Yeah, I tried this for a while, along with putting Chrome in increasingly obscure places on my hard drive. After these failed, I came upon the flash drive idea, which has the feature that it involves physical activity and therefore can’t be done mindlessly. If you need to, you can throw it across the room.
gothgirl420666
Karma: 1,631
This is kind of funny because I came to this open thread to ask something very similar.
I have noticed that my mind has a “default mode” which is to aimlessly browse the internet. If I am engaged in some other activity, no matter how much I am enjoying it, a part of my brain will have the strong desire to go into default mode. Once I am in default mode, it takes active exertion to break away do anything else, no matter how bored or miserable I become. As you can imagine, this is a massive source of wasted time, and I have always wished that I could stop this tendency. This has been the case more or less ever since I got my first laptop when I was thirteen.
I have recently been experimenting with taking “days off” of the internet. These days are awesome. The day just fills up with free time, and I feel much calmer and content. I wish I could be free of the internet and do this indefinitely.
But there are obvious problems, a few of which are:
Most of the stuff that I wish I was doing instead of aimlessly surfing the internet involves the computer and oftentimes the internet. A few of the things that would be “good uses of my time” are reading, making digital art, producing electronic music, or coding. Three out of four of those things rely on the computer, and of those three, they oftentimes in some capacity rely on the internet.
I am inevitably going to be required to use the internet for school and work. Most likely in my graphic design and computer science classes next year I will have to be able to use the internet on my laptop during class.
If I have an important question that I could find the answer to on Google, I’m going to want to find that answer.
It’s hard to find an eloquent solution to this problem. If I come up with a plan for avoiding internet use that is too loose, it will end up getting more and more flexible until it falls apart completely. If the plan is too strict, then I inevitably will not be able to follow it and will abandon it. If the plan is too intricate and complicated, then I will not be able to make myself follow it either.
The best idea I have come up with so far is to delete all the browsers from my laptop and put a copy of Chrome on a flash drive. I would never copy this instance of Chrome onto a hard drive, instead I would just run it from the flash drive every time I wanted to use it. This way, every time I wanted to use the internet, I would have to go find the flash drive. I could also give the flash drive to someone else for a while if I felt like a moment of weakness was coming on. I’ve been using this for exactly one day and it seems to be working pretty well so far.
The other thing I’ve been doing for a few days is writing a “plan” of the next day before I go to bed, then sticking to the plan. If something happens to interrupt my plan, then I will draft a new plan as soon as possible. For example, my friend called me up today inviting me over. I wasn’t about to say “No, I can’t hang out, I have planned out my day and it didn’t include you”. So when I got back, I wrote a new one. Most of these plans involve limiting internet use to some degree, so this also seems promising. I might also do something where I keep track of how many days in a row I followed the plan and try not to break the chain.
No, that’s how an honest person fools themselves. The encouragement gets stronger as you get closer, so finding the solution goes from a brute force search to a simple hill climbing exercise. The answers should all be “No” without any variation. No hints, no “I think you have some of the right ideas”, no “that’s not even close!”, just “No” “No” “No” “No” “No”.
I see what you’re saying, but you have to understand the context. This was not a formal scientific experiment, this was part of a puzzle game that was meant to be fun. In every other level of Notpron, except some of the final ones, it was suggested that people ask those farther ahead of them for hints and pushes in the right direction if they got hopelessly stuck. It would have been weirdly incongruous and callous for DavidM to have done as you suggest and not offer even words of encouragement to those who he knew were close.
One more thing to consider: one of the reasons I stopped was because I had already begun to feel embarrassed by how long the conversation was going. One would expect that if the method of figuring it out was brute force → hill climbing, DavidM would say things to imply that it takes time and that more guesses are better. In fact, he maintains that most people solve it their first time, he says “don’t brute force, or you’ll be banned from this level”, and at some points he explicitly told me to stop guessing and go clear my mind.
Also it’s important to notice how many guesses you’re making. For example, when you said “I’m imagining palm trees by a lake at sunset.” in the conversation you posted, that was a guess. Actually, more like three guesses...
I don’t understand what you’re implying here.
