a very useful tool if you can spot and dismiss the garbage.)
Agreed that there’s a lot of mostly-untapped potential in checklists and generally in the area of “deliberately, consciously applying advice from system 2”. I often feel like there’s a big gap between reading some bit of wisdom on LW and actually applying it in real life. And not just because of akrasia. For instance, I read Gwern’s page on melatonin probably at least a year ago, but only a few months ago did I actually get around to buying some. This wasn’t because of akrasia—I just read the page, went “good points, this is definitely worth doing” and then completely ignored my own carefully-gathered advice. I think this is partly due to general forgetfulness (for which: Anki), and partly due to the fact that I don’t actually really take ideas seriously enough, perhaps because I’m not used to my decisions actually leading to big real-life consequences (I’ve never had to make big grownup decisions about employment, where to live, etc.), which I’m still trying to fix.
I’ve lately been trying out running my life more on what my conscious thought processes output. Specifically, by using checklists that I refine by making them SRS cards and then think about and optimize and memorize every time they come up for review (and fail if I forgot them or made significant changes). I now have quite a lot of checklists, including a checklist for making checklists. Most of them are pretty trite or me-specific, so I’ll just put a few good ones here.
For conversations:
Look at their eyes.
Ensure you’re fully present, ie not thinking about what to say next. (So you don’t interrupt, so you pause before speaking, and so your facial expressions update quicker.)
Unobtrusively mirror body language.
Match tone and speed of voice.
This is from this book, which I skimmed a few months ago. It’s pretty useful. The book has more tips, intended mainly for male executives who want to convey an impression of power and charisma.
When my motivation’s flagging (on a timescale of days, not minutes):
Do a few hours on a stationary bike while listening to angry rap or dance music.
If I’m unable to do that, try disconnecting whatever distraction’s sapping my energy. (The internet, for instance. My short-term subagent is too dumb to realize that it should object to my going into /sbin and doing sudo rm if* iw*.)
If all else fails, take some caffeine. This’ll only work if you haven’t built up a tolerance. I haven’t had to resort to this since discovering the wonder of cardio exercise.
Now of course these all require motivation to start, but I find them to be pretty self-sustaining, in that once started they generate enough willpower for me to keep going. About disconnecting distraction: I strongly advocate a program of active warfare against your akrasia-inducing subagent. I don’t have internet on my main computer, for example. I’ve sabotaged the power plugs in my bedroom so I can’t lie down while working on my laptop (for longer than the 30min it takes for my pathetic battery to run out). I have to sit on the stationary bike, even if I don’t cycle, and that makes it a lot easier to start actually cycling. That’s enough to get me cycling, but if it wasn’t I could get someone to hide my laptop battery and only give it back when I really need it (so I have to run the laptop directly from the power plug). When I tell people this, they think I’m silly and eccentric until they realize I’m burning 2000 kcal a day and they’re not :)
Other things that seem to boost willpower:
Shaking off sleep debt with a bottle of melatonin and a week of ten-hour nights.
If male, not masturbating may help.
Fasting seems to help, though this may be more because I’m feeling powerful because I’m disciplined enough to not eat.
At the start of every hour, when my watch beeps:
Do a quick reality check to see whether I’m dreaming. (If so, use the chance at a lucid dream.)
Visualize that every person on earth is a p-zombie, except me. Doing this well is an instant boost to motivation and confidence for me, and it creates the right munchkinly mindset. It’s easy to do things if the only things watching you are heaps of atoms.
Apply mental contrasting (which I learned about from here) for increased motivation and more focus on higher-order bits. This nicely complements the p-zombie visualization.
I think there’s a lot more in this. For instance, I think I can usefully model myself as having only four or five emotional states, each useful for different things. There are some things I can do deliberately to shift myself into some of these states. I think it would be productive to experiment with different mental procedures to see which are most effective for what. So I’ve been writing lists of mental procedures I can try out, and I intend to start systematically working through the list and noting successes and failures. (This is how I came up with the idea of considering everyone else p-zombies.) I’m planning to make a topic about this here, and we can share our ideas and experimental results (but it’ll take me a month, so if someone wants to beat me to it, go ahead).
