I’m in Bristol! No idea if anyone else is.
drossbucket
Karma: 442
There are some great questions at the end of your posts and it’s a bit of a shame you haven’t had much uptake on them. It would be a lot of work to do many of these (which is why they’re good questions!), but I’ll have a go at your ‘slipping through the cracks’ question and do a worked example. Mine is also to do with making appointments.
I thought I did have a good system. I set a lot of Google Calendar email reminders and normally turn up to things with no problems. But actually I screwed up unusually badly twice last year and didn’t do much about it other than think ‘oops that was stupid’.
One was solvable in the end with a mad dash to the train station, but was stressful and annoying. The other one I travelled for three hours to meet up with friends on the wrong day… not my finest moment.
I notice that both of these were made informally on messaging/social media, and the problem was that they never even made it into a calendar in the first place. So I need to make sure everything ends up in the same system, rather than assuming a facebook event reminder or friends talking about it will be enough.
(I’m sure this is very obvious to more organised people, but this really isn’t something that comes naturally for me.)
It’s interesting that the problem is specifically with informal social events. A dentist appointment or work meeting has a kind of serious-business aura where I know it has to go in a system, so I just do that.
To fix this, I’ll have to make sure that arranging an event informally automatically makes me think of putting it on my calendar. I haven’t worked on this much yet, but as a first step I checked to see if this applies to anything coming up, and I did find one upcoming event that was on facebook but not my calendar and added it.
I’ve been reading through this series this week based on seeing your review posts, and have enjoyed it, so thanks! I think this was my favourite of the series, maybe because it covers things I was already thinking about anyway (but also the sentry part was really interesting).
I’m really not a natural at operationalising things, but have come to appreciate it in the last couple of years, mainly through accidentally ending up in a job that’s quite ops-heavy and realising I badly needed to get better at it. I like the tone of ‘this stuff is often boring and I’m not great at it, but it really pays off’ in this series.
I’ve done a very similar thing to you with breaking down getting up in the morning into lots of steps and realising the cold was an issue—my version is putting a jumper and thick hiking socks nearby to put on immediately. The surprising thing for me was how helpful just having a bunch of steps to do is, almost independent of what they are! Every morning after the alarm goes off my brain spontaneously generates a bullshit story about how today is somehow completely different to all the other days and therefore it’s completely reasonable for me to just go back to bed, but I just keep mindlessly plodding through steps and by the time I’ve finished the voice has shut up and I’m up and drinking a cup of tea.
If I was asked any question of the form ‘what’s the least impressive X that you are very confident cannot be done in the next Y years?’, I would hesitate for a long time because it would take me a long time to parse the sentence and work out what a reply would even consist of.
I think that I am unusually dumb at parsing abstract sentences like this, so that may not apply to any people on the panel, but I’m not certain of that. (I have a physics PhD, so being dumb at parsing abstract sentences hasn’t excluded me from quantitative fields.)
I notice that I’m currently unable to intuitively hold the sense of this sentence in my head in one go, but I am able to generate answers anyway, by the method of coming up with a bunch of Xs that I think couldn’t be done in two years, and then looking for the least impressive such one. It feels kind of unsatisfying doing that when I can’t hold the sense of the whole problem in my head, and that slows me down.
If I was put on the spot in front of lots of people, though, I might just panic about being asked to parse an abstract sentence rather than doing any useful cognitive work, and not come up with much at all.
Thanks for replying! I think I was expecting a link post to behave somewhat differently, i.e. take you to a summary page with comments rather than straight off the site. I will crosspost manually in future if I have anything that I feel would be a good fit (also I think the process of manually crossposting might have been enough for me to realise that this specific link was not a great fit).
I’ve posted on the frontpage as a linkpost (included explanation but appears not to show currently), let me know if I should do something different in future.
Metarationality: a messy introduction
Hi, I just wrote a post and was planning on publishing it here. I wanted to check a couple of things first though, as I haven’t posted on old or new LW before:
Should I post this to the front page or just to my page?
What’s the preferred way of reposting something from elsewhere? Just the link, link with some explanation, or reposting the whole lot here? (I’m happy to do any of these.)
Sorry if I’ve missed some other post that explains these things.
My second supervisor for my PhD was a big fan of this short essay by David Mermin, which you might like. He got all the new students to read it, and insisted on us always following the three rules there:
Rule 1: Number all your equations.
Rule 2: When referring back to an equation, identify it with a phrase as well as a number so the reader knows what you’re talking about.
Rule 3: Punctuate equations like prose.
Good advice for helping the reader along.
I’m a pretty monologuey person myself but still recognise this ‘thinking on the page’ thing. It’s a good way to describe it. I get into a state where I’m just writing… stuff… because it’s ‘there in my head’ for some reason, but doesn’t feel like it particularly corresponds to anything.
I’ve always found the advice you get from the old ‘close reading’ style of criticism useful for getting out of this state, the kind of thing you’d find in, say, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language essay: work at the word level and pick those words carefully. One place where ‘thinking on the page’ seems to creep in for me is when I start working at the phrase level instead, tacking together premade phrases that already sound good.