By the way, I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m some sort of shill for parapsychologists by continuing to defend what I’m saying. The fact is that I remain unconvinced. While I can see many possible explanations, I can’t find any that are actually believable. I feel like when I have investigated most paranormal or strange phenomena, I always end up coming across that one explanation that makes me say “Okay, that’s what happened, I can go home now.” This whole scenario, on the other hand, just seems like one big confusing mystery.
Maybe? Maybe you need to reread that email conversation you posted.
See my response to ShardPhoenix. It would be nice if you could elaborate on this. Obviously if I saw that my conversation with him was leading, I would not have posted this in the first place.
Every answer after that is contaminated.
Fair point.
It’s not DavidM you should be worried about. Actually, I should rephrase that: given the long history of fraud in this area, it is DavidM you should be worried about, believing in it has nothing at all to do with whether you are willing to lie about it and is an excellent reason to lie about getting positive results (how many people lie to produce evidence against cherished beliefs? and is there any way you could ever produce a smoking gun which could backfire like you claim he might be worried about?), and it’s also everyone else lying about it that you need to worry about (again, contamination).
It seems unlikely to me that he is explicitly lying in some way. I fully expect him to run a biased experiment, but not a rigged one. Most of the fraudsters have something to gain from their lies—either money, or fame. DavidM doesn’t make any money off of this (he worked on a movie about “the 5 natural laws of health”, but that is a completely different piece of woo than remote viewing and he also to my knowledge has never advertised the movie in association with Nu), and he is addressing an already captive audience. Secondly, if he truly believes remote viewing to be real, why would he run a faked experiment in support of it? Thirdly, for what it’s worth, my impression from playing Notpron for a few years is that he basically seems like an honest person.
If you think that he is lying, then in what way? How did he convince 31 minus one people to go along with this lie? Most of the people who solved Nu were active members of the community before DavidM ever became a conspiracy nut.
(By the way, did you know ‘boat’ is a rather common object? eg 149m hits in Google, comparable with ‘Obama’ at 141m hits. In Ngram, ‘boat’ even beats’ apple’ but not ‘table’, funnily enough.)
“Boat” is definitely a common object. I would say that it is one of the 100 most common objects to come to someone’s mind. So there should be a 1⁄100 chance that someone would guess it right on their first try.
It would be nice if you could elaborate on this. To me it seems like he exclusively either flat out told me “no” or gave me completely useless confirmation. When I guessed the palm trees by the lake, he said it wasn’t bad but he didn’t want to give me any more information. This seems like the only potentially useful hint, I’m imagining he said it wasn’t bad because I mentioned a body of water. Then I guessed the bee. I have no idea why he said it seemed on track, the only thing I said that seems relevant was “sharp”. But he told me that it wouldn’t help me and I couldn’t guess based on this confirmation. Then I guessed a helicopter, and he said it might be on target, but to ignore it. Again, I have no idea how this would lead me to the shark.
So we have two confirmations, two of which he explicitly told me not to think about and that they wouldn’t lead me in the right direction.
A question: how would you expect an honest person to act in this situation vs. a charlatan?
I would expect an honest person to deny incorrect guesses, and to give very vague words of encouragement when the other person said something that was close. This is in fact how DavidM behaved, except for some reason he was overly trigger-happy with the encouragement.
I would expect a charlatan to be much more leading. For example, I would expect that after my initial guess of the lake, he would have told me or at least hinted towards the fact that water had something to do with it.
EDIT: Also, I’m surprised he outright rejected the elephant guess, given that it and the shark are both big gray animals.
Also if 50% of people really get it on the first try without being led it should be easy to reproduce this in a controlled experiment since the effect is far stronger than that allegedly found by psychic phenomenon researchers.
Good point. (Then again, ChristianKI also makes a good point.)
Does this seem to you like evidence for the existence of psychic abilities in humans?
Geeks have most likely absorbed the “geeks are lesser, should be laughed at” meme to a certain extent as well.
This meme is at least a decade old. If we’re going to do rationality memes, we should do something more relevant…
Wow. I think this one might win.
Oh, okay, I see what you’re saying.
