Group Rationality Diary, February 1-14
This is the public group rationality diary for February 1-14. Now that you’ve downvoted it, and you know who you are, please identify and explain yourself.
It’s a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Established a useful new habit
Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
Tried doing any of the above and failed
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other’s experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn’t tend to work out.
Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.
Previous diary: January 16-31
I went to the emergency room instead of trying to just last out a chest pain + allergic reaction at home like I have in the past.
I used the time travel technique from HPMOR. Blurb at the bottom.
Pro: Still alive
Con: Really hard to do in moments of crises; I was only able to do this after about 15 minutes of time spent driving home (and then I U-turned to go to the hospital).
Blurb:
He’d wished then to fall back just a few minutes in time and change something, anything before it was too late...
And then it had turned out to not be too late after all.
Wish granted.
You couldn’t change history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the first time around.
Wow, that’s rough. I’m glad you were able to get help in time.
Sometimes I feel uncomfortable talking to strangers, and will put off scheduling appointments. Today, after a few days of trying to beat myself into getting a haircut at a barber’s shop or salon, I decided to cut my own hair instead. I’m very pleased with the results, and I will probably make a habit of cutting my own hair from now on. I know this solution doesn’t generalize to other appointments, such as medical examinations, but I’m very glad to have put that one source of distress to rest.
Yeah, and if you have hair clippers, they’re pretty foolproof—except for trimming around ears, smoothing transitions between different lengths, and dealing with the back of the neck. Which all just seem like garden-variety acquirable skills. It’s plausible that I should already own hair clippers and be using them on myself, and that I’m only not doing this because of trivial inconveniences. Hm.
I’ve had a permanent retainer in my bottom 4 teeth for about 5 years now. I recently started a habit of flossing, but it takes too much effort for me to use the official flosser for those. But, I recently started using the proxabrush every morning, which takes about 5 seconds per tooth and gets about 90% of the job done.
I’ve been doing it for 2 months almost every day now.
I’ve now been wearing my lumo lift posture tracker every day for a month. My girlfriend has noticed a noticable improvement in my posture.
Since January 5, I started keeping a exhaustive log of expenditures/income, and meals. I expect to use the former to create a clear budget.
Also, I have been setting alarms every time I need to do something in the next 24 hours. I forget things easily and making the conscious effort to remind myself tasks clutters my mind.
Finally, I keep a log of ideas, and projects. I often find myself solving some problems twice because I didn’t bother to write things down. Anything to remove mental clutter.
My grand plan is starting now—with an extreme epistemic update I was in denial about. Hah. And I thought I left those things behind me!
Could you be a bit more detailed? That way everyone can learn from your experience.
Most of it is basically me changing my views and actions and all that. The bottom line is me being the person I want to be, as cliche as that sounds.
My methodology? Read Lesswrong, Overcoming Bias, books, learn from experienced people, try new things etc. I highly recommend LW’s search feature, if you search for some words that you’re interested in LW’s perspective of them, it’s very useful. You might also find some forgotten gems, such as: http://lesswrong.com/lw/iri/how_to_become_a_1000_year_old_vampire/
Also, tsuyoku naritai, aka the will to tanscend.