Group Rationality Diary, July 16-31
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for July 16-31.
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!
Immediate past diary: July 1-15
Next diary: August 1-15
Realized I liked BDSM for the wrong reasons.
After some hard introspection,I confessed to myself that I didn’t find BDSM sexually arousing. The main appeal was that, compared to a vanilla partner, a submissive partner would be more likely to let me have my way in disagreements (and this would be ok since they would enjoy yielding) and less likely to betray my trust. I’m not a dom, I’m just selfish and mistrusting. Taking the outside view, I concluded that if I were to be in a BDSM relationship, there’s a significant risk of me becoming an abuser. Power corrupts and whatnot.
So now I’m distancing myself from BDSM.
Wow.
If you’d be willing to share, I’d be interested in more detail on the processing that lead to your conclusion.
What do you want to know?
This is, imo, some pretty high-quality introspection; congrats. For what it’s worth, I feel like the conflation you describe between abuse and consensual play is not uncommon in the BDSM scene. In other words, I suspect a nonnegligable proportion of doms are in it for the reasons you describe, but don’t have the introspective rigour to call themselves on it.
I did a backup of my computer data to external hard disk.
I knew that computer disks can crash, and once I lost some data after a disk crash, and yet I never before did the full backup. Because… well, it was a trivial inconvenience, something easy to leave to some unspecified day in the future. Also, thinking about a possible crash meant thinking about having to install things again on a new computer, so it was more pleasant to not think about such things. During the last five years I even had an external disk at home with plenty of free space, and yet I never did the backup.
A few days ago my computer had problem starting (then the problem magically disappeared again) and I realized that if I’d lose the data now, I would be really angry that I did not use the opportunity while I had it. Even so, it took me almost a week to really do the backup. Well, today it’s finally done.
When was the last time you made a safe copy of your data? If at this moment your disk would stop working , how much would you be willing to pay someone to restore the data? Which of those data would you miss most?
Keeping all your data in version control (preferably checksum-verified, like git, and regularly synched to remote storages) ensures that it’ll likely survive at least as long as you do, while not taking away the freedom to incrementally modify/organize it (as would be the case with large archive backups). This encourages you to actually keep the data organized, and to know which data is unique, to be preserved, making it more useful as a result.
I have the same problem. Worse is that I kinda need to leave my computer to do the backup for upwards of a few hours, making it slightly more inconvenient. I know I haven’t done a backup since my last major update to my commercial game, so if I lost my data right now, the source code would be gone (the compiled program itself is backed up in a secure location).
Somewhat related is that I have several gigabytes of uncompressed recordings in .wav format, which I have backed up, but still don’t feel good about deleting, even though I could use the disk space. I have a serious dislike of destroying data, even though in this case it is far from actually destroyed in any sense other than its section on one of two disks is marked as available.
I seem to recall hearing about some service that can automate backups. I would have to investigate the security/costs/CPU usage/etc, but it sounds like it could help some people get around the trivial inconvenience of actively backing up data.
Suggestion: if you haven’t by the time you read this, do a backup of that source code right now. Leave backing up the rest of your computer for another day if necessary.
Convert to FLAC? Then at least your problem will look more like ‘I have a gigabyte of FLACs’.
I use Carbonite for this, as it claims to keep everything backed up more-or-less real-time without me having to do anything ever.
This is only a recommendation wrt ease of use. I have not actually tested whether I can easily retrieve the backup,
One of the best solutions out there is Crashplan. Unlimited amount of data backed up to the cloud, to your friends computers, and to your other computers for a pretty cheap price.
It continually backs up your data and maintains a version history of all your files.
Today I had the health exam for the life insurance policy associated with my cryonic suspension contract.
Then I grabbed my best friend and girlfriend and repeatedly showed them clips from the Futurama episode where Fry’s dog waits for years after Fry gets frozen, and Fry misses his dog in the future, and the dog misses Fry in the past, etc. They are now both awaiting insurance policy quotes for their own suspension contracts.
I’ve developed a habit for when I want to feel like I’m doing something productive, yet there’s no real work I feel up to at that moment: tidying up. It accomplishes something (albeit something admittedly minor and unessential) while not being cognitively taxing, and it’s always available immediately. Of course, it’s also a way to procrastinate on higher-value tasks, but given the way I tend to function, I know I could be doing worse.
I’m experimenting with a randomized system of task-setting. (My main goal is autodidacticism in a bunch of disciplines.) I divided the subjects I want to study into 3 lists of 6 disciplines each, 18 in total. Every day I roll a dice to decide which of them I am to study on that day. The first roll decides the list; I have assigned each list two numbers out of the six available ones, and if either of them comes up on the first roll, then it’s that list that I pick. The next roll decides which of the 6 disciplines in a given list I am to study. The third roll decides how many half-hours I should spend on it. (I initially tried that with full hours, but if I’m unlucky enough to get two sixes in a row, then that day’s schedule is filled to the brim.) To give an example, the rolls 6 − 1 − 3 mean: from the Humanities list (which has the numbers 1 and 6 assigned to it) choose History (discipline number 1 on that list) and study it for 1 hour and a half (3 x 30 min = 90 min). I do this a few times, up until my schedule for that day is filled, to end up with a bastardized version of a schoolkid’s timetable, but without the predictability. The problem? I don’t always find myself willing to obey the dice. Sometimes I’m not happy with the resulting schedule and just decide to ignore it and go study something else instead. But a big part of the reason why I implemented this system in the first place is not to focus on certain disciplines to the detriment of the others. On the other hand, I could use a boost to the enjoyment I get from doing the tasks, and restrictions on what I should study take away from that. Dunno. Will figure out a solution to this.