I don’t know. For literally all my life I’ve felt compelled to work on creative projects in a variety of fields (most of which have never lead anywhere, but only really exceptional people have completed major creative projects on their own volition by their freshman year of college so I don’t feel that upset about it). While working on most of these projects, I would say that I am just “grinding” a majority of the time and in a state of flow a sizeable minority of the time. The best part is the feeling you get when you complete something and can look upon your work with satisfaction. I think game making probably has the best flow to frustration ratio of any creative endeavor I’ve done, followed by visual arts, then writing, then music. The one time I more-or-less completed a game for a month-long open-ended class project I absolutely loved doing it and was in a state of flow almost the whole time.
If it turns out that I “don’t actually enjoy” game making then I have absolutely no idea what I “actually enjoy”.
What are your odds on this?
I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to say.
If you could just snap your fingers, and the game would magically appear already completed, according to your specification, with your name on it… how would you feel?
Good, obviously. Isn’t this every creator’s dream, to have their vision realized down to the exact detail without having to put in any of the work?
If Omega would predict that you will never make a game, or participate in creating one… how would you feel?
Bad, but I would get over it and find something else to do.
LessWrong member for [at least a few] months. Guys, it checks out.
… is what I would say if this was reddit.
I changed my downvote to an upvote.
I think you’re playing it wrong? You upvote if you disagree.
What if “it” doesn’t exist?
This is really frustrating because I feel like the culture is constantly spamming two contradictory memes. Lumifer even explicitly gave me both of them upthread.
Don’t do something you don’t truly enjoy, follow your dreams
Don’t do something that isn’t practical, whatever you do, don’t end up working at McDonalds
But in my case (and probably a substantial majority of people) I honestly think that the venn diagram between one and two might have literally zero overlap. Like, isn’t the whole point of a job that it isn’t fun, and that’s why they have to pay you to do it? I tried to compromise by double majoring in something I am genuinely passionate about (art) and something practical (comp sci), but I feel like this is still not enough somehow...? Sometimes I think the only winning move is to get lucky and be born the type of person who has a natural burning desire to become an engineer.
No, I don’t think so. Game makers don’t really have enough status in society for this to be a problem, I think. Or at least, they don’t have the romantic imagery of writers, painters, poets, musicians, etc.
Do you code on your own, not because something external (like homework) requires it, but on your own volition, because it’s a natural thing to do?
No
Do you get into flow state while coding?
Yes
In your context just look up post-graduation employment rates by college major. Engineers and accountants will do well. Women Studies majors, not so much.
Yeah, I already did this. Science has always been far and away my least favorite subject in school, so science and engineering are definitely out. Math and economics seem to be the next best things after computer science, but neither of these, while interesting to a certain extent, exactly seem like buckets of fun.
Piece one says that you don’t seem to enjoy coding.
I don’t know if this is really true about me. Sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it, to be honest. I’ve pretty much hated it in college, but this might just be because of the way the courses are taught.
Something that is called a marketable skill (BFA isn’t it) which will allow you to become employed after graduation.
What are other examples of marketable skills to you?
As an aside, while I know and accept the fact that statistically BFA pays pretty poorly and has relatively high unemployment, I don’t understand it. Every company in the world needs a designer in some form or another. Who needs an anthropologist, a philosopher, a historian, a sociologist, a psychologist, etc.? And yet we are told that getting a college degree is definitely a good idea. Maybe there are a whole pool of white-collar jobs that have nothing to do with any particular major, but are only available to people who can signal their intelligence in a way that art majors can’t?
Some questions I’d personally put in if I was writing this survey (you don’t need to put these in if you don’t want to, just suggestions):
To what extent have your beliefs about the world and your reasoning processes changed since you became a member of this community?
To what extent do you think that MIRI’s mission is a worthy one (i.e. do you think that AI is a major existential risk, do you think it’s important to ensure the development of friendly AI, do you think that MIRI is capable of advancing that goal, etc.)
To what extend do you identify with the term “nerd”?
How do you perceive your physical attractiveness, on a scale of 1 to 10?
How would you rate your general success in life in the following areas, before and after you became a member of this community?
Progress on goals
Wealth
Social life
Romance
Happiness
Overall