**** Challenge. One praise and one criticism of the Hammertime sequence
***** Praise
- Initial framing of daily practice.
Seems convincing and logical, 30 days did not seem like too long.
Relationship with daily Hammertime practice turned to a noticeable supportive state.
Having single course that is supposed to do 10 different items of applied rationality in spaced repetitions manner
is also convincing to try.
Even if in my mind doing “two weeks daily practice of one particular exercise” seems more important—it isn’t more alluring
***** Criticism
- I keep stumbling on expecting more specific tasks related to the topic.
I.e in Design: “Now spend 5 minutes picking a bug that could be solved with application of Design in Schedules”
“Now spend 5 minutes devising a plan”, “Now murfyjitsu this and set up a first step”
I often do this on my own, by starting a 60min timer at the start of the Hammertime practice, but encounter a lot
of resistence, when I’ve read the post, didn’t found concrete instructions and have to invent something on my own.
Even “now set timer for 30 min and think of something to do to progress on one of your bugs” would help me with that.
efim
Taking Hammertime Final Exam by efim
Would you share, what is the state of your practice today?
Making any progress / hardships visible could be helpful to all of those who are thinking of starting out.
I really liked your take on planning. I’ve tried it on the task of “doing self CBT therapy session on my X painful belief” and found that there was another tension point that was helped by rewriting into additional steps.
I didn’t really understand your disagreement with ‘zeno thing’ - I saw it stating that most projects fail before they begin or immediately after the beginning. Regardless of truthfulness of this claim—it doesn’t mean that there are no other important failure points that would have been exposed in projects /if we were/ to start them.
But whatever failure points there are—fixing first line of failure still seems really reasonable. And I didn’t see any claims that this is all it takes for the project to succeed.
One of the most trivial examples—at the beginning of each separate step I could encounter similar levels of resistance.
I feel like I don’t fit in really well into existing comments with personal records on speed, since my numbers in these categories are not impressive at all.
I’ve practiced touch typing, and fairly happy with ~60-70 wpm, though further practice with special symbols would work wonders. I’ve started using vim (emacs evil mode) several months ago and now know $^@! and numbers much better.
If I am to dig around for something that could be impressive and somewhat related to speed—I’ve done a *lot* of regular meditation practice over the years and I can see that nowadays I notice distractions much more quickly, often during first second, before the mind had the chance to run away with them from my predetermined point of attention.
Since day 1 some change and progress
Most of all self confidence and self trust were improved by having a commitment to spend 1hr daily at the Hammertime work. Keeping regular progress reduces tension I felt at every thought of undertaking something from self-development
Reignited something that I’ve lost—light morning exercise:
I have evening TAP of putting yoga mat out before going to bed (+design). And morning TAP of jumping out of bed to have a sip of water and short stretching.
With the idea that I’d add more things to this morning activity
With timers and bug lists I’ve done several things that were easy one-offs, but I weren’t being done. Like small home improvements.
Right now apart from Hammertime I’m working on setting up GTD system, hopeful that I’ll make it stick for a while this time. That seems like a very important thing to add
I’ll just copy whole tree from org-mode with deliberations on Hammertime factoring with minimal editing
Maybe this will be helpful to someone, and if someone gives me feedback—that could be helpful to me too. Maybe I’m missing something, maybe I’m not going deep enough?
(Is there a way to hide long part of the comment under a spoiler?)
Initial plan: set 60 minute timer for whole daily Hammertime session.
Daily Challenge: 20min Goal Factoring for the Hammertime
** TODO hamertime goal factoring
** Let’s go
*** Goal: create feeling of momentum in self-development
**** Goal: use this momentum to keep investing time into self-development, into reaching goals
***** Goal: have stable life, where my needs are being met, with joy
*** Goal: finish something that looks impressive
**** Goal: have more weight and approval in discussions around rationalists
*** Goal: invest time into practicing, so if I fail I could tell myself that I wasn’t idle
**** Goal: to have internal peace in case of failure too
*** Goal: tingle joy of learning new things
*** Goal: decrease unpleasantness of having bugs—physical, mental, developmental, job related
**** Goal: have joy in things I do
**** Goal: have more energy to help people around me, see their happiness
*** Aversion: not always easy to understand what to do in remaining 60 minute timer, not wanting to approach
**** Goal: feel ease and clarity, evade discomfort and thinking
**** Goal: trust myself to invest time into helpful, useful things
*** Aversion: feeling that my notes will be lost, unusable and unhelpful very soon
**** Goal: trust myself to invest time into helpful things
i.e not having enough belief in helpfulness of the things I do right now
*** Aversion: my work table is less than pleasant to work on—table legs are in the way, easy to scratch myself
**** Goal: evade discomfort
*** Aversion: “but I’m falling behind on my regular job, getting lost”
**** Goal: support trust my colleagues have in me
*** Aversion: “I feel alone in this attempt to self-improve”
**** Goal: to have social support, to do things social circle approves
*** Updated Plan:
i.e can I improve /this/ thing or maybe subsctitue with another course of action that solves same goals, with less aversion or cost?