I’m beginning to realize that my biggest productivity-related failure is by far my habit of going weeks without even thinking once about my goals. Usually it takes something like a LW post on akrasia (since I check LW daily, even and especially when I’m having a “lazy day”) to get me back on track. I’m not sure it would work if I tried to send myself mere memos, like programming my alarm clock app to ring at a given time the next day, to remind me of the need to do some studying that day. I’d just feel annoyed and shut it down at once. For something to work, it needs to appeal to my interest in productivity/motivation hacks and then make me go through a certain thought process: visualizing how cool it would be to be able to work hard, and then autonomously concluding that it’s high time I did something for my goals. I’m not sure I could do that on a cue, but if there is such a cue that would work, I need to know about it.
I’m currently working on a website application to figure out what I can’t eat. It will use Bayes Theorem. This could make a huge difference in my life.
I also found that I’m really good at asking lots of questions when I’m stuck but not good at realizing that I need to stop working on something until more resources arrive.
Do you really need to build a whole web application for this? It seems like overkill. Why not just use a spreadsheet?
Actually, the web application already exists to a great degree.
The big tasks left are:
Set up something to generate metadata like the jump from storing a value that says “ate at restaurant” and having a bit go to True that corresponds to “ate in Los Angeles County”.
Do the actual Bayes classification or data analysis
It’s really hard to enter data into an XLSX on a smartphone. Also, I guess you can say that a MySQL database table has a lot of similarities with a spreadsheet so, in that way, I am.
I’d appreciate it I’d you could share the former when you are done with it. A more general use of this setup might be tracking the effects of frequent actions. There would be some hangups here, but they are a bit inconvenient to discuss while typing oh my tablet.
I would also appreciate it if you shared the web app. (I’ve got food problems all over the place, and I probably haven’t figured out all of them yet.)
(Just FYI, I don’t think Zian gets a notification unless you reply to his comment.)
You’re correct and thanks for posting that.
As I mention in another comment, the data crunching is completely separate and likely to generate lots of specific datapoints that are only relevant to me. This is where things get really hard to generalize/make easy to use widely.
If this doesn’t scare you away, then send me a message.
Likely pre-requisites are:
Programming experience
Experience with Java
Willingness to set up a local database server (I use MySQL)
Familiarity with the various ways to use Bayes’s theorem (I recommend Bayesian Artificial Intelligence and of course, EY’s article) and how things can go wrong
It’s actually online already but I am not publicizing it right now for a few reasons:
It assumes only 1 user right now so there’s no encryption or data separation
No reporting features (this is also a security feature; can’t have an XSS with no displayed values!) except for downloading the database and connecting with Excel/ODBC/Your favorite data crunching tool
Assumes the Pacific Time Zone
HIPAA/the mess around dealing with personally identifiable information
Ideas for mitigating the issues are welcome as deploying the site is very easy:
Generate a random string of letters and numbers.
Make a folder on your LAMP server named after #1.
Copy and paste the application to the folder.
Change 1 value inside a config file to point at #1.
Run a script to create the databases.
Fill in your database login information inside a config file.
(This assumes that you’re wise enough to avoid leaving any public pointers to the site.)
I’m trying to use neurofeedback to become one of the people who can actually create images in their minds which they see vividly. My neurofeedback provider is promoting the dominant frequency in my visual cortex. She has done it four times so far. I think I can sort of almost see mental images, but I’m not sure.
One of the unexpected side effects I had trying marijuana for the first time was significantly more vivid mental imagery. Probably not particularly useful to you, but I just thought I’d mention it.
A past neurofeedback provider told me that I would like marijuana because it promotes alpha waves and I have fewer alpha waves than most people do. I’ve never tried the drug.
One thing that could be helpful here is some external test of the vividness of your mental imagery. Is, for example, drawing a scene from memory known to be such a test? (I guess you’d have to get good at drawing first, but that might help with the imagery stuff too.)
Great idea about an external test. But I’m very, very bad at drawing things that look like real things.
Have you read this blog post and/or the book to which it refers?
No. Thanks for the link.
I’m going to start (re-)reading all of the posts in Main in chronological order, from “The Martial Art of Rationality” onwards.
Maybe you would like to read these first: “Twelve Virtues of Rationality”, “The Simple Truth”, “An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem”, “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation”, “The Power of Intelligence”. They are referenced from the early Main posts frequently.
Thank you. I had already read or skimmed most of those a while ago, but I hadn’t heard of the last one.
Consciously modifying my expectations for how much of a task I’ll complete is an effective tactic against feeling overwhelmed. I am not sure how much of this is the result of taskification and how much is the result of directly making the target easier to hit.
I know it is easier to not compulsively check FB, mail, etc. when I’m supposed to be working on other things if the tabs are not open.
However, I have just discovered that using break time to check FB and mail (since the volume in both cases is small) significantly reduces the amount of willpower required to go back to work—possibly from the little success-spiral boost of having Completed A Task.
Wondering what other break activities could also serve.