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malcolm.m.ocean
Karma: 57
I clicked on a link in the first one and found my way to this post: https://aellagirl.com/2016/08/21/421/
The kind of nothingnessness that she describes in this post seems like it might be connected with why awakened states haven’t been able to scale effectively. It seems to me that it is a non-obvious step to integrate a high level of awakeness with ongoing meaningness. I think that among other things, it requires having a community of people with a shared sense of awakeness. This makes sense, since humans are socio-cultural creatures. And then if the only sorts of communities that can maintain such a state tend to be unproductive (genetically or economically) because they are monasteries… then there are natural scaling limits.
This raises questions like “what would an enlightened family look like?” and “what would an enlightened company look like?” and “what would an enlightened school look like?” It seems that (for lots of reasons) the cultures would be very different than what we’re used to.
I am interested in knowing if Valentine or others have thoughts on these questions or any other questions related to scaling or avoiding what are in essence nihilist traps!
Seems worth linking to Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person, given that it contains a parallel to your phone analogy in the form of a “get out of the car” analogy.
I don’t have statistical data on it, but it is generally my experience that doing weekly reviews causes me to choose new priorities for the week, that I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise, and to the extent that those priorities are actually better, I then do them.
One of the advantages of doing weekly reviews as part of Complice is that the review system is integrated with a system for intentionally doing things each day, so I suspect it means that any possibilities noticed are more likely to be followed through on.
The integration isn’t as good as it could be though, and we have some sketches of a UI that’ll make it better. That’ll be added sometime this year unless my priorities shift.
Weekly reviews
“[weekly review worksheet] Was initially successful, but eventually became useless, and attempts to save it failed. There was also a meta failure where we didn’t notice how badly it was failing, and so continued spending time on it.”
Can you say more about how it became useless?
My experience (both personally and based on others’ experience using Complice) is that weekly reviews tend to be clearly really valuable whenever I do them, but I still often feel like they’re not important/urgent, and so I tend to put them off. So then the meta failure is that without doing my weekly review, I don’t get into the reflective headspace where I remember how valuable weekly reviews are. It sounds like you guys experienced something different, but I’m not sure.
Btw: the default weekly review questions in Complice are:
• What went really well this week? What did you do that worked?
• What got in the way? What didn’t work?
• Based on that, do you want to be approaching things differently?
• What are your priorities for the upcoming week?
These seem to work quite well, although I’m sure they could be further optimized!
Sebastian Marshall recommends these questions, which I also like:
• “What’s really going on?”
• “So what do I do about it?”
• “What matters, what doesn’t?”
[Meta: I posted this to Facebook and it occurred to me it could be a good thing to xpost here. I might have posted it top-level to the old LW Discussion, but somehow “Submit To Front Page” felt too big for it.]
Lighting, melatonin, etc
In addition to using f.lux (google it if you don’t have it) I wear orange glasses in the evenings, to improve my sleep (and also the experience of looking at a screen at night).
This site makes glasses that are much more subtle and designed to be worn all the time. They seem to be implicitly claiming that
(A) looking at a blue screen is bad even midday,
(B) they have some way to block the blue light in a way that isn’t annoying.
Re: claim B… hm. It seems their glasses are pretty clear. The way that LCD screens work, virtually all of the blue light coming out of your screen is exactly one wavelength (about 440nm, if you’re curious). So maybe they’ve manufactured a material that absorbs say 50% of that wavelength but almost nothing of wavelengths more than 5nm away. That would be interesting—it would make computer screens have a distinct orangeness to them, while the rest of the world would look mostly normal. I think their tech is patented, so it might be something one could look up.
I am interested to hear what people think about claim A.
Oh, and there’s another claim:
(C) that “digital eye strain” has something to do with color as opposed to just looking at something <2 feet away for hours on end.
I think if you wanted to help your eyes strainwise, you might be better off with a program that makes your screen go black for 20 seconds every 20 minutes, and to have a habit of looking at something 20 feet away every time (this is based on some heuristic I read about).
Just pledged $120/mo, bumping the monthly Patreon amount over $5k. That means just $860/mo to go!