**** Immediately after Hammertime—keep daily hour of self development, with same techniques I guess
maybe also—learning and installing GTD, and second brain for a could of weeks
**** Some of the hammertime bugs can and should be attempted with the tool I’m learning on this particular day
**** Definitely write daily in the comments
maybe also write daily in the chat for russian lesswrongers?
didn’t address the ‘falling behind on regular job’, will ignore for now, I guess
During 5 minute yoga timer I felt rushed to recognize felt senses.
Most of them were floating tensions in the stomach area.
Somehow even though they felt similarly, I almost always had a good idea which of the Big Life Confusions they are, and when I said their approximate name there was a release of tension in the stomach.
To get to more nuanced names I’d need a longer session for each specific life problem, with current set up I’ve added some of the discoveries to the bug list, and checked that others are already there
-- Not sure this is helpful, even if on-topic --
One way to see fear would be as a ‘feeling’ that signifies expectation of failure, possibly grand ‘loss’ of something dear.
Courage is often usually described as “Doing something even if you’re afraid”
Then fear could stem from some internalized beliefs and could be reduced with CBT exercises that examine true roots of the beliefs, fear could be changed by new experiences.
I’d guess CoZE works by creating new automatic assessment of the situation that currently seems dangerous, decreasing fear
What could increase courage?
Probably having clear goals, maybe making them somehow closer in time.
I’d guess creating self-image of a courageous person could help, i.e getting confidence in other areas of life.
I’ve heard that “leaving no line to retreat” might make people more courageous, but that could be dangerous.
There is a very helpful model of the human:
= a person has needs
there are approximating lists—https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory- whenever need is met, we generate pleasant feelings
- whenever need is not met, we generate unpleasant feeling- paying attention to feelings can help us discover unmet needs, even if we aren’t initially conscious of them
= there is an important difference between ‘a strategy’ and ’a need’
understanding of which can change behavior significantly
”need” is something that can be satisfied in many ways.
model proposes, that if we don’t fixate on the strategy and satisfy the need in a different way
it will be just as good.
with clear understanding of these things lots of conflicts can be solved.
conflict is often when people try to satisfy their needs with strategies that don’t satisfy needs of another.
focusing on needs and not on strategies can help us find different ways that satisfy all included.
This is applicable to sub-minds or sub-agents within one person.
Some needs are overlooked by society.
E.g my need for being seen, for friendly acknowledgement of my (light) struggles is unsatisfied at this moment.
To the extent that I initially thought to dedicate idea of “me wanting more understanding, and being afraid to ask for it” as the most important.(NVC in general turned out to be a very important tool for me)
Most of the sayings that could become mantras are rarely used, but stored and sometimes reviewed.
Loosing hurts if it’s a loss I can survive.
For me it means that any feeling of pain is an evidence of my continued life, helps to direct attention from past into action for my current and future self.
Helpful after grieving period.
The rules of the game are quite simple, but take a lifetime to master.
I take it to mean that most basic underlying rules for living are simple, something like “You can do anything” said in sarcastic tone.
But not all possible actions are helpful, and it takes experience and work to learn to live in a way that would be prosperous.
In addition it helps to notice that systems and rules devised by society are not the “reality” and could be changed, but also that they are complex and intricate systems that are hard to understand and worthy of understanding.
If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.
To me in means: “Even through the darkest times I need to save the seed of good, if I want goodness to thrive again”—to not loose all hope.
In reality I don’t literally believe that some good outcome will inevitably magically happen if I manage to guard and save a small amount of hope and tenderness, but that helped me out several times.
most successful were
cleared my desk
ordered window curtains
did initial body photos for tracking progress in sport and stretching + scheduled next checkup
Thank you for the link, I’ll look it through!
“Politics is a mind-killer” is a great idea for an opening! I didn’t think about it at first, Robin Hanson is interview for “Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot” (http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1911 number 67) describes the core point very in a very short and meaningful way.
Hi!
1) If I understood Julia correctly “easily answerable questions” correspond not to areas where you are good at predicting, but to areas where answer space is known to you: “Can I toss the ball through the hoop?”—Yes\No vs. “What is the best present for a teenage girl?” ??\??\money??\puppy??
2) If you have difficulties with associating common groups with your feelings or even percieve feelings that is really confusing and it would be good not to jump to the conclusions, but to add to other commenters: you could probably start by asking outside observer (i.e body language “comfort\defensiveness” “happy\sad”)
I think I remember described set of experiments correctly and at least in some of them control group was definitely allowed to cheat—there were no difference in the way people turned in their results (shredding questionare and submitting only purported result on different sheet)
It probably would be best described as ‘raising awareness’. I was introduced to LW when by chance I saw an hpmor mentioned on social network.
Before that I was completely oblivious to concrete examples of cognition malfunctions. I want to reduce involvement of chance in propagation of memes of rationality.
Concrete goals:
a) make personal need for clear-thinking visible and perceptible
b) show that some work (book abstracts, ideas introductions) is available here.
Request for advices on small presentation about LW community
I’m not sure how it relates to proposed stagnation (i.e loss of momentum) of LW community. Could you please elaborate? I understand affective death spirals to mean something completely different I am totally confused.
Hello!
If that is convenient to you—please write something about your current status regarding the TAPs right now?
It’s been ~2 years and I am extremely curious, plus several people might benefit from seeing actual examples and stories.