I have also found Eat That Frog to be an unusually good collection of the major productivity techniques. Incidentally, I also heard about the book from Patri via Divia.
For a shorter and more rationality-friendly version of the book, I summarized it here:
EDIT: http://becomingeden.com/summary-of-eat-that-frog/
I meant humanity at large, and I expect the rationalist community to follow suit.
I have two couches, so you can crash at my place that weekend as well.
If anyone else is interested, I am sure other members of the community will step up to host. :)
What do you call someone who generates positive externalities?
I agree that associating with PUA is distasteful and an immediate fail, and have removed the link from the post. The link is here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/298/more_art_less_stink_taking_the_pu_out_of_pua
Social phenomena exist like anything else and can be analyzed, but how it is discussed matters almost entirely. It is a high-status behavior to make observations about social phenomena, but analysis sends a bad signal.
Me + 1 coming in from NYC! :)
We were not sure how exactly to accomplish this, but if you could convince someone that the outcomes in their life were primarily a result of their effort (instead of being dictated by external circumstances), that could motivate them to try harder.
It doesn’t sound like fun to you, which implies you didn’t try it. FWIW, everyone who participated in the game thought that was one of the most fun meetups we have had to date. I greatly enjoyed the activity myself. The fast pace kept everyone fully engaged in the activity, and the rotating topic kept the conversation from getting bogged down. Cognitive biases are a topic of interest for our rationalist group, doing this alone instead of with a group of friends might indeed be less fun, but as you pointed out still quite useful.
Do you mean to say that you became aware of biases, internalized your belief in their importance, gathered the relevant info, became familiar with LW norms about style and tone, and wrote the article, all in one hour?
Certainly there were a lot of prerequisites that went into being able to do this exercise, and I did not mean to imply that everything that went into writing the above article itself was only one hour in total. The people here in the LW community are highly likely to have the prerequisites to do this exercise without additional time investment. Those five minutes included explaining the bias in question, when it was unfamiliar to any members of the group.
Even if you did, do you mean to imply that you thereby solved a major problem?
One of the explicit goals of the exercise was to gain awareness of the biases in question, which is the first step in modifying our behavior. Immediately following the exercises, everyone who participated was able to point out examples of it occurring left and right. Correcting these habits of thought will take reinforcement over a period of time, but by becoming self-aware and having others to point them out to us as well we are drastically closer to solving the problem than before the one hour of work.
That works the first 200 times, but at a certain point the low-hanging fruit is gone and the suboptimal habits you have turn out not to be as “irrational” as you thought
If you have actually picked all of your low-hanging fruit then congratulations, you are a supremely powerful human being.
I fully agree that what is holding us back is often conflicting emotional desires, and as you correctly point out there are methods of modifying those as well. We make mistakes on both an analytical and an emotional level, and dealing with both is vitally important to becoming the most effective person possible. Failing to take five minutes and actually trying optimize the situation is just one analytical failure mode, which I am trying to address with this one post.
FWIW, the LW NYC group holds regular game nights, and uses poker specifically as a rationality training ground. If you make the correct EV decisions, the pure statistics really will get you a long way. The rest, well...
In retrospect, I think there was quite a bit of this going on with regards to my play vis a vis Turkey.
Russia here.
This game was an interesting experience for me. I was completely unfamiliar with Diplomacy coming in, and it came at a point in my life when I was incredibly busy with other things. I didn’t even realize the game was beginning until it was hours before the first turn was going to end. I exerted no effort whatsoever to learn the rules or any basic strategic considerations until several turns into the game! During that point my play was entirely experimental, playing around with different diplomatic styles, seeing how people would react to things. The game was also initially anonymous, and I was very concerned with attempting to conceal my identity, which prompted a lot of reflection on my usual writing and decision-making habits. I was also wrong about Scott’s identity, which was very surprising to me.
Basically I failed to optimize the game in a very serious way, and I am not pleased with my performance. I don’t really want you guys to see my moves or my chat logs, but they are posted to the Google Group nonetheless. That said, I was legitimately doing other things with my life, and this game already started eating up hours/day. In the future I think I will do a LOT better. I will also make sure I can seriously devote the time and effort to a game before signing up next term. I recommend either doing very short turns that finish the game in a single day, or week-long turns which don’t require a continuous time investment in negotiation.
Despite my disappointment in myself, I had an enormous amount of fun playing this game. The intrigue brought us all closer together. It has also changed the way I conceptualize the world, which I always appreciate. On net, this was an awesome experience, and I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.
From my reading of the anthropology literature, some cultures are sex-positive and some cultures are sex-negative. The first google hit for “anthropology sex positive” is an anthro textbook which lists a bunch of examples of different attitudes towards sexuality, including some where it is encouraged and considered odd if promiscuity is not pursued.
Thanks! :D Congratulations are very much in order. Life is good right now.
I have wondered about that drive myself actually. I have always been strongly internally motivated, as far back as I can remember, much moreso than any external force has ever applied to me. I feel a strong need to optimize within all of my constraints, of which I feel time is the most binding. I identify very strongly with this drive, it seems very useful, and I have made enormous improvements in my life over the last few years since discovering rationalism.
Having fun definitely utilizes moments well. The problem is that I am not having XTREME FUN 100% of the time, there are many periods during the day where I end up mindlessly browsing the web, etc., and my to-do list contains items important to life which are not getting done.
I am actually facing this same problem myself. My personal life also got very interesting, and incredibly enjoyable. So enjoyable, in fact, that I really don’t want to do anything other than just enjoy myself and have even more fun!
My motivation has shifted entirely from getting things done to having fun, and the thought of doing anything significant to further my long-run interests seems too hard to bother doing. For the first time I can think of, I am now suffering from meta-akrasia: I know there are techniques I could use that would increase my productivity, but that would mean I would actually be working, and that doesn’t seem fun at all!
Costanza mentioned taking a break until things settle down. This is the advice most of my friends and family have given—enjoy myself for now, and set a date down the road to check in. I suspect if I wholeheartedly give in to the enjoyment, it will eventually fade a bit and my motivation to do other things will return. Of course, life has continual demands, and I do feel a strong pressure to utilize every moment. I am very torn on this issue.
MKP’s public image is determined almost entirely by their detractors, as they have no publicity team to put a more positive image out there or respond to these incidents. That incident in particular was about a business owner forcing his employees to join, I don’t think that reflects on MKP itself. There have been other high-profile incidents in the news as well, I am sure you can Google them easily enough.
My experience with them has been positive, everything is voluntary and opting out is completely respected. They certainly don’t take a rationalist approach to things (which feels distasteful at times), but they do utilize proven psychological techniques and make real changes in mens’ lives. I’m learning very useful tools from the organization, but other than that I have no particular connection or commitment to MKP. Obviously in a large, dispersed organization like this I am not getting a representative sample, but I have worked with three local communities now and have found the same in each one.
Thanks, I’m glad you found it useful! :)