Yes, but did it actually work?
Yes. Anecdotally:
I used it to shift back my sleep schedule from something like 10pm-6am to more like 7pm-4am. I tried this several times unsuccessfully prior to starting on melatonin. I like having an early sleep schedule because it makes it easier to recover sleep debt (sleeping one hour longer is easier than going to sleep an hour earlier). It also allows me to not waste the prime morning hours on school things, which is also good for motivation. Taking melatonin also seems to boost my mood and focus the next day if I used it to sleep long (10 hours, say) the previous night. It helps me self-enforce a time to fall asleep, as you say in your article. It also seems to have slightly mind-altering effects starting around half an hour after I take it, but I may have been primed by reading Tim Tyler saying it has effects like that. I take one 3mg cap around 6pm. I may experiment with decreasing the dosage sometime.
One thing I’m a bit worried about is that some of the lifestyle changes I’ve been making lately have led to seemingly-lasting improvements in mood. In particular, I’m worried about happiness causing contentment causing complacency causing suckage. I’m pretty sure happiness isn’t an unalloyed good.
If male it is also often found that not getting laid an enormous amount can also help when it comes to goal focused motivation. To resolve the ambiguity, that does not mean “frequently or for an extended duration do not have sex” but rather “do not be in a position of getting an overabundance of sex or sexual variety”. I am not aware of any studies, but anecdotal observation and expert testimony is at least somewhat credible, particularly given that this is what I would expect the influence of satiation to be in general.
It is alleged that Bertrand Russell was once asked why he’d stopped devoting much of his energy to philosophy, and replied “Because I discovered fucking”. (This is one of those stories that would be much funnier if actually true, but I haven’t yet been able to find any good evidence for whether it is or not.)
Weird. IIRC it was found that low blood sugar levels make ego depletion come faster. (OTOH eating too much does seem to weaken my willpower too.)
I am also confused by this. I’ve heard from many different places, and experienced myself I think, that fasting seems to make all your senses sharper and generally makes it easier to focus. And I’ve heard that this is because when you’re hungry it’s important in the EEA to get food, and focusing helps towards that.
But then why doesn’t evolution just make your senses sharp all the time? The best hypothesis I can come up with is that having such sharp senses is bad or unsustainable over the long term.
In which case you probably shouldn’t fast just for the heightened focus. Or maybe not much more than people in the EEA did.
(Another hypothesis is that people were hungry enough in the EEA to basically be in this state of heightened focus all the time. But then why turn it off as soon as you get food in your stomach?)
Huh, so are you talking about attention or willpower? They’re not quite the same thing (though you can use willpower to help focus on something).
Another possibility is that heightened focus wasn’t an unalloyed good in the EEA.
I can’t focus on everything at once, after all; the whole point of focus is that I’m focused on one thing at a time (as in this example, food). If the universe of things other than food that I might notice were I not focused on food-gathering, and thereby be able to exploit or defend against, has a sufficiently high expected value, then relaxing my focus and increasing my peripheral awareness of that universe of things has a high payoff relative to focusing more exclusively on food… at least, when I’m not really hungry.
Yes, that sounds a lot more likely and I’m disappointed that I didn’t think of it.
Agree with your points and suggest an edit to place an extra newline between text paragraphs and asterix denoted lists.
I did what you said and then saw that you had commented. :)
How do you do that? How reliable is it?
Here is an excellent FAQ about lucid dreaming. It says:
(I know, there’s lots of new age bullshit at that link, and in lucid dreaming generally. But no matter how much you cringe at the word “dreamsign”, lucid dreaming is a very useful tool if you can spot and dismiss the garbage.)