It’s the summer before my freshman year of college, and my only obligation is that my parents are paying me to clean our filthy house. So I have tons of free time that I am trying to put to the best use possible. Here’s a list of what I am doing:
My goal in life is to be a video game developer, so my main priority is learning how to make video games. I’m not really sure which of several possible projects I’ll end up spending most of my summer on, but right now I’m learning how to use Unity 3D.
I’ve been reading stuff in the broad category of “human nature”. For example, on my bedside table right now, I have Self-Made Man, The Luck Factor, The Happiness Hypothesis, Queen Bees & Wannabes, and The Moral Animal. I started this project in order to hopefully reach an a-ha moment that would allow me to realize what I’m doing wrong and therefore cure my shitty social skills, but I think I’ve already reached this moment very early into the summer, so now the whole project seems slightly less useful and I might forgo it in order to spend more time learning gamedev. :\
Doing Starting Strength.
Learning how to lucid dream.
I wanted to spend a lot of time getting better at meditation with the goal of eventually reaching jhana, but I’ve lapsed really hard in my practice lately and I’m having a lot of trouble getting back into it. So I don’t know what I’m going to do about this one.
I’m tracking how many pomodoros I’ve done of learning video game devlopment and reading about human nature here. My initial goal was to do five hundred in a fifty-two day period, but unfortunately it’s looking like this might have been overly ambitious.
I don’t really know if this counts as the planning fallacy. As I understand it, the planning fallacy is when you underestimate the time it takes to do a specific task. This was more like overestimating my energy and willpower, and therefore the amount of time I would be able to work in any given day.
For the purposes of diagnosing planning fallacy, time doesn’t mean time spent, it means total time. Quote from the Wikipedia article:
In a 1994 study, 37 psychology students were asked to estimate how long it would take to finish their senior theses. The average estimate was 33.9 days.
That’s not 33.9 days of continuous work. Underestimating how much time you have available per day to work on a project counts as planning fallacy.
My understanding is that the planning fallacy is just not taking the outside view, for whatever it is. Depending on your past experiences, you may or may not have fallen prey to it.
Note: Firstorderpredicate’s response isn’t as condescending as it sounds, it’s a Methods of Rationality quote.
I started this project in order to hopefully reach an a-ha moment that would allow me to realize what I’m doing wrong and therefore cure my shitty social skills.
I’ve typically understood that social skills are really hard to pick from books and implement it in real life. The main reason is that the time-scale on which you react in social situations is extremely short and insufficient for you to invoke the theory you learned. The books can be very helpful if you have a lot of social interactions and then use the theory to clarify and find patterns in all the data and then try to change a small pattern at a time.
Any rate, that’s just me. It might work different for you.
Everyone tells me that, but in my experience the reverse is true.
Intuitively, your claim makes sense. There’s so much nuance in human communication that it would be impossible to learn even a fraction of it from a book. For example, let’s say you have a slightly politically incorrect joke you want to tell. How do you know if it’s an appropriate time to say it? There are so many variables that have to be plugged into this function—number of people around you, closeness of the people to you, closeness of the people to each other, your own delivery, each person’s unique personality, age of the people relative to you, social status of you versus your audience, formality of the occasion, location, even time of day. So if you were trying to answer the question “when can I tell a politically incorrect joke?” you wouldn’t be able to read a book and figure it out—you would have to go and hang out with people and watch them tell politically incorrect jokes until you got an intuitive understanding of when it is permissible.
But the thing is, most socially awkward people report having occasional “on nights” where they are utterly charismatic, confident, say all the right things, and don’t run out of things to talk about. This implies that the intuitive knowledge of what to say that is necessary for good social skills actually already exists somewhere in the socially awkward person’s brain—it’s just not being accessed at the right time. So for the majority of people, learning social skills is more about making the right conditions to gain access to the buried intuitive knowledge of how to talk to people than it is actually learning how to talk to people. (Of course, you can’t take this to an extreme and imagine that a stereotypical foreveralone WoW-player type can shut himself in a room with a bunch of books and come out a Casanova.)
I don’t think the above two paragraphs convey my thoughts on this subject anywhere near perfectly, but that’s sort of where I’m coming from. My experience is that in the course of reading things on this subject, I’ll wade through lots of boring, obvious stuff, until every so often I read something that gives me a huge a-ha moment, upon which I instantly recognize that a certain thought habit I have is maladaptive and weird and damaging my relationships and immediately permanently reverse it.
This is also how I see it. Most of the power is already in your brain, although of course you get better by practice. But for many people the power is somehow “locked”. Something you find in the book, or doing some exercise you find in the book, may help unlock the power.
Evo-psych hypothesis: Everyone has the power, but there is a mechanism detecting that “your status is too low to do this”, which turns off the power, to avoid punishment by higher-status members of the tribe who want to preserve the social hierarchy. But the mechanism is an adaptation to the ancient environment, and is often miscalibrated today. Something in the book may help turn off the low-status feeling. (Perhaps even the fact that someone with high status, such as the author of the book, encourages you to behave high-status, can be perceived by the mechanism as an evidence of your status rising. It could be an equivalent of getting a powerful friend.)
