I realized that I was approaching my future career by doing the sort of things that I think I am supposed to do prepare for said career rather than actually figuring out how to go about preparing for it.
jetm
Um… “There has to be Shannon mutual information between the evidential event and the target of inquiry”?
Another idea is to use different browsers for different tasks. For example, Firefox for school, IE for goofing off, and Chrome for extra-curricular projects.
Anyway, time to remove all the books I will likely not want to look at in the near future to make room for useful things like my calendar and vitamins.
What I want to do is to figure out what I want to do. My basic (and vague) goal is to do the most amount of good with my future career. If I make that decision with my current tools, I will likely overlook something.
If I’m reading this correctly, if A is true and the evidence available to you for A is false, you wish to believe that A is false? Or am I missing something?
That makes a lot of sense. Looks like I’ll be slogging through a lot of links then. Thank you for the tip!
How to Evaluate Data?
I’ve been browsing the site for at least a year. Found it through HP:MoR, which is absolutely amazing. I’ve been coming to the LessWrong study hall for a couple weeks now and have found it highly effective.
For the most part, I haven’t really applied this at all. I ended up making a final break with Christianity, but the only significant difference is that I now say “Yay humanism!” instead of “Yay God!” I’ve used a few tricks here and there, like the Sunk Cost Fallacy, and the Planning Fallacy, but I still spent the majority of my time not thinking about things. Because thinking is hard.
Then I started trying again to figure out what I should do with my life. Now, the first time I tried this I spent less effort on the decision than I did on most papers I’ve written for class. Ended up signing a five-year contract with miserable results. Now I’m actually thinking. It is incredibly difficult, but I am convinced that it is worth it.
My current goals are to broaden my knowledge (I know a ton of information about classical music but almost nothing else) and sharpen my critical thinking skills.
I actually thought about something for the first time in years
While thinking about it, I jotted down “Find an article to back this up.” I quickly noticed my error and replaced it with “See what science has to say on the subject.”
I recognized that there is a problem with how I think about social interactions.
I suppose I could be more specific in case someone else finds it helpful.
I am currently pursuing a BS in Comp Sci at an obscure online university. I decided to supplement this with classes from Udacity. However, I found myself becoming addicted to the little ‘correct’ sign when you get an answer right. I found myself going mindlessly through the courses as if merely having taken it would make me better. I’ve since slowed down, making sure to internalize the information, and I’ve allocated much more time into building my portfolio so I can show future employers something more substantive than an easily-fakeable certificate.
I also changed a strategy from googling “How do I get into [x]” with doing actual research about what x involves and how best to get there from where I am now. In my experience, the former approach provides little useful information.