Orwell and the New Critics were maybe more interested in doing justice to sensory experience—finding new vivid images instead of stale old ones—rather than doing justice to internal felt meaning, but I think their advice of thinking about the individual words can still work.
Hm, I think people vary a lot on this. I like to have a blurred outline of a thing before I fill in detailed steps; I find it painful and frustrating to be dragged through detailed logical steps without that context. I find mimesis is good for producing the blurred outline.
Agreed that classes also often go way too fast. University intro maths courses (in the UK at least) are often pretty terrible for this. But I have no problem in principle with people learning a mix of syntax and substance at the same time.
I like this, but I don’t think mimesis is always a bad thing, at all. It’s often a useful stage on the route to deeper understanding. You see this in teaching sometimes: you’re trying to teach the cross product, but they’re learning that they need to underline their vectors, and that they should put some punctuation and explanatory words between their equations so another person can follow the argument. Eventually they will definitely need to learn both sets of things, but if you just get back vector salad with explanatory words interpolated between it they’ve still learned something that will be useful in their mathematical career.
I’ve never been a teaching assistant for a proofs course, but I imagine you have to mark a lot of epsilon salad, because I’m pretty sure I produced a lot of epsilon salad as a student in the course of internalising the language.
These days as a relatively noob programmer it’s normally me doing the babbling, and I’ve used this strategy consciously: offer up some network protocol salad or version control salad and gauge from my boss’s face how much it sounds like the real thing. I find that when I’ve filled in an outline like that and know roughly how to talk a language, it’s much easier to fill in the detailed steps.
I like the sound of the monthly journalling thing—normally I see reviewing included in these things as some kind of virtuous-but-dull thing people make themselves sit down to do at the end of the week or whatever, and it sounds so unappealing I can never be bothered to even try it. Your version sounds pretty enjoyable.
Cool, I like these sorts of lists! Here’s mine:
(Mostly) giving up caffeine. 7 points, ~5 years. Much easier to get up in the morning. I have a single cup of tea maybe once or twice a month if I feel like I need waking up more, and that’s enough to do the job now. Best used in combination with another elite lifehack, highly recommended if you can manage it:
Getting enough sleep. 7 points, ~5 years.
Pomodoros. 8 points, ~9 months. Really excellent and not sure why I resisted the idea so long. Turns out lots of half hour blocks really add up, and it’s significantly changed how I work. This is a relatively recent thing so probably still overexcited about it.
Keeping my desk clear of paper. 6 points, ~2 years. I used to be awful at having stuff piled up everywhere, which would put me off working at home and convince me that I had to go to a library or something. This works by having box files so that the paper never ends up there in the first place.
Lot of calendar reminder email alerts. 4 points, ~3 years. Not exactly life-changing but I have fewer birthday present buying panics.
Todoist. 3 points, ~9 months. It has Gmail integration so I do check it, and it sort of works, but gets clogged with stale stuff too easily. I generally find todo lists hard though so this is good by my standards.
Beeminder. 5 points (but hard to attach a single number to), used for ~4 months 2 years ago and then stopped. Extremely effective way to simulate the stress of having a lot of external deadlines. It worked brilliantly on a time-sensitive project I had, but too stress-inducing for me to want to use permanently. It did do an excellent job of reminding me what being a productive person felt like, and I’d use it again if I really needed to, but mostly it just made me realise I needed to get my internal motivation working better.
Leechblock type browser extensions. 4 points, used them on and off for ~4 years up to about two years ago. I think the one I liked most was called Crackbook, which added a delay to the page load time instead of outright blocking it. They tend to work OK until they don’t. There’s no particular reason I stopped using them, except that the problem doesn’t seem so urgent now I have a normal full time job and value my free time a bit more.
Thanks for the extra description, that’s helpful! I might give the audiobook a go then.
Thanks very much! Yes I wasn’t really expecting to be able to pick up too much from an online explanation, but a bit of context is nice to decide whether to explore further. It sounds like the audiobook would be a good resource after that.
Another question on the subject of Focusing: is anyone able to point to any good online resources explaining what it is / how to try it / any theoretical background it has?
On the one hand, I’m fascinated by pre-verbal, ‘embodied’ aspects of thinking, and this ‘felt sense’ idea sounds well worth exploring. On the other hand, as with anything in the self-help-adjacent area there looks to be a lot of dubious stuff and people wanting to sell you things, and if anyone has already looked into this and can save me from wading through the rubbish I’d really appreciate it.
Thanks, that’s useful! A post on this some time sounds good.
Item eight of your second list (‘schematizing everything’) sounds really interesting. Is it possible to give some specific examples? I’d like to get clearer on what you mean by ‘schematic workflows that other tools can be plugged into’.
I would also be interested in this! I saw a use for it within about an hour of reading the post, when I did something stupid and easily fixable with a bit of thought. I just wrote the problem into a gmail draft, but if doing this turns out to be useful I’ll try something more structured.