It’s the summer before my freshman year of college, and my only obligation is that my parents are paying me to clean our filthy house. So I have tons of free time that I am trying to put to the best use possible. Here’s a list of what I am doing:
My goal in life is to be a video game developer, so my main priority is learning how to make video games. I’m not really sure which of several possible projects I’ll end up spending most of my summer on, but right now I’m learning how to use Unity 3D.
I’ve been reading stuff in the broad category of “human nature”. For example, on my bedside table right now, I have Self-Made Man, The Luck Factor, The Happiness Hypothesis, Queen Bees & Wannabes, and The Moral Animal. I started this project in order to hopefully reach an a-ha moment that would allow me to realize what I’m doing wrong and therefore cure my shitty social skills, but I think I’ve already reached this moment very early into the summer, so now the whole project seems slightly less useful and I might forgo it in order to spend more time learning gamedev. :\
Doing Starting Strength.
Learning how to lucid dream.
I wanted to spend a lot of time getting better at meditation with the goal of eventually reaching jhana, but I’ve lapsed really hard in my practice lately and I’m having a lot of trouble getting back into it. So I don’t know what I’m going to do about this one.
I’m tracking how many pomodoros I’ve done of learning video game devlopment and reading about human nature here. My initial goal was to do five hundred in a fifty-two day period, but unfortunately it’s looking like this might have been overly ambitious.
“Awww, it sounds like someone fell prey to the planning fallacy.” :)
I don’t really know if this counts as the planning fallacy. As I understand it, the planning fallacy is when you underestimate the time it takes to do a specific task. This was more like overestimating my energy and willpower, and therefore the amount of time I would be able to work in any given day.
For the purposes of diagnosing planning fallacy, time doesn’t mean time spent, it means total time. Quote from the Wikipedia article:
That’s not 33.9 days of continuous work. Underestimating how much time you have available per day to work on a project counts as planning fallacy.
Fair enough.
My understanding is that the planning fallacy is just not taking the outside view, for whatever it is. Depending on your past experiences, you may or may not have fallen prey to it.
Note: Firstorderpredicate’s response isn’t as condescending as it sounds, it’s a Methods of Rationality quote.
Yes. (Spoilers deleted; Awfully sorry)
Dude, spoilers.
I’ve typically understood that social skills are really hard to pick from books and implement it in real life. The main reason is that the time-scale on which you react in social situations is extremely short and insufficient for you to invoke the theory you learned. The books can be very helpful if you have a lot of social interactions and then use the theory to clarify and find patterns in all the data and then try to change a small pattern at a time.
Any rate, that’s just me. It might work different for you.
Everyone tells me that, but in my experience the reverse is true.
Intuitively, your claim makes sense. There’s so much nuance in human communication that it would be impossible to learn even a fraction of it from a book. For example, let’s say you have a slightly politically incorrect joke you want to tell. How do you know if it’s an appropriate time to say it? There are so many variables that have to be plugged into this function—number of people around you, closeness of the people to you, closeness of the people to each other, your own delivery, each person’s unique personality, age of the people relative to you, social status of you versus your audience, formality of the occasion, location, even time of day. So if you were trying to answer the question “when can I tell a politically incorrect joke?” you wouldn’t be able to read a book and figure it out—you would have to go and hang out with people and watch them tell politically incorrect jokes until you got an intuitive understanding of when it is permissible.
But the thing is, most socially awkward people report having occasional “on nights” where they are utterly charismatic, confident, say all the right things, and don’t run out of things to talk about. This implies that the intuitive knowledge of what to say that is necessary for good social skills actually already exists somewhere in the socially awkward person’s brain—it’s just not being accessed at the right time. So for the majority of people, learning social skills is more about making the right conditions to gain access to the buried intuitive knowledge of how to talk to people than it is actually learning how to talk to people. (Of course, you can’t take this to an extreme and imagine that a stereotypical foreveralone WoW-player type can shut himself in a room with a bunch of books and come out a Casanova.)
I don’t think the above two paragraphs convey my thoughts on this subject anywhere near perfectly, but that’s sort of where I’m coming from. My experience is that in the course of reading things on this subject, I’ll wade through lots of boring, obvious stuff, until every so often I read something that gives me a huge a-ha moment, upon which I instantly recognize that a certain thought habit I have is maladaptive and weird and damaging my relationships and immediately permanently reverse it.
This is also how I see it. Most of the power is already in your brain, although of course you get better by practice. But for many people the power is somehow “locked”. Something you find in the book, or doing some exercise you find in the book, may help unlock the power.
Evo-psych hypothesis: Everyone has the power, but there is a mechanism detecting that “your status is too low to do this”, which turns off the power, to avoid punishment by higher-status members of the tribe who want to preserve the social hierarchy. But the mechanism is an adaptation to the ancient environment, and is often miscalibrated today. Something in the book may help turn off the low-status feeling. (Perhaps even the fact that someone with high status, such as the author of the book, encourages you to behave high-status, can be perceived by the mechanism as an evidence of your status rising. It could be an equivalent of getting a powerful friend.)
I agree with your evo-psych hypothesis.